Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 22, 2016

+

1. This morning on the news I heard three acronyms that meant nothing to me. This is the way people speak now. It saves time and breath. Most people quickly pick up these new words, for that's what they are, as I recently learned POTUS and SCOTUS, but nowadays the new ones are coming so thick and fast that it's hard for an old man to stay au courant. Why can't they speak plain English?

+

2. Anyone can learn to be a scientist but without the proper genes you can never be an artist. This was impressed upon my mind one morning as I watched my beautiful young trophy wife Marsha Skoglund, The Almost Perfect Woman, make blueberry muffouts for our honored Bed and Breakfast guest. With science --- well, it ain't science unless someone can duplicate your experiment and get the same results. But cooking is an art. Ask anyone how to boil a mackerel and you'll get as many answers as you have time to walk about and ask. I've never learned how to cook, although from time to time I thought it would be fun to learn how to make Jello. You might remember that I once filmed Pansy Bent showing me how to make Pansy bread, So I at least made an effort to provide fodder for myself. What brought me to this was watching Marsha open the oven door this morning. Inside the oven were three trays of tiny delicious blueberry muffouts. Marsha stuck her hand in the oven and poked a muffout with her finger. How do you write that up in the directions for blueberry muffout making? "Stick finger in oven and poke muffout." What does it mean? Although I did not try it, I'm sure if I poked the very same muffout I would end the day no smarter than I was when I woke up. If you don't know how to cook, there is a reason for it: you are not an artist. If you're not an artist, stay out of the kitchen because cooking is an art.

+

3. If you’ve never seen my solar panels that generate all our electricity, stop in the next time you’re going by. Solar panels in Maine are somewhat of a curiosity. I don’t usually talk too much about the 30 solar panels on my henhouse that generate all the electricity we use on this farm because where I live on the coast of Maine generating your own electricity from the sun’s rays means that you are 100 percent anti-business. In other words, if you don’t shell out 70 or 80 dollars for a power bill every month you are un-American. The good news is that I think we've used 900 KWH so far this billing period. We use electric heat in the spring and fall so we also save on our oil bill. Besides the electric heat we’ve been running the cellar dehumidifier and they are the two greatest energy hogs known to man. Even if we use up all our excess power credits the bitter cold Maine months of May and June, this summer the 7340-watt solar system will probably build up enough credit to let us use electric heat again in the fall. Stop in when you’re going by.

+

4. Have you ever gone into court just to see what they do in there? If you go in to court day after day and just sit quietly and listen, you might see different people, but they all tell the judge about the same story. You get the impression that the judge doesn't even have to listen because he never hears anything new. There is no one smart enough to say anything that might surprise a judge. Judges have heard it all before. At least that's what I thought until I asked my friend, Lawyer Crandall, if he ever said anything in court that surprised a judge. And Lawyer Crandall said, "Yes, Skog, I have. I once said, “Judge, my client is guilty.”

+

5. Two buzz words you might hear today are quality time. Parents are constantly urged to spend quality time with their children. One of the reasons this is difficult to do is because nobody seems to know what quality time is. The term has even overflowed its original parent childhood banks, and now is even used to express some mysterious relationship between married couples who have no children. A St. George woman, who seldom sees her 80 year old husband, complained that they never seem to share any quality time. The only time she sees him is when they go to bed. v 6. My friend Winky hates the cold so much, he hates the misery of Maine winters so much, that he finally moved to Key West where he could be warm and comfortable. Last I heard, he found a good job down there working in a meat locker.

+

7. Pick up any newspaper or magazine printed for general consumption and you will see an article, written by a white liberal, supporting affirmative action. On another page you will see an article, written by a well-educated member of some minority, opposing affirmative action. The only reason either article is in the publication is because the publisher thinks that the topic is a hot one which will generate a profit. Turn two more pages and you will read a story about someone who has been accused of violating someone’s Civil Rights --- by saying naughty words. Forty years ago no one would have thought anything about saying those words, but because human beings have an innate need for naughty words, and because the naughty words of 40 years ago are no longer naughty, new ones had to be invented. This prompts me to confess that on a recent Friday night I found myself in a time-warp. I attended a meeting where everyone there was 60, 70 and 80 years of age. We grew up in the 1940s and 50s, and are still burdened with the values of those degenerate days of long ago. Had a member of the Thought Police been there, all of us would have gone to jail, for, without even thinking twice about it, we all stood and sang three verses of the Too Fat Polka.

+

8. Nowadays you might make your telephone calls through your computer. I do. Anyway, one day Patty Moran gave me a Moran's Insurance Company hat. She also gave a Moran's Insurance hat to one of my very good friends, who happens to be a distant relation, from Cushing. He now lives far away in Rochester, New York. He forgot to take the hat with him and it's been in my office ever since. One day when I called to remind him he'd forgotten his hat, I noticed on the little information screen beneath his name that on January 17, 1992, he called to tell me that the end of the world was coming in 1993. People can forget things, but computers have a habit of remembering everything. And there it was on the screen. So I said to him, "Jazzman, on January 17, 1992 you told me, that the world was going to end in 1993. Have you changed your mind about that?" And he said, "I had to."

+

9. You’ll find people of all ages over at Sandy Shores Campground, which means that the residents have had to set up regulations, so the young people won’t be keeping everyone awake by singing around campfires at 3 in the morning. My friend Winky attended a meeting there when many of the new owners discussed these tentative regulations and someone asked if they could have a breeding operation. Winky said, “How are you going to stop it in a campground?”

+

10. One dark and stormy night my friend Winky heard on the TV news that there was so much snow and ice out there that anyone travelling should make sure that they have a shovel, tire chains, a bag of rock salt, a flashlight and booster cables. Winky said he felt kind of silly getting on the bus the next morning.

+

11. For over 38 years I’ve made a weekly one-hour radio program just for you. Wouldn’t you want to hope that I am better at making programs now than that 42-year-old kid who started in 1978? If you’ve been hanging in here with me for any amount of time at all, you will remember hearing me make mistakes in almost every program. I’d push the wrong control buttons and you’d hear me muttering about pushing the wrong button or messing up in one way or another. But then you noticed that as the years went by, all this changed. And now you no longer hear me whining and sniveling about making mistakes. This is because when you make a mistake when you’re old, you don’t even notice it.

+