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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 13, 2014

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1. Living on the coast of Maine can be a challenge. Let's take a specific example. What do you do if you live within sight of the famous Olsen house, and 75 yachts from New Jersey anchor beside your back yard? You might look out and think that it's a mighty pretty sight. But if you've seen yachts anchor there before, you know you could be looking at trouble, because most of those people on the yachts are environmentally oriented. That means that they would cut off a hand before they'd throw a can, bottle or scrap of paper overboard. But they've got to get rid of their trash somehow and you know how they do it. They lug it ashore and stack it neatly in your barn. The man who brought this to my attention said that he asked them why they were stacking their trash in his barn. And they said, "What do you do with your trash?" And he said, "I take it to the dump." And they said, "When you go there you can take ours, too." If you've driven through parts of Philadelphia and New Jersey, you probably thought that the people who lived there were responsible for all the ankle deep trash beside the road. But now I can't help but wonder if it isn't recycled yacht trash that some old Maine lobsterman has thrown out of his car on his way to Florida.

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2. The web page listed 10 foods you shouldn’t put in the refrigerator. I didn't see any food listed that my wife Marsha puts in the refrigerator today. Perhaps because some are exotic foods, anyway, like garlic and avocado, that are only stored and eaten by people from "away." But there are people who know more than I do about food and they might have something to tell us about it. I note that the word used in the article is icebox. I can remember that before we had an icebox my grandmother kept the butter and milk on a dumb waiter that went down into the cellar where it was cool. As I recall, when we got an icebox it was a varnished icebox. I don't think we ate fruit or fresh vegetables in the winter time, anyway. Seventy years ago diets of Maine people must have been very different from today. Back then you never heard anything about 10 foods you shouldn’t put in the refrigerator. Any food you had that you weren’t going to eat that day was in glass canning jars in the cellar.

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3. You might have seen five of Timmy Polky’s very nice brown cows in the pasture across the road from my house. In two or three weeks they chewed 9 or so acres right down to the bare ground. My brother told me that 80 and more years ago everyone in our neighborhood had a cow and the problem was finding pasturage for them. He said that our next-door neighbor had to take their cow about a mile down Hilt's point to pasture. And he said that Everett Baum used to have to take their cow from the village of Clark Island out onto the island Clark Island. I remember hearing that Chester Robinson's wife got killed down by the spring in 1922 when a car hit her. She was taking a cow somewhere, on a tether, I suppose.

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4. Speaking of cow friends, Timmy Polky's cow friends have chomped our back pasture down, and although they've only been across the road for a couple of weeks, there is not much left for them to eat in the 9 or so acres over there. They are already casting covetous eyes on the low hanging limbs on Raymond's side of the line. Anyone who has watched 5 big beautiful cow friends on 9 acres for a week can understand why there wasn't a bush or tree standing in our neighborhood 100 years ago. Even 40 years ago I could see the houses in Cushing across the river from my dining room. I could see the Cushing church and Ruth Aikin’s house. Now everything has grown up into trees. If we had more cow friends in our neighborhood wouldn’t it be a lot easier to see what our neighbors were up to in the house next door?

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5. I took my shower early and was standing in the kitchen in my socks and underwear, starting to boil the water for my oats. Before the water came to a boil, so I could put in the oats, Marsha and I knew that I had time to either: A. Go upstairs and get my clothes, or B. Go back down to my cellar office/studio and get my hearing aids. Do you think Marsha suggested that I get my clothes or put in my hearing aids? If you don’t know the answer to that question, ask any woman who is married to a deaf old man.

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6. Our shed door is open when I’m home and when visitors step inside they see a sign. This is what the sign says: “Welcome. You have entered the home of a DOM --- (Deaf Old Man) He wants to see you. He is probably in there but won’t hear you if you simply knock or whisper “yoo hoo.” Following these 6 simple steps will earn you his undying respect and admiration. It is also the easiest way to get in. Pick up this cow bell, walk over to the door and open it. Walk through the library ringing the cowbell vigorously as you scream “Hello in There” at the top of your lungs. Open the second door and continue screaming and ringing until you either attract someone’s attention or are taken out by the dog.” I posted this on my Facebook page and someone asked, You have a dog? Long-time radio friend Pegg, who knows me well, answered this question with: "He wouldn't pay for dog food and Marsha wouldn't tolerate the untidiness." Pegg got that right. Marsha takes care of dogs as part of her work and she enjoys her dog friends very much. Where they are. I have seen my friends chained to animals. Tell me if you don’t agree that the ideal pet is one you eat between slices of bread all winter.

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7. If you have time I wish you'd stop by and help me with a booger project. You know that from my chair in my cellar/office I can look up into two mirrors suspended from the ceiling and see the back yard and also the back steps. And you might remember hearing me say that I got a third mirror on the dump a couple of weeks ago to attach to the garage at such an angle that I can see anyone stopping at the rhubarb stand or driving into my driveway. The third mirror project is a two-person project because one has to sit in the cellar and say when the angle is just right and one has to move the mirror until it is just right, at which time it can be bolted into place. Although the project is a simple mechanical one, it might be compared with the first time that the telescope at Mount Palomar was focused in on the Andromeda Galaxy. Do you think I should put a fourth mirror on the roof of my house that would enable me to see Raymond Montgomery every time he steps out back of his garage? At a lower angle I'd be able to keep an eye on Timmy Polky's cows in the southwest pasture. For those who can't afford surveillance cameras, don’t you think that the possibilities with mirrors are worth consideration? Do you have over the desk in your office mirrors that enable you to see what's going on outdoors?

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8. Speaking of finding a place to park, one morning my brother told me that he heard Rush deprecating mass transit as a liberal plot to deprive Americans of their "freedom" to drive automobiles. We have all read what happened to our mass transit years ago when a few folks thought it would be nicer for people to burn Standard Oil and run around in Chevrolet automobiles on Firestone tires. For a few years now I have heard my conservative friends grumbling about building up the railroads in this country. They have never traveled anywhere else in the world where you can get on a train and be whisked from one city to another. If there is a problem in America, it is that Americans have not seen anything other than America. They have not listened to any radio broadcast that did not originate in America and they have never read a newspaper that was not printed in America. Those few Maine people who have traveled and read newspapers printed in other countries are called liberals.

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9. Many many years ago I mentioned on a radio program how you might boast of your great income without actually coming right out and saying, "I make a wicked amount of money." A circumlocution that provides the same function is to say, "Oh, don't I hate to pay an income tax." Then there was another way of boasting of an inordinate amount of wealth that appeared years later --- what was it? Yes, yes. I remember it now. "We don't have a television set or a telephone." That is another way of saying that you winter in your chateau in southern France and don’t need to be bothered by people asking you if you will clean out their henhouse or plow the snow in their driveways. Or do any other kind of work. Another one just turned up today that leaves no doubt in anyone's mind but what you were clever enough to earn enough money to give yourself an excellent damn-the-torpedoes retirement. That one is, "I will drive many extra miles to avoid going into a Walmart."

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10. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman and consummate organizer, more than once has helped a newly bereaved widow clean out her late husband's things. Some of the stuff is sold at lawn sales. Some of the stuff is given away. Anything that a widow can’t identify goes in the trash. An aged caring husband who is much older than his wife makes an effort to limit himself to one shirt and one pair of shoes as he nears the end, and I am no different. Luckily, I have a wife who is more than willing to help. Today, while hanging out her cleaning rags to dry, I was surprised when I pinned the ragged remnants of two of my favorite T-shirts on the line. One was given me at a computer convention I spoke at in Boca in 1991 and the other was from a Public Radio Program Managers convention, perhaps the last one held in Philadelphia. She tore up my favorite T-shirts and is using the scraps as cleaning rags. How nice that, long after I’m gone, my wife will have no choice but to think of me as she polishes lighthouse brass.

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