Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 17, 2016

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1. Our topic today is fashion. Let us begin by speaking out against those horrible high heeled shoes that women feel they need to wear. Every ad on TV shows impressionable young girls strutting in back breaking high heel shoes. Do you ever see in the ads a 40-year-old woman being told that she'll lose her job if she doesn't wear them? And then there were the days when women’s waists were constrained by those laced up things. Insecure women can obviously be convinced to do some pretty bad things to their bodies, just so they'll "fit in." Men have also rules for fashion, although they are not so painful. The only one I'm strict about is the need to wear a necktie. My father came to this country to break up rocks with a hammer and by wearing my necktie I am flaunting my first generation college education. Had my father been a doctor or lawyer and paid my way through college, I'd be free to open that top button on my shirt. What do you think would happen if anyone saw me in public without a tie and the top button open on my shirt? People would whisper behind my back, "Look at Skog, trying to make people think he came from old money."

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2. You’ve seen it --- a photograph of an elderly man who holds a pair of glasses in his right hand. He gazes thoughtfully at the camera, chin resting pensively on a knuckle. If you think about it, you have seen dozens of these pictures. Textbooks are notoriously full of them. As medical practitioners or patrons, portraits of these great men in a familiar pose adorn hospital corridor walls. But why this ubiquitous clenched hand --- always three or so inches below the nose? Is it that many of us never outgrow our need to suck or nibble at a pacifier? Listen closely because yesterday, while taking my picture, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, explained it quite nicely. Marsha said, “Put your hand up there to hide all those ugly old chins.

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3. Here’s a letter from Bill who says: "Good afternoon! I've got a couple students here at the music camp - NEMC, in Sidney who would like to know the correct title of your theme as played by Clark Terry. Would appreciate your help. Thanks." Incoherent Blues. Clark Terry and Oscar Peterson playing Incoherent Blues. I used to go out with mumbles, but I haven’t done that for years and simply clip off whatever song I was playing. Thank the students for asking.

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4. Saturday night I had to stay up an hour past my bedtime which is as quickly as I can get there after supper. All six of our Bed and Breakfast guests went out on the town. There was a street dance in Tenants Harbor to celebrate St. George days, so I couldn’t go to bed. I had to stay up to lift the blueberry cake out of the oven for my wife, Marsha, the gracious hostess. Two of the guests, an astrophysicist and his spouse went to the Antarctica association meeting in Port Clyde. I heard they are expecting 100 people. Have you been to Antarctica? John, the astrophysicist, says that Admiral Bird’s grandson spoke at the meeting. Another friend who was staying here, George, George was telling about staying in New Hampshire the night before with a woman who went to Antarctica. The small boat lurched on the way to shore and she was injured. So she missed the tour. George said they took her in later and helped her ashore and braced her up just long enough to have her picture taken in Antarctica. Have you ever been to Antarctica? And, by the way, be careful not to injure yourself if you are on vacation. Your B&B host hates to lose a night's pay just because you broke your leg and didn't show.

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5. While putting some nice boards I got on the dump into my garage, a hornet stung me between the shoulder blades. I put on my bee keeping costume and squirted them with Clorox and managed to raise quite a fuss. I wondered if killing a hornet attracts more hornets and I looked it up on Google. It said, “Yes. All social wasps emit an alarm pheromone from their bodies at the point of death, signifying loud and clear to any other wasps in the vicinity that there is a threat nearby. This is why it is very dangerous to kill a hornet near its nest, as the alarm pheromone could very well summon the entire colony to the dead insect.” --- You know, the same thing is true of human beings. You drop a bomb on a building and kill two or three people you don’t like and every friend and relative of the people you have bombed come out of the woodwork like hornets. I’ve found out that if I don’t go near the hornets, they soon forget about me and quiet down.

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6. Today we are going to talk about threats. Not veiled threats but blatant in-your-face threats. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is the master of the in-your-face threat. Because I don’t think that the need to make threats is genetically transmitted, she could have learned it as a small child by listening to her mother. And now that I stop to think of it, my wife’s father was the most moderate, laid-back man I ever met. One morning my wife approached the deposed master of this house, who of course lives with his fingers glued to the keyboard of his computer, and this is what she said. “Will you please make an effort to put in that microwave today? I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning it and I want you to put it in before it gets rusty.” Not a threat, you say. This sounds like a very polite and reasonable request? It is. But, then I said, “Before it gets rusty? You want me to put in the new microwave before it gets rusty?” --- She just paid four dollars for it so it was new to us. I laughed, and it wasn’t a nasty sarcastic laugh, but a real honest that’s-funny laugh and I said, “Do you know how long it takes something that is setting out in the barn to get rusty? You don’t seem to have much faith in my ability to get things done around here.” And that’s when she said, “If you don’t put it in, I’m going to pick it up and carry it in here and do it myself.” And right there you can hear the “If you don’t I will…” threat part. And you know as well as I do that she had been out there washing the breakfast dishes and rehearsing that speech until she had it down pat in its final form and trounced in here for delivery. If you are a husband, my question to you is, does your wife have a similar modus operandi when she wants something done? What? You don’t know because no matter how important and how intricate your project, you always jump up the first time she asks?

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7. My friend Julian, who has sold more than a few things in his day, says that the time to sell is when you have a buyer. I take that to mean that even though you might not be thinking about selling your grandfather’s 1932 Plymouth sedan with “floating power, set in rubber”, if someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, he or she owns it. I was thinking of that while out lawn sale ing the other day. Like a woman who knows the price of everything in the grocery store, I know that excellent bicycles are 3 to 5 dollars, books (and we are talking classics or science in hard cover) are a quarter, a handful of Craftsman wrenches are a dollar and pyrex dishes are half a dollar. So when I walk up a driveway and see prices on items that are ten times higher than they should be, I laugh out loud and think to myself that optimism for the economy is alive and well. Thank you for tolerating this digression. Now to the point. We said that the time to sell is when you are visited by someone who wants to buy. You might turn that end for end and say that the time to buy, is when you find someone who WANTS to sell. But if you have been to enough lawn sales, you know that you don’t really want to buy when someone wants to sell. The time to buy is when you find someone who has lost his job, or has been hurt in an accident but has no health insurance and has been unable to make payments on his house, all his furniture and possessions are out on the sidewalk in front of his former house so he HAS to sell.

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8. When I came out of the bathroom one morning, my wife Marsha said, “You were in there talking about what you were going to do today. I think you’re going crazy.” This was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize that I talked out loud to myself. But, as the day went on, I realized that when I was alone I talked out loud to myself all the time. Listening to myself for the first time, I was also somewhat shocked to hear myself employing lexical items that I never use with anyone but must have acquired 40 or so years ago while listening to the Nixon tapes. So --- because I don’t want people to think I’m crazy, I’m going to have to get a dog. People who talk to animals are considered normal.

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9. The dirtiest hotels in the world. That was what the junk email said. Of course I had to Google The dirtiest hotels in the world so I could see where they were. Number one is in San Francisco. Let me read you a sample of the reviews: “First and foremost no one should ever walk into a hotel only to find prostitutes walking around the inside.” Think about this. What reason would anyone have to complain about a prostitute who was on her feet?

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10. If you were to read even a few of the hotel reviews that turned up on a web page called The Dirtiest Hotels in the World, you might not have to wonder where Stephen King gets material for his novels. Listen to this: “When we checked in, the Manager offered us a free upgrade to the "Honeymoon Suite". It was a set up. The "Honeymoon Suite" had a vacant room next door that was "under construction". I was undressed to get into my swimsuit and heard breathing. I looked under the big gap under the adjoining room door. I saw eyes looking back at me!” I don’t know if eyes would have bothered me. It’s the hidden camera that can come back and bite you. And here’s another review: “We were looking for a dog friendly hotel…. It was absolutely horrible! The room smelled musty” --- Probably because the last people who stayed there had a dog.

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11. We all have things that we can do. And there are other things that we cannot do. Perhaps an adult might be defined as: “a person who knows what he can do and what he can’t do --- and isn’t afraid to admit it.” The email I recently received said, “humble, Don't you remember what I thought of as Plan A?” Of course I don’t remember anything about Plan A. Because I’d like you to learn a little more about me, you might listen closely to the reply I sent to this person: “Please realize that I don’t remember much of anything. If I have a talent, it is not in remembering, but in synthesizing that which I have recently heard and presenting it to you, my friends, as original material.”

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