Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for November 13, 2016

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1. A northern Maine man, who walked through 30 miles of deep snow --- in his sneakers, is alive today because of his survival training. Survival training is very helpful if you haven't had any brain training, because if you've had brain training you wouldn't have been wearing sneakers out in a blizzard to begin with.

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2. Many Maine businesses give away gifts to customers. Gas stations used to give away bottles of soda. You can usually find free food treats in supermarkets. It has been proven that you can increase your business by giving away these inexpensive free gifts. If you are a carpenter or housepainter, you might want to consider giving your customers little trees or shrubs to plant next to their houses. Your customers will love you. Who can deny that houses look a lot nicer with shrubs up against them or trees nearby on the lawn? But look at the roof and sides of houses that are encrusted with shrubs or have trees towering over them. There used to be one up by the corner near the Warren post office that was a classic example, but it rotted and fell down. Or, if you're like most of us, you can look at your own house. Nothing rots out a house like the shade from a beautiful oak. Nothing peels paint from a house like a near-by flowering shrub. When you house painters give your customers beautiful little trees and shrubs, you're just like the lobstermen who return short lobsters to the sea. You're planning for your future.

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3. Paint and putty don’t last like they used to. It wasn’t all that long ago that I took a window out of my barn. I had just reset the glass and painted it, but the paint was already peeling and the putty was falling out. And then I looked at the date I'd written on it when I last painted it and it was 1978. When time seems to have lost its meaning, you know you're growing old.

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4. If you’d like to laugh, Google Timothy Dexter who was born in 1747 and read what he did. He made a lot of money doing irrational things that shouldn’t have worked, but they did. You could make a movie out of it. Every time he did something that should fail, he made a fantastic profit. Oh, Google Timothy Dexter because I’d like to see you laugh. Here’s just one example. He sent warming pans down to the tropical West Indies. Warming pans were used to pre-heat cold beds in cold New England winters. Why would you need to heat a bed in the tropics? The ship captain sold them as ladles for the local molasses industry and made a good profit. Oh. One more thing. He wrote a book with no punctuation marks in it. The second edition contained two extra pages full of punctuation marks with a note telling the reader to use them wherever he pleased. The man’s name was Timothy Dexter and he died in 1806. Look him up the next time you need a good laugh.

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5. You hear a lot of talk about what will be available for jobs after four years at college. The people making buggy whips and wagon wheels went out of business when people started using automobiles. A similar thing is happening today in our rapidly changing technological world. Did you end up doing the thing you studied to do at college? I didn’t. Yes, I was like the rest: I went to college only because it promised a great paying job. $3,000 a year teaching grade school. And now, looking back sixty years, I would say that an education is worth more than a well-paying job. After 9 years of college, I came home and mowed fields and dug gardens for my neighbors with a Ford tractor. And I did it for years. But I was able to think and take notes while driving that tractor and it morphed into writing for 55 newspapers, 29 years on what used to be Maine Public Radio, and an unimpressive speaking career. I told you of the Eastport mailman who quit teaching psychology at Penn State. And the brilliant young boy on a Maine island who was sent to Harvard by a rich man who realized that the boy had potential. My brother saw that boy, with his 4 years at Harvard, cutting bushes out by the airport runway. Why shouldn't happiness and the ability to understand the people around you be the goal of an education? If you are clever no matter what you study you'll be able to survive after three or four years of grad school. Even if it is the realization that you'd be a lot better off in New Zealand.

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6. One of the great things about Facebook is that many of us old folks who use it feel obligated to step up and tell other people what they should do with their lives. Don't drink alcohol. Don't smoke. Read sociology textbooks. Spend a month in Finland. Don't leave a make up mirror on your bureau because if that low winter sun comes in the window and hits that make up mirror just right, there is one chance in a million that it can start a fire --- like I think it did in my house last week. The smoke alarm caught it before it burned the chair it was focused on to the floor, but smoke damage in the second story in our home is bad bad bad. Anyway, there are dozens of other things I think you should or should not be doing, and I will add them to my list when you get around to sending them to me. I’m thf at g mail dot com.

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7. Whenever I drive to South Carolina or Georgia or Florida, I drive through Scranton so I don't have to drive through NYC, Washington and Baltimore. It's an extra 100 miles or so but much easier driving. I’m an old Maine man. I’m not used to seeing a lot of cars in front of me and back of me on the road. City driving scares me. But after driving 95 miles an hour in Germany last month --- while cars whistled by me at 120-130 --- New York City would be a piece of cake. So I might go through NYC, Baltimore and Washington the next time I go south. Of course, in Germany I was in a new rented Peugeot that went faster when you stepped on the gas so you could get out of the way. In Marsha's Rav 4 with 260,000 miles on it, when you step on the gas, nothing happens.

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8. Some guys next door are shingling the roof in what we read is a 23 mph wind. It is more than that, because one of my inside storm windows I got from Window Dressers just blew out of the wall. It is wicked windy out there. How can anyone shingle in bitter cold gusts up to 40 mph or so? We had so many nice days when they could have done it. When I shingled the barn attached to that house 40 or so years ago I was up there at midnight with lights and a light snow was falling. I’m a procrastinator. Are you a last minute person? Know what I’m talking about here? All of the carpenter work I did with a chainsaw. You know, just thinking about shingling a barn roof at midnight in a snowstorm makes me say, “Ah, to be a kid of 65 again.”

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9. Dear Humble, Just caught your insightful comments on WRFR while waiting for my wife. I'm a cat lover, but I've got to admit you got it mostly right. There's just two things you missed. First, you called cats domesticated animals. Wrong. The owners are the domesticated ones. And then just think about what the world would be like if these cute cats didn't kill millions of birds. What would it be like if the world around us were filled with several hundred times as many birds as we have now. Airplanes would have to be grounded. They can't build a $1.1 million fence at Owl's Head to keep the birds off the runways. The noise of bird songs would drive us crazy. Finally, the, uh, solid waste left behind by those birds would put the fertilizer companies out of business. The organic farmers would put the scientific farmers out of business. Wading through it might be a problem. And this letter is from Bill, who says that he is a less humble farmer in Hope, Maine.

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10. Years ago during a winter blizzard that was supposed to be the worst in 30 years, Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency across Massachusetts, and banned non-emergency vehicles from roadways after 4:00 P.M. When I saw this on TV my thoughts were , "Good luck." Are they going to ticket people who are out in the storm? Yes, they can shut down the turnpikes, but there is always someone who thinks they will just barely have time to get from here to there and will try to beat the deadline. You know as well as I do that a lot of people who are stopped are going to be very angry. If there is one thing Americans hold dear, it is the right to drive during a blizzard until they get stuck and then have to be rescued or have their frozen bodies removed from their cars two days later.

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11. One night I watched a movie called the Graduate. It was made in 1967 and it reflects the protests against the establishment that were so popular at the time. I was in graduate school in 1967, attempting to ascertain if there really is a one to one correlation between acoustic and articulatory parameters, and I remember to get to my classes I had to step over students, who were lying in the corridors protesting one of our endless wars. But I wanted to say that Dustin Hoffman is a great actor. You could feel his pain when everybody in the world was telling him to do things that he didn’t what to do. He had obviously gone through our school system because he politely did everything that Mrs. Robinson and anyone else told him. Remember the old bumper stickers? “Question Authority?” He didn’t --- until the very end, where he beats them back with a cross and then uses it as a bar to lock them in the church --- which was the only part of the movie that I remembered --- that and the famous “plastics” line. So I squirmed and suffered through the whole Graduate movie, which played without commercials, just to see the last five minutes which I remembered were really good. Yes. I suffered. You’ve seen those movies where someone goes to open a door and you hear the ominous music in the background and you know something bad is behind the door and you’re hollering at the person on the screen, “Don’t open that door.” The Graduate affected me the same way, because I kept hollering, “Don’t do it. Get out of there.” What a fool that young man was to do everything that everyone told him to do. Of course, he finally snapped. But I suppose that is the definition of a nice young man. A nice young man is someone who does everything you tell him to do without questioning you. You and I like young people who do everything what we tell them without questioning us. Oh, you should know that one thing has changed in that Graduate movie. Remember that aged old hag, Mrs. Robinson? If you watch that movie today you’ll notice that she’s still a sleaze but that her complexion has improved, and that she’s about the age of your youngest daughter.

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12. Have you been watching the news? Nowadays, couples living in a home in which shots have not been fired are considered to have a good marriage.

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