Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for December 18, 2016

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1. And here is another junk email which makes me wonder if there is something wrong with me or if some people really are crazy. This junk email says, “see me in my bedroom getting undressed at…” such and such a website. Tell me if you think anyone who sends you an email like that is crazy. Yes. Tell me. I want to know what you think of this kind of email. Suppose I sent you an email that said, “See me in my bedroom getting undressed.” If I were to send it and you were to look at it, don’t you think most people would think that both of us were crazy?

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2. Now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, you can probably tell me why people do some of the terrible stupid things they do. They get positive reinforcement from their friends when they do bad things. If you see a girl sitting in the sun until she turns black, even though she knows that sun will make her old and wrinkled before her time, and perhaps even give her cancer, you know it is because some of her friends have told her how great she looks when her skin is all burned from the sun. A woman will jam her feet into a narrow pair of high heeled shoes and be uncomfortable all day and destroy her feet just because from time to time someone tells her that she looks good. I’ve always been amazed that people will undergo real physical pain or destroy their health if someone tells them it is the thing to do. To be fair, I’m a conscientious hedonist so I’m into pleasure and not pain. Oh --- some people will do things if they think it moves them up a rung or two on the social ladder. Speaking of which, why do you listen to this show?

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3. You remember seeing it on the news. A man who worked with a bear was killed by the bear. You will also recall that two years ago a man who lived with wild bears was eaten by bears. Not long after that a man who loved sharks and other dangerous denizens of the deep came to a sudden and much publicized end when one of them turned on him. You and I know that there are wild and uncontrollable creatures on this planet that may be toyed with for a while, but that at any time they are likely to turn on you. And yet, every day you and I hear of yet another friend who plans to get married.

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4. Here is a very interesting word from my friend Soni. It may warrant rumination. You have heard of vegetarians. But I learned that some people are opportunivors. I like that word because I am an opportunivor. Single men are probably all opportunivors. When I lived alone between the ages of 34 and 54 I was a full time opportunivor. People who have never had to prepare their own meals for 20 years have no idea of what a great feast a peanut butter sandwich is to an opportunivor. Opportunivors will always be welcome in my home. I would be the first to admit that they should even have their own special week every year.

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5. Are you hearing words that you never heard before? Well, this can happen from time to time if you’re in graduate school, and perhaps every day if you’re even younger. But now even some of us older folks, who can still remember when Americans could get decorated for shooting a fascist, are hearing words we never heard before. These words usually pop up in the 30 second breaks that infest our favorite tv shows. They are compound words or multi-syllabic words. And when you hear people saying these words, colorful butterflies on the screen flutter around in flower beds. You have already guessed that these words describe diseases. They are diseases that you had never heard of before, but now when they list the symptoms your jaw drops and you know your days are numbered. So why do they open the door to this pantheon of unprecedented afflictions? Only by inventing a new disease can they sell you a pill that will cure it.

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6. How many times have you been working on a project when some lemme show ya boy looks over your shoulder and offers advice? If you are not careful, it is not long before he has pushed you aside and has taken the burden of the entire project upon his own shoulders. It is usually about that time that you notice that there is an alarming one to one correlation between a lemme show ya boy’s ineptitude and his eagerness to help you. v 7. When my father married my mother he was Marianne’s husband. And he stayed Marianne’s husband until he became Sonja’s father. For his entire life my father was a non-entity. I thought I had done better than my father until today when I realized that I have fallen lower than Marianne’s husband or Sonja’s father. In fact, I have dropped as low as it is possible to drop in the caste [cast] system here in American today. There is a name for American untouchables. When we work in big box stores we are called associates.

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8. We all have things that we can do. And there are other things that we cannot do. Perhaps an adult might be defined as: “a person who knows what he can do and what he can’t do --- and isn’t afraid to admit it.” The email I recently received said, “humble, Don't you remember what I thought of as Plan A?” Of course I don’t remember anything about Plan A. Because I’d like you to learn a little more about me, you might listen closely to the reply I sent to this person: “Please realize that I don’t remember much of anything. My talent is not in remembering, but in synthesizing that which I have recently heard and presenting it to my radio friends, as original material.”

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9. Table manners are changing in this country. It is getting so that if you want someone to feel comfortable when they come to your house for supper, you serve them in paper plates on a plastic tray with plastic forks and a paper cup. Without even thinking, they’ll get up when they’ve finished, dump the paper and plastic into a big barrel, throw their tray on a pile next to the barrel, and leave. The only thing that will remain the same as the good old days is the absence of a tip.

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10. A friend of mine has a very impressive television server. It has somewhere between 500 and 1000 channels. I clicked through them just for fun and guess what? There wasn’t one program on there out of hundreds of channels that I wanted to watch. Nothing. Not one. We have Roku. Roku is different. You can watch YouTube on your Roku. On YouTube I can watch endless lectures by college professors on any topic you can imagine. There is no longer an excuse for being ignorant. I can hear any kind of music that appeals to me. I can hear concerts by top musicians. One morning I heard the people on the news talking about a football game that they called the super bowl that had been played the day before. I called my friend Julian and asked him if he watched it and he said he did. When I asked him what happened, I was not surprised to hear him say that he fell asleep. This is good. What else is television for?

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