Gov. Paul LePage has made the national news again, this time by ordering the Maine Department of Labor to remove a huge mural in its offices that depicted him frolicking nude with nymphs who looked suspiciously like members of the Maine Women’s Lobby.

Oops, sorry. That mural has already come down. The one LePage told his minions to get rid of this week shows the history of the labor movement in the state.

There’s never been a President of the United States from Maine.

George Washington never slept here. As far as historians can determine, he never even took a day trip to the state.

The annual Moxie Festival in Lisbon Falls has chosen its official theme for 2011, and once again, my entry (“Death By Moxie”) has been rejected.

This isn’t a new occurrence for me. I also failed to make the cut with 2010’s “Moxie – Not For Internal Use,” 2009’s “Moxie – A Little Can Of Gadhafi,” and 2008’s “Moxie – Side Effects Include Nausea, Vomiting And A New Appreciation Of Dr. Pepper.”

Some time ago, a kindergarten class in Scarborough was making collages, cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them onto shapes supplied by the teacher. One little student was using an old copy of Down East (apparently, they don’t all end up in dentists’ waiting rooms) that had my photo in it (the article was called “If you see this man, do not approach him – call the police immediately”) and thought I looked like a sailor who was thirsty and hungry.

I’m not one of those people who’s always going around criticizing Maine Gov. Paul LePage for saying things like it isn’t “proven science” that the Earth is round and revolves around the sun, or that we could lower health-care costs by skipping all the fancy tests and returning to the practice of having barbers bleed people with leeches, or that our prisons wouldn’t be so overcrowded if we went back to burning heretics at the stake.

I’m the last person on earth who would ever criticize somebody for drinking beer. I firmly believe beer is a healthy alternative to such beverages as soda (full of sugar or chemicals to make you think it has sugar), coffee (interferes with both the stress-relieving mid-morning and mid-afternoon naps), juice (often has more calories than beer and fewer vitamins – really, look it up), and water (may contain sharks or electric eels).

Moderation is a beautiful thing. Restraint is to be admired. Even abstinence has its place.

I practice them all – in moderation, of course.

When it comes to eating vegetables, I strive for the middle ground. Yes to corn on the cob, BLTs and baked beans. No to everything else that’s green, unless it’s a bottle of Ballantine Ale.

I summon up my willpower whenever I’m tempted to exercise or engage in house-cleaning-related activities. I’m told that once the endorphins kick in, you can become as addicted to that stuff as heroin.

Tokyo has Godzilla. New York has King Kong. London has Jack the Ripper. Paris has the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Even Los Angeles has Lindsay Lohan.

All the important cities of the world have their own monsters. And their own monster movies.

But what does Maine have? Some low-budget Stephen King adaptations. A misplaced “Lake Placid” (as well as “Lake Placid 2,” “Lake Placid 3” and “The Plum Creek Development on Formerly Placid Moosehead Lake”).

Also, we have a governor who uses cuss words in public.

I’ve had a productive day. This morning, I sold some oceanfront acreage in Millinocket to a nice couple from York. They were a little concerned about the lack of actual water, until I explained that the tide was out.

Dog. It’s what’s for dinner.

Or it was 9,400 years ago. Which isn’t all that old, when you consider the age of some of the stuff in the back of my refrigerator. I’d throw the gunk out if I wasn’t concerned about its possible scientific value. How else are scientists thousands of years from now going to know that back in early twenty-first-century Maine, people’s diets consisted primarily of gunk they carefully aged in the depths of refrigerators?