Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for October 9, 2016

+

1. My friend Winky took his new boat down to the harbor and plowed around for about an hour, but it wouldn’t go over three knots wide open. My wife Marsha was just coming in from Southern Island where she works and she noticed that Winky was having trouble so she comes alongside and says, “What’s the matter?” And Winky says, “I got this new boat with a brand new engine but it’s wicked sluggish. I’m going to take it back to the dealer.” And Marsha says, “That should be easy enough --- you’ve still got it strapped to the trailer.”

+

2. You might want to listen closely to this comment a long time radio friend sent me concerning income tax. Please tell me if you agree or disagree. Professor Bill says that, “Our tax structure should ensure that no single person (or corporate person) can acquire enough money to buy more than one politician.”

+

3. Do you have time to do everything you want to do in a day? I often write on my Facebook page that my day is not long enough. A friend, who has more than enough time to tell others how they should live their lives, wrote, “Prioritize.” Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. Were I to prioritize, I’d spend most of the day sleeping on the couch.

+

4. I want to thank my Facebook friend Katey for her advice and support. My wife’s stair chair just made a buzzing sound. It wouldn't work. Do you have any idea of what a struggle it is for a woman who has difficulty doing stairs when her stair chair doesn't work? I pulled the metal wires. I took the seat off and fiddled with the wires inside. The thing still made a buzzing sound. We talked about people who might be able to fix it. My electrician friend Mike works out of state. I don’t know how to use the electrical test meters. I suggested that we move downstairs, but we have guests coming Friday night and she'd rather crawl up the stairs for two days and nights than move downstairs. Then I remembered what Katey said when I told you that I'd fixed the clothes drier by pounding on the top of it with my fist. She said something about 90% of electrical problems being mechanical problems. So I kicked the stair chair hard three times. I stamped on the foot rest really hard. And I flipped the switch and it worked. Now we'll be thinking of Katey and thanking her every time Marsha uses it. What would you do without knowledgeable friends?

+

5. Did I mention this last week? No matter. You might not have been listening last week. I’m talking about the newspaper item about a woman up in the northern part of The County who claimed that she’d been kidnapped and locked in her car trunk for three days. It was suspected she had manufactured an excuse for not going to work. And, sure enough, when the sheriff examined the trunk he became suspicious: there was no indication that anyone had lived in the trunk for three days. The sheriff knew that if there are bears in the woods you will see signs.

+

6. I just mentioned to my brother that I'd recently read about fairies. I might have said the same thing to him yesterday. I can't keep track of what I said this morning or yesterday as easily as I once could. But I told my brother that I’d just read that 800 years ago people believed in fairies. Cyrus Eaton wrote a history of our area and my brother said that Eaton said that when the first settlers came here to our area in the 1700's, they could sense the presence of fairies. The early settlers were from Scotland and 300 years ago they still believed in fairies. My brother has an oak tree on his lawn that my great-great-grandfather might have planted 200 years ago. It is a wicked big oak. My brother says that if there are any fairies around here, they probably live under or around that tree. Are there any fairies around your place? I've never sensed any here. Nor have I ever sensed the presence of any of the many people who lived in my house 200 years ago. And it is not a good thing to start thinking about now.

+

7. You might have heard me mention the email I got that said, “Prepare for the future.” It doesn’t take a linguist to figure out that there is not much else to prepare for. If you want your friends to have something that is as equally profound to think about after you’ve said, “Goodbye,“ you might look them square in the eye and add: “Remember, the past is gone and the future knocks but once.”

+

8. While seated at a dinner table you have heard people say, “Would you like some more spaghetti” or “Would you like some more beans”? But isn’t that another way of saying, “You’ve had two helpings already but would you like some more? So no matter how much of a trencherman might be sitting at our table, we try to say, “Would you like some spaghetti” or “Would you like some beans,” leaving out the “more.” You see, by leaving out the more, we aren’t implying that they have already eaten twice as much as a normal person. There are other nice ways of saying things. My friend Phyllis said that her brother always asked his guests, “How long are you able to stay?” It serves the same purpose and sounds much nicer than, “When are you leaving?”

+

9. Here’s something I recently learned on You Tube. In Africa they are using teams of rats to detect TB bacteria in saliva samples from four clinics serving slum neighborhoods. So far this year, the 25 rats trained for the pilot medical project have identified 300 cases of early-stage TB - infections missed by lab technicians with their microscopes. If not for the rodents, many of these victims would have died and others would have spread the disease. Forty five or so years ago when I was a grad student at the University of Rochester I learned how to train rats. But I had no idea then that rats could be trained to sniff out land mines or to sniff out disease. Have you heard anything about using rats to sniff out disease in this country? I doubt if they’d use it here because it’s simple, nobody would make any money selling it, and it works.

+

10. How do you know when the honeymoon is over? What made you realize that you had been married a long, long time? Yesterday morning when I woke up, before I could even groan and get my eyes open, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, whispered in my ear, “Will you put the windows back in so I can finish painting them?”

+

11. One day I turned on the TV. It was my plan to watch the evening news. But the evening news had been put on hold. There was a football game on television instead of the evening news. Let me ask you this. What kind of a country do we live in, when a football game can take precedence over an important news program that is going to tell me in detail about the latest celebrity to say something that wasn’t politically correct, have an affair, go to jail, or die of a drug overdose. Only when it has been taken away do we realize how much we count on our national news service to inform and educate.

+