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The week of April 7 marked 35 years that humble has made this radio program for you. --- Around 1820 shows. He was a kid of 42 when he started driving to Orono every week to make this program.

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Rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 2, 2013

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1. There are things that should not be mentioned on the radio and we are going to talk about one of them now. You might remember that not long ago I said something about a man who discovered, much to his surprise, that his second wife was even nuttier than his first wife. Well, I’m not going to tell you how many threatening letters I got from men who said I’d better stop talking about them on the radio, but I am going to tell you that I’m never going to do it again.

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2. Let’s talk about global warming. Have you ever been out there all alone on the Internet searching for truth and wisdom and come up against something like this? And I’ll try to quote: "Fire and life are similar. Both are oxidation processes driven by dissipation of thermodynamic gradients from photosynthetic molecules with transformed sunlight in their bonds. Both are fractal and manifest emergent properties. But life is autopoietic; fire is not. This one warmed me - an autopoietic being - on a recent winter night near a meadow on a tributary of the Kennebec River." Now that is all well and good. And please remember that know nothing about the writer and am only asking questions here. I could probably look up some of the words and eventually guess what the writer was trying to tell me. But my point is, does the fact that a person has all those lexical items in his bag of tricks guarantee that we are listening to a scientist who has all the answers? Or is it possible that although the writer is brilliant that he or she is also crazier than a hootie owl and is leading us astray? My point is that in reading anything one must always first consider the source. Who wrote it and in which magazine was it published? What do other scientists in the field have to say about the writer? Bottom line --- does being able to talk about the dissipation of thermodynamic gradients prove that the speaker does not sleep every night hanging from his heels because he thinks he is Batman? Eyah. Carefully consider each source.

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3. We read somewhere that 14,000 wind generators have been abandoned in this country. We did not see where the writer got that number. And please listen carefully to what I’m about to say. --- It does not matter where he got that number as long as there are a few people who see it and are eager to believe it. There are folks who disagree with the number. I have nothing to say about it, although I have seen hundreds of wind generators cranking away in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Holland. By the way, I didn't see any rusty, abandoned ones. That's probably because they have the rusty, broken ones hidden away like Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. However --- wouldn’t it be nice if every rural residence in Maine were topped off with those solar panel things that very silently collect electricity from the sun? No gears or wheels. No rust. I have 6 of those sweet little things, and I'm enjoying them very much, as would any stingy, conservative old Maine man who gets no thrill whatsoever out of paying an electric bill.

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4. At the St. George High School alumni meeting last week I spoke with a distant cousin who said she has 18 or so PV panels on her house and that these nice little solar panels generate all of her electricity. Yes, I admit that she has a PhD in some kind of engineering. Hate her if you will. If we all had those nice solar panels on our homes, there would be no need for corporate America to sell us electricity generated by coal or dams or wind machines or even their solar panels. And, alas, there would be no need to bicker about should we or should we not have wind farms destroying the trees in Maine. To hear people talk about wind farms you’d think they were in the same category as the liquid fire we dropped from airplanes on the people and forests of Viet Nam. But Maine people are going to have to realize that they can put up their own little Photo Voltaic panels like I did before the bickering will stop about wind farms. And, until you and everyone else gets those solar panels, you will hear me chortling about how free energy from the sun has cut my electric bill. Chortle. Chortle.

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5. Although hundreds of people descended upon Moore, Oklahoma after the tornado, it is taking a lot longer to clean up the mess than experts had anticipated. That is because two out of the three people who came to Moore are taking the pictures which you saw either on the evening news or on YouTube.

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6. You’ve heard your friends say it: We ought to run government like a business. Get a businessman in there to straighten things out. The next time one of your friends says we should run government like a business, ask them to read some newspaper stories that come out of Augusta, Maine. Did you ever stop to think that we came within a million or so votes of having another businessman doing the same thing in Washington?

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7. It was refreshing to hear that the London man who robbed that woman last week was well dressed. He pushed open the door to her room, slammed her around, tore out the telephone and took purses and cameras. Is this not a great improvement from the old raggedy Fagan image that’s been popularized on stage and screen? Would it not seem to indicate that everybody’s standard of living has improved?

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8. I spent some time last fall reading up on the libertarian platform. The first part looks so good that you want to jump and down and cheer. And that's where they hope you'll stop reading.

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