Tag: Maine

• Funky old music-room posters (September 28, 2026)

  I recently dropped into a musical-instrument shop in downtown Bangor, Maine while visiting family. On the wall of a storage space in back hung a collection of circa-1980 posters by Tom Batiuk featuring Harry Dinkle, the monomaniacal high school band director from the American comic strip Funky Winkerbean. These were clearly designed and sold for display in school music rooms, and they made me ache with unexpected nostalgia.

• A stone in Portland (August 19, 2025)

  An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

• Your flag is what you fly (August 13, 2025)

  Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.