Shirtsleeve weather, days before Halloween. Who would have believed it? That's item one.

Item two: The morning DJ on the local community radio station, WERU, played a set of decent music that lasted all the way through my 25-minute commute to Rockland. I'd put an exclamation point here but it might detract from the serious tone of this blog.  

Though it seems to have eluded detection by the state's two leading newspapers, Wednesday this week was a pretty big day in some parts of Maine — notably school hallways and classrooms.

On that day, October 20, people around the country (and I would guess, thanks to the Internet, around the world) participated in a nearly spontaneous display of social consciousness by the simple act of wearing purple.

On Thursday, with a nor'easter approaching, I took a drive that I take more days than not, back and forth between Lincolnville Beach, where I live, and the village of Lincolnville Center. On the return trip I made a video.

I never leave Maine. I don't see the point of it. And what's odd about this is that I don't think of myself as an insular sort of person, or a small-town person, though on the evidence that's what I am. Or at any rate what I've become.

"The first thing you've got to learn about this ship," declares the Fred McMurray character near the start of The Caine Mutiny, "is that she was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots."