Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 3, 2016

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One morning my dentist and I talked about sugar. I went without sweet for 9 years but started eating sweets again last September and since then my teeth have taken a pounding with sugar. He said that three things are needed to make a cavity. Sugar. A tooth. And I've forgotten the third one. But after writing a check for $322 to have one tooth filled, I wondered if I should go back to giving up sweets. I was able to live without pie, cake, cookies, bacon, sausage for 9 years. I know I could do it again. The only bad thing about not eating sweets is that when you give up nibbling, you lose weight. I was down to 139. No, no. I wasn't dieting. All I did was give up sweets so I could tie my shoestrings again, and I automatically wasted away to skin and bones. In September I thought it would be nice to get back up to 150 so I pigged out on cookies and pie and cake. But in spite of water-picking after every meal and flossing and brushing and ACT, I still had a $322 cavity. So I'm very tempted to give up eating sweets. Because the minute I do, I'm going to slide right back to an anemic 139 pounds. And what mature man wants to have the body of a 19-year-old boy?

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2. Before we started to get some much needed rain I got in two hollows of squash. One yellow, the other kind named after husbands. Spineless. I had prepared a place for more radishes and was all set to drop in the seeds when it started to rain. I prepare the soil for radishes thus. I impregnate the soil with red hot fresh off the field cow nutrients. Sprinkle it here and there and work it in with my three-pronged weed digger thing that has a 4-foot handle on it. Then I take a pine board about 8 feet long and three inches wide and I lay it on the ground and wiggle it back and forth until I've made a groove in the earth an inch or so deep. This gives me a straight smooth V groove in the earth in which to drop radish seeds about an inch apart. Saves thinning. Then I use an antique coal sifter to sift soil on top of that. The small stones I collect go into a five gallon bucket and my brother puts the small stones in his driveway. Every year as I cart off gallons of small stones my garden sinks lower and lower into the lawn. Then I put the board over the row flatways and walk on it. This gives me a groove about one inch deep and three inches wide that will hold the water when I water it. By the time it gets warm enough to plant down here on the coast, summer is almost over. But the dirt is finally warm here. And it is powder dry. I've been watering my rhubarb to beat the band and my rhubarb loves it. Rhubarb loves to be drenched with a lot of cold water. When it dries out it gets flaccid and is unfit for consumption.

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3. I haven't put in a real garden this year. I don't know why. I guess it was simply too cold. On the 8th of July it was 62 degrees and that didn’t count the wind chill factor. When you have a few warm days in a row the end of May, you feel like getting out and putting in a garden, but that didn't happen this year. Every year but this one I've put in 40 or so squash plants and 30 or so hollows of cucumbers. But one day the temperature soared to 65 degrees and sweat poured from my muscular torso as I extirpated weeds to prepare the soil. It’s about then that you realize that you really should go back into the house and take off your snowmobile suit. Yes. Now that the days are getting shorter and winter is on its way, summer has finally come to the coast of Maine and you can start to think about putting in your garden.

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4. When I first did the math to put a shower stall in our upstairs bathroom, I saw that a custom built shower was feasible. It would fit nicely in the allotted space. We’re talking about what used to be a tiny closet in a 1811 house. Not much space here. But then I realized that once you got into this tiny shower stall it would be like being enclosed in a metal culvert: it would be so small that once in it, your arms would be pinned to your sides and you wouldn't be able to wash your body.

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5. “The health benefits of 1,000 bottles of wine in two tiny pills.” That’s what the email said. “The health benefits of 1,000 bottles of wine in two tiny pills.” You might not believe this, but I know some people who would rather get those health benefits by drinking the 1,000 bottles of wine.

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6. A friend of mine is home from a week in the hospital, and the first thing he did was fill out their questionnaire on what he thought of the hospital. He only comment was, "If you ever plan to shove that tube down my nose again, you'd better have bigger people there to install it and a lot more of them."

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7. I just read that "A third major factor that relates to life expectancy is income. In a recent study based on data from 2001 to 2014, researchers found that the average life expectancy for the richest men in the United States is approximately 87 years, which is about 15 years longer than the poorest." And then this: "the U.S. average of 79.68 years currently ranks 43rd relative to the rest of the world. Although countries with longer life expectancies may not be as large and diverse as the United States, it is important to ask why–for such a rich country–the U.S. life expectancy is relatively low, particularly compared to other developed nations." "The answer, according to the CDC, is threefold: drug overdose, gun violence, and car crashes." Because you’ve asked me for my opinion I’ll tell you that I think that the richest men have better access to doctors. They are likely to be better educated, too, and perhaps have less stress. Stress kills. I was looking for figures, but couldn't find them, that would tell me how long an 80-year-old man could expect to live. The older you are, as I recall, the better the chances that you'll live another five or ten years. You know what I'm talking about here. I've seen those figures. For example, if you're 90, you stand a chance of living 3 more years. If you are 80 you stand a chance of living 7 more years. Can you find those figures? Anything you can say to encourage me would be appreciated.

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8. I know nothing about calories. I have lived happily for 80 years without knowing about calories. I do know that when I stopped eating pie, cake, cookies and such, I wasted away to skin and bones. I did not diet. I simply stopped eating pie, ice cream, banana bread and other good tasting things. And when I did my gut faded into obscurum. If I had eaten one cookie a week, I would not have turned into a human skeleton. You can tell your friends that you don't pig out on sweets but your body knows if you eat one cookie. There is no fooling your body. No matter how late at night you eat a cookie and no matter how dark it is, your body knows. There are blessings in this world. Not knowing about calories or your Facebook feed are two of them. Those of us who are ignorant of the way things work have two less things to think about. Then we can think of happier things like Fatha Hines and Joe Venuti.

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9. Do you use Facebook? For some of us, Facebook is a valuable tool. One morning I awoke with the first two lines of a limerick in my mind: There once was a doctor named Murray, Whose hands were incredibly furry. I posted this on my Facebook page, and within minutes Mike, who lives over in Spruce Head, posted the last three lines. I edited it a bit and came up with this:

There once was a dentist named Murray

Whose hands were incredibly furry

As she fondled his chin

She said with a grin,

I wear rubber gloves, so don't worry.

And now I am able to offer it up to you today as a typical example of Maine artistic endeavors. Don’t tell me that there is no use for Facebook.

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10. There is a small wastebasket beneath the sink in the upstairs bathroom. Because in 1970 I asked my father to put a bathroom in a former closet, the bathroom is small in this 1811 house and there is no room on the wall for a rack for the toilet paper. Although, now thinking of it, it could be attached to the door. But, at present, the toilet paper lives on top of the water tank of the toilet. Yesterday my wife Marsha asked me if I knew that I had thrown the roll of toilet paper into the wastebasket. Either I have reached the age where I am unaware of some of my actions, or Marsha is weaving a web of fantasy that will pave the way for my eventual premature commitment. Stay tuned. Thank you for listening.

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11. While putting off plastering a wall --- which I don't know how to do --- by looking in my computer I discovered that 9.74% of our income goes to Walmart for food. I was surprised to see that it was that much. Walmart's biggest customer base must be the people with the lowest incomes. I know people who are so financially secure that they can afford to pay more for their groceries and do buy them elsewhere. The really rich buy organic food at farmers' markets. Oh yes. There are oblique ways of boasting about your affluence. One is to casually mention that you hate to pay your income tax. Wicked big income tax. Another is to let slip that you never buy food at Walmart.

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12. Do you think in quantitative terms? One of Marsha's friends replied to Marsha's letter with this: "... we live in close quarters – a 1,300 sq. ft. condo in a former church." I do understand that one gets square feet by multiplying length by width. So their place is 10 feet wide and 130 feet long? Have you ever been to our house? I have no idea of how wide our house is or how long it is. The only time you'd need to know that would be when you were going to cut down a spruce tree to saw into a 6 x 6 to replace the rotted sills on the north side. Does a 1300 square foot condo mean anything to you? When I really want to confuse people, I tell them that we live in an area about the size of the reading room at Harvard Law School.

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