MAINLY ODDS AND ENDS

[schlomo]

Mainly Odds and Ends

When my wife and I were browsing in a boutique store in Bar Harbor, Maine, we spied a catalogue listing some valuable coins. One of them in bold print was the 2005-P Kansas Fifty State Quarter worth up to $100: it is inscribed “In God We Rust,” an inadvertently blasphemous error. The bulletin board at the entrance to the Bar Harbor Savior Church reads as follows:  ALL WELCOME, NO EXCEPTIONS: Really? Besides being gracious to LGBTQ folk, such an all-encompassing welcome might lure a white supremacist mass murderer or a jihadist. At Thunder Hole in Acadia National Park, there is a bleak admonition: Warning: Water at Thunder Hole is Wicked Cold.” Not to be undone, weather.com last week had a red dot next to the Bar Harbor icon: I paraphrase: the air temperature may be in the 70’s, but the water is “wicked” cold, in the low 50’s. Be aware and beware! It must be dangerous, if not damnable, to wade into the ocean there. Next to a fenced-in wharf in Belfast, Maine, I noticed a large sign: PENOBSCOT BAY TRACTOR TUG PARKING ONLY, VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED TO SEA. Is this applicable to boats or the scofflaws themselves? At Portland, Maine, Bug Light State Park in one area at the curb near a World War Two ship-building monument, there is a sign that says you can’t park, stop, or stand there—what about crouching or sitting or crawling while drinking a Bud Lite?  To the traveler, the ordinary often becomes transformed into the extraordinary, sometimes wickedly so.