Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for August 21, 2016

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How sad it is when we hear that thousands of our friends lost their homes because of rising waters. Johnny Cash was singing about the water rising in what --- 1935? How high’s the water momma, five feet high and rising. We read that the flooding of the Nile has been an important natural cycle in Egypt since ancient times. For thousands of years rivers have been rising. 3,000 years ago people knew better than to build a home in places that were likely to be inundated. Have we learned nothing since then? I’m speaking as someone who lives on property that abuts the Atlantic Ocean. My farm is on the salt water. But it is 86 feet above sea level. New York City and New Orleans will both be long gone, or surrounded by dikes like Amsterdam, before anyone in this house is singing, How high’s the water momma?

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2. We have an old-time gasoline station hose bell in our driveway. Drive over the hose and a bell rings in my cellar. I have hearing aids and can now hear some high frequencies. There is a cricket here in my cellar that is chirping at the same frequency as our driveway bell which I hear through an insulated stone wall. I'm hearing the same tone. Every time the cricket chirps, I jump up to see who is in the driveway. My friend Professor Duane says he's going to pay a visit soon. Because he's a scientist, I'm going to ask him to help me mount another mirror on my garage that will pan the driveway. I have one mirror on my garage now, and by looking at the mirror here over my desk I can see the mirror on the garage that Rick Blood helped me align onto my rhubarb stand out by the road. I've got another mirror in the barn I got off the dump a couple of years ago. It is about 4 feet long and 18 inches wide and if Professor Duane helps me attach that to the garage at the right angle so I can see my driveway that cricket can chirp any time he wants.

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3. Wouldn't you think that after making rolled oats over 16,000 times over the past 45 years I'd have it pretty well down? Not true. One morning I started the water on low 2 and got carried away answering my 2 booking requests from booking dot com. So, although it didn't boil, some of the water might have escaped. When I put in the 7 heaping spoonfuls of rolled oats there probably wasn't enough water in the pan, so the water all boiled away before the oats had time to cook properly. So that morning I was faced with the prospect of throwing out my breakfast and starting out from scratch or eating oats that had not cooked long enough and had a bit of body to them. In other words, they had not been completely reduced to mush. If you have even eaten those quick rolled oats without cooking them for 10 minutes you know what I'm talking about.

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4. Did you know that German prosecutors once raided a Swiss bank? They claimed that bank staff assisted clients to avoid taxes. Well, what is a Swiss bank for? I ask you. What is a Swiss bank for?

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5. What do Elvis, Michael Jackson and Justin Bieber have in common? Justin Bieber only had only two more steps to go to catch up with Elvis and Jackson and he has already taken one of them. From the drug aspect, I can identify with these three weak people. Hundreds of times I've been unable to start a radio program or stand up on a stage without the help that comes from two quick cups of coffee. I call drinking coffee doing drugs. You always hear me talking about doing drugs. I’m talking about drinking coffee. Doing drugs. It is a psychological thing. You get to the point where you feel you can't do anything without help from drugs. The difference between the four of us is that I knew when to stop and have always been able to stop: I cut myself off after two cups of coffee. That’s with a lot of milk and a lot of sugar. Now that I think of it, just milk and plenty of sugar would probably have done the job. But please give this some careful consideration --- had I been rich enough to afford a doctor to help me with my addiction problem, I'd most certainly be dead by now from a drug overdose.

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6. Should you speak the language of the country you live in? I happen to believe that two old men sitting outside in the Clark Island sun should not be sent back to the old country for talking Swedish. --- Because when I was a kid there were a lot of old men sitting around in the sun in their funny, old paving cutter hats talking Swedish. I do not consider bilingualism to be tearing at the fabric of a country. My father and his father were two immigrants. When George Gamow went down to Paris to see De Broglie, Gamow says he had to speak French because, although De Broglie spoke perfect English, he believed that in France people should speak French. The French believe this, which is why I went hungry when I got off a train in the wrong place and got stuck in France one night on my way to speak at a university in Holland. And which is why I learned to read a good deal of French when I came home. On the other hand, if you go to Sweden or Holland or most anywhere in northern Europe except France, most of the natives would rather slash their wrists than speak their native language with an American. And when an American tries to learn another language, he is discouraged from trying. Most Europeans insist on speaking English. Has it ever happened to you?

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7. You can’t turn around but you see the cost of postage going up. Do you get the impression that someone is trying to destroy the post office? --- Prove that it doesn’t work, so it can be privatized? Some people think the post office is being sabotaged. There are people in this great country who think that our government doesn’t work, and, in or out of office, they do everything in their power to prove that they are right. The problem with the post office seems to be that they are trying to run it as a business. But why should a post office have to pay for itself any more than education, roads, or healthcare are expected to show a measurable bottom line profit? If we spent a fraction of what we spend on past, present and future wars on our postal service, there would have been no need to jack the price of stamps or be undercut by a private company that delivers packages. There are those who believe that the postal service and railroads and healthcare are services that citizens deserve and that should be paid for by the taxes they have paid in to the government. There are those who disagree. Most of those who disagree are very, very rich, and because they own the media, and are therefore able to control public opinion, they are eventually going to have their way. So you are very likely to see the price of stamps continue to rise until Benjamin Franklin’s good old post office for the people is sold off to the highest bidder.

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8. Here’s a letter from long time radio friend Susan who says: Are you tired of violence, drug addiction, pornography, domestic arguments, corrupt lawyers, divorce, child custody battles, exploitation of youth, fights over gun control laws, fights where there is no control over guns, hostility, war, political gerrymandering, failures of Congress to do anything at all, racist attitudes, Wall Street and bonuses? Wondering what else there could possibly be that anyone would even bother putting in a radio or television program? You could try listening to The humble Farmer and see if there is one more thing that you should add to the list of things you're tired of.

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9. Ever since Facebook was invented, I have gone to Google which brings up my screen of open-me icons across the top of the page and then opened my Facebook page. I just discovered that I can pull the Facebook icon down to the bottom of my computer screen and open Facebook without first going to Google. My point is that the wheel was probably invented in many different parts of the world at different times.

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10. My cough had been hanging in there for 35 days and I thought it was time to put an end to it before it put an end to me. I went into Pen Bay Medical Center and sat down on the other side of the desk from Judy, who checks people in. Big sign there on Judy’s computer: “Keep your germs to yourself. Cover your cough.” I told Judy I thought that was a good sign. And I told her that when I was doing a stage show for some association I sometimes stood by the door and shook hands with two or three hundred people and the first thing I did afterwards was wash my hands. Think of all the germs that I spread, one hand to another. I got to wondering why we shake hands. The custom obviously evolved before people knew about germs and I told Judy that I think we should have another way of greeting our friends that wouldn’t spread germs. And Judy said, “Well, you know what my dog does.”

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