"It would be insufferable," the philosopher John Locke declared in 1704, "for a professor to have a reverend beard overturned by an upstart novelist."
 
I don't know what prompted this outburst. But speaking as a onetime upstart novelist, and now a bearded professor of sorts, I applaud Locke's use of "reverend" and his clear equation of beard-wearing as a mark of wisdom and maturity.
 

Expectations were running high this week. One of the most riveting public speakers in memory, a man who has weathered personal setbacks over the past year but is nonetheless widely respected for his vision and idealism, was scheduled to take the stage before a highly selective audience — with the rest of the world looking on — and deliver a hotly anticipated speech. Skepticism was rife, but seasoned observers warned that one should never underestimate this man, who has proven himself to be resilient as well as charismatic.

Pity John Baldacci. Our poor governor had to stand up there last night and deliver his final State of the State address in the depths of a recession that has blown a half-billion-dollar hole in the Maine state budget.

Ah, the ides of January!
 

It's interesting how your view of life can sometimes change quite suddenly. It's as though you've been taking a cross-country journey — an old-fashioned sort of journey, by train, let's say — and for a long time the landscape does not seem to change much at all. There are endless variations on a certain set of themes — here a stand of scrubby pines, there the back side of a warehouse — and after a while your attention kind of wanders. Then all at once (what happened? did you doze off for half an hour?) you look outside and the whole world is different.

It's a whole new decade, I hear.
 
I'm a little reticent about proclaiming this unequivocally. The scars have barely healed from all that tongue-lashing we got ten years ago from number-conscious folks who insisted that, properly speaking, the new millennium would not kick over until 2001. Anyone who thought otherwise was "innumerate." I've heard nothing from those folks this time around. Maybe they're all busy studying for a math test.
 

I made it a point when launching this blog never to write about the weather. Blathering on about the weather, I reasoned — though we all do it in Maine constantly — ought to be reserved for social networking sites (by which I mean, for example, the checkout line at the grocery store). It has no place in a sober and literate forum like Down East.

"What's in a name?" wonders love-smitten Juliet. "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."

Well, maybe — there are roses and roses. Some smell better than others, and lots of modern hybrids have next to no smell at all. But Juliet was just a kid; let's leave horticultural disputes to grown-ups with time on their hands.

It's odd, the effect a little snowfall has on even the most seasoned Maine drivers. Something clicks in our brains — or perhaps fails to click — and we dash out onto the public roadways and proceed to do strange and irrational things.

Add to this the well-attested affects of holiday spirit — I'm not just talking about the kind of spirit that comes in bottles — and it's probably safe to anticipate that we're embarking upon a silly season during which the median level of driver sanity will plummet to its annual low.

"I miss Saturday-morning cartoons," pronounced my son's friend Miles, sprawled on a battered sofa in the basement lair. "Now we've got Saturday-morning depressing environmental documentaries."

My son Tristan, hunched over his computer, muttered in quasi-verbal agreement.