Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for April 17, 2016

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1. The general rule for doing anything right, is to work at it 80 or more hours every week. One day my every waking minute was consumed by a meeting with two of my former Hampton, Connecticut students from 1965. Marsha and I each had a good time. We were flattered that we were invited and glad we went. However --- if I were serious about writing or making radio and TV programs, I would have stayed home that day and written and made TV and radio programs. Whenever I get behind, the next day I have to start out by doing something I should have stayed home and done the day before. So even if I hit the ground running, I'll be a day behind. Being a day behind and a dollar short is the story of my life and the reason I never amounted to anything. This is also why successful men often retire with their second or third wife: most men who have really done well financially went years and years without stopping even once to enjoy life.

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2. No things considered here. Have you seen that intriguing ad on television that encourages you to refinance your loan? You are given two reasons for wanting to do this: Your monthly payment will be smaller and your loan will be paid off quicker. You and I have friends who can be convinced that a smaller monthly payment will pay off a loan in less time. Perhaps I am missing something here, but the only way I ever paid off an installment loan before I had to, I made larger monthly payments. Yes. I am familiar with the old story called Stone Soup in which a hungry man tricks some people into sharing their food. So, under fairy tale conditions, it is possible to make something out of nothing. You might even suggest that if the interest were low enough it could result in paying off the loan in less time. But how many altruistic bankers do you know? You might well ask how they scrape up cash for the expensive television ads if they don't raise the interest a percentage point or two. Someone pays for those commercials. Do you think it is the financial institution or the customer?

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3. Over 30 years ago, I spoke at an association meeting of Maine bankers and it was there that I first realized how much the setup of a banquet hall had to do with the success of a humorous after-dinner presentation. The officers of the association were seated on a platform where they could look out over the assembled tables in the hall. Every time I'd come to the punch line in a very funny story, the people who were not association officers would look up at the stage to see if any of the directors were laughing. You see, it might not be politic for a cashier to laugh if the bank’s president was sporting a face of stone. All hands were taking their cues from the directors. The directors did not laugh at my stories either, probably because they were afraid they'd look foolish up there at the head table on the platform, laughing their heads off at nonsense in front of all their cashiers and loan officers. And because the officers bit their lips and did not laugh, the tellers in the audience did the same. Since then, whenever I have been asked to stand at a head table and speak at any association with five officers on my left and five officers on my right, I have asked the officers to leave the platform and take seats in the audience. Or else I have retreated to the side from where I could attack both sides from neutral ground.

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4. You might correctly point out that if you need laughs, bankers are an exceptionally tough audience just by the nature of their work. Bankers do not laugh, no matter where in the audience they are seated. It is a conditioned non-response bankers learn early on. They know that if they were, for even a moment, to betray an iota of humanity, a friend might hit them up for a low interest loan. Nowadays bankers can print off reams of paper to justify high rates of interest or sound reasons for denying loans. But back when loans were determined by your reputation in the community by a loan officer who had probably known you and your parents and your grandparents for most of his life, they say there was a Rockland banker who had a borderline customer. The loan officer couldn't decide if he should take a chance on his neighbor or not. So he finally said, "Tell you what I'm going to do. You probably don't know this, but in 1918 I lost an eye in the Argonne Offensive. If you can tell me which of my eyes is glass, I'll give you the loan." The young man said, "Oh, I already know. The right eye is glass," "That's amazing. How could you tell?" "Easy. I could see a bit of compassion in the glass one."

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5. All of this high finance that we’ve been talking about here came back to me in a flash when I saw the television ad that guaranteed you’d pay off your loan quicker with a smaller monthly payment. What do you think? Would a person have to be numb, pretty desperate or both to spring for a deal like that? What kind of person can be convinced that they can have their cake and eat it too? Our friends who can do this are truly gifted because they can hold two completely contradictory beliefs at the same time and believe that are both true. For lack of a better word, I’d call the ability to do this “doublethink.” Here’s another example of “doublethink,” You see it all the time on television. A man, microphone in hand, stands up before a crowd and says that he’s going to increase the size of America’s military even as he lowers taxes.

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6. While we were talking about financial officers, the following yarn came to my mind, and, because it illustrates the warm, human side of our banker friends, it is only fair that you hear it now. You should know that my wife and my brother both liked this story so, because they are both pretty conservative I do not think I’ll offend anyone by passing along to you now. My neighbor, True Hall, is a realtor and this is his story and it is about a closing. You’ve bought property so you know what a closing is. There are one or two lawyers who show up at closings in blue suits and ties and sometimes two bankers in black suits and ties. Closings are always the same year after year: the same good old boys sitting in leather bound chairs exchanging papers in the same wood-paneled room. But after the happy customer left one particular closing, Hall looked around the table and said: “Well gentlemen, we have had dozens of closings that were always the same, but this one was different. Can anyone tell me what it was?” And every man in the room spoke as one voice, “She wasn’t wearing a bra.”

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7. Perhaps you recently read that the US continues to have the most billionaires. The last time I counted there were 492 billionaires in this country. Wow. Can you imagine it? Have you noticed that although these 492 billionaires could buy every vote in the country, they are shrewd enough to only buy as many as they need?

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8. In the course of the day you and I catch ourselves doing so many ridiculous things, that there is no really no need to make up stories. But from time to time a silly apocryphal tale that I think you would enjoy comes my way and this is one of them. At 2 AM, when my old neighbor Gramp Wiley got up to go to the bathroom, he looked out the window and saw a man going into the barn. He called 911 and reported a suspicious prowler, but was told that at the last town meeting folks had voted to cut back on government services. The town now had only one officer, she was checking on a car some kid had rolled over, and there was presently no officer available. A minute later Gramp called 911 again and said to disregard his first call because he had shot the man in his barn. Within minutes a state police car roared up and the burglar was soon in handcuffs. The policeman said, “I thought you said you’d shot someone.” Gramp said, “I thought you said there was nobody available."

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9. Do you remember Go dog, go? Have you ever read Go Dog Go? I had already served in the military, flunked out of music school and was living in Europe when Go Dog Go was written. But I heard about Go Dog Go because my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, used to teach little kids how to read. So when someone in our home is doing something the others appreciate, we cry: "Go dog go." And now that I think of it, I’ve heard teen age boys call each other “dog” in those movies where they steal cars in front of a hidden camera. They probably got that from reading Go Dog Go. Does this not indicate that our present educational system can boast of at least a modicum of success?

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10. An age is reflected in its literature. Edward Arlington Robinson, who 100 years ago was probably related to almost everybody where I live, wrote about whiskey. Gustaf Fröding wrote about poverty. Poets have written about bubbling brooks and whippoorwills and malleable young men who march off to die. My question to you is, how can any contemporary bard aspire for immortality when our present culture can be summarized in an essay about Viagra and plastic toys from China?

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11. Here’s a rare email that came my way a while back. The heading was, “Courier delivered Viagra.” Yes, it said, courier delivered Viagra. Can you envision in your mind a situation so critical, so pressing, that one would pay extra to have Viagra delivered by courier? Look closely and you’ll see vague specters, huddled miserably on the front steps. Their faces brighten at the distant drumming of hoof beats. A dispatch rider, leather bag over his shoulder, gallops into the dooryard. Without dismounting, he throws himself forward in the saddle, extends a clipboard, and says, “Please sign here.”

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12. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times, that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

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