One of the livelier points of the drive along coastal U.S. 1, at least until a couple years back, was an old farm in the town of Warren that appeared to be the forward operations post for a platoon of Marines. Actually there was only one guy in there, with three generations of his family, but he made a pretty good show of it.

The gang at the emergency room were a cheerful bunch. They bustled purposefully about, hooking me up to monitors and making polite but probing enquiries into deep recesses of my personal history and jamming me with needles into which they dribbled some actually quite pleasant drug. It wasn't how I'd planned to spend the evening but really it wasn't so bad.

My son Tristan, due home Saturday on spring break, has been struggling for days critiquing a book called The Improving State of the World. The book's premise — that things are actually getting better — drives him nearly apoplectic. (Can a nineteen-year-old become apoplectic? One prays not.)

Will Neils, the enfant terrible of Maine politics, tells a story about one of his numerous encounters with the law.

The blog you didn't read here this week was about a meeting at the local schoolhouse Thursday night. It would have been, had all gone to plan, mildly amusing and mildly exasperating. Here's the capsule version (make sure to swallow with plenty of liquid): 75 Lincolnvillians schlep out on a winter's evening to discuss the future of our town. Depiction of representative local characters. Background: Gateway 1 project, ambitious effort co-sponsored by MDOT to foresee and accommodate future development along an 80-mile stretch of the Midcoast.

On Thursday the Governor laid out his budget plan for the next two years. He called it a "jobs bill." And indeed he touched upon the topic of jobs, lightly, in his closing remarks, making it clear how his administration plans to address this vexing issue.

"Those who can work," said Mr. LePage, "we will simply ask them to get a job."

Problem solved! Standing ovation from the new GOP majority.

       

Click image for slideshow.

My driveway is shrinking.

With each new winter storm (which is to say, about twice a week lately) the navigable channel between parallel ridge lines of snow grows narrower. The turn-around near the house can just about accommodate a rickshaw. I regret now never having taken up the unicycle — a kid in my old neighborhood in Rockport village used to pedal one down to the park and it looked like fun, though of course being a kid he was equipped with rubber bones.

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.