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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 16, 2013

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1. My brother came into the solar radiant heated cellar office/studio of MainePrivateRadio the other morning and said, “This looks like something halfway between the command center for star wars and Chief Wahoo’s wigwam. I took it as a compliment.

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2. My brother came by with some notes the other day so I could type up and mail out a press release for the St. George historical society. Because I wanted my second breakfast before I started I pushed a book at him and said, “Here, while you’re waiting read Plutarch.” He said, “No, I’ll wait for the movie.”

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3. Do people who answer emails in offices sit around in a drunken stupor or is there a conspiracy afoot to drive me mad? When you write to a chamber of commerce for information about some upcoming event in their town do you get a letter back saying that your letter has been forwarded to someone else? --- With enough verbiage thrown in to assure you that the person who read your letter had no idea of what you had written? Without any hint as to how you might contact the people in charge? Or even who they are? Tell me about it. My shoulder is always here when you feel you have to talk.

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4. The other day I hung up near the ceiling over my desk an old medicine cabinet mirror that I got down on the dump. This one lets me see out the east window that is right behind me. The mirror up near the ceiling on the right lets me look out the south window and see who is standing on the back steps. So even though my office in the solar radiant heated cellar is below ground level, any motion in the mirrors catches my eye and makes me look up. Crows, cows, turkeys, visitors. No activity on my back lawn can escape my attention. I’d put up another mirror so I could see out the north cellar window but the ocular stimulation I’m already getting from two mirrors is overpowering.

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5. People are snobs and it is not to my credit that I am no exception. The spelling and grammar one sees in letters to the editor in a local newspaper’s blog is --- creative. It is also informative. Is not spelling and grammar the internal evidence that lets us know where any writer is coming from? --- Whether he commutes from his trailer to the shop on a muddy ATV or perhaps never leaves his aerie but earns big bucks by pecking at his computer overlooking the islands? Generations of great writers have capitalized on eye dialect. Who among us has not read Pygmalion or at least seen My Fair Lady? Like the political sign out by the side of the road at election time, does not the spelling in a post indicate how much education or critical thinking is behind it? So please do not disparage unique orthography or the ubiquitous greengrocer's apostrophe when you see it in on-line letters to the editor. Reading what our friends and neighbors have to offer should always be an educational delight.

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6. It has been called to our attention that nowadays "illegal drug use is behind many of the violent and property crimes residents experience," What happened to the good old days when people did these unpleasant things and more because they were drunk? When I was a boy we never heard about drugs. But there was always the same hooting and hollering and beat up people and shot people because our friends and neighbors would get drunk and get their names in the papers and sometimes end up in prison. Do you think it is any worse now than it was then? The only difference is that back then it wasn't illegal to get drunk, but nowadays, because weed is illegal, buying stock in any privatized prison is a good investment.

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7. Henry V, that mirror of all Christian kings, said, “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But I simply say you’ve heard me chew this rag before, but here it is again. Can you believe that a radio friend came up to me at the Common Ground Fair and said that when he first heard my show he didn’t like my accent? Wow. You can imagine that if I were inside I would have gone right through the roof. Didn’t like my accent. Do you remember what Abraham Lincoln said when someone accused him of being two-faced? He said, “If I had another face would I be wearing this one?” If I could articulate my sentiments in the manner of the late William F. Buckley would I be employing the phonological constructs of a hick? Here, again, is my story. My great grandparents William Williamson and Mary Farquar, came to Spruce Head, Maine from Aberdeen Scotland around 1870. I was born and raised in the home of their daughter, my grandmother. I learned to talk from a woman whose parents were born in Scotland in the 1840s. I studied English and linguistics in grad school for 4 years, so, having given the topic an inordinate amount critical consideration, I realize that my phonology and other significant suprasegmental phonemes could well be rooted in an orphan’s home in Aberdeen and not St. George, Maine. Anyway, if you were to see me come up to a polio victim and say, “Hey, you walk funny. Why don’t you quit dragging your leg behind you like that?” wouldn’t you think that I was incredibly ignorant --- or mentally ill --- or drunk? Yet --- some supposedly well educated people think nothing of coming up to someone with a speech impediment and saying, “Hey, why do you find it necessary to put on that ridiculous false Maine accent?”

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8. The name Chandler Woodcock turned up in a report on the Maine State Moose Lottery. Chandler Woodcock. A name from the past. Wikipedia only tells us that "Chandler E. Woodcock is a former Republican state Senator from Maine, and was the Republican candidate for Governor of Maine in 2006. He won a close primary election by 3% on June 13, 2006, against David F. Emery and Peter Mills. He faced Democratic incumbent John E. Baldacci in the November 7th Election. He lost by about 42,000 votes. In 2011, Republican Governor Paul LePage nominated Woodcock to be Maine's Commissioner of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and he took office in the spring of that year." If you like Governor LePage, you must love Chandler Woodcock. You might even remember some of the remarkable things Mr. Woodcock said and did long before he ran for governor in 2006. If you tuned in late, the fact that in 2006 Mr. Woodcock was the Maine poster boy for one political party’s way of life might be all you need to know to bring you up to date. Perhaps you've never thought about this before, but what does it tell you about David Emery and Peter Mills when Chandler Woodcock can beat them in election among conservatives? Don't you now have to look at them in a new light? --- I mean, isn't it the most liberal conservative who loses when there is an election between conservatives? If nothing else, before Commissioner of Wildlife Woodcock leaves office won’t Maine moose be lucky if they have a tick they can call their own?

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9. Here’s something I read that made me laugh. "I have drank at least 10 cups of coffee a day for 45 years, and still have not got enough." That reminds me of something one of my friends used to say 65 years ago: You’ve got a cast iron gut, me boy.” Do you believe that anyone can drink 10 cups of coffee in one day? Do you envy anyone who can drink even two cups of coffee every day for a week without thinking there is a hand in his chest squeezing his heart? It is true that people who only drink coffee for a quick high can get wicked high on two quick cups. Like famous jazz musicians of old who couldn't bring themselves to play without heroin, weed or whiskey, there are other entertainers who have a psychological dependence on coffee, and guzzle two quick cups before every performance just so they won't fall asleep on stage. Real men might be ashamed to admit that after drinking two cups of coffee every day for three days, they awake in the morning feeling rotten. It is an unpleasant feeling that quickly goes away after the first cup, and although regulars might think this nasty feeling is a part of growing old, those who have experimented know that the nasty feeling was caused by coffee. After two or three weeks of a coffee-free life, there is no rotten feeling in the morning. If I am not the only wimp who envies a Real Man who can drink coffee for a week without thinking they are having a heart attack, I'm probably the only one who will admit it. Can you drink coffee? How do you do it?

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10. My wife Marsha,The APW, and I have a new thing called a Roku box. We have cancelled our television, kept the cable for the Internet, and watch Columbo and Monk on Roku. No longer able to watch the morning Today show, we eat breakfast side by side --- I, drinking my rolled oats from the pan, and Marsha eating peanut butter and marshmallow on a freshly peeled banana. So now, for the first time in over 20 years of a happy marriage, we talk to each other over breakfast, and have discovered so many disturbing things about each other that hardly a day goes by but one or the other of us doesn't secretly plan on filing for divorce.

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