One recent June, after I had made reference to the “longest day of the year,” a lady from The County wrote to admonish me. She hoped I’d smarten up one of these days and put my brain into gear before letting my fingers do the walking over the computer keyboard.

Her lecture was short and to the point: Since every day is 24 hours in length, there is no “longest” or “shortest.” Some simply have more (or fewer) hours of daylight than others.

She’s right, of course, although I am pretty sure she’d have a tough job selling that concept to the World War II guys who stormed the Normandy beaches during D-Day on June 6, 1944. To them, it must have seemed like the longest day ever recorded, official hours of daylight or length notwithstanding. Which is why author Cornelius Ryan chose the title “The Longest Day” for his best-selling book that brilliantly described the operation.

(If my County pen pal was paying attention on June 14, which evidently was the proofreader’s day off, she may have blown a gasket. On the BDN weather page, readers learned that there supposedly were 32 hours and 27 minutes in that day, and the increase in daylight since Dec. 21 was 23 hours and 40 minutes. Oops.)

No matter. The lady’s point about The Day Erroneously Known As The Longest is well taken, and you’ll not find me glomming my way through that particular minefield again any time soon. My only purpose in bringing up the subject at all is to whine about the lashup already beginning to swing the other way, daylight-wise, so that one day before long we’ll look up and it’ll be dark at 3 o’clock in the afternoon again.

All of which is the long way of getting to this week’s premise: With the advent of summer, it is time to purge the tickler file of a season’s worth of deteriorating material that had once seemed like promising column fodder.

Out goes the newspaper clipping about Lewiston police finding the body of a man stuffed in the trunk of his car and deciding, after much deliberation, to consider the situation “suspicious.” The clipping did not suggest what may have prompted this startling conclusion.

Ditto, a recent article by BDN environment writer Misty Edgecomb concerning Maine bears becoming a nuisance in their springtime search for grub. It told about an incident in which an inexperienced hunter shot a bear in the rear end, causing the bear to fall out of a very tall tree and land atop a hunting guide. The image evoked was so vivid there should have been a great line there some place, I suppose. But time has passed me by and the occasion is lost, perhaps for the better.

I’m chucking a news clip describing how a new $5.5 million military radio system installed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida had taken to jamming remote-control garage doors in communities near the Florida Panhandle base. With any luck in fine-tuning the system, perhaps the Air Force techno-geeks will rig it so it also provides blessed relief by short-circuiting the area’s millions of cell phones.

I’m also tossing out an old note to myself about the spelling-challenged people who provide those identification lines for the bottom of your television screen during newscasts. A local evening news show gave us the “interum coach” of a “Little Leauge” team and mangled three of six listed Atlantic 10 Conference sports teams (“Massassachuetts” and “Deleware” and “Villinova”). Not to be upstaged, a network newscast (NBC) carried an ID line informing us that the screen scene was of some place in “Libia.” Other glitches from a spring’s worth of dubious ID lines included “gymnist” and “puppetier” and “Navy coreman” and “Sakatoon, Canada.”

This may explain why television, seemingly more often than not, simply declines to identify people who are speaking on camera. You can’t flub the ID line if there is none to flub. Better to have a phantom interviewee, however aggravating that sorry procedure may be to viewers.

And speaking of aggravations in the news report – printed or verbal – the practice of substituting “after” for “when” so we learn that so-and-so “was injured after his car struck a tree” or was “killed after he was hit by a freight train” was surely invented to drive paying customers up a wall.

You read or hear something like that and it makes you wonder if the guy survived his confrontation with the locomotive but was bumped off by an irate train crew livid at the thought of having to complete the subsequent paperwork.

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