Have you heard that Maine is the dumbest state in the union? That's according to a recent survey — well, actually, a chart — published on a web site that goes by the 100% credible-sounding name of Pleated Jeans ("No filler, just funny!"). There is indeed something funny about this whole thing, but I'll get back to that.

While rejecting any and all attempts to impugn our intelligence, I do admit that we might be a little crazy.

It’s another snow day at Watershed, where I teach a couple of English classes, as well as, I imagine, at schools across the state. While the students are nestled all snug in their beds, it’s probably safe to indulge in one of our favorite grown-up indoor activities: chuckling over the week’s headlines.

The physicist Niels Bohr, a patriarchal Dane who died in 1962, was regarded for a time as one of the few people on Earth able to make some sense of the web of paradoxes inherent in quantum physics. One story about Bohr is that he was present at the reading of a provocative paper by a younger scientist. The paper was received with a thunderous silence broken finally when Bohr rose and said, “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.

At the post office yesterday I ran into Will, a carpenter-slash-folk-singer —  not the only one in the neighborhood, either, which can probably be laid to that lamentable ditty "If I Had a Hammer" — and we chatted awhile about our globe-trotting children. Will's son Seth is somewhere in Asia en route to Hanoi; my college-age kids spent the holidays in London and were due back in a few hours. It's all a bit bemusing to us small-town dads.

"Well, now's the time to do it," said Will.