Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 24, 2016

+

1. You know me. I'm not one to panic over nothing. I'm no Chicken Little. But when Lester Holt told us about the heat wave that is sweeping the country, I sat up and listened hard. Fires, old people dying because their air conditioning broke down and no one checked on them, crops drying up and withering away. Well, you better believe I'm staying inside today, I'm drinking plenty of water and I'm going to take it easy, because sure enough, when I checked the weather report for today, in St. George, Maine, it is supposed to get up to 72 degrees in the shade.

+

2. You have heard me say that my wife and I have a symbiotic relationship which is the secret to a happy marriage. I am always cold. She is always hot. When I put an ice-cold hand down the back of her shirt onto her sweaty back, I say, “Ahhh. That feels good.” And she says, “Ahhh. That feels good.” Perhaps you and your spouse sneak about the house surreptitiously turning the thermostat up and down to suit your own personal needs. --- or opening and closing windows when the other isn’t looking. This does not happen in our home ---- because --- when the temperature drops down to 74 – 75 degrees, I always put on extra wooly pants and a sweater.

+

3. Even I have heard of the book called, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. We are told that it is a Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. My wife Marsha Skoglund, The Almost Perfect Woman, and I are living proof that two people can live together and get everything that we want without waging war. Because women are the weaker sex it is up to the man of the house to create and nurture this peaceful environment. Yesterday, for example, before Marsha came home I went outside and coiled up the water hose and put it on the well curb and coiled up the driveway bell hose and put that on the doorstep. I took out her lawnmower and filled it with gas and had it standing at the ready by the door. And when she came home at four o’clock she didn’t even come in the house for her earplugs. She had a grateful smile on her face and she had that lawnmower going when I went out there and begged her to stop long enough to protect her ears. Any man willing to follow my example can live in a happy home, free from unkind words and strife. All you have to do is never find fault with anything she does, agree with her no matter what she says, and get used to not being able to do anything right. Why engage in this senseless battle of the sexes when it is so much easier to sign an unconditional surrender?

+

4. ) Long time radio friend Harris Contos sent me the following news item: “VASSALBORO, Maine --Vassalboro's planning board has approved an application for a coffee shop with topless waitresses despite opposition of most residents who showed up. More than 50 residents showed up for Tuesday night's meeting and most of them voiced disapproval of the idea. Ellsworth businessman Donald Crabtree plans to open the topless cafe within 30 days at the site of the former Grand View Motel on busy Route 3. Planners said the central Maine town has no ordinance to regulate businesses' uniforms -- or lack of them. They say the proposal met the town's 10 performance standards, which are mostly related to safety, parking, traffic and signs.” Of course I immediately replied to this news item from Harris. My obvious question to him was the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance pay for any colds caught during working hours? Harris believes that any waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the company, saying that she wasn’t covered.

+

5. If you were a seagull in the town of St. George, Maine, you’d probably think back wistfully to the good old days when we had an open dump. Back then, sports, who’d go down to the dump to shoot rats, would see dozens of happy seagulls hopping around, eating garbage. My father called our dump the bird sanctuary. Of course nowadays, the town of St. George has what you would have to consider a state of the art dump where even a cockroach or a housefly would starve to death. Everything is recycled. There are two different wood piles, one for trees and limbs and one for lumber. There is a metal pile. There are big boxes for glass and tin cans and two boxes for different kinds of paper. There are boxes for half a dozen different kinds of plastic bottles. When you drive into our dump, the first thing you see on the right is Larry’s store, or whatever he calls it, where you can buy, for just pennies, all kinds of good things that people have thrown away. You can back your truck up to the wood pile and take home firewood, or the other wood pile and take home boards, or the metal pile and take home lawn mowers or bicycles. You should understand that some towns don’t allow people to come in and haul off anything they want for free. But the people running the town of St. George are smart. Think about this: every time I haul a good pine board or a kid’s bicycle home from the dump, I am saving the town money in disposal fees. When you see me leaving the dump with more than I brought down, you realize that St. George epitomizes the social experience they call recycling. The only losers are rats and seagulls.

+

6. My present topic is wishy-washy people. – I think that’s what I want to talk about --- people who can’t make up their minds. Not a day goes by, but what one of your wishy-washy friends stops by in need of something. They probably think that by being satisfied with anything and everything, their friends will think they are easy to get along with. But wishy-washy people make me scream and holler and wave my arms. One night my friend Alden came in here and asked if he could borrow a rat trap. I said, “Do you want a new rat trap or an old rat trap?” He said, “I don’t care.” Answers like that drive me crazy, because then, I have to either press a friend to the mat in hopes of extracting a definitive answer, or I have to make the decision myself. If I give him a new rat trap, will Alden say that he doesn’t really want to take my only new rat trap and that an old, used rat trap will do as well? And if I give him an old, cherished, family-heirloom type of rat trap, will he think I don’t value him enough to give him a shiny new one? You run into this kind of thing every day --- someone who can never tell you exactly what it is they want. Ask them if they’d like a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, and they’ll say, “Yes.” And then there was Thelonious Monk, rehearsing one his original pieces with a small group. The sax player said, “Hey, --- is that third note in the second bar of the chorus a b or a b flat?” And Monk said, “Yeah, one of those.”

+

7. It doesn’t take much to make me laugh --- even if I haven’t had a cup of coffee. One morning I laughed when I deleted some of the emails in my junk email box. One said, “Looking for a Fling?” What is a fling nowadays? If I had been pressed to define a fling, I would have said that a fling is running off to some near-by town for two or three days. But not until today did I ever wonder if yesterday’s fling is called a flang or a flung. I just Googled “Looking for a Fling” for a current definition. According to Google, the affliction known as “Lonely Wives Looking for a Fling” is now pandemic.

+

8. What you can learn when you listen to the radio. Of course it has to be a informative kind of radio and I’ve been getting my radio off a place called PRX on the Internet. One week I learned that Hawaii has about the highest electric bills of any state. Right up there with New York, Vermont and Maine. But on this radio program I heard that the University of Hawaii is going broke trying to run their air conditioners. How about that? Haven’t you always heard that the temperature in Hawaii is perfect? Never hot, never cold. And now we hear they can’t afford to run their air conditioners. I guess this punches a hole in that bit of folklore. Another bit of folklore, which approaches an outright lie, is calling Florida the Sunshine State. And if you have never heard of Ibsen or his play called “An Enemy of the People” I suggest you Google “An Enemy of the People” right now and become familiar with it. --- Because there are days when they shut down highways in Florida, The Sunshine State, because you can’t see the road through the smoke from wildfires. Even worse are the controlled fires caused by burning the cane fields and the burning forests that are being swept away by endless housing developments. On an average day, you might not see that smoke or even be aware of it, but the soot builds up on your car and in your lungs. Some days the air is so bad in parts of The Sunshine State that you can’t get enough air in your lungs to ride a bicycle. You find that your lungs make a little whistling sound when you breathe. People who live in many parts of Florida take this constant smoke and burning eyes for granted and should you mention smoke, they’ll give you a funny look and say, “What smoke?” Don’t expect to see anything about Florida’s rotten air quality on television or in the newspapers. It would be bad for the tourist business. Yes, and please do look up Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People.

+

9. On the morning of a big convention in Cleveland, I looked at the television and saw hundreds of people jostling each other, elbow to elbow in a narrow space between the state police and the national guard. I couldn’t help but think what a great day it was in Cleveland for pickpockets.

+

10. If you visit enough stores in Camden, you'll see a book named, "Why Gay Guys are a Girl's Best Friend." How could you argue with that? Anybody who thinks about it at all knows that gay guys are everybody's best friend. Ever see one run up your taxes by sending 8 kids to your school's remedial reading program? Ever have one break your heart by marrying your high school sweetheart or running off with your wife? Seeing that book brought to mind a poem I wrote years ago when I was a single man that summarizes the situation: "Oh what a great world this would be, if all the guys were gay --- but me."

+

11. Is there really any point in being a rich, handsome and famous man? Is it worth the bother? If you are not rich, famous or handsome, you don’t need to feel that you’ve missed out on something. A friend of mine in Camden, Maine, who has devoted most of his adult life to reading Hollywood movie magazines tells me, that the only advantage in being a rich man is that it enables you to find a very attractive woman who will marry you and then leave with half of everything you have. Here in Maine we have thousands of average men who have married very unattractive women who have done the very same thing.

+