Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for November 27, 2016

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There are all kinds of lifestyle gurus out there. They will tell you how to look better, how to feel better, how to make more money, how to get more done. I just saw one article listed on line that you can download. It is an article that will teach you how to get up early. You don’t need to bother to download it because I’m going to tell you how to get up early. Get some cows.

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2. Here’s a response to that recent letter I read about the doctor who cuts off parts of your feet so you can squeeze them into pointy shoes. Martha says, “No wonder alien space ships don’t want to land here.’

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3. There are forces in the universe that transcend the best intentions of even rich and powerful men and that is our topic today. My friend the Booger Boy is a Type A. He is a fussy man. His cars are clean and polished. His many homes are clean and polished. His most recent wife is clean and polished. And it came to pass that an appraiser knocked at the door of the Boy’s primary residence and said that he was there to appraise. And the Boy’s wife was distressed because no one was allowed to wear their shoes into the Boy’s house. And in particular no one was allowed to wear their shoes while walking on the Boy’s plutchs carpets in the living room. Now you might not understand this if your living room is no more than a ball park for your six kids, the neighbor’s kids and any animal lucky enough to sneak in to forage food scraps off the floor. And you might not understand this if you are of an artistic temperament. Just this week I was thinking about a man I once saw clipping his toenails in the dining room. Why did he clip his toenails in the dining room? Well, he was an artist and, as the great Perce Sein once said about the lobsterman who built a skiff in his kitchen, after all, what’s a kitchen for? And, after all, if you’re an artist what’s a dining room for? And with that said, let us go back to the side door of the Boy’s primary residence where an appraiser stands, hat in hand, waiting to be invited in to appraise. And although the Boy’s wife was afraid to tell the nice man that he would have to remove his shoes before entering the house, she was even more afraid of her husband’s wrath if she did not. So she took a deep breath and apologized and said that she would have to ask him to remove his shoes before stepping on her husband’s plutchs carpets. And the man said that he would dearly love to remove his shoes, but one of them was nailed to his wooden leg.

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4. You will recall that Jimmy Parker advised me against putting shelves in my garden’s tool shed. Jimmy said that if I picked all the stuff off the floor and put it on shelves, it would only create a big empty floor which would cry out to be covered with more stuff. I would be locked into a never ending cycle of building more shelves and accumulating more junk. I would end up like the man in Fort Kent who built 24 rental storage units but discovered that he needed them all for himself. But, with the help of Victor, my Spanish professor, I put in the shelves anyway. My father was a carpenter and I inherited my father’s radial arm saw so making shelves is really no big deal. My tool shed started off as a Finnish sauna and was probably made by Victor Korpinen around 1925. The building might have been square 80 years ago, but today it is crooked. What do you do when you put shelves in a crooked building? Do you make them conform to the ship-like contours of the bulkheads or do you try to make everything square and level? My father didn’t like to work in old houses because everything was crooked. I can remember when he put clapboards on John McCoy’s house 40 or 50 years ago that John McCoy wanted the clapboards to run uphill to conform with the contours of his house, but papa want to put them on level. You’ve heard me say that the south end of my 200 plus year old house is 9 inches lower than the north end of my house. Did you try to straighten your old house when you moved in or is one end of your kitchen counter one inch higher than the other? Even if you haven’t written a book on old houses, I’d like to know if you consider crooked floors and walls to be a problem. I’m

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5. There are movers and shakers and then there are just plain movers. Every time I go away for two or three days, when I come home my wife Marsha has moved around some furniture. It doesn’t seem to matter if things were nice and comfortable when she started. I get the impression that she moves just for the sake of moving. My friend The B Boy told me that his grandfather used to tear the shingles off the garage and put them back on just to have something to do. We’re talking here about that nervous Type A energy. Marsha can’t even open windows or unscrew bottle tops but she can move a couch with the power of her mind. Wouldn’t you expect anyone with this kind of power to sprout long green ears? Why do they do it? Why do bureaus that are upstairs have to be moved downstairs? If you live with it I’d like to know how you survive. I’m thf at.. To give her credit, my wife Marsha does not carry this moving business as far as her father Bill. One time Marsha’s mother came home from a trip and discovered that Bill had sold their home on the lake and had bought a place next to Burger King.

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6. I cheated this morning. For the past five months Spanish has been my reading of choice because I know that no matter how slow a learner you might be, if you read a language over and over and over there will come a day when vous will compredo alles. But this morning I cheated and read French. Other than reading one line in there that upset me --- and let me read that line for you. “Mais la place d’une femme est au foyer!” --- You needn’t be ashamed if you lack a cosmopolitan education and need me to translate that for you, because doctors and lawyers and engineers need small Latin and less Greek --- “Mais la place d’une femme est au foyer!” But the place of a woman is in the home. Besides reading that one upsetting line in there, I noticed, for the first time, that on the front covers of all my Harlequin Romances, and I probably have 50 or 60 of them in almost all of the Indo European languages except English --- yes, on the front covers of each of these books is a picture of a man with black or brown hair hugging a blonde girl who is wearing a low cut dress. Yes. On the front cover of every Harlequin Romance you will see a blatant example of age discrimination. Why don’t some cheerful 70 and 80 year old people pose for those covers? Don’t old people hug too? We still have teeth so we can even smile for those cover shots. If you think about it you realize that the only difference between young people and old people in those cover pictures would be the color of their hair --- and a somewhat lower décolletage.

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7. Here’s a letter from Christopher in Bucksport who writes: A few years ago, on a very cold Christmas day, my family and I were on our way to Gouldsboro and there on the top of a large spruce tree sat a hawk owl. This was a first for me. After reporting the sighting to the local bird club I was the recipient of many telephone calls to help "verify" my sighting. I had been a "birder" for many years and attended trips with many of the regional "experts". I had not involved myself with the politics. I figured they could get the credit. They were successful. A couple of years later (Christmas day to be exact) I spotted a ruby crowned kinglet at my feeder in Bangor. The call went out and two big men and one small man came to my home and "perched" themselves in my kitchen to "verify" my sighting. They sat there most of the day. The bird never came back. I was subjected to various questions and the doubts were raised about my "sighting". I realized I had ruined their day and they were not happy about it. These competitive drives were never part of me. I believe you have kindled something I never experienced before. I have just witnessed two flying pigs (a female and a much more colorful mail in winter plumage) browsing at my feeder. The call is going out later this morning. Christopher in Bucksport,

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8. Rich sent me a web site called working in America jobtracker. It lists all the companies in Maine that are exporting jobs. Everyone knows that big box stores are nothing but huge funnels that suck money out of your area and the economic pressure to export jobs is only one more reason that fewer Maine people are going to be able to own their own homes. I look at job exporting as a curious hydra because it is impossible to even discuss it without getting in the same position as Will Hunting in that Good Will Hunting movie, where he is interviewing for a job as a code cracker for the government. Will Hunting was an incredible genius and you might remember that chain of events that he said would occur if he took the job. It was a domino kind of thing. If he did what they wanted him to, something else would naturally happen which would, in turn, cause something else to happen, and on and on. --- No one should be surprised to learn that people who own companies set up their companies where materials are readily available and labor is cheap, and that they have a right to shut down factories when the cost of labor eats into their profits. I knew a man in St. George, Maine who made a good living by telling people where they should be setting up their manufacturing plants. You know that America is not unique: I talked with a man in Holland who sold his factory but is opening another one in Macedonia where the labor is cheap. No sooner do people get decent wages and working conditions and living conditions when the factories shut down and move to another area where people will work cheap. And, of course, the cycle will repeat itself there. So don’t be surprised if more factories in Maine shut down and move away, because most people here do expect a decent wage. Just about the only people in Maine still willing to work for next to nothing are school teachers.

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9. Dear humble, After this Friday's excellent show I had occasion to see a segment on the late night news about these ridiculous stiletto (3-6") pointed, hundreds of dollar shoes. I know that you and I share the peeve about this nonsense...Firstly, once upon a time the only women who were wearing stilettos were ladies of the night...Now mind you, this does not mean I am a prude, hardly...Secondly we are back to those dumb points again. The human foot cannot properly fit into them. Which brings me to the news story which was bi-fold. They featured special classes that women paid for on how to properly navigate their bodies when wearing these torture devices. My word!!!...Next was a Park Avenue, rather palatial officed Dr. Levine, blond damsel who is in the business of, with no apparent conscience, modifying the human foot. Her clients (I hesitate to say patients) get injections to fatten up the ball of their feet so that they can balance themselves on those stilettos, and she also removed bones and shortens toes so that the foot can be crammed into the points. My memory serves me correctly, but ABC once featured this same fine example of the medical profession when she was removing pinky toes for the same reason.....Honestly Humble, are we living in a mad mad world?? Faithful listener Alexandra Thank you Alexandra. Yes, I have never understood why anyone would want to cram their feet into small, uncomfortable shoes. And I have never understood gambling or drinking or smoking or Viagra. If there were a place where one could go for IQ injections, however, I would get in line.

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10. Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.

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