[Have left Maine, and am now in Connecticut, or possibly Rhode Island. Am somewhere New Englandish still. Maine was very relaxing, we had the lobster feast, we swam about 5 times a day and didn’t watch any television or follow the news — when is Romney picking his veep, by the way? (I’m betting he’ll go for Ryan, I just got a feelin’ about it). We managed to get out of the state without succumbing to the temptation to buy a scented candles or duck decoy — an occupational hazard for any Maine tourist, to judge by my rather jaded 2005 piece about a summer vacation Down East.]

By J.A.

Now we go into another excruciatingly charming fishing village. There are hundreds of them up and down this ragged coastline, each village unchanged for centuries, except for the addition of restaurants, tour boats, ice cream parlors and gift shops, the whole scene so unbelievably quaint and precious and perfect that you want to drop to your knees and just surrender.

My initial survey indicates that gift shopping has replaced fishing as the primary industry in Maine. The fishing boats and fisherpersons are just a backdrop, a decoration, a delightful ambient touch, for the serious endeavor of selling people yet another friggin’ scented candle.

The difference between a normal store and a “gift shop” is sometimes hard to discern, but the basic rule is, gift shops sell things that no one needs. No one needs a handcrafted wooden duck decoy. No one needs a wine rack that holds one bottle of wine. No one needs any more Amish soap that is surely manufactured by robots at the fully automated Amish Soap Factory.

But when you go to a charming fishing village you feel compelled to buy these things, in part because you owe a present to someone who had previously bought you a totally useless gift. It’s like an arms race. It’s the Battle of the Wind Chimes.

Sometimes people buy gift items for themselves to prove that they went somewhere charming. The worst victims of the fishing-village charm offensive will feel obligated to completely redecorate their home in a nautical theme. Let’s face it, what gift shops sell are costumes for houses. You find yourself thinking: “We should dress up the house like the cabin on a sailboat! We’ll have fish netting everywhere, and a pilot’s wheel, and paintings of three-masted ships blasting one another with cannonballs like in ‘Master and Commander.’ We’ll have a huge shellacked marlin on the wall, and our houseguests will assume we routinely yank game fish from the Gulf Stream. We’ll be nautical. We’ll wear a jaunty sailor’s cap!” But then, of course, you gasp at the prices, and wind up just buying a silly hat with antlers.

Gift items pretend to be useful while actually being destined for a shelf. The aforementioned wooden duck decoy might, in theory, be used by a hunter, who could float the fake duck in a pond, luring a real duck to its doom. This is a form of entertainment across America. The problem is, no self-respecting hunter would use a gift shop decoy. Real ducks aren’t stupid. They can tell when something is a gift item, intended for shelf display, and not an authentic wooden duck decoy.

Look here: a ceramic container for lemons. You know it’s for lemons because it says, on the side, “Lemons,” in quaint cursive script. On the underside it says, in fine type, “Made in China.” You have to wonder, do the Chinese factory workers who crank out lemon containers know the English word lemons, or does it look like meaningless squiggles to them? Do the Chinese find our alphabet to be really weird, unlike their ancient pictographic system that consists of random-looking slashes and little sketches of pagodas?

Now look outside: a wooden footbridge lined with flower boxes! The flowers are blooming, and the footbridge crosses a stream that flows beneath the gift shops and tumbles over a ledge into the harbor, where the vintage sailboats patiently wait for someone to paint pictures of them. The slogan of Maine, declared at the state line, is The Way Life Should Be. But they made a mistake and let a cynic visit, and I will tell you now: This is not the way life actually is.

Maybe there are still people who putter around on a wharf or motor out to sea to catch lobsters. But I guarantee you they have to hold down a second job, and they do their gift shopping at Wal-Mart. Just about everyone else is a tourist, vacationing from office jobs and suburban cul-de-sacs, and trying, for a few days, to imagine a world without war and terrorism and ethnic hatred and epidemic disease. A world of quaint fishing villages.

Within a few months, this lovely little slice of Maine will recede into the back of one’s mind and into the photo album, along with snapshots of that vacation in Wyoming or the one in the Florida Keys, and we’ll be who we always were.

Only with a new duck on the shelf.

[We’re still on the road, now in Maine, bivouacked on a glacial lake framed in evergreens and patrolled by loons. The lobster is cheap this year and so tonight we may have to have an epic lobster feast. I’m not going to blog, but I do happen to have stashed in my laptop bag a guest kit, from the juniormost child in our family, Shane Achenbach, who is 16 and perceives herself a social-media maven. She’s developed some rules of the road for parents who use social media. I’m going to post the first half of it, which deals with Facebook.]

The Rules of Parental Social Media Etiquette

By Shane Achenbach

Don’t friend your children. But if you really, really can’t help it and have a somewhat functional relationship with your children, then fine. Friend them. But try to resist looking at their activities unless they appear on your newsfeed.

And don’t comment on their activities! If your child uploads a picture of an inanimate object that is indicative of an inside joke that you are not a part of, do not comment. Explaining the joke ruins the joke, especially when you are explaining it to your mom. If your child uploads a picture of her friend, do not comment. And do not friend this person. This person does not know you. Does your child ever do this to you? No. He/she does not. Because it is weird.

If your child uploads an inappropriate picture, do not comment. Go upstairs to your child’s room and sit down with him/her in person. Tell him/her that no future employer or college admissions officer wants a slut and/or drunk (this depends on what the picture was of) on the premises. If done right, this will not turn your child against you enough to defriend you, but will just sufficiently scare him/her into never posting an inappropriate picture again.

[On vacation, on the road, heading Maineward, I’m going to post a few things from the archives. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about science denialism, the information anarchy of the Internet, pseudo-science, and what you might call the truth wars, and it occurs to me that I wrote about all this many years ago. Have dug up the story and, although the specifics are very dated — Dan Rather is still anchoring the evening news, for example — the general themes and principles hold up pretty well, I think.]

“Reality Check”

By J.A.

Originally printed Dec. 4, 1996, The Washington Post, Style section

The Information Age has one nagging problem: Much of the information is not true. We live in a time besotted with Bad Information.

It’s everywhere. It’s on the street, traveling by word of mouth. It’s lurking in dark recesses of the Internet. It’s in the newspaper. It’s at your dinner table, passed along as known fact, irrefutable evidence, attributed to unnamed scientists, statisticians, “studies.”

There has always been Bad Information in our society, but it moves faster now, via new technologies and a new generation of information manipulators. The supply of Bad Information is not the only problem -- there may also be a rise in demand. Perhaps as a social species we have developed a greater tolerance for it as we desperately try to slake our thirst for intrigue, excitement and mind-tweaking factoids. The plausible has been squeezed out of public discourse by the incredible.

There are seven fundamental types of Bad Information.

* Obvious but Wrong Information: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution breaks the news that Richard Jewell was the prime suspect in the Olympic bombing. Jewell was obviously the perpetrator, because he had been the “hero” who found the bomb, and we all know that a “hero” is usually a self-promoting, bogus individual, if not an outright killer. Also, the information was leaked, and leaked information always sounds true. Unfortunately, the FBI had no actual evidence, just a hunch. The government eventually sent him a note telling him he wasn’t a suspect anymore. Whatever.

* Information Censored for Your Own Good: Americans made sure to buy cars with air bags, preferably on both the driver’s and passenger’s sides. Then we learned that air bags can kill small children. The experts knew of the danger and kept it quiet because they thought it would create public panic and lead people not to use air bags and thus die in greater numbers. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are thinking of the dozens of times they have let their kids ride up front. As a rule, when one piece of Good Information goes unknown, it means another piece of Information will turn Bad.

These have become the Feel-Bad Games. Like any sports fan, I like my agony of defeat mixed in with generous portions of the thrill of victory. So far in these Olympics there’s something askew — there are moments of triumph, but there is an overabundance of pain and anguish. There are so many grim faces of athletes who have seen 10 years of training obliterated in a single misstep. See Liz Clarke’s great story today on our front page, about the changing nature of gymnastics (“with the sport’s difficulty escalating so rapidly, it’s no wonder the ‘game face’ of modern-day gymnasts tends to be a clenched jaw rather than a radiant smile”).

The story echoes what we discussed on this blog the other day. The gymnasts don’t seem to be having any fun. It looks like torture. They're judged against perfection and always found wanting. Sure, the U.S. women’s team won gold with a flawless performance, and we can feel great about that. But can I just point out that as we speak the Russian gymnasts are still crying.

Even the Michael Phelps feel-good story of the week strikes me as a little false. Yes, he’s now won 19 medals, the most ever, making him the surely the greatest swimmer ever and maybe the best Olympican. I feel good about that. But .... ahem ... he’s faltered a bit in the individual competitions. I’m still shocked that he got out-touched in the 200-meter butterfly when it looked like he had the thing in the bag. And Ryan Lochte? You’ve heard of “all hat, no cattle.” Well, at certain key moments this guy is all grill, no teeth. Did my eyes deceive me or did he get tracked down by the French guy on the final leg of the 4X100 relay as if he were swimming in a pina colada? I am planning on feeling bad about that as soon as I figure out how it was even possible.

I like the beach volleyball women a lot, and they’ve been aweseome, but I can’t keep their names straight because they’re over-hyphenated. I feel bad about how I am with names.

Today could be a feel-good day, so let’s watch and see. But if it gets grim and anguishy again I’m going to retreat to baseball tonight.

Although ... the Nats just dropped two to the Phillies and if they lose three in a row you know how I’ll feel about that.

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Must read: The Internet is making us crazy. Maybe you should print it out and read it, just as a precaution.

When you watch the Olympics with friends and family, you spend a lot of time saying to your companions “Now what’s happening?” and “Who’s this?” and “What do they call this sport?” and “Can anyone tell me the score?” and “Why is she crying?” and “Is that the guy we like or the guy we don’t like?” and “What if we switch to the baseball game for just a couple of innings?”

And that’s just during the Opening Ceremonies!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the family-viewing nature of the Olympics — the way there’s something in the nightly NBC prime-time broadcast to appeal to each and every person in the family who happens to be female. And guys can watch too! But if you’re a certain kind of guy you may find yourself periodically going through a kind of withdrawal, in which at the cellular level your flesh begins screaming for someone, anyone, to score a touchdown.

Apparently they play basketball in the Olympics, and soccer, and other stuff involving a ball, and there’s boxing, but you usually can’t see that kind of thing in prime time because we must obsess over gymnastics and swimming and the heroic parenting that the athletes in these sports require. Half the prime-time coverage features parents fussing and weeping and fist-pumping and putting all kinds of body English into their parental spectating.

NBC in its wisdom has decided that we don’t need a graphic anywhere on the screen telling us if we’re watching a 100-meter sprint or a 400-meter individual medley or a 200-meter whatever. Sometimes races will end before you’re psychically ready for them to end; other times the swimmers keep going and going as if waiting for someone to tell them they can stop. And there’s nothing more embarrassing than doing a fist-pump in your living room when your swimmer wins and then discover that it was just a heat and not a final. I hate those moments of Viewer Error.

But swimming is extraordinarly linear and simple — you can tell who is fastest just by watching — compared to gymnastics, in which the scoring is seemingly subjective and mysterious. Also cruel. There’s a sadistic element to gymnastics. These apparatuses are like medieval instruments of torture. I am SURE that I saw a pommel horse in an old Vincent Price movie. Scoring is judged against the standard of perfection. One slight mis-step out of bounds in the floor exercise and your lifelong dreams will be crushed and then ground by the bootheel of fate into the dust of eternal oblivion. Let’s get the close-up on that anguished face.