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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 July 21, 2013

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1. As important as it might seem to you on the day it happened, 20 years from now no one will ask you, "Where were you when Duchess Kate had her baby?" I should hasten to say here, that although an Englishman shot my great-great-great grandfather in 1776, at present we have no hard feelings against the English and hardly ever mention the pain and suffering it caused our family at the time. And this week I am only one of millions of Americans who are eagerly following this birthing story as it unfolds and wish the Duchess and Harry and the child well.

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2. The email said, "If You Do This For 10 Seconds, You Will Prevent A Heart Attack From Occurring In Your Lifetime" I do not feel that by ignoring this email my life hangs in the balance. This email does not interest me. I am not going to read anything or look at the video. The last time I got suckered in, it simply said that Nelson Rockefeller would be alive today if he'd eaten two aspirin before calling his secretary.

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3. Some of us are not all that keen on advocating the reading of history. If everyone read history every single person would think like all the other people who read history. And wouldn't the world be a dull and unbearable place if everyone thought just like you did?

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4. Would you let a company have access to your checking account if they paid you $100? Because I like to have some small control over my monthly $504 social security check, I wouldn’t do it. You might, and that’s ok with me. Here’s what made me think about this. The email says: “Tired of going online or calling to pay your bill each month? There's a better way … Set up automatic monthly payments for the most convenient way to pay your bill. When you do, you'll be included in our monthly drawing to win a $100 credit on your bill! Each month we randomly select one winner from our customers who use our automatic payment service.” --- Probably you know that some companies will not even do business with you now unless they have access to your credit card. One telephone service provider had my credit card. It was the only way I could do business with them. They were great to do business with until they kept jacking their rates and then wouldn’t let me cancel when my contract expired. Someone stole my credit card. I cancelled my credit card. The telephone company always collected payment a year in advance from my credit card. I just happened to decide to cancel my phone service with that company because they kept jacking up the rates but they wouldn’t let me go. And when they discovered my credit card had been stolen, they kept calling me and writing me threatening letters. --- Because they wouldn’t let me cancel my service for the upcoming year, they claimed I owed them 390 or so dollars. You’ve heard me mention this but I’m going to say it again. You can read it on line. Two Germans died in a house in Florida. Their neighbors thought they had gone back to Germany. And their German relatives thought they were in Florida. Because their bills were automatically paid, and their checks were automatically deposited, it wasn’t until the house was seized for non payment of property taxes that their desiccated remains were found. So, no. I’m not going to sign up for easy automatic payments even if you were to give me $100. I don’t want some undertaker to someday tell the newspaper reporter that, “We had to scrape Robert Skoglund off the rug.”

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5. So the Governor in Maine wanted to hire a former Miss Maine for some educational position. I ask you, What's wrong with having a good looking girl fronting any organization? I remember of being hired to do a talk by a former Miss Maine who was running some organization up in the County. She went on to doing the news on a Bangor TV station. The governor obviously understands marketing and knows what he's doing. Can you think of any TV show that doesn't boost its ratings with pretty eyes and a dazzling smile? Can you think of any old geezer on TV who doesn't share the screen with the nicest looking female he can afford? Ok, so on the national shows, she also has a law degree and is brilliantly articulate. But please notice that, unlike some of the receptionists you might have seen in your physician's front office, she always weighs less than 200 pounds and gives the impression of having all of her teeth.

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6. "Army engineers to build 1,800-foot half million dollar fence atop Fort Knox.” That was the newspaper headline. Are they building a wall so people won't fall off Fort Knox and be hurt? What would you say if you saw a man with a tin can on the streets of Bar Harbor, collecting money to build a fence around the mountain so people wouldn't fall and get hurt? There are people who live to be hurt. Why make it even more difficult for them by putting up hand rails and building fences?

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7. Did you read about the man who hurt himself trying to pull a metal sign out of a pine tree with an ATV? We’ve all done this kind of thing so it’s pretty easy to visualize. Something snapped and he was injured. We read that “Alcohol does not appear to be a factor." If this had happened to me, I would rather have it say in the paper that I was drunk.

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8. One morning I was delighted to see a 9-year-old granddaughter stick her finger in her mouth up to the third knuckle and suck the food off it. This is the unmistakable mark of the rich kid. If I wanted my new friends to think that I had more money than I could spend, I would let them know it by sucking food from my fingers when I eat. Poor people have dirty hands from cleaning toilets, digging drainage ditches and fertilizing gardens with cow nutrients. Even a good scrubbing doesn't take away the memory of where those hands spent most of the day. But can anything bad happen when you suck the fingers that have spent the day grasping a ski pole or the handlebars of a $3,000 racing bike? I must shamefully admit that my people always lived from hand to mouth. And that there is something about sucking on my fingers while sitting at the table with a few of my cultured friends that grates against the lower-class way I was brought up. The ability to suck the food from one's fingers cannot be learned. Like speaking French without an accent, one has to be born and nurtured in the society where it is the norm.

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9. "The woman, whose name has not been released, was missing for about six hours..." You see this headline all the time. Old people who forget who they are and where they are. They wander off and sometimes they are found and sometimes they are not found. Unfortunately, this terrible forgetting disease is not confined to the elderly. For many years I played for a dance every Saturday night at the Blue Goose in Belfast and from my vantage point on the bandstand it was not uncommon to see women no more than forty who would forget that they were married and leave the hall every week with a different man.

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10. This morning I was reading about the development of brick making in Sumer. Which naturally made me think of the people who live in that area today. Which made me think that a person who cannot learn brick making or anything else from a master artisan is dull, indeed. We go to school to learn from a school master --- a person who can tell us how to do something that we’d like to be able to do ourselves. We all have our mentors from whom we have learned valuable lessons and we are going to talk about that now. Years ago Hitler invaded Denmark, claiming to be protecting Denmark from a British invasion. Years later George W. Bush invaded Iraq, claiming to be protecting the world from the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are those who say that GWB was not all that clever. But I would disagree and must point out that a person able to learn from a master teacher is a lot smarter than most of us. President Bush was even smarter than his teacher because when the smoke cleared in Germany the land was in economic ruin and Hitler had shot himself. But when the smoke cleared here, the land was in economic ruin and President Bush had retired to his ranch in Texas.

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11. I have been watching the 125 or so Monk episodes on Roku. On one show I noticed that Monk's skinny little female helper started wearing high heels (which will ruin her feet) and had put on 15 pounds between her knees and her belly button. I couldn't understand how she could have got so broad in the beam between the filming of only one show. When I mentioned it to my wife Marsha, she said I had pushed the wrong button on the clicker and was watching the program on the wide screen.

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12. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But --- I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next

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