Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 8, 2016

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1. How do our friends in the medical community get their information. Obviously by various and sundry ways. My wife Marsha just got home from seeing our doctor friend. Marsha says that our doctor told her that she just heard that I had a heart attack in December. How did our doctor know this? Her father who watches my program saw me talking about it on TV.

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2. One of my friends was wondering if he should start taking $1500 from his Social Security when he is 62 or $2000 a month from his social security when he is 66.2. He has two choices. Which one would you take? It all depends. And, if you think about it, the choice would be a simple one in some cases. If you smoke, it would probably be wise to start taking your social security as soon as possible.

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3. Radio friend Tim writes this on my Facebook page. He says that “Guns are perfectly safe as long as they are owned by conscientious people who always keep them unloaded in a heavy-duty, locked container. If someone attacks you, hit them with the container.”

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4. I recently read somewhere that "College grads do earn more in the long run, but only if the student was actually suited for college. Higher education is wonderful for many, but for another large percentage, employment opportunities lie in blue-collar work that often pays just as much." No news here. Plumbers, electricians, well, almost every blue collar worker you can think of earns more than a school teacher in Maine with an MA and 25 years of teaching experience. As I recall, in some European countries children who would be academics and those who would be technicians are separated before the kids in either group waste valuable years studying something for which they are not suited. I think of this often. No matter how much some of us study, we cannot retain the material covered. Some of us have no business in the halls of higher learning. I will tell you from experience that the only good thing about having a mind incapable of retention is being able to read the same books over and over. Each time is a exciting new experience. Another factor enters into play in this ability to pay your own way in your society. It is very important and it is your amount of physical endurance. Your energy quotient. If you tire easily and find it impossible to complete simple tasks like painting the side of a house or writing a newspaper column --- and, have a low IQ, you have two strikes against you. You and I know many people who are not at all clever who have done well economically just because of their I think I can I think I can mentality and their ability to work 18 hour days. At my little brother's 76th birthday party I said that it was remarkable that I was able to stand and repeat a mindless chore for three hours at Window Dressers last fall. I helped make inside storm windows for the rich and poor alike. I didn't think I could hang in with anything for that amount of time. Doing the same thing over and over for three hours. Do you know what I’m talking about here?

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5. Read in the Smithsonian magazine in the dentist's office one morning. Like any successful magazine it is full of ads. Did you know that the 8-day New England foliage tour is $1285 or so? Viewing the ancient ruins in some middle eastern country is $6580 or so. I suppose the extra $5,000 is to pay for the accompanying armed security guards. Can you imagine anyone paying $162 a day to look at red leaves drop from the maples in my pasture. For those who are interested, have I got a deal for you. Recognized two names in the magazine, which pleased me. Rosalind Franklin, in very small print and Ariel Sabar in even smaller print. Not many people know much about Rosalind Franklin. Even fewer would recognize the name Ariel Sabar. He was a humble radio friend when he lived down in the Buxton area. Please send me a note and tell me that you, too, know about Rosalind Franklin. Or look her up, read about her, and send me a note to thank me for telling you about Rosalind Franklin. Oh, I didn't realize until I just looked that Rosalind Franklin was born in Notting Hill. Notting Hill is one of my favorite movies. I like movies with a happy ending. I avoid movies with sad endings by reading the synopsis of any movie before I watch it. In a year ask me where Rosalind Franklin was born. It will be interesting to see if my short term memory will fail me.

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6. My 92-year-old friend Alden Bent visited. He mowed the pasture/lawn. I put the bagged grass clippings around my rhubarb. Mulch. My wife Marsha went to visit a granddaughter for two days and she was afraid that Alden and I were going to starve to death in her absence. Alden and I have been eating for a combined total of 172 years and my wife was afraid we didn’t know how to forage for food. For 20 years, as a single man, I lived on spaghetti, and if I were 60 I could do it again. Because some people are picky with language, I'm not saying that now, at 80, I could live on spaghetti for another 20 years. With my genes the chances of my living to be 100 are pretty slim. If I were rich, I would have bought two plastic models of human skeletons and had them collapsed across a dust covered dining room table clutching at a barren chicken carcass to greet my wife when she came home. It would have kept her from being disappointed.

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7. When I was in the dentist's office a woman came in and laughed and exchanged a few words with the woman behind the desk. I smiled at her and said that when one was a married man it was nice to hear a woman's voice saying pleasant things in the morning. I enjoy saying silly things like that. I told my wife Marsha when I came home. After almost 30 years she still finds me to be mildly amusing. She knows that few take me seriously and said I was very bad.

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8. One recent morning at the Veterans Administration, Dr. Karen tested my ears. She said there wasn't much change from last time. She tested me in an acoustic cell-like place. I went in one in Bucharest in 1967 at the International Congress of Linguists and was worried that they might be about to exact a confession from me. Romania was a communist country back then. I'm probably the only person Dr. Karen tested this week who could write a definition of a phoneme or who knew how to produce, upon demand, a voiceless labiodental fricative. She said that the new hearing aids were better. I said I didn't want new hearing aids just to have new hearing aids. I only wanted them if they would improve my understanding of language as she is spoke. In two weeks I'll go back up and get fitted. How happy I will be if I can simply sit where I am and not have to jump up and run into the next room every time my wife articulates a question or barks a command. I get to keep the old hearing aids as a backup. I wonder if either one of them would fit my little brother. He could use hearing aids. The new ones I'm getting are little round things that plug in to any ear. The ones I have now were made from a mold that fitted my ear. If my brother really wants to hear, don’t you want to bet he can make them fit?

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9. We all see things through our own eyes. A Facebook friend posted a picture of Penobscot Bay taken from the top of Mount Batty in Camden. Hoo Hah. Everyone is expected to exude platitudes about the cloud formations and whatnot. What I saw in the picture was Curtis Island at the mouth of Camden Harbor. In 1955 when I was in the Coast Guard I had to put sacks of coal on my back and lug it up to the lighthouse on Curtis Island. Do I need to tell you that I have opinions on Curtis Island and Penobscot Bay --- where I was stationed for two interminable years. The wheel turns slowly but it turns. Around 60 years later the Veteran’s Administration gave me two hearing aids that cost more than my entire salary for two years in the Coast Guard. When you are old, my child, you know about these things. You have a different outlook on life. Here’s more good news. If you are madly in love with someone who won’t even give you the time of day, do not slash your wrists in despair. There is a very good chance that 40 or 50 years later whatever remains of your dearly beloved will turn up on your doorstep, knocking with unbridled desire at your portal. And if you peep out from behind your curtain you will see nothing that will inspire you to unlock the door.

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10. Little public service announcement here. Beware of the clothing donation scam. Our friend David just received a call from a charity asking him to donate some of his clothes to the starving people throughout the world. He told them to buzz off! Anybody who fits into your average American’s clothing isn't starving!

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11. Perhaps 100 years ago somewhere in St. George, Maine, old granny would want to visit Sarah, so they'd put her Granny’s bonnet on her and lug her around the house a couple of times in her chair. And they'd set her down and someone would say to her, "I'm glad you came, Grammy," and they’d chat with her awhile. And then they'd lug Granny back around so she'd think she was home. For generations after that, when anyone in that family was just puttering around and not doing anything of importance all day, they'd say they spent the day visiting Sarah. I'm Robert Skoglund. ThF. Thank you for spending the last few minutes with me visiting Sarah.

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