Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for November 1, 2015.

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1. You might already have read on the Internet that one of the big credit card companies expects to reduce the number of jobs at the firm by roughly 8,000. These 8,000 people will be replaced by an answering machine, programmed by someone with one of those soothing California voices, which will invite you to select from one of 18 choices. Of course each one of those 18 voices will give you six more choices, until you are so lost you won’t even be able to remember why you called in the first place. The only people they are not firing are: The person who denies your loan, The person who denies your medical claim, The person who charges you late fees, and the person who can't help you with your problem.

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2. Amazon and Google are wonderful. With Amazon and Google you can quickly find for your coffee pot, a replacement cord --- that you can't afford to buy. Farberware CO-PC3 2 Feet 6 inch Power Cord (Fits two prong units only.) by Farberware $13.89+ $7.09 shipping Twenty bucks for a cord? The other day when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman tried to whip up a pot of the coffee drug, smoke and crackling and sparks came out of the thing and she made a black mark on the kitchen counter. The cord shorted out and burned off. Cords do that if you yank on them. For 20 bucks you better believe I drilled out the rivet that holds it together and soldered the wire. I thought it would be a 30 minute job, at the most, including finding the tools and solder. But that black socket part has two sides to it. And even after I had the wire soldered it took me an hour to figure out that the two sides are not mirror images and it only goes together one way. The same thing happened when I tried to put a coupling in the rain gutter on the henhouse. It only goes together one way. What would you pay for a little elf who would sit on your shoulder for the rest of your life and help you with your little projects around the house? All the elf would usually have to say is, “Try it the other way.” Whatever the elf cost it would be worth it, because ignorance is very expensive.

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3. Do you realize how lucky we are to live in St. George, Maine? We have some of the nicest neighbors you’d find anywhere. Of course, a sociologist or an anthropologist would tell us that we like our neighbors because they share our values. We like the same things. We do the same things. We are all pretty much alike. Well, in my neighborhood this should be true. Most of us who have lived in this part of Maine for 281 years have the same ancestor. This was brought to my attention one day when I stopped in to visit my neighbor, Gary Hyvarinen. Gary was in a t-shirt, having a wonderful time up to his elbows in soapsuds in his immaculate kitchen. Gary said, “I do all the dishes and clean up. Sandra cooks.” Then he said, “At Robert Faustini’s house, he cooks and Beverly cleans up.” You know, even though my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is from away, she very quickly assimilated the values of both Sandra Hyvarinin and Beverly Falla. Marsha cooks, and then she cleans up.

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4. We read what we want to read. We read to confirm our own conceptions of the world. I suppose I might just as well come right out and say that I am talking about politics. Although we have newspapers and television news, email is the way many of us now have our political views confirmed. And because, with small unpleasant exceptions, we only hear from our friends who email us things that confirm their views (which they know are our views), about half of the people in this country never get to read the truth in a politically oriented email. The other 50 percent of emails containing political commentary is outright slander and deliberate lies. Most of us have friends with whom we cannot discuss politics or exchange politically oriented emails. This is because we don’t want to distress our friends by suggesting there is another side of the political fence. If you own a factory where 400 children without health insurance work over sewing machines for 12 hours a day, you are not going share the political views of a man who collapsed and was rushed into the emergency room because his health insurance provider wouldn’t approve some necessary tests his cardiologist had requested the month before. So the bulk emails that these two people send out to countless friends of their own political persuasion reflect diametrically opposed political views. Tax and Spend or Borrow and Bomb. I’m t h f at g mail dot com. Which group emails you?

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5. Jack Mansur, who was one of my college roommates at Gorham Normal School, sent me this story. It is the exact kind of story I like to tell you on this program. -- I asked a librarian for a book on Pavlov's dog and Schrödinger's cat. She said it rang a bell, but she wasn't sure if it was there or not.

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6. Commenting on my radio show and the fact that I play a lot of Garner, Rebecca Carr says: "I should also mention that it took me quite a while to decipher the name Erroll Garner. You often simply said his last name (as you often just use Django's first name). My Midwestern ears heard "Ghana" no matter how many times I listened or how hard I tried. I started searches for names like "Ghana Jones". I was so delighted to finally hear his first name. The next record I bought was his and I love it." Thank you for that letter. It is not the first time someone has commented on the way I say Garner. So that everyone will understand, I should always say, Garner, Erroll Garner. As in Bond, James Bond. He obviously wanted to have people understand who he was before he shot them. Bond, James Bond. Garner, Erroll Garner.

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7. Since my surgeon friend tightened up the little trap door that separates my stomach from my esophagus, I’ve had to chew my food into liquid form so I can ingest it. This would naturally bring to your mind Horace Fletcher, The Great Masticator, who claimed that food should be thoroughly chewed before swallowed. He even said you should chew water before swallowing it. You might remember that Horace Fletcher said, "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate". As I said, since my operation, only things in liquid form will pass from my lips into my stomach. My doctor friend tied a knot in some mysterious trapdoor down there to ensure that anything I eat will behave itself. The ultimate goal was to eliminate my constant coughing -- that was caused by my stomach acid refusing to stay down where it belonged. As a result, the hamburger that was raised on my farm that I had for supper the other night and the hamburger that I had for dinner the next day, had to be thoroughly Fletcherized. It is impossible to turn home-grown hamburger into liquid, although I Fletcherized it to the point where I could ingest it. Actually, everything I've eaten since my operation I've had to Fletcherize and I've thought about the process a lot over the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure I first heard of Horace Fletcher in a psychology 101 class I took at Gorham Normal School around 1962. It was one of the salient items that I retained, which certainly ensured that there would be nothing about it on the test. Please tell me that you remember hearing about Horace Fletcher in one of your psych classes. I plan to mention Fletcher in my next newspaper column. Wouldn't you think that bandying about the obscure Fletcher in a newspaper column would grace it with an aura of erudition? Don’t you agree that I'll improve my image if I manage to work him in?

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8. My friend John Leeke gave us a hunk of the finest kind of cheese. John was on his way to work in the lighthouse on Monhegan and spent the night here so he could take the early Monhegan boat out of Port Clyde. Marsha was going to put that cheese into macaroni and cheese for supper, but I happened by and got a nibble of it while she was cutting it up. I said it was too good to waste on a casserole, so she put that cheese aside for me to gnaw on and used some inferior cheese in her casserole instead. I’ll eat that cheese with crackers over the next week or so. My mouth is watering just thinking about that nice, sharp cheese. You certainly remember what De Gaulle said about cheese. Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage? And, because although I can read French I articulate French like an American, to clarify, I tried to say, “How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?”

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9. Do you buy books on Amazon? I buy excellent books for a quarter at lawnsales, but from time to time I hear of a book I’d like to read and that’s when I bring up Amazon. A few years ago I heard of a man who spent 29 years in solitary in jail before they said that he was “Probably innocent” and let him out. You can think of a lot of people who went to jail: Martin Luther King, Thoreau, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Thomas More, Oscar Wilde, Solzhenitsyn, Ghandi --- you could think of hundreds more, and it makes you wonder why you never contributed enough to society to warrant a sentence of your own. Anyway, this poor man who was probably innocent wrote a book called, From the Bottom of the Heap and I said to myself, I’d like to read From the Bottom of the Heap. Let’s see if I can find it on Amazon for only one cent and four dollars postage. Guess what? At the time it was $12.95 plus the four dollars postage. And the same thing happened the last four or five times I looked. My question to you is, why do the books you’d like to read always cost $12.94 more than you want to pay?

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10. And now you and I are going to talk about threats. Not veiled threats but blatant in-your-face threats. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is the master of the in-your-face threat. Because I don’t think that the need to make threats is genetically transmitted, she could have learned it as a small child by listening to her mother. And now that I stop to think of it, my wife’s father was the most moderate, laid-back man I ever met. Anyway, yesterday morning my wife approached the deposed lord and master of this house, who of course lives with his fingers glued to the keyboard of his computer, and this is what she said. “Will you please make an effort to put in that microwave today? I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning it and I want you to put it in before it gets rusty.” Not a threat, you say. This sounds like a very polite and reasonable request? It is. But, then I said, “Before it gets rusty? You want me to put in the new microwave before it gets rusty?” --- She just paid four dollars for it so it was new to us. I laughed, and it wasn’t a nasty sarcastic laugh, but a real honest that’s-funny laugh and I said, “Do you know how long it takes something that is setting out in the barn to get rusty? You don’t seem to have much faith in my ability to get things done around here.” And that’s when she said, “If you don’t put it in, I’m going to pick it up and carry it in here and do it myself.” And right there you can hear the “If you don’t I will…” threat part. And you know as well as I do that she had been out there washing the breakfast dishes and rehearsing that speech until she had it down pat in its final form and trounced in to deliver it. If you are a husband, my question to you is, does your wife have a similar modus operandi when she wants something done? Does she make not so thinly veiled threats? What? You don’t know because no matter how important and how intricate your project, you always jump up the first time she asks?

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