Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for January 31, 2016

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1. Because I am not going to live forever I went in to see my friend, Lawyer Crandall, about updating my will. Crandall said I had to get an executor I could trust with money. And I said, “When it comes to money you can’t trust anybody.” And Lawyer Crandall said, “It’s a good thing that’s true or I’d be out of business.”

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2. You might have heard me mention that a few of my neighbors here on the coast of Maine are somewhat provincial. John told me that he was standing around outside chatting with a woman when he chanced to look at the scratches in the ledge underfoot and said, “Look where the glacier went through here.” And the woman said, “Recently?” And of course John said, “No, years ago.” And the woman said, “Well, I wouldn’t know. I live over in Friendship.”

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3. It is not uncommon to go out in the woods in the town of St. George, Maine and see a little wooden platform twenty feet up in a tree. I think they call this a tree stand. My friends who are hunters climb up the tree and sit or stand on this tiny wooden platform, sometimes for hours, until an animal comes close enough for them to shoot it. By that time, the hunter is so stiff from just sitting that he can barely climb down the tree. This is why there is hardly a hunter alive who has used one of these tree stands who has not fallen off the thing and dropped kerplunk on the ground. Perhaps you have chanced upon those Wipeout television programs where people crash snowmobiles and skateboards and water skis. But if you have never seen a hunter fall out of a tree stand you realize that Maine’s number one sport has been denied valuable promotional coverage. Are not producers of Wipeout shows remiss in not adding footage of falling Maine hunters to prime time television?

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4. Sometimes I see 20 wild turkeys on my back lawn. A friend of mine told me that he has taken several of these turkeys home for dinner. He says that the breasts are good eating but that the drumsticks are so tough they could be used for Marimba mallets. I asked him, “How often do you shoot a turkey?” He said, “Until he falls down.”

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5. Here is one of the curious things you can read on line. “For centuries, champagne bottles were a nightmare for French glassblowers. The wine's pressure would reach about 90 pounds per square inch (about the same pressure as a small bicycle tire) and make the bottles unpredictable. Then, in 1828, weather conditions put extra sugar in the grapes, allowing pressure inside these bottles to go well over 90 PSI, causing 80% of them to explode. In fact, during that period, spending time in a wine cellar was considered more dangerous than going to war.

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6. When my father married my mother he was Marianne’s husband. He stayed Marianne’s husband until he became Sonja’s father. For his entire life my father was a non-entity. I thought I had done better than my father until today when I realized that I have fallen lower than Marianne’s husband or Sonja’s father. In fact, I have dropped as low as it is possible to drop in the caste system here in American today. There is a name for American untouchables. We are called --- associates.

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7. Here I am at the kitchen counter this morning opening pill bottles when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, says, “Why don’t you let me put your pills in one of those pill dispensers? Then you’d only have to open one thing in the morning instead of three.” I told her I’d rather open the three bottles because, after all, a man my age should be getting some exercise.

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8. Between 100 and 200 years ago, my neighbors in St. George Maine used to get around. Many homes in my neighborhood still harbor sea shells and knickknacks from faraway places. My grandfather was on a ship that sank off Ireland in 1882. You have probably already figured out that he survived. But if you look at the gravestones in the cemetery out back of the Wiley’s Corner church, you’ll see that a lot of people who made their living on boats didn’t come home. Then, 100 or so years ago, my neighbors no longer went to sea and became somewhat provincial. Seems as I recall back in the forties someone asking Percy Jones if he’d ever been out of the state of Maine and he said, “Yep, I been to Augusta.”

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