Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for December 20, 2015.

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You email me a lot of stories. I don’t know if they are true or not, and I suppose it doesn’t matter. One afternoon a cop saw a bum leaning up against a building drinking something out of a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. And the cop said, “What are you doing there?” And the bum said, “Just what it looks like. I’m holding up the building.” The cop took the bum by the arm and led him off --- and the building fell down.

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2. The Maine I grew up in is long gone. I don’t seem to know many of the people who live in my neighborhood unless they are my relations. Who are these strangers and where did they and their curious customs come from? When did they appear and what brought them here? When I was a little boy, old men cut hay with horse drawn mowing machines. The horses hauled hay home in a huge wooden hay-rake. We could climb on top and tramp hay, although were underfoot and a great bother. When I was a little boy, I used to ride in a mule-drawn buggy with Percy Jones when he’d go down the Clark Island road to cut a few alders with a razor-sharp axe to heat his home. I bought the farm where I have lived for almost 50 years from Myrtle Ray, one of my mother’s third cousins, and if you visit me today you can still see, hanging behind a seldom-used door to the back attic, a thing that is stuffed with a ball of assorted string and other useless objects that I cannot identify. It has probably been there since the Great Depression --- and I’m not talking about the financial crash of 2008 that everyone has conveniently forgotten. I can remember a time when rich kids were the ones who didn’t wear their father’s made over pants to school. I can remember patching the hole in the sole my shoe with a piece of aluminum because cardboard fell apart and was useless in wet weather. If something broke so bad that you couldn’t fix it, which was unusual, you still couldn’t throw it away --- just because. That was the Maine I was born and brought up in. But what has happened to Maine? Listen to what I heard on Channel 6 one morning. “You cannot scare a coyotee by shouting, but if you throw a tennis ball, it usually works.”

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3. I chanced to notice that The New Hampshire Bar Association has 27 or so people listed as employees on their web page. There is a natural law that says the more available cells you have in your prison, the more people you will find to fill them. This is one reason they immediately tore down the old Maine State Prison in Thomaston. Had they not done so it too would now be as full as it was when they built the new one over in Warren. It is the same natural law that says the more money an association has to spend, the more employees it will take to spend it. I have a book that lists every association in the United States. It tells how much money each association has to spend and how many employees it takes to spend it. Opening the book at random, I see that the Truss Plate Institute has an annual budget of from 250 to $500,000. They only need a staff of three to spend it. The NH Bar Association has around nine times that many of employees. According to my math, either the NH Bar Association has a four and one half million dollar annual budget, or NH people are so thrifty that an association employee in New York can outspend them nine to one.

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4. Are you torn in the morning --- not knowing which of two things to do? Should I compile some comments on the profits generated by our culture of fear, or should I write about my impossible new Canon Pixma MX 922 printer? My printer is too complicated. I can't even figure out how to print a letter on it. Its dashboard is a jumble of flashing lights, dials and buttons like one would expect to see in a fighter jet. I printed a letter the other day but by the time I got back at it again I forgot how to do it. It is not fair that things should be so complicated nowadays. I admit that I am contributing to the problem. I could go to the store where I bought the thing and receive instructions on how to complete the three simple tasks I expect from it: print letters, print CDs, scan documents. And then I could make a YouTube video telling others how to do it. There are a lot of videos out there explaining how to operate the Canon Pixma MX 922, but they don't really tell you how to even turn the thing on. The children purporting to explain the thing have no idea of the concept of programmed learning. I could make a video telling other folks how to run the machine. But I am not doing it. I am contributing to the problem.

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5. One spam I got one morning said: “Over 12 million songs for Robert Karl Skoglund” What would I do with 12 million songs? If each song lasted 3 minutes I could only hear 480 of them if I listened for 24 hours. If I listened full time for a year I could only hear 175,200 of the 12 million songs. I’m not going to do the math again, but the first time through on my hand held calculator tells me that I’d be 139 years old before I heard them all. Songs are to be listened to and enjoyed and although it is nice to have enough for my needs, a reasonable person would hope that the thought of 12 million songs would only appeal to a very greedy person or a fanatical collector. And when you consider it in those terms, how many people really need 12 million dollars?

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6. I can’t think of anyone in the town of St. George, Maine who isn’t either employed or retired. I understand that in some states there is unemployment. In those states some people give their occupation as unemployed. That means that they don’t have a job. Others give their occupation as a consultant. In Maine that means that they are really unemployed.

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7. You know people who are good story tellers. They’re fun to listen to. I can rattle off the names of 6 or 8 of excellent storytellers, because back when I used to have to write a newspaper column once a week and had nothing to say, I’d go see one of them. Eddie Tyler is a good story teller. I have heard Ed Tyler speak before a group and can tell you that he knows what's going on. I was on my third glass of punch when Eddie came over and said, "For years I was the supply man down at Marine Colloids. Anybody needed something, they came to see me. I had the reputation for being tight. I didn't give them what they asked for unless they had a good reason for needing it. "One day someone came in and said, 'Ed, someone stole my stapler.' "And I said, 'You're a grown man. Don't come in here and bother me with things like that. You should be able to figure out what to do.' "This fellow left nodding eagerly. "The next day when I came to work, my stapler was gone."

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8. Years ago I spoke at a state association of funeral directors in one of those big states west of Texas. The man who heads up that state’s funeral directors association called me on the phone and sounded quite excited about having me entertain his group. He said, “Let’s see, if you start telling stories at two in the afternoon, you can finish at four.” Of course that kind of startled me. Two hours before funeral directors? I said, “Perhaps you should understand something. In my business, when we talk too long, our customers can get up and walk out.”

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9. A great computer guru named Richard Bird once told me that he liked computers because, unlike people, if you work with them long enough and treat them right, they will do what you want.

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