Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 19, 2016

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Did you know that grandchildren are not interested in looking at lobster boats or trees? When they ride out into the country with you, they each have a little black cell phone in their hands and they wouldn't take their eyes off it if a dinosaur stepped on the car.

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2. As stirred my rolled oats this morning I noticed that it was still dark and quiet in the executive suite of our Bed and Breakfast where the children were staying. Because they got to bed even before I did last night, I mentioned to management that it was remarkable that children could sleep 10 hours without moving. I said that I couldn't do it. Whereupon, she replied, "Yes you can." It is very encouraging to have a loving wife confess that, when it comes to some physical endeavors, her 80-year-old spouse is every bit as good as a 40-year-old child.

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3. Is there something wrong with me or am I out of touch with present modes of communication? Why can’t I just relax, drool, and go along with this dumbing down of America? You know that people who don’t know how to use email and the telephone are my pet peeves. Tonight when I picked up the phone and said, “Robert Skoglund here --- what can I do for you?” the voice on the other end said, “Hi there --- how are you doing tonight?” How am I doing tonight? I don’t pick up my phone to hear someone ask me how I am doing. I wanted to cry. Nobody cares how I am doing, so why throw that meaningless phrase at me? Why, why, why can’t people simply say who they are and what it is they want? More and more Americans seem to be on a little programmed track, and if you throw them off that track, they have to back to the beginning and start over. You are not allowed to drive a car without first passing a test. Wouldn’t you like to see everyone take a course in talking on the telephone and then having to pass a test before being allowed to have one? This is not done because it would keep half of the people in America from communicating with their neighbors. Well --- we finally determined that this caller wanted to talk with his aunt, who happened to be our friend. I told him I’d be glad to have his aunt call him when she came home --- if he’d be kind enough to leave his number. And then, another slap in the face. He said, “Do you have a pencil?” In other words, “You don’t have brains enough to keep a pen and paper on your desk so I’m not going to give you the number until I’m sure you are ready to write it down.” The most annoying thing about this entire incident is that I didn’t need to ask him for his number because my telephone automatically records it.

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4. It is the time of year when some parents finally get to see boyfriends who were acquired over the past school year. If your daughter is a serious student, who is also a friendly outgoing type, three or four young men might show up in the course of a month. This is good. It means that your daughter will probably marry a very rich 50 year old man when she's 35. Were you pleased with the most recent ones your daughter brought home? If you're a father, or a stepfather like I am, it's important to have your greeting down pat. Think it up ahead of time. Years ago, when my friend, Lawyer Crandall, heard a young male voice on the phone asking for his daughter, his standard reply was, "She's in a mental institution." Crandall says they simply said, "Oh good. Thank you. I'll call back later." Another father told me he had his greeting down pat. He smiles extends a hand, and says, "So you're the chemist who's been in Africa working with Aids patients.” I can remember that 15 or so years ago I was very impressed with the crop my wife’s daughter brought home. Each one admitted that he was a grad student on full fellowship to this or that university. Grad student on full fellowship has a nice ring to it. Every time one would appear, I'd say to myself, "Here's a smart fellow who's going to go places. He can't fail." But then one day I happened to think that for three years I was a grad student on a full fellowship.

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5. Captain Freddie was one of my neighbors when I was a kid. They say Captain Freddie didn't get to go to sea until he was well along in years --- almost 20. He wanted to go when he was younger when one of his relatives, Captain Seymore Watts, or someone in the same business, even came by the house one time and asked him to help haul a load of coal to California. But Captain Freddie’s mother had lost two or three family members at sea and she wouldn't let him out of the house. Captain Freddie said, "You know, that ship went down and all hands was lost. I suppose it's just as well I didn't go."

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6. Many years ago a most unpleasant man moved here from Boston. After putting up with his foolishness for two or three years, one of the local boys thought he'd encourage this guy to move back to Boston. So late one night this kid came up behind the man as he got out of his car, stuck a gun in his ribs, and robbed him of three dollars and fourteen cents. The next day that man moved back to Boston. We were all glad to see him go, but none of us were pleased with the way the kid had gone about it. And the next time I saw him I chewed him out for scaring the man to death. He said, "Scared? Don't you know nothing about city people? They aren't afraid of holdup men. When that Boston man felt my gun in his ribs, he got just plain homesick."

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7. What do you do when it looks too good to be true? Yes, yes, I know, but I signed up with an on line pen pal language site anyway because I don’t know anyone in Italy to visit should I ever go to Italy. Marsha and I have many relatives and friends in Sweden and Holland from whom we can sponge a room and food for two days. And by adding a couple of stops in Germany we can spend three weeks in Northern Europe without exhausting our supply. But it would be nice to know someone down in Italy where we could crash, too. Oh --- the --- on line pen pal site? It seemed to work slick, until I found a woman in Holland who wanted to practice English and Norwegian. That really pushed my buttons, because I can read Dutch pretty well and even understand it if she is spoken slowly, but I’ve been able to muddle by in Norwegian ever since I lived in Sweden almost 50 years ago. Yes, yes, you could have told me. When I tried to contact this woman, for the first time in the entire operation a little dollar sign popped up on the screen. For only $6 a month I can contact other people, but until I pay up I can only sit like a mummy and hope that my phone will ting a ling. Can’t you well imagine that there are 3,000 members of the club out there, each one waiting for someone else to spend the first $6 to get the ball moving? Doesn’t it remind you of The Diogenes Club? You will recall that it was co-founded by Sherlock's older brother, Mycroft Holmes. Once within the hallowed walls, no member was permitted to even look at anyone else. v 8. For perhaps fifteen years, I wrote a humor column which appeared in over fifty newspapers. I wrote fiction. That means I made up wild, improbable stories about people who didn't exist. You have to be very careful to get your facts straight when you write fiction, because otherwise the people you are writing about will call up and complain.

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9. Are you good at remembering names and faces? I'm not, because I have prosopagnosia or face blindness and it's more annoying than embarrassing when someone says, "I can't believe you don't remember me. I've been to your house four times." I'm not alone when it comes to having a bad memory. You probably heard about those people who forgot to list on their job applications that they had been convicted of theft, assault, manslaughter and even cocaine trafficking. What an exciting life you must have if you can forget that you spent your last birthday in jail.

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10. Did you hear about the woman who said that robbers had locked her in her car trunk? It gave her an excuse for not coming to work for the previous three days. Police became suspicious when they looked in the trunk, because there were no signs that anyone had lived there for three days. Anyone who has made a study of bears in the woods would have become suspicious. If a bear or a fox or anything else lives in your woods --- or in the trunk of your car --- for three days, you will see signs. Why didn't that woman realize that if a person lives in the trunk of a car for three days, there should be signs? I think it's because she'd watched too many soap operas. On soap operas, they can tie a woman to a chair for a week, and if you give her an occasional drink of water and a scrap of food, she gets along fine.

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11. Do you ever get cards in the mail, thanking you for your pledge to the University's Annual Fund? I got a card, but --- because I could not recall making any such pledge, I called them. The woman in charge did not sound surprised. Instead, she asked me the name of the student caller who had signed and mailed me the pledge card. When I told her, she said that he was one of their third-world exchange students, and that mine was the second call she'd had on him. She explained that to get these students to make calls, the University offers them small premiums, a pizza, or something like that, if they can get a certain amount of pledges. I was not home when he called, so he obviously filled in an amount that would earn him a slice of pizza. Please notice that I have not mentioned the student's name, his home, or his university. Had I done so there would be too many people wanting to talk with him about managing General Motors or Citibank.

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