As March morphs grudgingly into April and the restless natives turn their attention to such springtime rites as ridding the front lawn of four months’ accumulation of state-sponsored “sand” – the traditional Raking Of The Gravel ritual that is so much a part of life here in The Real Maine – I am inspired to crank out one of those insipid change-of-season three-dot columns.

By now, sad to say, you know the drill: Random thoughts and irrelevant commentary interspersed amongst little known facts and obvious conclusions and the three dots of ellipsis signaling a sudden leap from one topic to another. Much of the lot has been gleaned from news clippings, notes made on the fly, memoranda from cyberspace pen pals, and the like, with a shelf life of overripe bananas. The resulting product is a solid tipoff that the writer has irresponsibly been diverted by the spectacle of the University of Maine Black Bear hockey team working its annual spring magic when he should have been out earning his keep.

After one previous such production last fall, a wag e-mailed me to quote the late great humorist, James Thurber. “You should have read either a great deal more or a great deal less than you have,” he wrote, after considering the preponderance of evidence that I had taken the day off; had “mailed it in,” as they say in the trade. He was probably right. Nonetheless, I courageously press on …

Speaking of Thurber, the man had some hard and fast rules for those who would write for a living. Some inkling of the general idea of the piece should be apparent in the first 500 words, he insisted. And the word “I’ll” should not be divided so that the “I” is on one line and “‘ll” on the next. “The reader’s attention, after the breaking up of ‘I’ll,’ can never be successfully recaptured,” he advised. Thurber was continually bugged by inquiries from wanna-be writers of humor, seeking tips for success. After trying to read one dreadful manuscript dealing with the confused whimsies of the Shoshone Indians he had his secretary return the manuscript with a polite letter saying that he had died …

Having pretty much violated Thurber’s rule about getting to the point in the first 500 words, I can’t promise that his standard concerning the contraction “I’ll” won’t likewise be broken, seeing as how I’ve known the master computer that has the final say in what gets printed in the newspaper to illegally hyphenate words such as “it” and “is” in our news columns. Talk about trying to recapture the reader’s interest after the fact …

Pressing questions … Which feels more like being nibbled to death by ducks – the routine hike in your cable television bill, or the hourly price change at the local gasoline pump? The continually spiraling cost of a postage stamp, or the inevitable-as-death tuition increase at the University of Maine? …

How come when cops are describing to news reporters how they solved the latest crime they invariably claim to have “immediately” done thus and so in pursuit of their duties? If they ever owned up to doing anything on a non-immediate basis would they be defrocked and stripped of all pay and allowances? …

As well, why do manacled felons in orange prison jumpsuits always go through such gyrations to cover their faces while being led to or from the courtroom? Show me a miscreant who faces the television camera head on and maybe flips a defiant bird or two at the camera man and I’ll show you my kind of stand-up guy: A loser with pride in his craft …

Dubious diversion … Watching the local television stations try to one-up each other by pushing their daily news broadcasts to an ever-earlier time slot. If Station A has a 6 p.m. broadcast, Station B must top it by going on air at 5:30 p.m., which means that Station C has no choice but to leap-frog to 5 p.m., and so on, until the heads of couch-potato viewers are in danger of exploding from watching all of the vapid boilerplate required to fill the expanded time …

Major-league masochism … Counting the “ya knows” in a radio or television interview involving anyone under the age of 40. My obsessive research shows that the average number for a five-minute discussion is 43, with no place for the count to go but up. Competition from the equally idiotic “I mean” is stiff, however, and when I heard a nationally syndicated sportscaster recently use the two in tandem roughly a dozen times, as in “I mean, ya know, Oklahoma is a great team, but, I mean, ya know, Indiana is decent, too,” I was sure I had died and gone straight to hell …

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.