Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for February 14, 2016

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My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, has brown eyes. She is not old enough to know the song, Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes which I sang to her the other day. Chorus: Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, I'll never love blue eyes again. Willie, oh Willie, I love you, Love you with all my heart; Tomorrow we might have been married, But liquor has kept us apart. Seven long years I've been married, I wish I was single again; A woman never knows of her troubles, Until she has married a man. Down to the barroom he staggered, Staggered and fell at the door; The last words that he ever uttered, "I'll never get drunk any more." You might find it interesting to learn that I found the words to this song on an Arkansas Family Tradition Web Site.

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2. If you are a seagull in the town of St. George, Maine, you probably think back wistfully to the good old days when we had an open dump. Back then, Wilder Oakes and his friends who’d visit the dump to shoot rats would see dozens of happy seagulls hopping around, eating garbage. My father called our dump the bird sanctuary. Of course nowadays, the town of St. George has what you would have to consider a state of the art dump where even a cockroach or a housefly would starve to death. Everything is recycled. There are two different wood piles, one for trees and limbs and one for lumber. There is a metal pile. There are big boxes for glass and tin cans and two boxes for different kinds of paper. There are boxes for half a dozen different kinds of plastic bottles. When you drive into our dump, the first thing you see on the right is Larry’s store, or whatever he calls it, where you can buy, for just pennies, all kinds of good things that people have thrown away. You can back your truck up to the wood pile and take home firewood, or the other wood pile and take home boards, or the metal pile and take home lawn mowers or bicycles. You should understand that some towns don’t allow people to come in and haul off anything they want for free. But Mr. Polky and his friends who run the town of St. George are smart. They know that every time I haul a good pine board or a kid’s bicycle home from the dump, I am saving St. George taxpayers money in disposal fees. When you see me leaving the dump with more than I brought down, you realize that St. George epitomizes the social experience they call recycling. The only losers are rats and seagulls.

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3. Friends send me letters. Here is one I’d like to read to you. The first part is actually a letter that my friend got from one of his friends. And this letter says: "Studies suggest that people who use a lot of swear words tend to be more trustworthy and honest. There are also health benefits associated with people who use more swear words in their daily vocabulary, including: increased circulation, elevated endorphin's and an overall sense of calm." That’s what this person sent me, and because endorphins was spelled incorrectly I had a good idea of where this information was coming from. My friend commented on this letter he got. He said, “Apparently I would be a more trustworthy and honest person if I used swear words on a regular basis. I do not use them now, and never have. I shy away from people who use them on a routine basis. I also never realized that there were significant health advantages from daily use of swear words. Perhaps you would not have bad knees if you used such language over the years? At 80 years old, is it too late for a person to bolster their trustworthiness, honesty, and health by adopting such language now? Would you have to double or triple up on swear word usage to get caught up for all the years you missed out on this beneficial opportunity? Could it be that the pharmaceutical companies have kept this a secret so that they could sell us more drugs, when simple swearing is all that is needed? If these things are true, aren't we are doing a disservice to our children by denying them the benefits of swearing? If we want our children to grow up to be more trustworthy, honest, and have better health, shouldn't we be teaching them swear words in school? Shouldn't such words become a standard part of their spelling and grammar lessons? Wouldn't the world be a more peaceful place for our children?” Well. I want to thank my friend for sending that along to us. You can be glad that I’m not going to comment on it right now. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and you can tell me what you think.

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4. Do you think that environment shapes behavior? Years ago some friends invited me to attend their party at the Alumni House at the University of Maine. It was a great party, and although I don’t know the politically correct name for one of the games we played, all it amounted to was getting 150 people to work together on a project. The people at each table were asked to glue together and decorate a gingerbread house --- a challenge indeed for Maine men who find themselves without duct tape or WD 40. Of course when 6 people work together at one table on a project there is usually at least one who is content to sit back and watch and at least one who has to manage the operation. They are the Lemme Show Ya boys. That’s just the way things are. At one table I saw a strong argument for those of you who believe that environment shapes behavior. The gingerbread house built by the Washington County crowd had a chainfall hanging from a tripod out front, a yellow police “do not cross” tape, 2 dogs chained to an outhouse and a Bait For Sale sign on the front door.

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5. Have you heard the ad about the vitamins that stick? I heard it. And I wondered about it. This company claims that ordinary everyday vitamins get flushed out of your body without doing you any good. But --- you want to buy their special vitamins because they stick. I’m like you. I thought it was funny, too, when I first heard it. An organic vitamin atom is the same as a vitamin atom that’s spent the winter in a chair inside a nuclear power plant.. But then I thought about it. And if you compare these stickable vitamins with some of those donuts you used to get when you were in the service, it does make sense. When I was stationed on the Cutter Laurel in Rockland in 1955, the cook made donuts that would hang around in your stomach for four or five days.

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6. Just about the most exciting thing an old man can do is to take the AARP driving class for old people. I’ve done it two or three times. I admit that I’m not a good driver and that I have caused somewhere between 6 and 8 accidents over the past 40 years. I seem to get in the way at stop signs. Here’s the big red stop sign. I ease up to it and stop. I look in my rear view mirror and see someone closing in, not looking at me but to the left at oncoming traffic, so they can run the stop sign, because they figure that I’m a typical driver and that I’ve already run the thing, and wham, before I can move I’ve had my rear bumper in the way again. You don’t know what it’s like to be chewed out for being a stupid driver until someone who has rammed you in the rear end screams in your face. When you hear some old dubber say, “I’ve driven 65 years and never had an accident,” you might want to ask yourself if he stops at stop signs. Remember that “I’ve never had an accident” is not the same as, “I’ve driven 50 years and never caused an accident.”

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7. When talking about an AARP driving class for old people it reminded me of a prize winning television commercial I wrote, produced and narrated for the Maine Seatbelt Coalition almost 30 years ago. It showed my friend Stanley French next to a car in his junkyard and Stanley was crying. One of his friends had hit a pole and because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt he’d gone right out through the windshield. You don’t see me in this commercial, but you hear my voice and I’m saying, “This is my friend Stanley French who owns this junkyard here in South Thomaston. There’s nothing that bothers Stanley more than seeing a car brought in here that one of his best friends was driving without wearing a seatbelt. You know, Stanley could have sold that windshield for 65 dollars.”

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8. The television commercials I made for the Maine Seatbelt Coalition were so successful that Betsy Frederick, who was running the Maine Coalition, got me to speak at the National Seatbelt Coalition meeting in Washington. I’d also had my life saved one time because I was wearing my seatbelt when a fire engine ran a stop sign and hit me broadside, so I was introduced as a survivor. Alive because I’d been wearing a seatbelt. Although I was kind of new to the speaking business back then, I knew I had to have a great first opening line, so just before I was to go on, I called my friend Richard Warner in Rockland and said, “Richard, in 10 minutes I’m going on before the National Seatbelt Coalition in Washington DC. Quick, give me an opening line.” And Richard said, “Washington, DC is an excellent place to hold the National Seatbelt Meeting. I can’t think of a town in the entire country where there is a greater need for restraint.”

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9. When my wife Marsha, The almost Perfect Woman, came home, I greeted her at the door and said, “Mike has written a movie and if, by any chance, he is able to sell it, he wants me to narrate some of it because he needs a real Maine accent.” Marsha said, “Can you fake it?”

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