Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 29, 2016

+

We are all products of the environment in which we were raised. Even though that is a platitude, I feel that I must start with it. Recently I have seen several pictures taken from the top of Mount Batty in Camden. You can see Curtis Island in the pictures there at the mouth of Camden Harbor. People enjoy climbing mountains and posting pictures of the ocean and sky and trees. When you see these pictures you are supposed to catch your breath and exclaim, “Oh, that is beautiful.” But when I look up this picture taken from the top of Mount Batty, it conjures up the most unpleasant memories a man can have. I did not have to read the caption beneath the picture to know where it was because I have looked at a chart of this area for hundreds of hours. When I was in the Coast Guard in 1955 I came ashore on Curtis Island in a small boat filled with bags of coal. I was ordered to place a bag of coal on my shoulders and carry it up, up, up to the lighthouse on Curtis Island until I, and my fellow sufferers, had emptied the boat. So when I see this picture, I am reminded of back breaking labor and two of the longest years of my life. It is not a pretty picture.

+

2. A firestorm of indignation broke out when I mentioned on Facebook that my wife Marsha boiled my asparagus for fifteen minutes. You’d thought I’d gone to Augusta and suggested a hike in the minimum wage. In an area where quiche now infests traditional Grange hall suppers I was not surprised to be told by many of my younger friends that they eat their veggies “blanched” or practically raw. Our city friends who never pulled a carrot from the ground were raised on mushy canned vegetables and may be compared with the folks who think that reality is the shadows they see on the cave wall. When they break their bonds can they be blamed for wanting a vegetable that offers up a bit of resistance or at least some manifestation that it was once alive? Because I can’t cook, unless you count spaghetti and rolled oats, on Facebook I maintained that cooking is an art that cannot be learned. Some respondents said that cooking is a science. Perhaps you have an opinion. Is cooking an art or a science?

+

3. Perhaps you have an opinion. Is cooking an art or a science? It is a ready-made topic for discussion. Living on the coast of Maine as we do, you know that trotting out the life history of everyone concerned before we actually tackle the matter at hand is mandatory. One lazy summer afternoon in 1965 I married a wonderful young woman at the Chebeague Island Inn. That was one of my more memorable weddings and I seem to recall that Tommy Bucci played piano, I played bass, and my wife’s father danced with the new bride. By the time I was 29 I had played for so many dances and private parties that standing on the bandstand, even at my own wedding, seemed like the natural thing to do. Later in the day I noticed my philosophy professor, Jim Whitten from Gorham, conversing with my wife's philosophy professor, Doug McGee from Vassar. I approached and asked if they were having a profitable chat. Mr. Whitten said, "Oh no. So far we have only been defining our terms." Before inaugurating any discussion on the best way to cook vegetables, one might start by defining the terms and parameters to be permitted or anticipated. Defining would be difficult when you read, “Stick your fork in the asparagus to see if they are done.” What is “done” to one is raw or overcooked to another.

+

4. Facebook friend Claire says, "If one can read, one can cook." Is this true? If you've ever tried to follow written directions to complete some simple task on your computer, you might have noticed that a couple of crucial steps are usually left out. Like his colleagues who write cook books, the computer guru writing the computer instructions thinks that you don't need to be told to hold down Ctrl with your little finger as you hit F8. When I’d ask my old neighbor Gladys in the trailer next door how long to cook mackerel, she’s say, “Until they’re done.” “How do you know when they’re done?” “You can tell.”

+

5. So --- "Poke muffin with finger to see if it is done.” If this is the first time you’ve ever opened an oven door you could poke the muffin all day and only learn that your finger blisters easily. Or how about, “Seed and dice a green pepper.”? How does one seed and dice a green pepper? My brother says that when he was 12 I taught him how to drive a car. He says I’d scream, “Push on the clutch.” He says that didn’t help him much because he didn’t know what the clutch was or how to find it. If cooking were a science anyone who could read could cook. I can read. I can’t cook. Therefore, cooking is an art.

+

6. If cooking were a science anyone who could read could cook. I can read. I can’t cook. Therefore, cooking is an art. Facebook friend Duane disagrees. He says, “I am a very good cook. I am an engineer. Cooking is engineering. Engineering is all about taking things that exist and combining them to make something useful. Cooking is all about taking edible things that exist and combining them to make something delicious and edible. Cooking is engineering and engineering is not correlated with artistic talent.” I’ll bet that if I followed the same recipe as Duane, I’d fail. And then someone would gently say, “Everybody knows that you can’t roast a 300-pound pig on a turkey spit.”

+

7. Old men had best keep their opinions to themselves. I raised a ruckus when I mentioned on Facebook that I thought my wife Marsha boiled my asparagus for fifteen minutes. Anyway, after enduring two days of ridicule on Facebook for eating overcooked food, I asked Marsha how long she boiled asparagus. She said, “Oh, from three to five minutes. Any longer than that and it gets mushy.”

+

8. A local psychiatrist has published a book entitled, There Are Two Kinds of People in The World. The two types are quilts people, who are into delayed gratification, and fudge people, who are into instant gratification. That’s why quilts are usually around forever and fudge hardly ever gets stale. And this is also why fudge people and quilts people get along so well. Quilts people enjoy watching fudge people eat up all that instant gratification, knowing that someday when their quilts are finished, they’ll get their rush. Whereas fudge people are in perpetual awe of anyone patient enough to wait months or years for anything.

+

9. I read somewhere that California spends nearly seven times more per year on each prison inmate than it does on each student. Crime might well be eliminated in California the day that students figure out that for every criminal killed during a robbery or executed, seven students could be sent to college.

+

10. Someone was telling me about a sociologist at Harvard who published a study indicationing that everything is youth oriented nowadays. No one seems to be surprised. Society has always been youth oriented. Human nature has not changed in 10s of thousands of years. Did you ever stop to think that The Ten Commandments, which are at least 4,000 years old, are obviously directed at young people. Nobody over 50 would ever have the strength or desire to break any one of them.

+

11. Can you tell the difference between the Harley bikers and the BMW bikers? The BMW bikers are the guys who can wash off their tattoos when they get home.

+