Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for April 24, 2016

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In 1995 I spoke at the New York Telephone Association meeting in Lake Placid, and visited their trade show. I asked one of the vendors, who does shows all over the country, if there was more money in New York than Maine. And he said, "I think there's just as much money in Maine, but these people in New York know how to spend theirs."

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2. It seems that no matter what your cause, nowadays you can support it with quotes by Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Nowadays nobody would dare say anything bad about either one of them. Wow. Abraham Lincoln said that. These guys I’m listening to on the radio must be on the right side if they’re quoting Abraham Lincoln. And they have an American flag on the wall behind them. But --- if folks down my way had owned radios 200 years ago, they would have smashed them with a hammer had a radio commentator said anything good about Thomas Jefferson. The Embargo Act of 1807 shut down the shipping in Wiscasset. And can you imagine what the Emancipation Proclamation did to Maine shipping in 1862? You’ve heard me say that they had a torchlight celebration parade in Thomaston 5 miles from here when Lincoln was assassinated. They touched off tar barrels. People who like to quote Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln should remember that in their day they were two of the most hated men on the coast of Maine.

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3. Janice Lang is a professional photographer. She lives in Ottawa. Among other things, Janice goes as far north as it is possible to go in Canada and takes pictures for --- I think --- the government. She was here the other day and took pictures of me and my wife Marsha. I posted one on my Facebook page and one of my friends wrote that Janice knows how to capture the moment. Janice does know how to capture the moment. She has a camera that takes pictures like a machine gun. She takes 50 pictures, all of which capture the moment. Then she selects one to post that will make people say, Janice really knows how to capture the moment. Have you ever taken a picture that captured the moment?

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4. I have here a letter from a listener. He says, "Why do our wives always know where our lost household items are? I've checked with my male friends and they tell the same story. Whenever I am missing the car keys or the book that I've been reading, my wife rolls her eyes, throws up her hands and exclaims that men are helpless creatures. Then she asks the obvious: "Have you looked for it?" "Of course I've looked for it; how would I know that it's lost if I hadn't looked for it." She feigns a sort of indignation, suppressing a condescending smirk; then she says something like, "Have you checked the kitchen table next to the fruit bowl?" I ask her why she put my book on the kitchen table. I know I didn't put it there. I always put my book on the coffee table next to my reading chair. And so it goes. Almost every day another item lost by me and miraculously found by my wife. Actually she doesn't find things; she just knows where they are. I believe that women have secretly been taught by their mothers to passively ensure their husbands' dependency by hiding their stuff and then finding it for them. They get up at night, not to go to the bathroom, but to hide something that we will need the next day. They practice sleight of hand so that things appear in places that we know we've searched only minutes earlier. Robert, does this scenario ring true to you?" My reply has to be, Yes, it does. Just last week I couldn't find the butter, which is an unheard of thing in my house because in four years of marriage the almost perfect woman has never run out of anything. I took many things out of the refrigerator. I looked on all the counters because I knew that she is infallible. But I couldn't find it --- because I was looking for the little yellow tub. Now I know that butter also comes in little blue tubs. Thank you for reminding me of this with your letter.

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5. Have you ever lost your keys in the sand at the beach, had your credit cards stolen from your gym locker, or left your wallet at the tennis court? If these unfortunate situations sound familiar, then perhaps you ought to give up sports.

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6. What should we do with kids who have short attention spans? They can't sit still long enough to learn anything in school. Take the candy and soda away from them and give them a bowl of fish chowder every two hours. Getting one or two bowls of fish chowder into those so called problem children every day would save taxpayers millions in school psychologists and councilors. At least that's what a local undertaker told me. It's no sense to argue with him, because he's going to have the last word anyway.

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7. When it’s town meeting time in Maine hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent bangety, bangety, bang, as fast as the moderator can bring his gavel down. And then everything grinds to a halt and there is a heated two hour argument over a $300 item which would buy new weapons for the constables. New weapons? One wonders if the old ones were worn out. Did the barrels burn off, red, hot and smoking? What is the most dangerous thing these town constables have to do? They'll tell you that it is not shooting it out with desperadoes or fishing out the people who walked on thin ice. The most dangerous situation in Maine law enforcement is stepping between a man and wife who are slugging it out, toe to toe. No matter which one the officer grabs, the other one slugs him. Anyone from Massachusetts might be puzzled at the things that happen at a Maine town meeting, but there is a simple, reasonable explanation for everything. For example, at our town meeting a man stood up and voted to cut 16 percent from the budget across the board. He moved that there be a secret paper ballot. This took an hour and a half. While people were standing around they bought all the cookies and soda on the table at the end of the hall. Of course, the guy who made the motion to have the secret ballot owned the concession.

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8. A high school girl in Camden gave her boyfriend a box of home made chocolate chip cookies to eat on his way back to college at Fairley Dickenson in New Jersey. Everyone knows that chocolate causes pimples. So not only will the young man enjoy the cookies on his trip down to Fairley Dickenson, but his pimples will be so bad for the next two months that he probably won't be able to do any dating until the next school vacation, at which time he'll be back in Camden. Even when they're in high school, they've got us figured out.

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9. If you're from New York or Boston and you've just moved up here, so you can live life like it should be, you might be tempted to have a lawn sale --- so you can blend in with the natives. You might decide to have the sale all by yourself on your own front lawn. Or you might get together with some of your friends or neighbors just so you can advertise a 3 FAMILY LAWN SALE. Or a super 6 FAMILY LAWN SALE. The more families you get to join you, the more impressive it sounds and the more of a crowd you're likely to draw. Here's how the Maine lawn sale works. To begin with, you have to have some things that are absolutely worthless. It might be clay ducks someone gave your second wife for a wedding present. It could be toys that your kids have broken or outgrown. Be sure to include that exercise bike that you never did have time to use. You pick a day for the sale and advertise it in Uncle Henry's. Go around the neighborhood a week before the sale and nail hand printed cardboard signs on telephone poles. Put up a lot of them, because most of them will blow away or get wet and fall apart. The night before, drag all the treasures over to the appointed place and store them in a barn or garage. If you don't have a storage place put it on tables and tie it down with blue tarps. The day of your great sale arrives. You get up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and drag all your treasures out on the lawn, or take off the blue tarps. Now, it really doesn't matter what time you advertise a sale, because professional lawn sale goers will be tearing at it like raccoons on a box of garbage an hour before you're ready. If you advertised your sale to start at 8, the grim-lipped professionals will be digging for the treasures under your tarps at 7. All this sounds harmless enough, but there is a very great danger in having a lawn sale --- it's rain. Do you have any idea what happens if you and six of your friends have been hauling stuff to your house steady for a week and then, on the day of the sale, it rains? You can't hesitate. You have to load every bit of it on a truck and haul it to the dump. Right then! Don't think you can sell it the following weekend, because by then everything will be soaking wet and shopworn. Nobody will even look at it. Another danger is, that once you've started a collection on your lawn, people will drop things there during the night, and before you know it, people will be mistaking you for a native. The summer will pass. Your collection will grow daily, and not until October, when the leaves turn to gold, will your rusted metal blend in with the fall foliage.

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