Leftovers

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Look closely into the DNA of the average Rhode Islander and you’ll find lottery numbers. Scratch tickets in the Christmas stocking have become such a Rhody tradition that this year the state lottery director felt obligated to issue a public declaration suggesting to parents that giving instant tickets to children as stocking stuffers might not be the best way to ensure that celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas doesn’t turn into enrolling in a 12-step program.

White Christmas, Brown New Year
A rose care product company will pay tribute to the history of the Rose Bowl this Friday with a 32-foot tall, 55-foot long float made up of thousands of dried and live flowers, including four large “floragraphic” images of historic games on the gridiron. One of them will feature Brown University. Rhody’s Ivy League school gets the full rose treatment from Bayer Advanced for the landmark 1916 tilt between Brown and Washington State. That game marked the first time an African-American student, Brown’s Fritz Pollard, played in the Rose Bowl, the oldest of all the college bowl games, which kicks off annually on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Calif., shortly after The Tournament of Roses Parade. Pollard was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005. For the record, Brown lost 14-0.

What Cheer?
A recent National Park Service study of Rhode Island’s Roger Williams Memorial offered little to cheer about. Among the criticisms: There’s no memorial at the memorial. Almost nobody knows where it is and those who do aren’t sure why it’s located on North Main Street. None of the park’s resources have national significance. The place can’t decide whether it wants to be a park or a landmark. There’s trash in the well that may (or may not) indicate the location of the stream where Williams originated his settlement. The state DOT even refused to put up signs for the memorial on the highway, citing the landmark’s insignificance. The lesson? Sometimes you founder when you try to honor a founder.

New Orleans on the Narragansett
Providence is considering adding streetcars to ease congestion and get traffic flowing again in parts of the city. Given Providence’s rich traditions in blues, jazz and dining, some locals already like to think of it as a cold New Orleans. The back-to-the-future tram look could bring us even closer. Providence residents, like those in New Orleans, already adopt a fatalist attitude toward big storms. The Hurricane of ’38 was the Katrina of its day. Locals celebrate bad weather by drinking near the Hurricane Barrier. And while the city may never have a streetcar named Desire, there is an adult entertainment club by that name.

Downsizing
One deeply disturbing but underreported consequence of climate change is the potential extinction of “size of Rhode Island” references. While ice shelves continue to break apart and float off to places like Australia and New Zealand, their remnants fall far short of Rhody length. Consider two of the most recent moving icebergs, variously described as “the length of seven football pitches,” “the length of Beijing’s ‘Bird’s Nest’ Stadium,” “twice the length of Hong Kong island” and “twice the size of New York’s Manhattan island.” Not a single Rhody reference in the bunch. Talk about an inconvenient truth. Not for nothin’ but when the world stops measuring its natural disasters and cataclysms in Rhode Islands, maybe it’s time to dust off those Mayan calendars.

This week’s question: What is your New Year’s tradition, or your favorite New Year’s memory?

Prose and Cons

Maybe it’s just a knee-jerk survival response to being the smallest fish in a big pond, but Rhode Island breeds self-obsession the way Glenn Beck breeds conspiracy theories. Four books have been published in the past four years chronicling the fables, foibles, fallacies and quirky cultural attractions and behaviors found in the Ocean State.

Ryder Windham’s “You Know You’re In Rhode Island When …” and Roberta Mudge Humble’s “The RIght to Crow: A Look at Rhode Island’s Firsts, Bests & Uniques” were published in 2006. Seth Brown’s “Rhode Island Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff” came out in 2007. The latest, “Rhode Island 101: Everything You Wanted to Know About Rhode Island and Were Going to Ask Anyway,” written by Tim Lehnert and published earlier this year, is the best of the bunch.

MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, Inc., chose Rhode Island to launch its 101 Book Series, producing guides to all of the United States compiled and written by local scribes, after a similar venture proved successful with the Canadian provinces.

The most impressive thing about the book is that even lifelong, all-things-Rhody mad residents will learn something new. Small enough to fit into a purse or coat pocket, the volume comprehensively details the state’s oddities and trivial pursuits, while fleshing out the facts with 26 engaging opinion columns by prominent Rhode Islanders.

Anecdotes and tidbits trace Rhode Island’s “mobsters and lobsters” legacy, a sobriquet made popular by Providence Phoenix columnists Phillipe and Jorge (who emerge in the book). There are also stories of mills, mansions, vampires, ghosts, pirates, stuffies, bubblers, dynamites, Plunder Dome, Dollar Bill, the Ancients & Horribles Parade and everything that makes Rhode Island what it is today.

In between, there are lists galore (“Five Quebecois Rhode Islanders,” “Top Five Legendary Weiner Joints”) and carefully selected quotes compiled in a running “They said it” feature. The guest columns are especially enjoyable (among them “Rory Raven’s Top Five Tales of Haunted Rhode Island,” “Ted Widmer’s Five Ways Rhode Island Influenced the United States,” “Robin Kall’s Top Five Rhode Island Reads,” “Tony Petrarca’s Top Five Forecasting Challenges.”)

In sum, it’s a field guide for travelers to the strange ways and byways of Rhode Island and a keepsake for Rhode Islanders who can’t read enough about their home state.

Skeptics Wanted
With so many scandalmongers around, Rhode Island is a haven for skeptics. Thankfully, North Kingstown’s Tom Sgouros is one of them. His “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Rhode Island,” published earlier this year, is billed as “a skeptical look at government, economics and recent history in one lively little state.” Sgouros, an independent journalist and editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, a political newsletter, compiles and expands his columns and writings into a book-length analysis of the state’s financial shenanigans and bad decision-making at the highest (and lowest) levels. In doing so, he debunks conventional wisdom about business as usual (a.k.a. the Rhody follies), pointing out the flaws and hypocrisy in many of the traditional arguments about the ills and problems of the Ocean State. Just an edited glance at the index will let you know that this is not your typically dry white paper:

Beast, Starve the, 147; boogeyman labor, 23; Bruce, Lenny, 135; Gekko, Gordon, 26; I-boondoggle state debt, 15; Jamestown two police cars, 72; lemons market for, 51; lottery, projections, bad, 11; mall not useful investment, 61; music stops eventually, 41; Oedipus, 42; orange drivers, 142; paradise this isn’t, 23; sea bass vs. cod, 141; self-freezing Popsicles, 57.

By taking a closer and more thoughtful look at Rhode Island’s infrastructure, tax collections, debt service, municipal aid practices, police budgets and salaries for white-collar and blue-collar workers, Sgouros describes a state in crisis and how it got there. His insightful skepticism puts him in good company with the dissidents and critics that have helped define this state since it was little more than a humble settlement running uphill from a Providence stream. (Nobody is sure where that stream is today, although some believe its source to be located under the Roger Williams National Memorial on North Main Street, under a well now clogged with litter and crushed beer cans.)

Oceans Three
Three Rhode Islanders collaborated on a new book about a decade-long effort to survey life in the world’s oceans. That volume, “World Ocean Census: A Global Survey of Marine Life,” serves in part as a preview for a final report to be released next year. It’s filled with stunning pictures, including dramatic images of such creatures as the jeweled squid, cownose ray, football fish and Hawaiian monk seal, along with several colorful corals and everything from scallops to sharks. Fans of maritime New England will enjoy scenes ranging from logbooks of whaling expeditions, vintage postcards of beached black fish and finbacks off Cape Cod and a collage of coasters and placemats from old seafood restaurants. Even the names – The Oyster Boat, The Lobster Claw, Anthony’s Fish Grotto – conjure days of platters and bibs in southern New England. My favorite picture in the book is a 1910 postcard of a 270-pound halibut caught at Provincetown, a fish as big as a dune shack that dwarfs the fisherman who caught it. Today Evelyn’s or Flo’s could serve fish ‘n’ chips for a month from a fish like that. Like many white fish, halibut have just about disappeared from the North Atlantic. Go to Jim’s Dock in Jerusalem and take a look at the snapshots on the walls if you want to see the giants that didn’t always get away in the old days.

R.I.P. Myopic
One sad note of prose to add: Myopic Books in Wakefield recently announced that it would close at the end of January. The store, located at 343A Main St., featured an eclectic selection of used books and routinely hosted intriguing solo art exhibitions on site. Owner Kristin Sollenberger said that the Myopic Books on Angell Street in Providence will remain open and that in the meantime all books at the Wakefield location will be 25 percent off. The closing of Myopic, on the heels of the body’s-still-warm loss of Mom and Pop’s on Robinson Street in Wakefield, is just more kindling for the bonfire of lost bookstores in an age of Kindle and iPod Touch.

This week’s question: What is your favorite book that you discovered in a used bookstore?

'Curiouser and curiouser'

Looking Glass Theatre, the longtime Rhode Island children’s theater company, must have fallen down the rabbit hole. One day it was here, applying for state arts grants, performing at local schools. Then suddenly, as Lewis Carroll might have said if he had grown up in Woonsocket, “there they were…gone.”

So maybe Alice doesn’t live here anymore.

If so, that would be a shame. The first time I saw the company, I was a student at the late, lamented West Barrington Elementary School. (Where one brick building once stood now dozens of homes squeeze together in a garish parody of a Hollywood set. Wisteria Lane meets Washington Road.)

A traveling company from Looking Glass performed some of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in the cafeteria-auditorium, where they always sent us for meals, indoor gym class and whenever they wanted to show us movies about the Harlem Globetrotters or the evils of smoking. The story I remember best was “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the one where three men are told that they will meet Death under a tree. They discover gold coins instead and praise their good fortune, but inevitably greed consumes them and the prophecy is fulfilled. It was a transforming experience, opening my eyes to the instant magic of theatrical storytelling. It also served as my introduction to the rich world of Chaucer.

Eleven years later, I was out of college, working as a cub reporter for a weekly newspaper in southern Rhode Island, with Saturdays off. I noticed a small advertisement: Looking Glass was looking for actors for Saturday presentations of an Old Stone Bank - (also late, not as lamented) -sponsored series telling little-known stories of the American Revolution. I was chosen to act in one of the short plays, chronicling the lively narrative of Tempe Wicke, a New Jersey woman who played an important role in the war. My role was a narrow-minded American soldier – somewhat blustery, quick-tempered and chauvinistic, like a cross between Yosemite Sam, Foghorn T. Leghorn and Tom DeLay. Every Saturday, we traveled to two libraries around the state, carting our set, changing into costume and improvising the play a bit to fit the space and keep us sane. It was a chance to act and get paid for it. More importantly, it was an opportunity to explore the quirky communities of my native state as I visited places like Hope and Chepachet for the first time. I don’t remember much about the actual play, except that I got my comeuppance twice a week, and the kids loved it. The run ended, and I haven’t been asked for my autograph since.

At its peak, Looking Glass presented more than 300 performances a year throughout New England. There are Looking Glass Theatres in New York, Chicago, San Diego and Pennsylvania, but apparently Rhode Island is no longer part of Wonderland. Does anyone out there know what happened to the company?

Abbreviation deviation
As one might expect of the smallest state in the nation, Rhody is a place that likes its diminutives. The state’s daily newspaper, The Providence Journal, is known colloquially as the “ProJo,” (PRO-JOE) while Rhode Island College is “RIC” (RICK). The former Providence Civic Center, now the Dunkin’ Donuts Center – home base for “Friartown” and Providence College men’s basketball – is “The Dunk.” The old Ocean State, now the Providence Performing Arts Center, goes by the horrid nickname of “PPAC” (PEE-PACK). It brings to mind the reason the Community College of Rhode Island system changed its name from Rhode Island Junior College. Because too many locals referred to RIJC as “REE-JECK,” which offered the best of both worlds in Rhody slang, combining a memorable diminutive with the hardcore Vo Die-luhn accent.

What is your favorite Rhody diminutive?

Going Rogue

Once upon a time in America, in a galaxy far, far away from the one that inhabits the mind of Sarah Palin, “Going Rogue” meant acting like a Rhode Islander. During Colonial days, Rogues’ Island or Rogues’ Land was the Puritan put-down for Rhode Island. "The fag end of creation" and "the cesspool of New England" said Calvinist Cotton Mather, unable to contain his contempt at the neighboring land of crazed exiles, common crooks, sinning scoundrels and soul-trading ne’er-do-wells.

In short, it was a place where anything goes and everyone kicked out of everywhere else went. Then, like today, folks tolerated each other, but few got along.

Undoubtedly the freest colony in America, and the major source of anarchistic thought and institutions, was little Rhode Island, which originated as a series of more or less anarchic settlements founded by people fleeing from the brutal politico-religious tyranny of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay (who referred to the new territory as “Rogue’s Land”). Unsettled and untouched by the land grants or the Crown, the Rhode Island area provided a haven close to the Massachusetts Bay settlement. (Source: “The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in America,” by Murray N. Rothbard.)

The First Rogue of Rhode Island was Roger Williams. Banished from Massachusetts, he founded the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which later became a state, and gave a burgeoning nation its first taste of religious liberty, a Narragansett-English dictionary, and free speech without the threat of government clampdown. Now vandals are defacing his statue, a tree root consumed his skeleton, revisionists want to knock down his monuments and some people want to truncate the name he gave us. Roguishness never goes out of style, but apparently it never rests in peace, either.

Williams was actually a pretty complicated man. His tolerance became less expansive as he aged and the “lively experiment” of Rhode Island, a utopian ideal of free thinking, free living, free wheeling libertarianism degenerated into a free-for-all of selfish and scandalous behavior. Rhode Island turned out to be a cauldron of tempers and egos. Communities formed, then split along political/religious lines. They formed somewhere else, then split again. This process continued ad nauseam until you have what we have today – 39 towns with almost no shared or centralized resources among municipalities. By the end of his life, Williams had hardened his views.

But then, he was never a true anarchist. Not like the Rhode Islanders that followed. According to Rothbard:

The honor of being the first explicit anarchist in North America belongs to Williams’s successor, a leading religious refugee from Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson. Anne and her followers, who had become far more numerous a band of heretics than Williams had amassed, emigrated to the Rhode Island area in 1638 at the suggestion of Williams himself. There they purchased the island of Aquidneck from the Indians and founded the settlement of Pocasset (now Portsmouth).

Follower and fellow founder, the wealthy merchant William Coddington, had a political and religious falling out with Hutchinson. So he left to form a new settlement called New Port at the southern end of the island and almost immediately declared war upon Portsmouth. The settlements eventually united, but Hutchinson’s radical views on liberty got her in trouble in her own colony. She was forced to abandon Rhode Island for New York, where Mahican Indians killed her in a raid.

Another prominent Rhode Island individualist was Samuell Gorton. Rothbard says:

An English clothier, his libertarian political and religious views and individualistic spirit got him persecuted in every colony in New England, including Providence and Portsmouth…Fleeing Anglican England, Gorton successively had to escape from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Providence. In the Providence incident Roger Williams began to display that totalitarian temperament, that impatience with anyone more individualistic than he, that was later to turn him sharply away from liberty and towards statism…Accused of being “anarchists,” denounced by Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay as a “man not fit to live upon the face of the earth,” Gorton and his followers were forced in late 1642 to found an entirely new settlement of their own: Shawomet (later Warwick)…

On and on it went. New idealists included The Rev. Thomas Olney, John Field, John and Rebecca Throckmorton, Catherine Scott (sister of Anne Hutchinson), Robert West, Ann Williams, William and Robert Harris. These Baptist anarchists fought tooth-and-nail with Williams, who by that time was up to his neck with individualists and was eager to ship them all to Oliver Cromwell. When the mad Puritan ordered Rhode Island to punish all “intestinal commotions,” the colony greased a new law to send “ringleaders of factions” to England for trial.

Two points: It is interesting to note that all of these religious and political free thinkers had multiple followers, even though they didn’t have Twitter accounts.
It is also curious that people are so divided as to whether being a rogue is a scarlet badge of shame or pride.

Earlier this decade, the blog “Snarkout” concluded a post with the following:

Rhode Island has been called (and may well be) the most corrupt state in the Union, but if arguing in favor of separation of church and state and the essential worth of the Narragansetts made Williams a rogue, “Rogues’ Island” is a title Little Rhody can bear with pride.

Last year, in his blog “Liberty and Culture,” Jason Pappas brought up the phrase “Rogues’ Island” in conjunction with historian John Fiske’s charge that Colonial Rhode Islanders, in trying to evade economic law, printed paper money but got no quarter from the merchants, plunging the colony into a financial abyss. As farmers and merchants fought and factions took sides, said Fiske:

These outrageous proceedings awakened disgust and alarm among sensible people in all the other states, and Rhode Island was everywhere reviled and made fun of…and forthwith the unhappy little state was nicknamed Rogues’ Island.”

So Pappas wonders: “Have we become a Rogues’ Island nation?”

Answer: Not until every state’s founder rests in archival eternity as a tree root.

Who is your favorite Rhode Island rogue?

Make Way for Rhodylicious

For the past couple of weeks, digital screens located over the highways of Rhode Island have warned drivers about the new state law that bans texting while driving. Lost is the irony that drivers are basically reading a giant text message sent by the state. Still, the law makes a lot of sense, especially to those of us who commute long distances to work, dodging the texting, phoning, shaving, movie-watching, coffee-spilling, GPS navigator-adjusting traffic around us. The truth is that many Rhode Islanders should be banned from driving while driving, but taking away texting is a good start.

The law is also a good lead-in to this week’s blog, since “intexticated” (being distracted because you were texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle) was recently announced as a 2009 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year finalist. According to the Web site, Urban Dictionary, the term has been around for a while and also means sending a drunken text message or photo to someone (sometimes accidentally, almost always regrettably). The Telegraph of London made note of a 29-year-old businesswoman who scrolled down her phone’s contact list to send a salacious “sextext” to her boyfriend “Dan,” only to realize to her horror by checking her outbox much later that she had instead solicited her “Dad.”

“Sexting,” or the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone, is in fact another Word of the Year finalist, proving the influence of technology on today’s lexicon. Other tech terms that made the dictionary were “hashtag” (the # sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets that contain similarly tagged items or thematic sets), “netbook” (a small, portable laptop with limited memory) and “paywall” (a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site, which is only available to paying subscribers).

The economy is on everyone’s minds these days, reflected in the language as “freemium” (a business model in which some basic services are provided for free in the hope that users will be enticed to add premium features or content), “funemployed” (deciding to enjoy one’s newly unemployed status by taking trips, having fun or pursuing other interests) and “zombie bank” (a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support).

Our growing concern about the environment has given rise to “green states” (where environmental laws are strict) and “brown states” (where they aren’t) – which seems like just another way of saying “blue” and “red” if you think about it. Another eco-word is “ecotown,” denoting a community built and run on environmentally friendly principles.

In the realm of politics and current affairs are the “birthers” (who don’t believe President Obama was born in the U.S.), “teabaggers” (who protest President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package) and “death panel” (a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live when care is rationed or, alternatively, a weapon on an old “Star Trek” episode). Bridging the generation gap are “choice mom” (a person who chooses to be a single mother) and “Ardi” (for Ardipithecus ramidus, the oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced - “intexticated?" - to the public in 2009).

Novelty words include “deleb” (a dead celebrity) and “tramp stamp” (a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman).

The dictionary also cited two notable word clusters.

Twitterisms: Twitterati. Twitterature. Twitterverse. Twittersphere. Retweet. Tweetaholic. Twittermob. Twitterhea.

Obamaisms: Obamanomics. Obamarama. Obamasty. Obamacons. Obamanation. Obamafication. Obamanator. Obamalicious. Obamania. Obamacracy. Obamanon.

The winning Word of the Year was “unfriend,” the act of removing someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Left unsaid is if “unfriend” is the Word of the Year, what does that tell you about the year?

In the meantime, Half Shell would like to nominate Rhody for next year’s word cluster. Some examples:

Rhodyverse: Anything that myopically chronicles Rhode Island, including this blog; the Web site Quahog; Phillipe & Jorge’s Cool, Cool World column in The Providence Phoenix; the late, lamented OSO.com; the old Cox TV show, Rhode Trip; the Web site Art in Ruins; the store Only In Rhode Island; and folklorist Michael Bell, to name a few.

Rhodyrati: Celebrity Rhode Islanders, such as the Farrelly Brothers, Jhumpa Lahiri, Buddy Cianci and Mr. Potato Head.

Rhodyfication: Tangible proof of your Rhody cred, such as wearing a Narragansett Brewery Father’s Day tie, even when it isn’t Father’s Day, or carrying the business card of a R.I. State Trooper in your wallet, tucked behind your driver’s license, just in case.

Rhodylicious: Something only a Rhode Islander can truly appreciate, i.e. wiener joints, sleeping to the sound of a foghorn and weekly scandals.

Leading to this week’s question: What belongs in the Rhodyverse?

Waste Land

Wanna buy a dump? The State of Rhode Island, in desperate need of ready cash, is considering selling or leasing the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the major repository of Rhody waste, which manages the state’s recycling programs and the Central Landfill in Johnston. Apparently, running a landfill isn’t the trash cow it once was. The concern now is that the dump may be yet another potential black hole in the state’s seemingly bottomless pit of money problems.

According to a report by the ProJo’s Mike Stanton, revenues have dropped from $70 million to $45 million at Resource Recovery. Not all of the losses can be blamed on the economy. In typical Rhody fashion, scandals outnumber recycling bins at the landfill, where $75 million disappeared amid the banana peels, broken bobble-heads and computer cartridges. In his Nov. 3 article, Stanton chronicles a laundry list of abuses overlooked by past leaders: “…flawed construction projects, questionable land deals, cronyism, suspected fraud, apparent bid-rigging, bogus workers’ compensation claims and phony overtime scams.” In other words, when it comes to business as usual in Rhode Island, something stinks to high Jerimoth Hill.

There is a long and colorful history to refuse in the Ocean State, where even former governors have been known to dive into Dumpsters in a frantic search to find wads of cash in a tossed-out brown bag.

Ritualistically, many Rhode Island school kids visit the Central Landfill on field trips. Artists, especially in Providence, have long recycled trash into sculptures and artworks that have appeared on the city’s streets and in galleries. Andre the Giant may have been known worldwide as a wrestler and the strong man in the movie, “The Princess Bride,” but in Providence he will always be known as that guy plastered all over Dumpsters, telephone poles and stop signs.

The Trash Man Cometh (Then Goeth)
The city of Providence has the worst recycling rate in the state, with fewer than 10 percent of residents sorting out plastics from cardboard, glass from paper and dumping them into green or blue bins. Instead, each week the curbs and corners of Providence streets fill up with random refuse, overstuffed bags and broken furniture. Now the city is fighting back. Starting this month, Providence residents had to put out two recycling bins for every trash barrel, or else collectors wouldn’t pick up the garbage. The bins are supposed to be placed outside even if they’re empty. So far most city residents have ignored the “no-bin, no-barrel” policy, resulting in uncollected garbage lining the streets of Providence as far as the eye can see. As Olneyville resident Maria Medeiros said in Friday, Nov. 13 edition of The Providence Journal:

We’re going to have a city full of garbage … They thought they had a rat problem before, wait until this garbage stays out for a week.

Throwaway Lines
At the Rose Hill Transfer Station in South Kingstown, there’s a cinderblock building with a bunch of books and magazines inside that someone, years ago, sign-posted as the Rose Hill Free Library. It works on the honor system. Drop a book or two off, take a book or two home. There are no due-by dates or late fees, and no shortage of trashy novels.

What is your favorite trashy Rhode Island story?

Rhode Tripping

The R.I. DOT recently opened the latest phase of its Iway project. Now when travelers on Route 195 West come to the split for 95 North and South they see two big green signs. One says “New York,” the other “Boston, MA.” Just wondering but was it necessary to add the Massachusetts postal abbreviation? Is there anyone in Rhode Island who is confused about Boston's paternity? Does the R.I. DOT worry that some of the traffic is aiming for Boston, England?
Plain old “Boston” was good enough for the previous sign. The only surprise about the new Boston sign is that they didn’t slap a “Historic” in front of it, so that it could join Providence, Wakefield and East Greenwich on the “Historic” New England redundancy highway tour. Given the way language is changing these days, however, maybe we should just be grateful that the sign doesn’t include an emoticon or describe the Hub as “Bostonalicious.”

Signs of the Times
Every once in a while we get a letter-to-the-editor about sign pollution in South County. And it’s true, there do seem to be a lot of needless signs out there. Especially those blue evacuation signs, pointing drivers in the direction of the back roads of South County in case of apocalyptic natural or manmade disaster. Considering the daily road jam whenever classes let out at the University of Rhode Island or the hour-long backlog on Kingstown Road before and after concerts at the Ryan Center, the idea that we will be able to evacuate efficiently and swiftly in the event of emergency is beyond delusional. In fact, as bad ideas go, it ranks somewhere between the Ford Pinto and the Cleveland Indians’ 10-Cent Beer Night promotion at the old Municipal Stadium.

History Lesson
My frequent travels from Barrington to Warren, Bristol and Newport roughly follow the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route. Rochambeau’s French Army marched from Rhode Island to Virginia in 1781. Signage along what is now Route 114 and other stretches of local asphalt identifies the Rhode Island portion of a series of encampments and roads used by the U.S. Continental Army troops under George Washington and French troops under Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau stretching 680 miles from Newport to Yorktown. The marked route now plays connect-the-dots in Rhode Island, although important landmarks like Monkey Town Road are unrecognizable today, victims to generations of urban sprawl. The full route is the most recent National Historic Trail signed into law, and is the only one of 19 such trails to include Rhode Island.

The Billboard Jungle
Around here, there have been few good billboards over the years, yet they keep going up. According to an online article on “outdoor advertising in Rhode Island,” billboards should be creative if they’re going to reach consumers who are breaking the speed limit:

Billboards advertise everything from God to gum and they are the most popular form of outdoor advertising in Rhode Island.

There’s one up now, visible from 195 West and paid for by the Reproductive Science Center, riffing off of the confusion created by re-routing the roads through Providence during the Iway project: “Need help having a baby? Left lane.”

A few years back, the Roger Williams Park Zoo erected the memorable: “Imagine going through life as a naked mole rat.”

Leading to this week’s question: What’s the best (or worst) billboard you’ve seen in Rhode Island?

The Snark Wears Hunter's Orange

I’d like to give Newsweek’s Raina Kelley a do-over. In her October article, “Leaf Us Alone,” Kelley tore apart the autumn-worshipping, leaf-loving visitors to New England, condemning the entire season in the process. Worse, she claimed to speak for all of us who call New England home. Now, sometimes writers write things in a bad mood that they later wished they hadn’t written. Maybe this is one of those times. But in case it isn’t, today’s blog will deconstruct Kelley’s rant, reprinted here in its entirety, interspersed with snarky comments in italics by yours truly:

Autumn in New England – what a lovely thought. “The maple wears a gayer scarf, the field a scarlet gown,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Few could. But it doesn’t hurt to try. Here are some of my own attempts to describe autumn, culled from old columns:

The funeral for the green leaf lasts a couple of months in New England, where foliage season is both a rite of passage and a cottage industry.

In New England, autumn plays through the landscape like a kid with a box of crayons.

But the only winter worth worrying about is the nuclear kind. Otherwise, let us get on with autumn, New England’s most inspired season. Now is the time to notice: The landscape is electric, the air is reviving, and we wake to the knowledge that every new day is a blank canvas, and everywhere you look there is color to fill it.

New England already knows it’s God’s country, what with all those cute churches on every village green, but come fall it may really be true.

Actually, come this fall, we’ve learned that New England is the least religious part of the entire country. In a recent study, New England passed the Pacific Northwest as the place where the fewest number of citizens regularly go to church or follow a particular religion. But it’s true that those white-steeple churches and village greens contribute to the scenery.

Nothing says America like a cool afternoon spent apple picking, pumpkin carving and leaf ogling, all finished off with a nice, warm apple-cider doughnut (preferably two).

Not sure they feel the same way in Texas, but it’s a nice sentiment.

The problem is: I get sick just thinking about it. Why? I grew up in Connecticut, and as far as I’m concerned the leaves of autumn might as well be the 11th plague.

Sounds like yet another one of those Connecticutites who like to call themselves New Englanders because it gives them a kind of cocktail party cred but they’re really New Yorkers who spend every day commuting to Manhattan and would have to use MapQuest to find Boston. You know. The kind of Nutmeg State lodger identified in those local McDonald’s commercials, where Connecticut is referred to as “Newyorkachusetts.”

Oh, sure, tourists love them. I once saw a grown man cry over a particularly lovely stand of maple trees, and he was covered in Army tattoos. Tears aren’t the telltale sign of a leaf peeper – or “outsider,” as we locals like to call them. Outsiders are the ones who throw around phrases such as “nature’s majesty” or “breathtaking array,” all the while walking around with their heads cocked permanently skyward (I’ve always assumed that the first call they make on Monday morning is to their chiropractor.) Sure, all those leaf voyeurs drop millions of dollars on that horrible maple-syrup candy that I’ve never seen anyone actually eat. But they also clog up winding country roads, jack up the prices in restaurants, and buy up all the really big pumpkins.

Can a New Englander who loves being outside be considered an outsider? Because I don’t know any New Englanders who don’t look at the leaves every autumn, gasping at the colors and grasping for ways to describe them, sometimes succumbing to cliché. The “heads cocked permanently skyward” reference once again betrays the author as a closet Manhattanite. In technical tourism terms, that’s a New York skyscraper thing, not a New England foliage thing. The phrase “leaf voyeurs” is nice. I’ll have to borrow that someday. Except for a few weeks in November and March, “winding country roads” in New England are always clogged. Without the tourists, there would be no restaurants. And I’ve never had trouble finding a big pumpkin in autumn, even on Halloween.

A native New Englander does not gush over leaves. OK, so we don’t gush over anything, but leaves – never going to happen.

Not all of us descended from the Puritans. I’m a native New Englander. I gush. (See above.) Most of my friends are native New Englanders. They all gush. My friend Gavin and I gushed all fall as we jogged the same route along a local bike path, watching the changing color and transient wildlife in the swamp and woods. I went to a mountainside cabin in Vermont on Columbus Day weekend, with eight friends, all native New Englanders, when the trees were at peak color. We drank and gushed. I visited my friends Frank and Terri in my old stomping grounds in Plymouth, N.H. We hiked in the woods, following unmarked trails painted in sunshine and leaf colors. They’re both from the Midwest, but they supported my gushing wholeheartedly. I bicycled in Little Compton a couple of weeks ago, popping in at art galleries and coffeehouses, marveling at the range of autumn tones in the landscape, sharing brief conversations with native New England strangers. Gushing everywhere.

Actually, we try to pretend the leaves are still green, because long after all the peepers have gone home, we have to dispose of all those leaves. Raking leaves is a horrible, Sisyphean chore.

No, again. Standing in line at the DMV is a horrible, Sisyphean chore. Raking is only spiritless for people who own too many acres. Obviously the author has never raked leaves on a sunny autumn day surrounded by bounding dogs and godchildren jumping in leaf piles. It is good exercise and the leftover non-raked leaves make a fine mulch for the winter garden.

I’m quite sure that is the main reason New Englanders are so grumpy. (I used to think it was because the Patriots were such losers, but that, apparently, wasn’t the problem.)

O-for-three. The Patriots had nothing to do with it. New England grumpiness began with Calvinism and continued with the Red Sox being oh-so-close but not winning the World Series for 86 years while the dreaded, Babe Ruth-swiping, money-burning Yankees consumed pennants like Cracker Jacks. Now that the Sox have won a couple recently, there isn’t as much grump in our demeanor, although the fact that this year’s Bronx Bombers are world champs is – like thickness on a red berry or a horse’s coat – a sign of a longer, darker, colder winter.

The misery of raking cannot be exaggerated.

Except for when it can…

Imagine standing for hours in the sun, dragging a huge metal salad fork back and forth, back and forth. Your vertebrae compress. Your hands break out in blisters. Your feet sweat and swell. Sometimes the rake moves the leaves toward the pile, but more often the leaves clog the rake, requiring you to stop, remove them by hand, and place them on a huge pile of already raked leaves. A huge pile, by the way, that attracts wind, dogs, small children, and fire like nobody’s business. It’s easier to get a cat into a sack than to keep a pile of leaves together. Seems Mother Nature’s determined to protect her precious babies from spending eternity in garbage bags.

Go ahead, reader. Take a few seconds to shake off the hyperbole.

And it’s not as if the leaves are doing anything miraculous. Get a grip on yourselves, people. Cold weather stops photosynthesis, and the leaves die. All that bright color is a death shroud.

That’s precisely why it is so miraculous. The colors of flowers growing out of the earth in the spring and the colors of leaves falling back to the earth in the fall is great spectacle and drama, reminding us of the beauty inherent in the cycles of life, birth and death. There was a time when artists and scientists both understood that exploring the truth doesn’t mean sacrificing wonder.

We’re not Disneyland – far from it.

For which we are grateful. The Disneyfication of the universe is a depressing turn of events.

If you want a warm welcome and some kind of apple-picking show, try a different part of the country. We will take your money, but we’re miserable hosts (guests don’t rake).

Sounding like a whiny New Yorker again. A true miserable New Englander would never confess the fact.

That’s why local farmers walk the other way when you want to buy something. That’s why so many of them use “honor bins.”

Actually, most farmers use honor bins because they’re usually out farming. Or sometimes, in the case of the farm I used to visit regularly in Ashland, N.H., out playing paintball games with their kids.

In that way they get the money, but they don’t have to make small talk – a chore second only to raking.

It’s true that New Englanders aren’t schmoozers. Small talk is, by definition, small. We like big talk. Whether it’s in our sermons (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), poems (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”), philosophical thought (“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”), political speeches (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”) or daily conversation (“Yankees #@*%!”).

The spread up the street from my parents feeds its apples to the neighbor’s pigs – that’s how little they care about whether you get a pie to take home as a souvenir.

Or how much they care about the neighbor’s pigs…

And don’t even mention syrup.

Syrup.

Just buy the candy and go. All the carbon emissions from your slow-moving cars have overcooked the environment, and now the maple trees are going dry. On the other hand, no maple trees means fewer leaves to rake.

Spoken like someone wearing a crisp, blue cap with “NY” on its bill. If Twain, who became an end-of-his-life New Englander, settling in Hartford, could write one of his most moving pieces on the aftermath of a New England ice storm, surely there’s still room in the region for those of us who like watching leaves dazzle as they die.

This week’s question: What is your favorite piece on nature written by a New Englander?

Scratching Rhody

It tells you everything you need to know about Rhode Island that the state lottery commission is located next to the state prison. All Rhode Islanders are born with a lottery gene, and if the “CSI” franchise ever moved to Rhody, the celebrity forensics experts would discover silver latex ink under our fingernails, smoothed-over edges on our nickels, pennies and quarters, and a tendency to defy the laws of probability in our DNA. That’s the only way to explain the obsession with PowerBall numbers, scratch cards and Keno games in the Ocean State, which happens to be number one in lottery sales per capita in the country. Here, residents think that all Ping-Pong balls come individually numbered, scratch tickets are the perfect stocking stuffers at Christmas, and meeting regularly for late-night coffee and Keno at the corner convenience store is considered an acceptable date.

This gambling fixation is as old as the state itself. Even before The Lot opened in 1974, Rhode Island embraced the notion of taking a chance, any chance, anytime, with whatever money was leftover in the pocket. One example: The part of Westerly known as Avondale was once called Lotteryville until the 1880s, because original settlers received their houses as part of a lottery scheme.

But Rhode Island’s true lottery legacy is the scratch ticket, most of which involve familiar characters or offer a theme. The latest features Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” which seems about 30 years too late for it to be so popular – except that in New England some things, like pewter and Steven Tyler, never really get old. In the past you could also buy scratch games for “The Three Stooges,” “Family Guy” and The Crypt Keeper (host of “Tales from the Crypt”). The state legislature even allows the lottery to make money for good causes through its scratch ticket program. Two years ago, the R.I. State Council on the Arts had a scratch card that raised funds for local arts organizations and communities. It was followed by a “Scratch the Tick” game, with part of the proceeds funding tick awareness programs.

Lot of Art
A Providence artist has found a way to make something of value from all of those shredded hopes and confetti dreams. Rebecca Siemering’s “A Fine Suit,” made from more than 1,000 discarded scratch tickets and representing over $3,500 in gambling losses, was presented as one of the Providence Art Windows in 2007 and now stands in the offices of its new owners, Fidelity Investments in Smithfield.

Siemering, now the director of Providence Art Windows, began creating additional objects out of lottery cards, while developing installations for other projects that represent some of the most intriguing art being made in Rhode Island. Among them: Her latest art window, “piece(work),” a time-based installation on Eddy Street, and “The Bells Ring for Thee,” still decaying in the North Burial Ground as part of the Cryptic Providence group installation. For her window, which she visits and works on weekly, she designed a “crazy quilt” that reflects the news of the world and the buzz of conversation around Providence. For the graveyard, she created a landscape of sound in an adjacent field, “planting” rows of metal flowers that played a vibraphone’s range of tones in the breezes, gusts and rainfalls that filled the seasons.

Future Scratch
The Rhode Island corollary to Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” theory is that in the future every Rhode Islander will appear on his own scratch ticket. Until then, we have plenty of opportunities to add to the state’s rub out culture. How about:

“Scratch What, Netop?” (To repair the fingers on the statue of Roger Williams in Providence’s Prospect Terrace Park and to develop a foundation that will supply the statue with permanent maintenance and a lifetime of replaceable fingers.)
“Scratch That Nuke.” (To entice another Russian nuclear sub to dock in Providence and serve as the city’s Russian Sub Museum, since the previous one sank, was scrapped and is being recycled into millions of toasters and electric razors.)
“Scratch That Kirk.” (To refund the R.I. International Film Series after William Shatner canceled an appearance last-minute to receive the first ever Nathaniel Greene Humanitarian Award in Rhode Island, causing the festival to give back $5,000 in advance tickets.)
“Scratch That Hound.” (To bail out the state’s beleaguered greyhound-racing industry.)
“Scratch a Buddy.” (To put a little extra cash in Buddy Cianci’s pocket in exchange for favors to be named later.)

Now it’s your turn. What would be a good subject for the next R.I. Lottery scratch card?

Eastwick or Leastwick?

“The Witches of Eastwick” is not John Updike’s best work, but it may be his most lasting. It’s a novel about Rhode Island witches that many critics charged as misogynist but Updike said was intended as a satire on feminism. In his view, contrary to the popular idea that the world would be better off with women in power, Updike felt that the world would be in exactly the same mess as it is now. In other words, power corrupts absolutely, regardless of gender.

Subsequent renditions of his tale have squeezed dry whatever satire sustained the original story, focusing instead on perpetuating a soapy “Peyton Place” meets “Dark Shadows” view of New England. A place where attractive women are subject to relentless gossip and, therefore, turn to witchcraft between mornings clamming and nights boiling lobster for their boyfriends. You know. A place like Barrington.

Kidding, kidding. Nobody boils their own lobster in Barrington. Actually, to create Eastwick, Updike merely combined East Greenwich with Wickford, where his family name is prominent. But in truth the Ocean State has a checkered history with his story. Hollywood wanted to film the movie version (starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Cher) in Little Compton, but the locals weren’t crazy about Nicholson-as-the-Devil character spewing inside the little church on the town common. So the production moved to Massachusetts and was filmed primarily in Cohasset, with other scenes shot in Scituate and Castle Hill in Ipswich.

This year’s ABC TV version is the first televised production of the story to make it on the air, after two previous attempts. The show tries very hard not to pin down Eastwick’s exact location, except to put it somewhere “on the edge of New England.” The opening sequence features images of Ocean Drive in Newport, but for some reason the show’s creators are reluctant to come out and say it’s set in Rhode Island. Instead, they’ve invented a pastiche of New England towns – a blend of Maine’s fog (stolen from “Murder, She Wrote”), New Hampshire’s foliage, Vermont’s covered bridges, Rhody’s seaside charm, the witch legacy of Massachusetts and Connecticut’s New York hand-me-down fashion sense. The result is like putting Yankee magazine in a blender with “Desperate Housewives,” “Charmed” and “Providence.”

Lucky us. “Eastwick,” based on the first few episodes, is a mess. It’s not funny enough to be a comedy, not scary enough to earn its horror bones, not dramatic enough to be a drama and, despite the predominance of eye candy, not sexy enough to be worth staying up for.

A press release earlier this year by the R.I. Film & Television Office lauded the show for its aerial shots of Newport and for planning to film more location shots in Rhode Island. As it turns out, guess-the-location might be the only reason for a Rhode Islander to watch.

This week’s more important question: Where can you see houses decorated for Halloween in Rhode Island?

(There’s a nice little stretch beginning in Wakefield on Saugatucket Road, going through the Peace Dale Rotary and back into Wakefield via High Street, where three homes go wild decorating in the kitsch of the undead, making menageries of giant spiders, skulls on fence posts and cobweb-covered ghouls. If you’re in the neighborhood…)

Randomocity

Thoughts, observations and leftovers picked up from the jumble of a sloppy desk:

Inner City
The streets outside the RISD Museum last week were cluttered and clanging with the fixing and rebuilding of Providence. Blue and yellow scaffolding scaled the museum walls. Jackhammers jumped. Trucks rumbled and beeped backing up. Construction workers wearing hardhats and drinking cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee joked between duties. Officers diverted traffic and pedestrians around concrete Jersey barriers, yellow caution tape and orange barrels and cones.
The sights and sounds of city making, part of the daily routine in the epic narrative of urban living, was coincidental but also complementary to the installation inside the Chace Center, where ceramic sculptor Arnie Zimmerman and architect Tiago Montepegado have staged “Inner City,” featuring 200 figurative and architectural elements. It’s a stunning exhibition, about 80 pieces larger than previous versions that toured Lisbon and the Netherlands. The room of anonymous city buildings and workers and the detritus of urban streets – trashcans, graffiti and broken walls – captures the vibrancy and absurdity of modern life in its cycles of boom and bust and moods alternating between whimsy and hopelessness. Walking back out from the gallery, trying to avoid being bulldozed and cement mixed on beautiful Benefit Street, I passed the live versions of those workers and told them that everything they were doing had already been done in clay inside. A few expressed an interest in checking it out but one guy shook his head and said: “I like breaking things. Not making them.”

Mobile Art
If you see a 16-foot Penske truck rumbling through Rhode Island blaring sounds of gulls and waves and the rhythmic clicking of shrimp percussion, follow it until it parks. The truck is the vehicle of choice (at least for now) for the Mobile Art Project, an initiative coordinated by Viera Levitt and Hera Gallery, both of Wakefield, to bring art on wheels to locations in Rhode Island where you don’t usually find any. So far it has shown up at village greens and elementary schools, train stations and sea walls, supermarket parking lots and senior centers. The first artist featured is Warwick’s China Blue, who created a 9-minute sound installation titled “Aqua Alta.” She recorded around and under the waters of Narragansett Bay and the Providence canals using hydrophone arrays and seismic microphones, along the way capturing the chanting of gondoliers, the radio singing voice of Marvin Gaye, an osprey crying and the gloop-glop-glubbing sounds of sloshing seawater and river chop. To immerse yourself, you have to walk inside the box at the back end of the truck. Organizers told me that the most surprising thing they’ve discovered is how many people take pains to avoid getting near the truck wherever they park. Among the hundreds who have responded to the work in surveys, one person wrote: “Not your average Belmont parking lot experience.”

Newport’s Best Kept Lunch Secret
Unless you’re a mariner, you probably don’t think about having lunch at the Seamen’s Church Institute in Newport. The building at 18 Market Square was designed in the 1930s to serve all seafarers, including naval personnel, fishermen, yachtsmen, ferryboat captains and crew, freighter crews, customs officers, Coast Guardsmen, old salts, transients and travelers from around the world. It has a painted chapel, designed symbolically to look out upon the Seven Seas, and an altar hung with an embellished sailcloth held by nautical knots. There’s also a little library and a small café with a few tables and a short counter that delivers tasty cheap eats, ranging from burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches to more exotic chowders and soups. Called the Aloha Café, the place serves mostly grizzled mariners and sun-burnt seafarers, but it’s open to tourists, and the elbow-to-elbow conversations about weather, waves and wayfaring makes you realize that in the passage of life, we’re all just human driftwood.

Word of the Day
Over on the paper side I write an occasional column that adds new words to the lexicon. Sometimes words find me. From Bob and Diane Smith’s letter to the editor about the Antique Autos/Perryville Day celebration earlier this summer comes “automobilia” – a word used by collectors and antique car fanatics to describe anything related to vintage vehicles.
Leading to this week’s question (which was actually posed by my friend Tom, but since I haven’t come up with a good solution, I’m passing it on):

What would be a good word for that situation on the highway when everyone in traffic is forced to swerve simultaneously at high speed because lanes have shifted?

'Hurricane,' the musical

All Rhode Islanders have a Hurricane of ’38 story, passed down through the generations by family or friends, describing how this beach or that house was completely wiped out to explain why they now have a water view.

More than 70 years have passed since the Sept. 21, 1938 blow, also known as “The New England Hurricane” or “The Long Island Express,” wreaked havoc on the Ocean State. But to paraphrase the Alan Alda character in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” tragedy + time = musical. The hottest show to come out of this year’s New York Musical Theater Festival is “Hurricane,” the story of a storm, a weatherman that nobody listened to and the Rhode Island village of Napatree, which ended up being obliterated.

“Hurricane” is based on news accounts, anecdotes and books written about the storm. The show features scenes of Depression-era New England life with music ranging from traditional sea chanties and folk songs to chorales, lullabies and a turn-of-the-previous-century waltz. Think of it as a hip-shaking, toe-tapping “Our Town” meets “The Perfect Storm.”

While the play’s Rhode Island-ness is a mix of fact and fiction, some of the early critics have some catching up to do to establish their Rhody cred. One review featured on the musical’s Web site states: “While the original storm has been forgotten, this show should not be.”

Forgotten? In a state where everyone still gives directions to the red bridge, which hasn’t been red and was actually demolished as a bridge almost 40 years ago? No, I don’t think so. Seventy years isn’t long enough for a Rhode Islander to forget a hurricane that quite literally changed the puzzle-piece shape of the state and helped stamp our identity as hopeless storm worriers grounded in the knowledge that behind every snowflake lies a new opportunity for bureaucratic incompetence.

When the Hurricane of ’38 hit Narragansett, Benjamin Curtis Jr. was 12 and living at The Dunes Club, which got destroyed. The next day was his birthday.

“I remember one thing my uncle said: ‘People down there,’ meaning the Pier, ‘they’re drowning like rats.’

Not all of the news was tragic, though. Some of the monkeys that survived the storm escaped the monkey pit at Rocky Point Park and spent the rest of their lives in the woods and suburbs along Warwick Neck. There are still Rhode Islanders who remember feeding the monkeys on the way to the amusement park. And when the venerable Lobster Pot restaurant in Bristol was destroyed by the hurricane, 10,000 pounds of live lobsters earned a reprieve from the boiling pot, escaping the menu to return to the bay.

Speaking of Rhode Island storms: If someone made a musical of the Blizzard of ’78, what songs would make the soundtrack?

Some suggestions:
“Welcome to Rhode Island (Closed for a Week)”
“Milk and Bread”
“I-95 Where Are You?”
“Stranded at Benny’s (Love Among the Glue Guns)”
“Why Does the Snow Always End at the Massachusetts Line?”
“There’s Never Any School in Foster-Glocester (Salty’s Lament)”
“Sledding to Almac’s”
“My Kingdom for a Front-Loader (The Governor’s Song)”
“Milk and Bread (Reprise)”
“The Dead Are Sleeping On The Roof Tonight (The Coffin Song)”

Leaf blog

The swamps and woods of Rhode Island are already blushing here in the early part of autumn. Shades of red in maple, tupelo and sumac join with yellow birch to create fiery contrasts with the cool or neutral tones of gray, brown and paper-white trunks, stands of evergreens and pools of pastel blues and murky purples. It’s early, but you can see the color changing every day, especially along the swampy William C. O’Neill (South County) Bike Path, where deer and hawks and great blue herons are commonly spotted in the wooded rainbow.

Perhaps this is not breaking news – “Autumn arrives in New England.” But I felt compelled to point out to the rest of the world that just because the leaf-tracking Web site The Foliage Network has decided to drop Rhode Island from its deciduous tour, doesn’t mean the color is lacking in the Ocean State. According to the site:

Due to a lack of foliage spotters, we regret that we will no longer be covering Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island.

So that leaves it to Rhode Islanders to cover our own state. With help from my dog-eared copy of Neil Jorgensen’s “A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide” to southern New England, here’s a brief description of the showstoppers in our autumn landscape:

The first to turn are the red maples – the Rhode Island state tree – in the swamps, glowing bright red and occasionally orange. Also early are the white ash found on uplands and stream banks, making a variety of distinctive colors from maroon to rust to a dark greenish red.

As the season moves on the bright orange of poison sumac adds to the warm look of swamps and bogs while twiggy tupelo turns an intense dark red on the edges of swamps and ponds. On the slopes of upland forest, red maples turn vivid orange, yellow and red, often hanging on until Halloween. The intense yellow of hickories, lacy in appearance, and the slightly duller canary of black birch will also come out during the middle fall period. Beech can be found in moist, shady sites, leafing light green to yellow to brown.

Sugar maples, the postage stamp tree of the New England autumn, pose for desk calendars on roadsides, in cemeteries and churchyards in their brilliant peach color. Alternating shades of yellow in old fields and waste grounds are often painted by quaking aspen alongside the pinkish-orange and yellowing sassafras (which also like the wood’s edge and dry spots). They are joined by Staghorn sumac, featuring vibrant orange turning to vivid red leaves, growing in large clumps suggesting a frozen fire. The middle season also features the purplish maroon maple-leaved viburnum, traditionally spotted in upland woods, especially among oaks.

Speaking of oaks, it is a species that sometimes gets short shrift when discussing New England’s fall foliage, but some autumns the oaks can be quite lustrous. Both red oak and black oak present variable colors, with the former generally reddish-brown and the latter mostly yellowish-brown, in canopy that has been known to last well into December in Rhode Island. Norway maple, the last of the maples to turn, goes out in a bright yellow flash while the last flush of fall is usually played by the wild cherry, gradually progressing from green to yellow. Even past peak, in their copper, rust and russet skins, the raw umber and burnt sienna remains of failed Crayola colors, the local leafscape is worth exploring, no matter what the Foliage Network says.

Because it’s not just the act of looking at a leaf that defines the season. It's the quest for color, an adventure of fresh-air encounters and surprising discoveries on rambling back roads that makes foliage seeking such a pleasure in New England. It’s all part of the region’s carnival of fall – days of fermented cider tasting, wood smoke ghosts writhing like dryads from chimney stacks, mutant pumpkins in the patch, obscene gourd shapes spilling out from handmade baskets, the scent and crunch of pine needles in the frosty forest. Leading to this week’s question: What is your favorite spot in Rhode Island for fall foliage?

Hope, the motto

Given the average Rhode Islander’s chronic and pervasive cynicism, it is more than a little ironic that the state motto is “Hope.” One of the three great Christian virtues (along with faith and love), hope has not always been considered a positive force in human culture. To the ancient Greeks, hope was as deadly as all the world’s evils – it was the only one that didn’t initially escape Pandora’s Box.

Roger Williams and the early Rhode Islanders, however, had no such qualms. Having named their first settlement Providence, they took a Pilgrim’s progressive view of the world, finding metaphors everywhere, especially in the landscape. To them, hope was a spiritual gift from God. In the marketing of the times, given the “lively experiment” that this eclectic colony was undertaking, it made perfect sense for “Hope” to be the original Rhode Island brand – or “motto,” in ye olde jargon. Most believe that the motto (along with the state’s symbol, an anchor) was taken from a Biblical passage in Hebrews 6:19:

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil;

Rhode Island’s state motto was adopted as an element of the “arms of the state.” It is found on the state’s coat of arms, seal and flag. (The seal of Rhode Island is the sole image to illustrate the concept of “Hope” on Wikipedia.) As excerpted from Rhode Island Statutes, Title 42, Chapter 4, Section 1:

Arms of state. The arms of the state are a golden anchor on a blue field, and the motto thereof is the word “Hope.”

So Rhode Island takes its hope seriously. The state has a Hope village and a Hope Valley. Shepard Fairey, the former Rhode Island School of Design student whose street art became a local sensation, borrowed the motto, added a little Andy Warhol and provided the lasting image of President Obama’s successful campaign. And now a University of Rhode Island professor has co-written a book with a professor from Keene State College in New Hampshire titled “Hope in the Age of Anxiety.” To gauge your own level of hopefulness, take the Hope Test.

So this week, in the spirit of our state motto, we ask: What does Rhode Island get right?

House cleaning
It’s a crossover Monday here at the Independent. In last week’s Arts & Living section, I previewed the 10 finalists for the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The movies were screened at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston last Thursday – one of 173 locations on five continents to show them last week. The global tally concludes tomorrow, when the winner will be announced in New York City. My choice? “Mozambique,” a powerful documentary in which AIDS orphans are empowered to tell their stories using donated cameras and videocameras. Runner-up in my book was “Skhizein,” a darkly comic animated film from France. It was a difficult choice between two very different films. Ultimately I went with the film that emphasized hope over the one that succumbed to despair.

Rhody Universe: The Moon

Belated thanks to Rick Spilman, host of The Old Salt Blog, (a must-read for all who love the sea and a good yarn), for taking note of Half Shell’s theory that the two Russian subs reportedly lurking off the East Coast might have been auditioning to be the next Rhode Island museum.

But if you thought lamenting for a Russian Sub Museum that sank and was turned into scrap metal was as odd as it gets when it comes to the marriage of Rhode Island and museums, consider the recent news from Rijksmuseum in Holland. According to an Associated Press report a few weeks ago, the Dutch national museum confirmed that its celebrated moon rock, a popular tourist attraction, is really just a hunk of petrified wood. Naturally, when museum officials traced the rock to its source, it led back to a Rhode Island man.

Apparently, the museum was bequeathed the rock after the death of Prime Minister Willem Drees in the late 1980s. Drees had received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts as part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the moon landing.

Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.

Talk about lending ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who believe the first moon landing was staged. Moon rocks may be passe now, but three months after the first manned mission, they probably weren’t the kind of things you’d hand out willy-nilly – like, say, engraved dinnerware – to every dignitary on the planet. Did the State Department pawn off petrified wood as moon rocks as a matter of practice? Was it a one-time practical joke? Or perhaps someone in the department pocketed the rock and substituted the wood he’d picked up in a gift shop at Yellowstone earlier that summer. Middendorf says he doesn’t remember, but then, since all diplomats do is give gifts and go to parties, it’s not hard to imagine forgetting the time you handed over a nondescript gray lump to the Dutch PM in exchange for a wheel of Gouda.

Anyway, all this talk about museums reminded me that a few years back on the paper side of things, I called for Rhode Island to be more innovative and experimental in its museum culture. Among the suggestions:

The Bayquarium: An aquarium built on the waterfront focusing on the natural history, biodiversity and sea lore of Narragansett Bay (plus a raw bar).

The Museum of Horror: Emphasizing Rhode Island’s gothic culture, including stories of local vampires, ghosts, witches, phantom ships and associations with horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. A separate ghost wing, featuring holograms of commonly sighted Rhody apparitions, could include a new office for Rhode Island’s TV team of Ghost Hunters.

The Museum of Scandal: Telling stories about everything gone tabloid in Rhode Island, from the Claus von Bulow trial to Plunder Dome, lottery abuses to blizzard snafus, through collected news footage, memorabilia and ephemera.

The Museum of Religion: Celebrating Rhode Island’s central role in establishing freedom of religion as a basic tenet of American life, the museum would explore all forms of religious belief and ritual practiced in the state, from its indigenous cultures to present-day storefront churches.

Companion buildings, The Narragansett Museum and The Wampanoag Museum, could detail the contributions of Rhode Island’s most prominent native communities, from their interactions with early settlers to stories of art, commerce and language that continue to influence our culture.

This week’s question: What kind of museum would you like to see in Rhode Island?

Toy stories

Gritty, working-class Pawtucket is world headquarters for some of the most famous toys and games on the planet. It’s an all-star roster that includes Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe and Clue, the murder-mystery game with weapons, rooms, suspects and a detective’s notebook that plays as a cross between Monopoly and an Agatha Christie novel. But fans of the original game may be surprised to discover that it is now out of print. In its place, last year Hasbro launched its new Clue, a game that seems more like a cross between “CSI” and the National Enquirer.

The number of weapons has gone up from six to nine, although missing are the lead pipe, revolver and wrench. In their place are a pistol, dumbbell, trophy, poison, bat and axe (the candlestick, knife and rope made the cut). The nine rooms have changed as well. There is no longer a ballroom, library or conservatory. Now clues can be searched in the hall, guest house, dining room, kitchen, patio, spa, theater, living room and observatory.

But the biggest changes occurred with the characters. Their last names stayed the same, but they’ve added first names and updated their bios. Miss Scarlet, for example, is now Cassandra Scarlet, a starlet who is always appearing in the tabloids. Mr. Green is now Jacob Green, an African-American “with all the ins,” whatever that means. Professor Plum, the character I generally picked because of his obvious intelligence, scholarship and book-loving nature, is now Victor Plum, a billionaire video game designer who I now consider the anti-Plum. Each character also has a special power that can be used to influence the game. In other words, this is Clue for mutants.

It’s a sad world when armchair detectives are no longer allowed to guess Mrs. Peacock in the library with the lead pipe. Eleanor in the spa with an axe sounds more like a scene from “Scream” than Clue.

G.I. Joe, another Hasbro giant, is now starring in a big-budget Hollywood movie, “G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” although the reviews suggest he should stick to plastics. The words of Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers are typical:

I don’t know what to say about the acting, writing and directing in “G.I. Joe” because I couldn’t find any.

Pawtucket-born G.I. Joe was created in 1964 as a boy alternative to the girl Barbie doll craze. But calling G.I. Joe a military doll didn’t sit well with Joe Q. Public, so he became the first “action figure” and the icon for every moveable man sealed in cardboard to come. Standing just shy of 12 inches and known as “America’s Moveable Fighting Man,” Joe was a hit in the mid-Sixties, but suffered a slump in the late Sixties and early Seventies in part because of the increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam War. So he left the military to lead an “Adventure Team,” and during the Me Decade he evolved both Kung-Fu Grip and Eagle Eye vision. Over the years, G.I. Joe shrank to about 3 ¾ inches. He is now more popular than ever, starring in movies, graphic novels and toy stores worldwide, and in the ultimate sign of global success, finding himself in bizarre headlines across the continents. They include:

Austrian G.I. Joe Turns Into G.I. Jane

For those who aren’t going to read the link, apparently a soldier stationed in Gratkorn, Austria had a sex change operation, much to the confusion of his unit. One of the other soldiers in the barracks summed it up:

He left the building a man and returned as a woman. We find it rather strange.

Sienna Miller Burned Cleavage During G.I. Joe Film Shoot

In her words:

Luckily it wasn’t my breasts, it was the bit in-between…you know, ‘G.I. Joe,’ it’s not going to be the best acting work we’ve ever done.

Before he was a doll man, G.I. Joe earned fame as an American homing pigeon that carried a message to a European village during World War II in advance of a German attack and is credited with saving more than 1000 troops. G.I. Joe was one of 32 pigeons to receive the Dickin Medal for gallantry and bravery in saving human lives. He retired to the Detroit Zoo. After his death, he was mounted and is now on display at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

A recent British study revealed that most Barbie dolls end up dismembered. No similar study has been commissioned to determine the percentage of G.I. Joes that get blown up in firecracker explosions, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.

This week’s question: What is your favorite board game or childhood toy?

And now for something completely different

In a world a-Twitter with texting and sound bites, the epic poet has given way to the sloganeering pitchman. Writers are distilling works to their fortune-cookie essence, from memoirs to novels, sermons to plays. While this is a new-school phenomenon, the practice goes back at least as far as Hemingway, who once declared his greatest story to be the untitled six-word fiction: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Today there are Web sites dedicated to producing six-word literature and poetry. Many are quite good, especially Smith Magazine’s memoirs (life stories in six words), a collection of which was published under the title “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” There are advantages to hearing a six-word sermon – as anyone who has sat on hard pews enduring 60,000 words on one of the "Thou Shalt Nots" might attest. Although such a restriction would have forced Jonathan Edwards to alter the title of perhaps the most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” (an exhausting eight words), to something pithier – “Sinners: Be Good or Be Smote.”

Consider how much more time the old Anglo-Saxon storytellers would have had for building mead halls if they didn’t have to spend days memorizing kennings and inventing alliteration to recite epics such as “Beowulf.” They could’ve just blurted, “Kill the monster. Make momma mad,” and moved onto the next flagon.

Shakespeare, who might’ve actually made something of his life if he didn’t have to write so many sonnets and soliloquies, could have summed up “Hamlet” with “I guess it’s not to be.”

One day all writers will jump on the six-word bandwagon. We’ll have six-word travels (“Stonehenge: Giant rocks and gift shop.”), six-word news (“Cheney leaves bunker, now on Fox.”), even six-word obituaries, although it’s hard to imagine topping Saturday Night Live’s first-season catchphrase: “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

Criticism also has six-word potential. My six-word review of the six-word phenomenon? “Less is more, more or less.”

And can a six-word blog be far behind? I’ve already got the first post: “Everything is measured in Rhode Islands.”

This week’s question takes its cue from those old back-to-school assignments of yore: In six words, what did you do on your summer vacation?

Wishing everyone reading this earlier-than-usual post a cheery Labor Day weekend, even those of you who do not labor…

Vacation blog

Just a skipping stone across Nantucket Sound from Hyannis Port, where Senator Edward Kennedy spent his final hours at the family compound, lies Martha’s Vineyard. The island is one link in the chain of a geological feature that shares a natural history with Cape Cod (as well as Nantucket, Block Island and Long Island), forming “The Outer Lands” of the eastern United States. It also shares a cultural history with all of southern New England, where Ted was more than a headline-maker, sea-lover and Red Sox fan. He was a neighbor.

Last Wednesday I was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Ted Kennedy died. I had arrived between storms, enduring the drip of Bill while escaping the drench of Danny. Here, the harbormasters, watching mariners from other climes scramble to leave their moorings, cynically derided Bill as a “television hurricane” – in other words, a storm that is more hype and hot air than hurricane – even before it arrived. Bill finally showed up sloppily on a Saturday night while friends and I attended a Martin Sexton concert at Nectar’s (the long-ago Hot Tin Roof).

The rest of the week was mostly sunny and breezy and perfect, and the communal feeling took on a Before Ted/After Ted quality, as giddy exuberance gave way to reflective appreciation. We beached and swam at Lambert’s Cove (despite the pink jellyfish warnings) and Long Point (despite seals in the breakers, acting as shark-bait). We biked to Menemsha and Chappaquiddick (despite broken spokes, narrow shoulders and not enough grease on the chains). We took the On Time ferry, which is always on time, because it runs on island time, contingent on tides and moon phases, rendering clocks useless. We pub-crawled in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, sampling local beers, sushi, crab cakes and calamari. We jogged in a road race along East Chop one morning and watched fireworks and wandered through the gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs another night. We shopped for souvenirs at Alley’s General Store in Chilmark and books for the beach at Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven. We happened upon the presidential motorcade twice, once just after the First Family landed while we were coming off a 3-mile dirt road that winds to wild surf and another time on the way back from a road trip to the clay cliffs and clothing-optional beaches of Aquinnah. We feasted on mussels, oysters and lobsters at the Home Port on a misty Menemsha evening, watching state troopers on motorbikes return to their dockside quarters, still on Obama patrol. Most nights we listened to cicadas, slapped mosquitoes, watched lightning bugs and streaking stars, smelled both the ocean and skunks in the pines and ate farmstand corn and tomatoes with our grilled meals.

Later in the week, there were other scenes:
One day after Kennedy’s death, in the harbor at Vineyard Haven, along the beach next to the ferry dock where rows of wooden dinghies are roped together, someone had scratched words out of driftwood in the wet sand: “BYE, TED.”
Buoys painted red, white and blue bobbed in Nantucket Sound, bearing the message: “R.I.P. TED.”
And along Route 195 West just beyond Fall River and the Braga Bridge (and throughout the highways of Massachusetts), LED monitors deleted their road construction warnings to announce: “THANKS TED. FROM THE PEOPLE OF MASS.”

To some, especially outside of New England, Senator Kennedy was a lightning rod for liberalism, cronyism and scandal. Once when I was at a gym in the Florida Keys, I began talking with a Chicago fireman, who said, “You’re from Ted Kennedy country? How can you stand it?” I barked something back about the Daley family, but there’s no sense in arguing without context, so eventually we dropped the politics and picked up the barbells. Last week’s retrospective gave people a fuller understanding of Ted’s whole story, from the flaws, failures and foibles to his countless triumphs. In the end, Ted was many things, but most of all he was a Boston guy. A Cape Cod guy. A New Englander who cared about this place as much as we do.

While leaving the parking lot at the New Bedford ferry, I spoke to the toll-taker. “It’s a shame about Ted,” she said, “but you knew it was coming when he didn’t make it to Eunice’s funeral. At least he had one last good sail, and he’s with Eunice and his brothers now.”

This week’s question: How will you remember Ted Kennedy?

The Kitsch List

The Russian Sub Museum in Providence was always an odd detour, and now that its star attraction, a Soviet-era K-77 submarine, is destined for an afterlife as recycled scrap metal, the state’s best Boris and Natasha road trip is just another Cold War memory. Too bad, since reports of two modern Russian subs skulking about off the East Coast have been all over the papers and blogs in recent weeks. Maybe one of them wants to be the next Rhode Island museum.

The sub that sank is also a significant blow to the local kitsch list. Before it bottomed out, it fit perfectly into Rhody’s Land of Misfit Toys, a collection that includes:

The Big Blue Bug, a giant cobalt-colored termite hanging over I-95 in Providence, the mascot of New England Pest Control and a party animal typically decorated during holidays;
The Quonset Seabee, wearing a white Navy hat and holding a wrench and a Tommy gun, the mascot of the famed Fighting Seabees, who were stationed in Davisville;
The abandoned Milk Bottle Building in Manville, which may or may not even be there anymore, since I can’t remember the last time I found myself in Manville;
Assorted human-sized, artistically rendered Mr. Potato Heads that sprouted up around the state a few years back. Invented by Hasbro of Pawtucket, Mr. Potato Head earned sidekick star status in the “Toy Story” movies, but jumped the shark as a goofy Rhode Island tourism campaign in 2000.

Some kitsch seems to stick around forever, like the Roof Dragon on the Providence Children’s Museum. Others drop by for a few weeks of bad taste then disappear, like the giant inflatable purple gorilla in a bathing suit I saw hanging from a car dealership while I drove down Route 2 earlier this summer. Cling Kong was somehow supposed to entice me to drop in and buy a car, I guess, but it seems to me they might have done better with a giant, inflatable Fay Wray.

In any case, it’s never a good thing to lose a Russian nuclear sub, whether it belonged here or not. More importantly, Rhode Islanders have to step up and preserve what’s left of our kitsch, lest we be considered a place defined entirely by good taste and a sense of style and aesthetic. Please. Who wants that?

This week’s question: What belongs on the Rhode Island kitsch list?

Also, Half Shell will be on holiday next week, testing the waters off Martha’s Vineyard and bottom feeding for blog fodder. Until next time, keep it raw...

Shafted by Shatner

“No more blah, blah, blah!”
- William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” episode, “Miri”

Forget the “Wrath of Kahn.” William Shatner earned the wrath of Rhode Island last week when he canceled an appearance at the last minute, causing R.I. International Film Festival organizers to scramble and give back $5000 in advance tickets. Shatner was scheduled to appear at the Columbus Theater last Thursday to show his film, “William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet” and accept the first Nathanael Greene Humanitarian Award from RIIFF, along with a President’s Medal from Rhode Island College. Instead, he threw one of his red-shirted ensigns to the wolves. Film festival organizers found out by an e-mail sent by Shatner’s minion (“personal handler”) a few days before the event that The Man Who Would Be Kirk would not be coming because of “contractual obligations for an upcoming film project.” Of course, since Rhode Islanders are more cynical than your average Klingon, nobody’s buying that excuse.

Top Ten Reasons Why Shatner Shafted Rhode Island

10. Just now found out that Rhode Island wasn’t one of the Greek Isles.

9. Sudden upsurge in popularity as Sarah Palin interpretive poet spurred him to cancel all current obligations to concentrate solely on his art.

8. Heard that he would have to endure red carpet interview from the old R.I. public access “Star Trek” guys.

7. Insulted when state police wanted no part of “T.J. Hooker” marathon.

6. Discovered that, in the early days of the federation, Rhode Island was a haven for Romulans.

5. Balked when RIIFF organizers refused to change name of Nathanael Greene Humanitarian Award to Denny Crane Humanitarian Award.

4. Furious that Rhode Island hotel wouldn’t give him Priceline discount.

3. Upset after learning that Shatner versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” would not be played at Providence WaterFire.

2. Heard rumor that RIIFF wanted Sulu first.

1. Didn’t realize that there was going to be so much blah, blah, blah.

What is your best conspiracy theory for why William Shatner dissed Rhode Island?

Roger that

Three years ago vandals broke off and stole six fingers - all five on the left hand and the thumb on the right - from the statue of Roger Williams in Providence’s Prospect Terrace Park. The fingers of Rhody’s founder were never found, and poor Williams has been left to stand there stoically through the seasons, suffering the indignity of lopped hands and the occasional graffiti makeover. The most recent defacing, or de-fingering, was the third time in the last two decades. Reluctantly, the Providence Parks Department plans to replace the missing digits by the end of the year, but the continuing saga of the First Rhode Islander demonstrates that, more than 325 years after his death, Williams remains a bizarre and controversial figure.

Long before religious toleration and the separation of church and state became fundamental principles of American democracy, Williams espoused these ideas and was considered a radical religious nut by many of his contemporaries. He left London for Boston after a disagreement with his church in England, but found Boston no more hospitable to his views. The Salem church wanted Williams but a Boston faction prevented his move there, so he ended up in the Plymouth Colony for two years. But the Plymouth congregation soon tired of his tolerant views of American Indians, so he went back to Salem, where he assisted a Pastor Skelton, who died suddenly, leaving Williams in charge. Once again, he got into trouble and was brought before the Salem court for his “diverse, new and dangerous opinions” that questioned church orthodoxy, and was formally exiled from Massachusetts. The Bay State was so steamed at Williams, its leaders didn’t repeal his banishment until 1936, 253 years after his death, when, presumably, it was safe to let him back in.

Coincidentally, that very year his remains were placed within a bronze container and put into the base of a monument where his disfigured statue stands today at Prospect Terrace Park. When he died, Williams had been buried on his own property but he was moved in the 19th century to the tomb of a descendent in the North Burial Ground. Before reburial, his remains were discovered under an apple tree but only a small amount of actual bone was found. The roots of the tree had grown into the place where his skull rested and traced the shape of his decomposing bones, growing roughly into his skeleton. Known as the “Williams Root,” it is part of the collection of the R.I. Historical Society, mounted on a board in a basement of the John Brown House Museum.

Several businesses in Rhode Island are named after him – everything from Roger Williams Hospital in Providence and Roger Williams University in Bristol to Roger Williams Auto Repair in Providence and Roger Williams Sleep Lab in Johnston. His legacy also includes those missing fingers. If they keep disappearing at this rate, soon there will be enough to distribute to every Rhode Island driver. Given the workout that solo fingers get on the roads of Rhody, perhaps it's only fitting to call this time-honored salute, “giving the Roger.” Another idea: Hold Rhode Island’s version of the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys. Call them the Rogers. Hand out bronze Roger fingers on a base of Cumberlandite to deserving Rhode Islanders. The ceremony would take place at - where else? - the Venus de Milo.

This week’s question: Where would be the most likely place to look for the statue of Roger Williams’ missing fingers?

Emmy for a 'Guy'?

[Blogger's note: Apologies for the post-Monday post, but all Half Shell staff spent the past three days in the mountains of New Hampshire, listening to the screeching of barred owls into the wee hours. And now back to our regularly scheduled blog...]

News that the set-in-Rhode Island cartoon “Family Guy” earned an Emmy nomination for best comedy series has created a firestorm of angst on the airwaves and in the blogosphere. Often vulgar and tasteless, “Family Guy” has offended just about everybody since it was created in 1999 by R.I. School of Design graduate Seth MacFarlane, who based his fictional town of Quahog, R.I. on Cranston. If you haven’t seen it, think “All in the Family” meets “The Flintstones.”

Despite a high gross factor (something that seems indelibly connected to the Rhody funny bone – see Farrelly Brothers), the show can also be outrageously clever, funny and satirical. Twice canceled, “Family Guy” was the first show to be resurrected based on DVD sales. Some TV watchers consider it a cheap knockoff of “The Simpsons” (including, apparently, the creators of “The Simpsons,” who took a shot at “Family Guy” by depicting Peter Griffin as a “clone” of Homer Simpson in a Halloween special). The creators of “South Park” aren’t fans, either. They devoted a two-part episode (“Cartoon Wars”) to savaging “Family Guy,” depicting the show’s writers as manatees who create episodes by pushing rubber “idea balls” inscribed with random topics into a bin. MacFarlane responded to his critics by saying they’re right.

Rhode Islanders, of course, watch the show differently than people who live anywhere else, looking for the local references and inside jokes that make this cartoon essential viewing on a par with “Caught in Providence.” Several times in most episodes, the Providence skyline is visible in the distance. Kids go to Buddy Cianci Junior High School and James Woods Regional High School. Happy-Go-Lucky toys, Inc., where Peter works on an assembly line checking for unsafe toys, is a stand-in for Hasbro in Pawtucket. The Web site www.quahog.org routinely updates its “Family Guy” concordance, connecting the Rhody dots on the show. My favorite local culture moment: In “The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire,” Peter paints over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the Andre the Giant “Obey” graphic invented by former R.I. School of Design student Shepard Fairey. The now iconic street art image started popping up in Providence neighborhoods in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Worthy of a Wicked Pissah?
Kevin Costner in “Thirteen Days?” Fred Gwynne in “Pet Sematary?” Tom Bosley in “Murder, She Wrote?” Rob Morrow in “Quiz Show?” You’ve heard them, you’ve cringed, and now Half Shell wants to know: What’s the worst New England accent ever attempted in film or on television?

Extra Pissah
New England is not only Red Sox country. It’s Team Wicked Pissah country. A New England-based adventure racing team, Team Wicked Pissah represents the region on those 9-day eco-challenges that involve kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing and bushwhacking without sleep in remote parts of the world. It’s also the best New England sports team name this side of the professional tennis Boston Lobsters and the R.I. high school Coventry Knotty Oakers.

Uglification still in progress

Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” Extending the metaphor, Rhode Island over the centuries has composed a fairly impressive unfinished symphony. From the stone-enders in rural areas to Colonial box houses in towns and cities, white clapboard churches to rambling stone mills, the state is blessed with buildings that find a balance between aesthetic and function. As elsewhere, long years of poverty may have helped the landscape, requiring residents to be creative about preservation when development dollars were lacking. So the East Side of Providence, the villages of Wickford and Kingston, the granite-quarried streets of Westerly, the modest shingle shacks along the coast and the tidy skyline of the state’s capital city are among the cluster of unparalleled architectural scenes that Rhode Islanders enjoy daily. As Ted Sanderson, executive director of the R.I. Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, said to me earlier this spring: “In some states, they put a velvet rope around a building and invite people to walk around it on special occasions. Here in Rhode Island, people live, work, shop and worship in historic places every day.”

Even allowing for the state’s love of kitsch – which explains the fondness for the Quonset hut, another local invention – Rhode Island has survived the Houstonification of modern life through its passion for preservation and by building with an eye on its surroundings. Until recently, that is, when a combination of suburban sprawl and money-grab development has produced some stunningly bad architecture. New eyesores seemingly pop up like poisonous mushrooms nowadays.

I’ve mentioned some of them before in my annual Broken Anchors Awards, a column devoted to dubious achievements in Rhode Island (Jan. 10, 2008):

THE UGLIFICATION IN PROGRESS AWARD
To developers and politicians in our capital city, where the river walk has jumped the shark from a place of cobblestone and cozy bridges to a showcase for boxy buildings on steroids. Where once there were views, now huge rectangles blot out the State House and surrounding church steeples, casting cold shadows and creating wind tunnels in winter. From the Ice Cube (GTECH World Headquarters), with its neon blue scar illuminating the night sky to Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, the twin Waterplace Towers painted in the color of bad squash, Providence is transforming into North Dallas before our eyes.

Another building that causes a wince is the former Kaiser Aluminum tower that has been converted into penthouses for the Carnegie Abbey Club in Portsmouth. Any joy experienced while driving over the elegant Mount Hope Bridge, taking in the expanse of blue-water, white-sail Narragansett Bay and emerald-green Aquidneck Island below, is quickly muted by noticing the colossal jutting tower, so out of place in its delicate surroundings. I call it the Blight on the Bay, or Old Blightie, when I’m in a Ye Olde Rhode Islander mood. Something that ugly is usually found among the pelicans and palm trees on the Florida coast.

What is the ugliest building in Rhode Island?