Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for January 10, 2016

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1. Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever seen a stone statue cry? I have seen something that fits in the same category and I am going to tell you about it now. This is not something I would say in a room crowded with strangers, because it would immediately destroy my credibility. But I can tell you what I saw out on the highway yesterday because you have listened to me for years and you know that however improbable my story, it is the truth. Listen to this. Yesterday, out on the highway, I saw a Volvo station wagon with no bicycle or ski racks.

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2. Perhaps you have been to Egypt and have seen, with your own eyes, the pyramids. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, has seen Stonehenge. You would be a unique individual, indeed, if you have seen the stone heads on Easter Island. I have seen the Parthenon and I have steered the Coast Guard Buoy Tender Laurel through the Cape Cod Canal. The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Cape Cod Canal, Stonehenge, the moai on Easter Island, the Parthenon. Now, can you tell me what these five things have in common? Are they not all excellent examples of what intelligent young people can accomplish when not distracted by TV or video games?

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3. I heard it on WBZ Boston. A reporter said “irregardless” and I enjoyed the shibboleth almost as much as the first time I heard Dan Rather say “momentarily.” You might know that as a linguist I take language as she is spoke. One dialect is not intrinsically better than any other. To be sure, anyone who has read Pygmalian knows that some dialects will earn you more money than others. And from what I have read of big time con men, they spoke the finest kind of French --- or English. I would love to be able to shift gears and employ the phonetics or suprasegmental phonemes of an English con man. But I’m stuck with my singular hodge-podge of Scottish and whatever it was they were speaking here in St. George, Maine over the past 200 years. I think that the sociological implications of languages are fascinating and I chuckle when I think that the same people who raise their eyebrows when they hear me toss off an “ain’t” --- are very likely to say, “If you ever get a chance, come over and visit Marsha and I.”

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4. In an op-ed piece I wrote for the Portland Press Herald, I mention the two realities of Maine winters. My brother told me that Maine winters have two realities and that each is in the eye of the beholder. I've heard of a very wealthy man who enjoys looking out his windows and watching winter storms churn up the sea and blow everything to bits. The cost of constantly repainting his house is nothing to him, nor is the cost of the fuel that heats his home. On the other hand, I was one of the young coolies who had to work outside in cold, stormy weather for years and years. I've seen my truck rust out because of the road salt. So I see winter with different eyes. Let's shift this seeing things with different eyes to another level. You tolerate my constant whining about how I can't remember anything. And you have heard me say that I envy my friends with total recall. Remember the movie --- I think it was called The Paper Chase. The professor asked a student in the class to answer a question. The kid had total recall, but he couldn't answer the question because he was unable to put the information at his fingertips into perspective. And that is what I'm thinking about now. The older I get, the more I learn of the human brain and the mysterious way that it works. Some of my friends, whom I envy for their brilliance, make some very simplistic observations. --- They have all the information at hand, but they can't evaluate that information and put it into perspective. There is a part of their brain that has a door that is seemingly shut tight that keeps them for seeing what is obvious to you and to me. Do you know what I'm talking about here? You know more than one person very close to you about whom you have often said, "He/she just don't get it." You might say that I have just experienced an epiphany, although my spell checker had to tell me how to spell it. You have heard me say that if I had the ability to remember things, I'd have half a dozen PhDs in several disciplines, simply because I worship these manifestations of erudition. But if it cost me the ability to evaluate the subtleties or satirical meaning in a sentence, I don't think I could do it. It would keep me from writing and saying the things I've been writing and saying for the past 50 years.

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5. Will you permit me to thank my friend at WFDU for getting my bio and pictures up on the WFDU jazz hosts webpage. She did a beautiful job. I’m delighted with it. Check it out. What do you think about bearing arms? One of my friends says, “I'm unwilling to bare arms because of unsightly cellulite.” Wearing long-sleeved shirts can also help prevent melanoma.

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6. My Internet friends are billing me for using more of something than I used to use. I wrote to these nice people who host, I think that is the word, my web page and asked why I was being billed more all of a sudden. Although they told me what to do in plain English, I have no idea of what they said. Here is part of what I was told. "You can use Awstats feature in your cPanel to find out which is causing the bandwidth limit exceeds. It will show you the bandwidth usage on monthly basis." So I am driven to Google to find out what a C panel is. And when I Google around, I am rewarded with these very simple and obvious instructions: "To view AWStats traffic statistics for a domain, click the link next to the domain that you wish to view" I have no idea of how to find a domain. I have no idea of what a domain is or what a domain does. If I had one, it would go hungry because I wouldn't know what to feed it. If you put a cave man into a car and tell him he can start it by first turning on the switch and pulling out the choke, he has no idea of what you're talking about. It’s not that I don’t want to learn how to become computer savvy, but the world is moving along so fast I can’t keep up. When you give computer instructions to a man who was born before WWII in a home that had no telephone, refrigerator, television set or flush toilet, you are really going to have to get back to basics.

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7. In Psychology Today we read that “walking through doorways empties your mind. Doorways really cause forgetting.” You will remember that we often talk about this power doorways have when it comes to making us forget. No sooner do hundreds of young Maine people walk in through the door of a bar when they forget that they are married.

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8. Here’s an interesting letter from a radio friend who says, “In the old soviet union the saying was "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." In public interest law the reality is they pretend to pay us but we work for sure…. Here are two cases you will appreciate. They came up in an elder abuse task force meeting the other day. After our last big storm two men solicited an elderly man to shovel snow off his roof. They worked for half an hour and demanded $400. The kicker is they didn't have their own shovels or ladder and they borrowed those items from their victim. Another case - a young woman snatches an elderly woman's purse from her shopping cart and then goes to the service desk to ask them to call a cab for her.” Thank you for that letter. It would appear that there will never be a recession in Maine as long as our young people are on the cutting edge of improvisation.

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9. When I went into the doctor’s office, the doctor asked me if I had noticed the man who just left. I allowed as how I had seen a man leave but I hadn’t paid too much attention. The doctor said, “That man is 107 years old, and he plays golf every day.” Wow. Isn’t it sad to see a man who is still strong and active at 107 who’s completely lost his mind?

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10. When my friend Winky was in high school, he went to the senior class prom with a girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.”

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