“Buying that bridge was no mistake. It will be worth a lot of money someday.”

The Movie: Way Out West, 1937 (Charley Rogers, Felix Adler & James Parrott, screenwriters; James W. Horne, dir.)
Who says it: Oliver Hardy as Ollie, a would-be prospector in the Old West
The context: Ollie defends his and Stan’s decision to invest in the Brooklyn Bridge.
How to use it: To reassure yourself about your favorite bad decision.

Bad decisions, I've made a few... but moving to Maine hasn't been one of them, at least not so far. I keep getting e-mails and phone calls from friends in southern California who say, "Do you think you'll ever move back here?" and, "No, really, why did you move?" As if southern California were the only place any rational person would want to live.

So today, I offer my list of ten advantages Maine has over Los Angeles.

Things That are Better in Maine

1. Maine has real weather, unlike southern California, which has long stretches of no weather, interrupted by the occasional apocalypse.

2. Local TV news. To be fair, local TV news anywhere is better than Los Angeles.

3. I have yet to call the Gardiner police to break up a fight between a hooker and her client under my living room window.

4. In central Maine, everybody is poor, so I don't have that sense of relative deprivation.

5. You will never see a Botox coupon in the Kennebec Journal.

6. Maine is a much better environment for live performance than Los Angeles, where people expect their entertainment to be edited and packaged.

7. Maine has wildlife beyond the occasional lizard, snake or desert rodent.

8. Maine does not need its own specialized vocabulary for traffic jams.

9. Maine has better public libraries than Los Angeles.

10. In Los Angeles, I looked older than my age; in Maine, I look younger. Or at least I can pretend I do.

The river's supposed to crest around 2:00 this afternoon. We won't have "catastrophic" flooding, but the water's pretty high -- as you can see here. That's Augusta, not Gardiner, but it's headed our way.