You are correct that there is nothing better than freshly boiled lobster straight from the salty deep. YUM! Toss some corn-on-the-cob in the pot with the lobsters and you get some tasty stuff.

A friend of mine rented a cottage from a family who lobstered as a hobby. So one weekend a bunch of us went out to her place near York for a lobster boil. She and I and three fellas headed down to the dock where a crate full of "leftover" lobsters was waiting. The family had been out that morning and took the prime lobsters to sell to markets. I put the scare quotes around leftover because if the ones we got were the rejects then the prime had to be incredible.

Anyway, my friend asked us to help her grab the lobsters and one of the guys reached in and pulled one out. It immediately started flapping it's tail, he squealed like a little girl and dropped it back in the crate. We cracked up and then I reached in to help my friend. Most amusing is that the three burly guys would have nothing to do with helping us gals pull the irate lobsters.

Those lobsters were worth the work - delicious, tender, and plenty of meat.

Heh. I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw how energetic a really fresh lobster could be. Before that, I'd only seen the grocery store tank variety, which are already half dead by the time they get to you.

Oh, and the corn. Definitely!

Robbo,

If you're headed to Maine I've got some good places to go (for sights, eats, etc.) that I can send you. I know you are a Maine veteran, so none of them are probably new, but my wife and I have been going for the last six years, so I've got some recommendations. Let me know.

Thanks - Perhaps we should start a "Tell Robbo the LB Where He Can Go!" meme.

I love lobster, but I actually prefer our local Dungeness crab. *shrug* maybe just a regional bias, but I've always felt it combined the best attributes of lobster meat and other types of crab meat.

I like Peggy Noonan but I find her tone to be pretty much starry-eyed AND patronizing 100% of the time.

I found her book on Ronald Reagan to be unreadable. Literally. It was idol-worship. There were some good anecdotes in there (one about him going door to door for votes in California and having someone think he was Roy Rogers - very funny) - but God, Peggy sounded like a heart-sick little teenage girl throughout the whole book and I found it ludicrous. She talked about how the sun broke through the clouds at some moment during his inauguration ... and then went off on this mystical tangent in the book about how 'I wasn't the only one who saw it - so and so saw it ... and so and so saw it ..." and somehow Noonan made it mean God had blessed the day ... I thought: Woman, you need a feckin' editor. She sounded like an idiot and a phony.

But strangely enough: I do love a lot of her columns. She wrote one piece last winter, I think - or maybe the winter before - about the snow in New York City which moved me so much that I printed it out and keep it in a scrapbook. She completely expressed the magic of a snowfall in Manhattan. That's when her starry-eyed tone can really really work.

But not so with politics.

My dad calls her a "blowhard" and I think that's pretty accurate.

Oh, and yes, of course: lobster. mmmmmmmmmm

I grew up in a town where lobster fishing was the main industry - so I kind of got sick of them as a kid - like: lobster AGAIN??? hahahaha

But still. Nothin' better than a juicy creamy lobster. Even better if you have a lobster bake, and you're on the beach, and you're playing volleyball, and there's a keg ...

Heaven!!