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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for October 27, 2013

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Hello out there in radio land. Thank you for listening to The humble Farmer, your very own private radio show which I make just for you right here on Maine Private Radio, the one and only and exclusive home of No Things Considered.

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1. You probably heard that they quickly caught that armed robber who held up the fried chicken restaurant. Although he escaped with an armload of cash and fried chicken, within an hour he showed up at the emergency room and asked to have his stomach pumped.

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2. Mary said that it was nice that I kept a diary or journal of my life on my Facebook page. That’s not really why I write so many seemingly meaningless things on my Facebook page. I like writing things out on my Facebook page because I can simply cut and paste what I want to use on this radio program. Or perhaps it will fit into a column for the newspaper. With notebooks, I have to copy it over. Here’s how it works. I’ve kept notebooks for years, a habit acquired in 1975 or so when I was mowing fields and digging gardens on a tractor. I had a special extra pocket sewed on my pantleg and kept a little notebook in it. As I mowed about on automatic pilot, sometimes cutting down lilac bushes that people wanted, I wrote down things that came to mind for use in my newspaper column. Now my Facebook page is ideal for what I use it for. I get information back from friends who answer my questions. Collectively, my friends know everything. I can use their pithy comments on my radio and television shows. My friends educate me. And, unlike my notebooks, I can simply cut and paste without having to try to figure out what the scribbles mean as I try to type them into the computer. You can probably tell me what it is about my radio show that people like, because not a week goes by but what some very intelligent person tells me that they miss hearing The humble Farmer in their town. So the show does attend to the interests of some. The great thing about my Facebook page is that you don't have to read it if you don't want to. So it's not as if I'm inflicting my daily doings or opinions on my friends who have a real life. It’s very much like radio or television. You can turn it off.

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3. Have you ever asked why, when you go into the doctor's office, you write everything on a paper which a secretary then copies into the system's computer? Why don't they have a computer screen in the lobby and let you type the thing in to begin with? Functional fixedness. Remember the Saber Tooth Tiger Curriculum? It's the way we've always done it.

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4. Once or twice a year, I’m lucky, a piano player stops in at Bed and Breakfast at the farm. You know, of course, that a piano stool is nothing more than a magnet for piano players. No sooner had Rainer and his wife Sabine from Frankfort walked in the door when Rainer rushed over to the piano and started to play a Bill Evans version of I Fall in Love Too Easily. Pat Michaud had just tuned our piano so it sounded pretty good. I grabbed my bass and we played for four or five hours, only stopping when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, dragged us in to the dining room to eat. The next morning I had just finished power washing mold off the east side of the house so Marsha could paint it when they drove in the dooryard again and Rainer asked if he could send an email to his son in Germany. All this time Marsha is in 7th heaven scrubbing and cleaning the bedrooms upstairs and you can well understand that after Rainer got out his email he couldn’t wait to rush over to the piano and play more Bill Evans. Well, you have heard me say that Marsha goes to sleep at night compiling a list of things that I absolutely have to do the next day and Rainer hadn’t played three changes before she shuts off her vacuum cleaner and yaps downstairs like Old Aunt Shaw, “None of that, none of that.” Scared the poor man half to death. Of course Marsha didn’t know that Rainer was visiting and thought I was slacking off in there. I feel good about the whole thing. Does this not indicate that my wife thinks I can play piano like Bill Evans?

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5. I enjoy looking at my new solar collectors and I enjoy talking about my new solar collectors. I even enjoy figuring out how much money I’m saving with my new solar collectors. In 2011, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was an average of 940 kilowatt hours per month. Louisiana had the highest annual consumption at 16,176 kWh and Maine the lowest at 6,252 kWh. Or 521 a month average for a Maine household. Where I live on the coast we don’t run an air conditioner 9 months out of the year so my average power usage for 7 months in 2007 was 613 kwh per month. Above average, but we have a B&B and have extra laundry and dishwashing. We also use the clothes drier on all B&B sheets and towels because our bird friends are disrespectful. In 2007 we were not generating power and might not even have had solar hot water heaters. Back then we could have been heating our domestic hot water with the oil furnace, which meant the oil furnace had to run all summer. We now have an 80 gallon electric water heater. The water in it is preheated by the 8 solar water heaters on the side of the house. Funny thing about shifting over to an electric hot water heater and getting the solar panels. We are no longer burning oil in the summer to heat our water, but at the same time that we started to heat our water in an electric water heater --- preheated by the sun --- our power bill went down. Here’s a question you might want to ask yourself the next time you see those solar panels on the barn on Mechanic Street or on the house out on the Old County Road: Is my neighbor saving more money than I am?

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6. I’m a quantitative person. I count when I wind the clock. I count when I walk up a flight of stairs. I look at the electric measuring meters on my house at least once every day to see how much electricity I’ve used from Central Maine Power and how much excess electricity I’ve pumped back into the grid for credit. It has been about 30 days, or one billing period, since the eight new 245 watt panels have been on line, bringing my total capacity up to 3.44 kilowatts. So I have no idea if that will supply all the electricity I need for the year or not. I do know that my first bill with the new system was about $100 less than it was five years ago. Does it make you wonder if your neighbor is saving more money than you are?

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7. Do you enjoy learning new things? At least once a day I pull a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off a shelf, open it at random and read. It is fun to do this. I recently read this about comets. “Since the belief was long prevalent that the movement of the heavenly bodies influenced the affairs of men, it is natural that comets were once regarded with considerable suspicion and interest.” Today some Americans will tell you that the national deficit is caused by the blacks, Mexicans and unemployed whites who are getting government assistance. They are blissfully unaware of our wars, the removal of regulations on our financial institutions and the huge corporations that pay little or no taxes. Do you suppose that these folks also regard comets with considerable suspicion and interest?

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8. The Common Ground Fair is the most impressive gathering of people to be held in the state of Maine. They have this Common Ground Fair every year, the last weekend in September, and I always do my best to be there. My favorite event is the sheep dog demonstration. They put these little dogs out in a field with a dozen sheep and when the dog’s trainer whistles, these dogs jump up and herd the sheep into a pen. Every organization in Maine that might be in favor of some positive political or social change is represented at the Common Ground Fair. My friend David Bright said that the most shocking thing he saw there in three days was the endangered species booth. David went over to check out The Endangered Species Booth and there was no one there.

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9. My friend John told me that he was standing around outside chatting with a woman when he chanced to look at the scratches in the ledge underfoot and said, “Look where the glacier went through here.” And the woman said, “Recently?” And of course John said, “No, years ago.” And the woman said, “Well, I wouldn’t know. I live over in Friendship.”

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