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1. Betty Ford, who was addicted to drugs and alcohol, lived to be 93. Coward that I am, I managed to live 75 years without either one of them. But I'd pop some pills and break out a jug tonight if I thought it would allot me another 18 years.

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2. Every day I read a newspaper blog. Reading the letters to the editor that people paste on that blog is as close as you can come to reading letters from another planet. Please listen to this letter to the editor from a man who writes about the people who are going crazy on the chemicals they call bath salts:, “One more good reason to carry a firearm. Having nuts like this running around, it won't be long before an innocent person will be hurt or killed by someone on bath salts” I might add--- who is legally carrying a firearm. You can see why a student of logic can easily become addicted to such a page.

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3. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, staggered into the house beneath a bag of groceries and said, “I can’t believe that gasoline has gone up fourteen cents a gallon in one week.” I laughed. Because if the Maine legislature were to impose a new one cent state tax on each gallon of gas --- you know, to pay to repair roads and bridges --- any legislator who voted for that one cent tax increase on gasoline would be blacklisted by every chamber of commerce in Maine for being “anti business.”

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4. One does not need to drive racing cars or climb Mount Everest to live on the edge. When it is summer in Maine we have the unfortunate but ubiquitous news items about kayaks, ATVs and motorcycles. In the winter it is snowmobilers or skiers who warrant space when they slam into trees. Outside of someone going through the ice in the spring or getting shot in the fall, there isn’t much in Maine papers then but accounts of drunken brawls, drug induced insanity or the fruits of mental illness. Was it my friend Lawyer Crandall who told me of the Millinocket woman who flipped a snowmobile after hitting a bump in the trail? Her horrified husband quickly shut off his motor and rushed over to make sure her machine wasn’t damaged.

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5. The newspaper blog I read every day has guidelines but the pages would be somewhat barren if an editor ever enforced them. The guidelines say, “No vulgarity, racial slurs, name-calling or personal attacks.” And beneath it we read, “your artificial intelligence is no match for your natural stupidity.” Many of us find this name-calling to be helpful, as, like the flag with the snake on it out front of your trailer, it is an excellent index of the writer’s social class and credibility.

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6. Although you might have read much of Goebbels diaries did you know that this master of media manipulation was once rejected as a reporter by a newspaper? You already knew that when Hitler was young he was unable to get into art school in Vienna. What a different world we would have today if our present standards for both art and newspaper reporting had been applicable in pre-Nazi Germany and Austria.

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7. You might have heard that George W. Bush was in Maine for his birthday. Did you think he’d be celebrating the occasion in Switzerland?

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8. A reader writes a letter to the editor that says, “All I know is my GPS occasionally sends me in circles in Maine neighborhoods. It's like being in the Twilight Zone, wondering if there really is a world out there. Maybe this Google thing will set me on a straight course before I return to using paper maps.” What this person says of the GPS and Google is true in many places. With a GPS you very often have to know where you are going at intersections that give you three or more options. If you type 785 River Road, St. George, ME 04860 into Google Maps, you will get a choice between two miles below that address (which you are told is in a town named Knox) plus another place across the river in Cushing very close to Walky Chalkie’s house. Plug that address into my GPS and it directs you to a place half a mile up the road. If you want to take the Old County Road shortcut between Rockport and Thomaston, the GPS will fight you all the way and try to get you back on Route One. A woman who works for a business that requires her to give accurate directions told me about Bing maps. Sure enough, type that 785 River Road address into Bing, and it puts you right in the driveway. Although I don’t know if there is a GPS for Bing, Bing certainly is a help when giving others directions or checking out your route ahead of time. Does Bing work well for you?

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9. Oil is a finite resource. Americans don’t believe this. Corporate America spends millions of PR dollars annually to ensure that we do not believe this. But the people in an oil-rich country called Abu Dhabi know there will come a day of reckoning, and are building the first city that will leave no carbon footprint. They are also giving their young people the kind of education that will enable them to survive the inevitable transition from oil to wind/solar power. They plan to sell this knowledge, technology and electrical power to the US and other backward, unprepared countries that walk whistling down the road in a blissful state of denial. You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t read this. My wife Marsha recently visited the administrator of an Abu Dhabi school and came home to give me an earful. All this was brought to mind by two interesting items on the morning news. The first one says that yet another oil spill has contaminated a US riverbank with oil. Flooded fields and pastures are covered with crude oil, water supplies are threatened and people are worried about their health and futures. In the second news item it was reported that many Maine people are opposed to wind turbines because they would destroy the view.

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10. We read in a newspaper that a couple of entrepreneurs who brought over 400 pounds of marijuana into Maine will probably serve 5 years if convicted. A reader asks, “So who is the bad guy in this story?” This is a good question that should be answered over and over until taxpayers fully understand it. Prisoners are one of America's most lucrative cash crops. If it weren't for the great amount of money to be made by putting people in prison and keeping them there for as long as possible, pot would have been legalized many years ago and half the prisons in this country would be empty. It takes dozens of different businesses to service your average state-run prison. Does it help explain why the US locks up a larger percentage of its population than almost any other country in the world? If it were not for the obscene amount of money corporate America makes feeding them, prisoners would still be raising their own meat and vegetables. Because privatized prisons cost taxpayers even more than prisons run by the state you can expect to see a lot more of them. If you'd like to double your cash in a short amount of time, you might consider investing in privatized prisons. Privatized prisons are a growth business that will probably outlast the world’s oil supplies. So who do you think is the bad guy in this story?

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11. Have you ever tried to write the ideal button-pushing headline for a Maine newspaper? --- Gay parents blind child with rocket fired from Baldacci’s moving ATV.

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12. Men. Do you jump up and obey every time your wife barks a command? If you are newly married you might. But those of us who enjoy marriages that might be compared to a butter nut squash just before the first frost --- that is men who have marriages that have mellowed and ripened to a satisfying state of perfection, do not jump up at her first words. Any experienced husband will tell you why. No matter what my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman says, you can bet that as soon as she says it the little cogs and wheels in her head start to move --- you know --- to evaluate all of the attendant ramifications --- and within 30 seconds she has changed her mind and says just the opposite. On the other hand, she thinks that I am wishy-washy --- that is, that I don’t really mean something when I say it, because --- should I say, “two helpings of chicken is enough,” she always says, “Are you sure?”

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