Winter Slush

A miscellany of holiday remnants…

Except for the freak pre-Halloween snowstorm that added a chilling grace note to the weekend of molten iron pours and trick-or-treating zombie brides, late autumn and early winter were unseasonably warm this year, as the southern New England landscape never got out of its bleak brown-gray bathrobe day after day. So even the most hardened cynic might be forgiven for believing in a little Christmas magic on the morning of Dec. 25, when a few fat snowflakes tumbled down and the neighborhood cove cascaded in flurries for an hour or so, giving us a taste of a white Christmas, if not the feast that many had hoped for.

There was less poetry in the real world, but no shortage of holiday weirdness, at least in the news pages. The following item comes from the South Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s South County Independent:

A LITTLE HO-HO-HO
A North Kingstown woman is under arrest after she allegedly tried to give the Wakefield Mall Santa a lap dance and then stole DVDs from one of the stores.

The item goes on to describe the woman’s bizarre behavior. According to the photographer on the scene, Santa handled the situation with the dignity one would expect from a centuries-old elf. Before allegedly stealing five DVDs, the woman managed to get the photo of herself on Santa’s lap from the photographer, telling him and St. Nick to “come watch her dance at Cheater’s [a Providence strip club].”

Another item, this time from the North Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s North East Independent, falls under the Grinch category:

LARCENY
Greg Pignolet, of 91 King Phillip Drive, reported on Friday that his decorative winged pig was stolen from his front yard overnight.

While we certainly don’t condone the theft, it does strike us as odd that a winged pig would go missing around the holidays. We have heard that animals can speak on Christmas Day. Perhaps pigs can fly, too.

Finally, we also noticed in our papers that one local senior center plans to hold its New Year’s Eve celebration on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. “with the ball to drop at noon.” We like this idea. Beats having to spend another midnight watching Z-List celebrities complain about the cold in New York and Fergie introducing lame musical acts from Los Angeles.

Having said that, perhaps it’s appropriate that, in households across America, “dropping the ball” is the signature moment of New Year’s Eve. Isn’t that the year in a nutshell? We begin with hope and promise and resolutions of change; we end worn-out, beaten down, glad it’s over. Year after year, fumbling through, mostly dropping the ball. And yet there it is again, lying in front of us, waiting to be picked up and carried across the goal line.

What’s your New Year’s resolution?

Making Soupy

Most families and cultures have their own Christmas customs, honed over the years to the perfection of a jeweled ornament. This year I had a chance to celebrate someone else’s tradition. On Wednesday, thanks to the Garafola family of Bradford – and Bill Lucey, our publisher, for inviting me along – I was allowed to participate in a winter ritual native to Rhode Island, or more particularly, the town of Westerly: Making soupy.

Which is how I ended up with my hands buried in pork butts and carrying raw sausage from closet to cooler and sausage casings from kitchen to basement. Short for soppressata, soupy is a cured sausage mixed with secret herbs and spices – every family has their own you-die-if-you-discover-it recipe – that hangs over winter and is ready to eat by the following Easter. The Garafolas, a friendly bunch, put up with my intrusion and inexperience, allowing me to work the drill that fed the meat into a synthetic casing managed by the family’s patriarch, Lou, whose touch is amazing to watch. If I had any say in such matters at all, I’d bestow upon him the title of soupy maestro.

The tradition dates back to a town in Calabria, the birthplace of many Italian immigrants who settled in Westerly around 1900 to work the granite quarries as stonemasons. Now Westerly is the soupy capital of the world, while just across the river, in neighboring Pawcatuck, Conn., settled by Sicilians, hardly anyone makes it. In fact, it is a food so identified with the families and villages of Westerly that many lifelong Rhode Islanders have never heard of it, much less tasted it. (Although Pat Garafola, the family matriarch, said that you can get a white soupy in Providence. The Westerly version is red.)

Every family thinks they make the best soupy, of course, which is how it should be. The sausages are passed on at Easter to family (at least family that is still on speaking terms) and close friends. Our own family Christmas tradition includes a South African Mixed Grill, made by my father, who usually combines a bit of steak, back bacon and sausage to eggs over easy, fried potatoes, tomatoes and banana, with baked beans and toast. This year the sausage will be soupy, before the curing.

What are your family traditions for Christmas, New Year or any of the winter holidays?

[Note: Publishing a bit earlier than usually since Monday is the official holiday. Same next week. Expect a pre-New Year’s Day post on Friday. Merry Christmas!]

On the Civil War Trail

War is the scribe of history, and its imprint smudges the news of the day in every generation. Last week the Iraq war was declared over, but our country’s military engagement continues around the world, a reminder of the shadow that always accompanies the season of peace and light.

The story of Rhode Island in wartime has been sporadically documented. A couple of weeks ago this blog focused on Christian M. McBurney’s “The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War,” a book that contributes significantly to the Ocean State’s historical narrative. The Revolutionary War, at least in New England, has always been a primary concern. There are trails with landmarks and burial grounds telling the Patriot story scattered throughout the six states, and all New England schoolchildren grow up with a fundamental understanding of the region’s importance to the emerging nation’s aspirations and sense of identity – even though Massachusetts gets most of the ink.

Recent scholarly excursions into King Philip’s War have expanded our understanding of Colonial-era Rhode Island and the surrounding Puritan New England colonies as well. From June 1675 to August 1676, the war was fought between the growing population of New Englanders (aided by some local tribes) against Native American tribes comprising the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nipmuck and others.

The World Wars are commemorated in monuments. All Rhode Islanders know the World War I monument, a towering shaft of Westerly granite that used to occupy the crazed DownCity roundabout known as “suicide circle” until it was relocated to its current position in front of the Superior Court building in the 1980s when Providence moved its rivers. World War II left a legacy in V-J Day, now known as Victory Day, denoting the date when the Japanese surrendered. Rhode Island remains the only state in the U.S. to mark the date with a holiday. A Rhode Islander is also purportedly the young sailor depicted in the world’s most famous photograph of a kiss. Alfred Einsentaedt’s signature image of World War II, of the sailor kissing a nurse in a white dress, taken on V-J Day in Times Square, is one of the iconic American scenes, even though in recent years other veterans have laid claim to putting their lips on the moment.

Given the level of fascination with all things historical in these parts, it’s surprising that Rhode Island shows such scant interest in a war that much of the rest of the country can’t get enough of – the Civil War. Especially since by the time of the War Between the States, Rhode Island was a hub of manufacturing, with many of the mills generating fabrics for Southern plantations then switching over to produce material for the Union cause. Rhode Island regiments served with distinction in the Civil War, and yet even this year’s 150th anniversary of the war’s beginning didn’t generate much play in a state that saw its capital celebrate its 375th anniversary.

A new organization in Massachusetts is trying to bring more attention to New England’s role in the Civil War. The New England Civil War Foundation is seeking to create a New England Civil War Discovery Trail that will spotlight houses of historical significance (such as the residence of Gen. Ambrose Burnside – whom we have to thank for “sideburns” – on Benefit Street in Providence), places of maritime activity (such as Newport), and factories that made products for Union soldiers, including uniforms and guns. The only Rhode Island location mentioned to date on the Web site is the Mill at Shady Lea in North Kingstown. According to the site, blankets were made there for Union soldiers. Also, several POWs from the South, who were stationed at Fort Adams in Newport, ended up working there, with many of them staying on and settling in the area.

The South County Museum in Narragansett and the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society in Kingston are just two of the local historical landmarks that contain objects and ephemera detailing Rhode Island’s involvement with the Civil War. Anyone who wants to nominate historic spots for the New England Civil War Discovery Trail should e-mail editor@battlefieldjournal.com.

What was Rhode Island’s most significant contribution to the Civil War?

Sea-struck

The watery side of Rhode Island gets the gallery treatment in a couple of exhibitions hereabouts. The Artists for Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, featuring hundreds of artworks in a variety of media made by more than 70 Rhode Island artists – all focusing in some way on the state’s most precious resource, Narragansett Bay – will be on display through Dec. 27 in Providence. I’ll have more this Thursday in the paper and online.

While the Save The Bay show emphasizes the bay’s scenery, biodiversity and variety of moods (in all seasons, types of weather and times of day and night), an exhibition at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport goes for something deeper. Titled “Ocean States,” and curated by Ernest Jolicoeur, the gallery’s new director, the exhibition showcases five Rhode Island-based artists responding to the sea.

Two installations stand out. The first, at the entrance, is a companion to the exhibit – Bert Emerson’s “A Day at the Beach,” a large-scale construction of found objects, glass, wood, plastic and aquarium filters transformed into something that on first glance appears culled from the mad scientist’s laboratory in “Young Frankenstein.” (The one where Igor, played by Marty Feldman, dropped the first brain, so he took the one belonging to “Abby someone…Abby Normal.”)

Emerson’s inventive installation contains 75 items, representing a fraction of nearly 1,000 pounds of trash, everything from those ubiquitous crushed Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cups to fishing lures and SpongeBob SquarePants novelties, collected during a local beach cleanup in September. The piece is a collaboration with Clean Ocean Access, an organization whose mission focuses attention on the cleanliness and safety of the water at the Rhode Island coast and issues of public access. COA provides a weekly program that tests levels of unseen contaminated water in our shore areas. While people are sometimes warned about contamination, the sea life of Narragansett Bay doesn’t have the option of closing the beach. COA’s idea, according to the artist, is to make “the invisible visible,” which is what Emerson has done here with his provocative and labor-intensive artwork.

The other eye-grabber is “Waveform 1,” a kinetic sculpture by Mikhail Mansion and Will Reeves, made of steel, wood, aluminum and stainless steel, that mimics the undulating quality of ocean water. The contrast between the construction’s hard materials and its fluid action is disorienting and visually engaging, all the more so since the rhythmic accompanying sound here is not sloshing water but the mechanized noise associated with engineering (echoing the age of steam). Positioned in the center of the gallery, the installation is 100-by-128-by-120 inches in size, and demands attention throughout the visit. The mechanical wave rises and falls from a battery of overhead controls that include pulleys and wires, gears and cams, turning metal and wood into the shape and motion of a jellyfish. Thus the wave, as the primal act of the sea, is ingeniously reconsidered here.

Other artists present multiple works. All have their highlights. As a series, Allison Eleanor Bianco’s screen prints featuring grounded and sinking ships in highly saturated colors is a successful blend of the comic and tragic. A staggered fleet of tall ships, tugs, trawlers, tankers, ferries and cruise ships are depicted in their beached or submerging vessel forms at their voyage’s unexpected end. Dramatic color choices and the specificity of each vessel’s design add to the poignancy of works, which resonate with evocations of loss, memory and the ultimate inevitability of all journeys, human and otherwise.

Buck Hastings cultivates surreal scenes using old magazines and oceanographic textbooks, creating dream-like photo-collages inspired by the adventure of deep-sea exploration, while Todd Moore presents large India Ink drawings on paper, immersing viewers in topographic detail along the rocky New England coast. Both artists add to the collective of the re-imagined ocean that cradles Rhode Island (and, by extension, the world beyond). And, with Narragansett Bay pounding the rocks below the Cliff Walk just a few hundred yards away, the Hamilton Gallery is ideally situated to offer the tantalizing bit of sea-smack found in “Ocean States.”

The show ends Wednesday. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

This week’s question: What is your favorite artwork depicting Rhode Island?

Revolutionary Rhody

Flashback, August 1778. With American patriots and their allies primed to capture the British garrison at Newport, and French forces poised for an epic sea battle against the British in and around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island found itself at the epicenter of the Revolutionary War. Victory here, and the war might have ended sooner, with place names like Portsmouth and Quaker Hill becoming as much of the nation’s consciousness as Yorktown and Bunker Hill.

We can only speculate what might have happened had the sea battle not begun at the cusp of a hurricane, or “the Great Storm,” as it was known. The weather, coupled with evasive strategy by Britain’s Admiral Howe, eventually forced the French fleet to depart Rhode Island for repairs in Boston – a major factor in dooming prospects for absolute American victory in the Rhode Island theater.

I’ll have more on Christian M. McBurney’s “The Rhode Island Campaign,” a scholarly account of the first joint French and American operation of the Revolutionary War, in this Thursday’s paper and online edition. Today’s blog is devoted to a few marks made in yellow highlighter, an accumulation of oddities and details that didn’t make it into the review.

One only-in-Rhode-Island moment: On Major General John Sullivan, commander-in-chief of the American Army, requesting provisions from Continental depots in Boston:

Sullivan refused only one item because Rhode Island had plenty of it – rum.

Speaking of rum, the demon drink was one of the few advantages that Providence held over Newport, which bested our state capital in population, wealth and culture:

…in one area, at least, Providence outdid its flashier sister city: in 1769, its thirty-one rum distilleries surpassed Newport’s twenty-six.

Some of the British turned out to be scarecrows. Or scarepatriots, as Colonel John Topham’s 1st Rhode Island State Regiment discovered when it inspected British fortifications on the island at Butts (Windmill) Hill:

Marching inland, he discovered amid the earthen walls and wooden barracks atop Butts Hill only dummy soldiers – red-coated uniforms stuffed with straw.

Straw soldiers weren’t the only trick the British had up their sleeves. The Navy had a ploy of its own:

Howe had brought with him three fire ships, which could be set ablaze and adrift when the tides and winds were right to crash into the huge, anchored French ships. [The names of the British fire ships were Strombolo, Sulphur and Volcano.]

The Aug. 10, 1778 edition of The Boston Independent Ledger, reporting on the war, declared “All eyes are now turned to Rhode Island.” (What a difference a couple of centuries make, give or take three or four decades. Now when all eyes turn to Rhode Island, they’re watching “Family Guy.”)

Some things never change: Colonel Laurens, riding on horseback from New York to Providence, reported that he had journeyed “in 48 hours over the worst and in some parts the most obscure roads that I ever traveled.” Welcome to Rhody, where some of our potholes are on the National Historic Register.

Rock stars are famous for not going on stage unless their demands for, say, a bowl of green-only M&Ms are met. With the baguette-mad French, apparently, the deal-breaker was bread, which was lacking in Rhode Island: According to Sullivan, French Admiral D’Estaing asked for 6,000 bricks “necessary for the construction of ovens to bake flour and make bread. Our existence depends on it.” And Laurens wrote, “The French squadron will want a great quantity of provisions whether they winter here or return to France. No biscuit is to be had here. Pennsylvania must furnish flour, and bakers should be employed [there] immediately.” Apparently, the French never got the hang of jonnycakes.

What is your favorite Rhode Island historical oddity?

Winterizing

Although the weather outside is hardly frightful, I'm making the call now: If you live in New England, get ready for a cold and snowy winter. My reasoning is based solely on recent observations while walking or jogging through neighborhoods suddenly exploding in fat squirrels with bushy tails. I'm talking Santa girth. These aren't woodsy rodents. They're sumo wrestlers. I've got three in my backyard that don't even bother moving anymore when I walk by. They live in a cedar tree on the property and have to take turns scrambling up the bark (although the word "scrambling" is generous; imagine three sumo wrestlers rock climbing behind one another and you have pretty good idea of the pace). So this can't be a good sign for anyone hoping for a mild winter.

But if you don’t trust my forecasting skills, weather lore is abundant in foolproof methods to gauge the severity of winter. Here are a few:

1) Find a dead, local goose. (In other words, no Canada geese. And nothing store-bought. You don't know where they've been.) Locate the breastbone. Its length will indicate the length of the upcoming winter while its color will determine the season’s severity. A plain white breastbone foretells a mild winter. The more mottled, the more severe.

2) Check for moss growing on a tree in your neighborhood. Locate the south side of the tree. The more moss growing on that side of the tree, the harder the winter ahead.

3) Watch those fat squirrels with bushy tails bury their nuts. The deeper they dig, the colder the winter to come.

4) Think back to July. Were the anthills high? If so, it means a snowy winter.

5) Peel an onion grown locally. The general rule of thumb is: “Onion skins very thin/Mild winter coming in; Onion skins thick and tough/Coming winter cold and rough.”

6) Go to the riverbank. Locate a muskrat hole. The higher the burrow, the higher the snow will be this winter.

7) Cut open a persimmon seed. Look inside. If it has a knife shape that means winter will be cold and icy, with winds that cut like a knife.

8) Check the thickness of cornhusks, raccoon tails and the hair on the nape of a crow’s neck. If thicker than usual, expect a rough winter.

9) Watch pigs. Are they gathering sticks? Watch ants. Are they marching in a line? Watch woodpeckers. Are they sharing trees? Watch spiders. Are they spinning bigger-than-average webs or showing up in your house in greater numbers? All of these animal behaviors predict a severe winter.

10) Find a woolly bear caterpillar. Is it fatter and fuzzier than the last time you looked at a woolly bear caterpillar? Is the orange band in the middle narrower than normal? Both are portents of a hard winter.

There’s more. Did the monarch butterflies, snowy owls, geese and ducks migrate early? Are the hornet’s nests higher than normal? Have the bees hibernated in their hives prematurely? Are squirrels gathering nuts even earlier and more frantically than usual, and hiding them in odd places? Are you suddenly noticing crickets and mice in your house?

If so, bundle up and make sure your shovel and scraper are handy. Based on the Fat Squirrel Theory, Old Man Winter looks like he’s building an igloo in Rhode Island this year.

This week’s question: What winter weather lore do you trust the most?

Thanksgiving Story

A few years back I welcomed new neighbors with a harvest basket filled with a cornucopia of gifts and a card that read, “You’ve been turkeyed.” On the heels of a previously anonymous Halloween candy-and-art-supply “You’ve been ghosted” delivery to the doorstep, the secret grab bag of Thanksgiving kitsch became part of a new tradition, with variants (“You’ve been shamrocked” on Saint Patrick’s Day; “You’ve been egged” at Easter) keeping the mystery going all year long.

(Not all of the skulking was successful. A late-night egg planting one Easter went horribly wrong once when children opened their plastic eggs the next morning in the living room, only to see grubby, slimy, early-rising insects crawl out. They had been attracted by the jellybeans inside. On the plus side, according to their parents, the negative reinforcement seemed to curb the kids’ appetite for candy that year.)

The gist of the Thanksgiving ritual involved a visit from the great gobbler, Tom Booghalamoon.* Inspired by my own childhood readings of the Great Pumpkin, whom Linus waits for unfailingly to visit every year in “Peanuts,” Tom Booghalamoon – also known as Tom B. Turkey – is a giant flying Narragansett turkey that wears a pilgrim’s hat and rides a broom. Just as Santa Claus brings gifts to children everywhere on Christmas Eve, Tom Turkey welcomes anyone who has moved into a new neighborhood since the previous Thanksgiving with gifts of hearth and harvest. With his faithful Turkey Boys and Turkey Girls, urchins that have a home in a corn maze the size of Rhode Island, at a latitude and longitude that doesn’t appear to exist on any known map, Tom brings good cheer to those who are leaving something behind but are also looking forward to whatever might be ahead.

What is your favorite Thanksgiving Day ritual?

· Linguists may recognize Booghalamoon as Persian for “wild turkey.” Other foreign names include: “Chilmyeonjo,” Korean for “seven-faced bird”; “dik rumi,” Arabic for “Roman rooster” or “Ethiopian bird”; “huoji,” a Chinese word meaning “fire chicken” (other Chinese words include “tujinji” or “cough up a brocade chicken” or “tushouji” or “cough up a ribbon chicken”); “la dinde” in France, which is derived from “(poulet) d’Inde” or “(chicken) from India”; “(der) Truthahn” in German; “gallopoula” in Greek, meaning “French chicken”; “Peru,” in Portuguese, which is also their name for the country “Peru”; “bata mzinga” in Swahili, meaning “the great duck”; and “feel murgh” in Urdu, meaning “elephant chicken.” (Source: Wikipedia.)

Day of the Dolphins

In Celtic mythology, the dolphin was considered “the watcher of the water” or “protector of sacred water.” So the recent sighting of common dolphins cavorting in a pod just off Barrington Beach could be taken as a sign that Narragansett Bay is getting healthy enough to support the kind of baitfish that will bring Flipper back into the fold here in Rhode Island, where the mermaids and giant sea monkeys left along with the horseshoe crabs back during the 1970s, when the bay was a toxic sewer.

I remember two things about combing the shore along the upper part of the bay back in the early 1970s. For the first couple of years, you could find as many horseshoe crab shells as rocks on the shore. Then they just disappeared. The other vivid memory is a nighttime excursion to the Providence waterfront, near where the big tankers dock now. I looked down into the water and saw a steady stream of electric blue goop going out with the current. Never knew what that blue goop was, but if I were a fish I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have wanted to swim through it.

In the years since, Save The Bay has done a remarkable job of cleaning the water, educating the public, lobbying politicians and fighting industrialists to bring the state’s most important resource back to health. I know this because about the time I moved back to Rhode Island, I began to notice the horseshoe crabs again, swimming along the tide line. Eel runs and bluefish runs frequent the channels. Some former oyster beds are recovering. More places are opening for safe quahogging. So there’s hope for the mermaids and sea monkeys.

It’s good news that bear have returned to our forests and dolphins to our bay. Now that environmental regulation, including legislation for clean water and clean air, has proven to work, and creatures like the osprey – on a fast track to extinction during the 1970s – are thriving once again in Rhode Island, many in Congress want to curtail these programs and put the ecosystem back in the hands of the industrialists. I think the dolphins dropped by to remind Rhode Islanders not to let them do that.

While Narragansett Bay has improved, it still has too much pollution from sewage waste, treatment plants, storm water spill-off, over-development and industrial facilities that violate their permits, resulting at times in the creation of dead zones, beach and shell-fishing closures, fish-kills and clam die-offs. It’s nice that the watchers of the water spent a day at play in Narragansett Bay. But vigilance isn’t just the job of marine mammals. If Rhode Islanders want to preserve the bay for future generations, we can’t expect dolphins to do all of the watching.

Which is why the annual Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, opening this Thursday at the Save The Bay Center at Fields Point in Providence, is worth a detour for anyone who cares about the bay’s revival. More than 70 artists, most from Rhode Island, will showcase over 200 original works of painting, photography, sculpture and jewelry inspired by the Ocean State’s most prominent landscape. The show, which helps to fund the organization’s KEYS campaign (Keep Educating Young Scientists), continues through Dec. 27. If you’re an art-lover or a bay-watcher, drop by and discover more than 200 ways to see an old friend in a new light.

This week’s question: What was your favorite wildlife encounter in Rhode Island?

Blog on the Half Shell Classic
We didn’t exist as a blog back in 2000, when the movie “Chicken Run” came out. But Rhody-philes might like to rent the stop-animation classic, if only to rank the performance of its protagonist – a Rhode Island Red named Rocky Rhodes – against those of other cartoon Rhode Islanders, including the cast of “Family Guy,” Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head from the “Toy Story” trilogy, and “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.” Just sayin’: The rooster gives the American dysfunctional family, the potatoes and the soldier who takes himself a bit too seriously a real run for their money.

Marquee Marks

Last week, while checking in with Fusionworks Dance Company in Lincoln, I noticed the “P” was missing on the Pharmacy sign at the Lincoln Mall Target. So it read: HARMACY. I made a note of it because I liked the idea of a “harmacy” as a place you go where the drugs do more harm than good.

Earlier today my friend Gavin, during our lunchtime jog, said he saw his favorite sign amid a string of cheap motels near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Trying to set itself apart, one motel advertised free HBO. Except that the “H” had disappeared. Turns out that this particular dive was actually offering: FREE B O.

For a long while a few years back, Junge’s Hotel on Route 16 in North Conway, N.H. had a marquee with a dark letter. So it read: “Jung ‘s Hotel.” I always wanted to stay there, imagining a “Twin Peaks-ian” atmosphere in which rooms would be visited by spirits and angels, Grim Reapers and devils, old wise men and Earth Mothers and the like.

More than once during my bicycle trip up the East Coast a decade ago, I saw signs advertising Sunday events with the S missing that read: UNDAY. The idea appealed to me. Ever since I have tried to schedule one “unday” every month – a day to break routine, explore somewhere new, try something different and tune out the noise of the world. The ritual of the unday as a day devoted to spontaneity and adventure – whether recreational, scholarly or spiritual – is something I’ve cultivated to the point where I can’t imagine a month without one. Amazing to think it was conceived amid a plastic wilderness of pink flamingoes and mailbox manatees.

What was your favorite roadside sign?

Late Potato
Not sure how we missed this, given this blog’s obsession with all things Potato Head. But earlier this year in Time magazine’s “Culture” section, it was reported that Pawtucket-based Hasbro was introducing thinner versions of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Bowing to a carb-conscious public and recent statistics about obesity, the toy manufacturer apparently decided that the iconic spuds should be a better role model for kids, hence the slimmer figures. For some reason, Hasbro also suddenly decided they needed pants. So that’s the news from Rhody: No more naked potato.

All Hallows

In the spirit of today’s Halloween, we present an Eastern screech owl, denizen of the Rhode Island woods, courtesy of an e-mail from the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, which is sponsoring owl prowls, full moon hikes and wildlife walks throughout the state in November. It’s just one of the bits of whimsy and mischief I’ve noticed today, from the elaborate rogues’ gallery and horror menagerie that annually takes over a house on High Street in Wakefield to the barista in a bumblebee outfit who served me coffee and a bagel at Sweet Cakes Bakery and Café in Peace Dale.

Work gets in the way today, so my Doctuh Funkmeistuh – “Zombies like funk. We are the funky dead.” – persona will have to wait a few moons to unleash itself upon an unsuspecting public, but that doesn’t mean we’ve gone cold turkey on the holiday. Last Friday some friends and I met at the Steel Yard in Providence for the 6th annual Iron Pour. This year’s theme was “Molten Masquerade” and the whole experience was, in owl terms, a hoot. Members of the Iron Guild poured about 500 pounds of liquid, gold-colored iron into various molds, metal skulls, jack-o-lanterns and giant sculptures, while the yard smoldered and blazed, producing billowing white smoke, shimmering steam and exploding stars out of the iron that splattered against the cold ground or expired in the raw autumn night. Equally impressive was the furnace containing the oozing orange metal, sending plumes of wild yellow and blue fire sky high and disgorging streams of the amber liquid when called upon. The ironmaster (or ironmistress in this case) asked the crowd to vote on naming the furnace from such possibilities as El Jefe, Hoss the Boss, Psiclops (not Cyclops, for reasons I can’t remember) and Banshee (inspired by the incessantly noisy but necessary furnace fan) – although I was partial to the suggestion by one guy in the audience who said we should name it Dave…Dave the Furnace.

Some of the molds became spears that were used to attack a monstrous witch, which caught flame and disintegrated into its skeletal pose. Another large mold, once it cooled and was lifted off the ground with a winch and a steel chain, was revealed as a giant, glowing skull. The Iron Guild members, in their best village mob impersonation, moved in loose choreography, attacking various masquerade figures, including a giant goat and a tree-like creature that reminded me of one of the characters on the old “H.R. Pufnstuf” kid show. They lit a massive metal jack-o-lantern and sent it rolling down a hill. They ignited skulls around the perimeter (although the skull directly in front of us seemed to have enough life in it to keep snuffing out the fire, eventually treating us to a brief but spectacular interlude of flaming eyeballs and a torch-like tongue before going dark again). Masked mythical creatures cavorted along with one ironmonger twirling a flaming lasso of sorts, sending colorful sparks into the night. Another character – a crowd favorite – revved a flaming chainsaw and ran around a lot. Every time the molten iron splattered on the ground or collided with other surfaces the oxide produced dazzling fireworks of mostly silver and blue. Pumpkins in the dark jolted to life with each pour, instantly flashing their sinister jack-o-lantern grins. The evening was a theatrical mix of controlled volcanic eruption, magma flow, the rites of destruction and creation, and sparklers on steroids.

At one level the night was about the pure joy of burning things. At another it was modern mythmaking, a blend of art, science and ritual weirdness harking back to the Halloweens of yore and the fire festivals of ancient tribes. Luminous and fanciful, the Halloween Iron Pour is one of those quirky experiments in living alchemy that Providence does so well. Prometheus and Vulcan should be proud.

This week’s question: What was your most memorable Halloween?

Throwaway Size
During last week’s game 5 of the World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals, Fox broadcasting announcer Joe Buck dropped a Rhody size reference between at-bats, noting that “220 Rhode Islands” could fit into Texas. Of course, while the geographic math may be true, on a cultural level it’s doubtful you could find 220 Rhode Islanders who could fit into Texas.

Pulp and Cow

While trolling for blog fodder this morning I stumbled onto a blog that had previously trolled my newspaper to comment on and link to a story I’d forgotten I’d written. Welcome to the vortex, where information spins endlessly, cycling forever, outliving the minds that thought it, dreamed it and bothered to write it down.

Turns out that last year the blog Grim Reviews scattered a few kind words about a pre-Halloween feature I wrote three years ago about Rhode Island native C.M. Eddy Jr., a pulp writer for “Weird Tales” and a close friend to H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini. Eddy’s grandson, Jim Dyer of Narragansett, had compiled a partial collection of his work – 13 stories titled “The Loved Dead and Other Tales,” published by his homegrown company, Fenham Publishing. Previously, Dyer had published Eddy’s work in “Exit Into Eternity, Tales of the Bizarre and Supernatural.”

Given that Halloween is just around the corner, it seemed like a good time to resurrect a couple of quotes from the piece that serve to illuminate Lovecraft and Houdini, two artists in different disciplines whose influence on modern horror writers (in Lovecraft’s case) and illusionists (in Houdini’s) is unquestioned, from Stephen King to David Copperfield.

Lovecraft, of course, was a Providence native and Rhode Island lifer, while Houdini was a frequent visitor to our humble state. The words are Dyer’s:

On Eddy’s relationship to Lovecraft:

My grandparents became friends with Lovecraft in the early 1920s. He used to walk to their house in Fox Point and stay late into the night. My grandfather and he would take late-night walks in the streets of Providence, looking for interesting places or just talking about ideas for stories. My grandmother typed some of his manuscripts…He wasn’t competitive at all. Lovecraft had a hand in a lot of stories that he never got any credit for. He had a circle of friends, who would mail each other different stories and make comments.

On Eddy’s relationship to Houdini:

He worked as a ghostwriter and an investigator for Houdini. Houdini paid writers to write stories that had his name on them in popular magazines. He also used to go around the country breaking up séances and exposing mediums as fakes. My grandfather would travel to a town ahead of him and find out everything he could. He’d figure out how the voices were coming from the walls, how the table might be moving. Then he’d type up a report for Houdini, who would show up with all of the newspapers and expose the act as if he was doing it on the spot.

Odd Cow
The runaway cow that fell out of a truck last Tuesday on the Jamestown Bridge while on its way to the slaughterhouse captured the attention and imagination of locals. The bovine avoided capture for two hours before being shot by police and state environmental officials at the request of its owner. We’ll have more on the paper side in “Flotsam & Jetsam” this Thursday, but for now we’d like to know where Jamestown Bridge Cow ranks in Rhode Island’s cow pantheon. Here’s my take:

1) Golden Cow. (Newport Creamery logo.)
2) Jamestown Bridge Cow. (RIP)
3) Diva Cows. (Two of the seven Cows on Parade owned by Imagine, a boutique store in Warren. The colorful cow-sized sculptures graze eternally outside the second story of the store along Route 114. Warren has embraced the kitschy cattle, unlike denizens of Imagine’s previous home in Barrington, who raised a hue and cry to ban the cows from their town.)
4) Colt Park Bulls. (Two Jersey bulls owned by Colonel Colt that now stand as sculptures on marble pedestals at the entrance to Colt State Park in Bristol. Colt raised the finest Jersey herd in the world. On the right is a Grand Champion. On the left is a bull that killed a farm worker.)
5) The Purple Cow. (A boutique store in Wakefield.)
6) Rhody Fresh. (The logo for Rhody Fresh, local milk from local farms.)

Years ago, after someone shot an elephant in Chepachet, the town’s residents honored its memory with a statue and an annual holiday. This week’s question: How should we honor the late, lamented Jamestown Bridge Cow?

Grab Bag

Piecing together a few random finds from recent reading, with a Rhody twist. First, from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s unauthorized autobiography as excerpted in the British newsmagazine, The Week. In the extract, Assange recalls spending much of his childhood on the run from his mother’s abusive ex-lover, a member of a cult called The Family, based in the mountains north of Melbourne, Australia:

It was so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. The very last time, we got some intelligence that Leif was drawing close: they told us he was near us in the hills outside Melbourne. My brother and I showed a lot of resistance that final time – we just couldn’t bear the idea of grabbing our things again and dashing for the door. As a bribe, my mother and I told my little brother he could take his prized rooster, a Rhode Island Red, a very tall, proud, strong-looking bird, who was also extremely loud.

And two more for the size of Rhode Island archives:

From Sloane Crosley’s collection of essays, “How Did You Get This Number,” in a paragraph on an essay about a trip to Alaska titled “Light Pollution”:

The state of Alaska itself is like one big whale. Chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island exist like barnacles. They could detach from a glacier up north and no one would notice.

From the archives of the Economic Collapse blog:

Did you know that a new desert the size of Rhode Island is created in China because of drought every single year?

This week’s question: What is your favorite use of Rhode Island in a printed sentence?

Rhody Awards

Meandering among the throngs yesterday during an Indian Summer excursion along the East Bay Bike Path, watching snakes slither sideways to the grassy margins and butterflies hitching rides on colorful backpacks, I paused every now and then to do a little browsing at the Barrington Preservation Society’s historical markers. These story kiosks, spread out through the Barrington stretch of bike path, are a relatively recent addition to the recreational route.

Through text and old photographs, the markers document places of local interest. Like Haines Park, the former property of a physician who bought the land because he believed in the virtue of fresh air and outdoor recreation, who spent one summer living there before dying of asthma. One of the oldest state parks in Rhode Island, Haines became a great escape for East Bay residents, a place for hiking, picnicking, baseball, bocce and horseshoes. A wooden footbridge (destroyed by the 1938 Hurricane) connected it to Crescent Park, the East Bay’s lesser-known cousin to Rocky Point, where a mammoth wooden roller coaster stood until 1961. Some of the stone fireplaces, constructed by masons as part of President Roosevelt’s WPA initiative, remain in use.

A short walk away tells the story of Bay Spring, where my neighborhood is located. It began as a summer tent colony (like the tourist camp on Cronin’s Bathing Beach at Point Judith or the tent community that developed at Roy Carpenter’s Beach in Matunuck) and turned into the town’s industrial center. One factory churned out the country’s largest supply of imitation leather, mostly for the auto industry, while the lace factory, which is now an assisted living facility, supplied the world with veils, curtains and other lace works. My neighborhood also was one of Rhode Island’s most productive oyster harvesting locations – at one time providing enough business for three thriving oyster shacks. The Bay Spring Yacht Club building (also destroyed by the 1938 Hurricane) stood at what is now Lavin’s Marina, hosting summer nights of cards and pool on its second floor, music and dancing on the third.

The walk went on that way, like a slow-moving View-Master. The next stop was Drownville (the original name for West Barrington), home to farms and a train station depot on tracks that once stretched from Providence to Bristol. Once again, the 1938 Hurricane – which did more to change the face of Rhode Island than anything since the Wisconsin Glacier retreated – left its mark, forcing the abandonment of passenger rail service, although freight still traveled the tracks until 1976.

Then onto Little Echo, an ice pond created from a clay pit, where icemen stored their winter haul in a local ice house and served the surrounding neighborhoods until the age of electricity and refrigeration. Residents would put large signs in their windows with the numbers 25, 50, 75 or 100, indicating how many pounds of ice they needed, and the icemen cameth. No questions asked. The pond now hosts bullfrogs and dragonflies, mute swans and snapping turtles the size of flying saucers.

Brickyard Pond, the next stop, now a tranquil place for fishing, kayaking and birding, was once the site of a huge clay works, where Barrington bricks were made. It is estimated that more than 100 buildings in downtown Providence and on the East Side were built with Barrington bricks. (I still have one of the bricks, courtesy of my friend Tom, who gathered it from the rubble of the late, lamented West Barrington Elementary School while I was living in New Hampshire.)

The story kiosks paint a picture of past vibrancy, connecting the dots. Trains came up and down what is now bike path, carrying loads of bricks to Providence, and fabrics from the Bay Spring factories, and ice packed in sawdust keeping oysters alive for delivery to the shore dinner hall at Crescent Park and restaurants in Providence, Boston and beyond. Even amid the Spandex and bicycles carrying GPS navigation systems and little trailers containing Pomeranians, the old ghosts come to life in these historical markers, which on Friday will be honored, most deservedly, at the R.I. Preservation Celebration with their own Rhody Award.

Chosen by Preserve Rhode Island and the R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission from nominations by the public, the Rhody Awards pay tribute to individuals, organizations and projects for their contributions to the preservation of Rhode Island’s historic places. In doing so, they celebrate our sense of place and the stories that make us who we are today.

The icemen and the oystermen, the station agents and the factory workers of West Barrington may be gone, but the village goes on. And thanks to the happy marriage of history, nature and recreation on the East Bay Bike Path, its legacies won't be forgotten.

What is your favorite example of historic preservation in Rhode Island?

Footloose: Super Sized

A camera crew walked into the woods of West Greenwich a couple of weeks ago, looking for Bigfoot. Readers are welcome to provide their own punch line.

The Animal Planet TV series “Finding Bigfoot” dropped by Little Rhody to investigate a Sasquatch sighting in the Ocean State. The show, now in its second season, has already hunted for Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington.

Tall, hairy and elusive, like pretty much every drummer that ever played in a 1980s heavy metal band, Bigfoot walks like a human and is categorized as a cryptid, last seen avoiding the paparazzi from The Weekly World News. At least three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization believe that there are different Bigfeet – each with slightly distinctive characteristics – roaming the various states. The one in Florida is known as the Ape Skunk, because of its distinctive odor. The one in Rhode Island is called “Big Rhody,” – or Ted, by its friends.

In the spirit of reportorial accuracy, it should be noted that “Big Rhody” is also a 28-inch pizza (with an 87-inch crust circumference) made by the folks at Pier Pizza.

The TV show was inspired to visit Rhode Island based on a video shot from a car of a shadowy figure keeping pace alongside the automobile. [Santa George? Pogo Dave? The ghost of Tarzan Brown?] On the BFRO Web site, the most recent reports of possible Bigfoot evidence include:

Oct. 2006, Washington County – Possible stick formation found by hiker in the Great Swamp.

Oct. 1998, Providence County – Daylight sighting by mountain biker in the Black Hut Management Area outside Glendale.

Summer 1978, Washington County – Mother and son see Sasquatch close-up from road.

If I remember my summer of 1978 correctly, there’s a good chance that mother and son were smoking something close-up from the road before the Sasquatch sighting, but that’s a blog post for another day.

On the other hand, the two most recent sightings occurred in October, making this month a good one for Bigfoot spotting in Rhode Island. Given that the winds and rains and salt-smack of Irene have stripped and dried-out the leaves from most of our trees prior to this year’s foliage season, Rhody leaf-peepers might want to shift their attention to hairy, barefoot giants this year.

This week’s question: If you were a Bigfoot in Rhode Island, where would you live?

Return of Naked Man

From this week’s North East Independent police beat, with an assist from the Independent’s East Greenwich reporter Cassidy Swanson:

NAKED MAN VISITS RESIDENCE

A local woman received a strange visitor around midnight on Sunday claiming that the apocalypse is imminent. According to a police report, the resident stated that she heard a noise coming from her front porch and opened her front door to find a naked white man, approximately 20 years old, 200 pounds and 6 feet to 6 feet, 3 inches tall with blond hair, who was wearing only a pair of white socks, the report states.
The woman called to her son-in-law, who also lives at her home, and when he spoke to the man the visitor said “The world is ending,” and “I’m sorry if I scared you.” The male then proceeded to run from the home, smacking himself on the buttocks with his hand, the report states.

In the interest of accuracy, as our proofreader pointed out, this guy is really Almost Naked Man, given the white socks. But for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll give him the benefit of the Fully Monty.

Creepy though it sounds, Naked Man is a pretty popular character in the police logs and beat reports of weekly newspapers across America. I first realized this more than a decade ago, when a professor at a college I worked at in New Hampshire – who liked to spend summer nights wandering the streets around the campus in the nude – was caught by police one evening hiding in the bushes a few blocks from his home. I was the college’s news director at the time, and the professor begged me to keep his name out of the paper. I told him I had no control over that, but he had control over whether he put his pants on when going out in public. At any rate, I discovered that the professor was merely one of countless numbers of Naked Men out there, roaming the cities and suburbs from sea to shining sea. Some are ideological naturalists. Some are closet risk-takers. Some are curious or chronic streakers. Some are bombed or stoned out of their gourds. Some have a screw loose. Some are no doubt perverts. At the end of the day, it takes all kinds to be a Naked Man.

But outside of any disturbing aspects of Naked Man’s behavior, he may yet have some value beyond providing brief amusement in the police beat sections of weekly papers. I give you the Naked Man News Headline Game. Here’s how it works: Read the headlines of an actual newspaper then replace one of the words with Naked Man. As an example, here are some real headlines from recent editions of The New York Times:

House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond with Netanyahu
Dodd-Frank Act a Favorite Target for Republicans Laying Blame
Qaddafi Calls New Libya Government a Propped-Up ‘Charade’
Greece Nears the Precipice, Raising Fear
Turkey Predicts Alliance with Egypt as Regional Anchors
Strauss-Kahn Concedes ‘Error’ in Sexual Encounter with Maid
Paint Creek, the Town Perry Left Behind
Facebook to Offer Path to Media
Tumult of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington
Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires

Now for the Naked Man versions:

House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond with Naked Man
Naked Man Act a Favorite Target for Republicans Laying Blame
Qaddafi Calls New Libya Government a Propped-Up ‘Naked Man’
Greece Nears the Naked Man, Raising Fear
Turkey Predicts Alliance with Naked Man as Regional Anchors
Strauss-Kahn Concedes ‘Error’ in Naked Man Encounter with Maid (Some of these actually work for real!)
Paint Creek, the Naked Man Perry Left Behind
Facebook to Offer Naked Man to Media
Naked Man of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington
Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Naked Man

As you can see, it really doesn’t matter where you put the Naked Man. He works in nearly every editorial situation.

However, given that I write for a family-friendly newspaper, I’m going to limit this week’s question to: What is your favorite all-time newspaper headline?

(Mine comes courtesy of The Boston Herald, after a man carrying a few tons of timber traveled an overpass he wasn’t supposed to during the morning commute. The road collapsed, his truck overturned, spilling wood all over the highway, causing epic traffic delays and costing millions of dollars in lost productivity and repairs. The Herald’s cover that afternoon featured a photograph of the forlorn driver with an inset of the damage he caused under the headline: LUMBER JERK.)

Rhodywood Cameo

Last week Hollywood came to town to film a car chase. The R.I. Film & Television Office even sent out a press release celebrating the fact, although why you need a couple of Hollywood stuntmen to fabricate what most Rhode Island commuters see on the highways and byways everyday is hard to understand.

The Washington Street shoot in Providence took two days, which is usually how long it takes to find an open parking space on Washington Street. The scene will appear in a Universal Studios moving picture called “R.I.P.D.” Surprisingly, the movie’s not about the Rhode Island Police Department. Instead, it’s an action-adventure film described as a cross between “Men in Black” and “Ghostbusters” in which Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds play “two undead police officers dispatched by the otherworldly Rest In Peace Department to protect the world from an increasingly destructive array of creatures who refuse to move peacefully to the other side.”

It’s a poorly kept secret that the undead have long romanced Providence, mainly because the city makes them feel at home. Lovecraft lived there. Poe pined for a lost love there. It’s a town friendly to ghosts, vampires and zombies, so the idea of partially filming a feature about undead policemen in Rhody’s capital city is, quite literally, a no-brainer.

And given the fact that Rhody has potholes that can send you into other dimensions, the choice of Providence for a pulp movie car chase has merit, too – although unless we’re talking about the scene from “Bullitt,” “The French Connection,” “Ronin,” “Vanishing Point,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “The Italian Job,” “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Cannonball Run” or “Against All Odds,” we’re bound to be disappointed in the careening chrome even as we admire Hollywood’s ability to elongate Washington Street into something closer to the Pacific Coast Highway.

Leading to this week’s question: What Rhode Island road is best suited for a Hollywood car chase?

Size reprise
Great size of Rhode Island reference in The Atlantic magazine, falling in the first paragraph under the headline, “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America.”

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Nice to know that more than 60 years of Rhode Island-sized sprawl turned America into what it is today. But how do we measure the sprawl that is actually in Rhode Island? In Quonochontaugs?

Songs for the Rhode

The Clash began “Know Your Rights,” a cut off the “Combat Rock” album, with the words: “This is a public service announcement…with guitar…”

In homage, some of our old blog posts have new life…with guitar…

Last March Blog on the Half Shell dedicated one of its weekly musings to Rhode Island’s characteristic standing as “The Knowaguy State.” The piece prompted West Kingston singer-songwriter Billy Mitchell to e-mail me, requesting permission to pursue the theme in song form. The result, “I Know a Guy,” is a witty, upbeat ditty describing the foibles of Rhody culture and cronyism with a catchy melody and infectious chorus. The song is the sixth track on Mitchell’s latest CD, “Detour,” to be released in October. (It’s one of two Rhody-centric songs on the disc. The other, “Meet Me Under The Shepard’s Clock,” pays homage to a Providence tradition in a simpler, more enchanting time.)

During the recent Wakefield Arts and Entertainment Festival, South County singer-songwriter and artist Jon Campbell mentioned casually (if half-jokingly) that he’d be interested in tweaking a recent column of mine (“The Ballad of Yellow Lobster”) in song form. The column basically re-capped the one-year anniversary of the death of Tyler, a yellow lobster pulled from Narragansett Bay that made headlines around the world before it expired in a research facility at the University of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay Campus – and after providing enough material for all or part of four columns and two blog posts. It’s cruel sport, but that’s the way we lobsterazzi roll.

Still, it got me thinking that if this media thing doesn’t work out, maybe I have a future in pitching song ideas to crooners.

Some possibilities (with apologies to parodied artists in parenthesis):

“Buddy Was His Name-O” (anonymous English songwriter)
“Snail Salad in Paradise” (Jimmy Buffett)
“Termite in a Blue Dress” (Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels)
“Mr. Clam Man” (The Chordettes)
“My Kind of Town (Pawtucket Is)” (Frank Sinatra)
“50 Ways to Lop a Lobster” (Paul Simon)
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa George” (Tommie Connor, Jimmy Boyd)
“(Here’s to You) Mr. Potato Head” (Simon & Garfunkel)
“Ode to G.I. Joe” (B.B. King)
“That’s About the Size of Rhode Island” (Sesame Street)

If you were to write a song about Rhode Island, what would it be called?

Postscript: Irene

A funny thing happened on the evening the power was restored to my cove neighborhood in West Barrington. One neighbor sat on his porch, strumming guitar. My friends across the street, after checking light switches, computers and TVs to make sure they were functioning, turned everything off, went for a dusk bike ride and then lit their outdoor fire ring, inviting people over to talk. My parents, who generally occupy evening hours at their house on the laptop (Mom) or watching television (Dad), were sitting on the porch in the dark, conversing while looking out at the bay and the planes flying to and from Green Airport. Most of the neighborhood, in fact, was out strolling, cycling or sitting in their porches, chatting amiably.

After going more than four days without power, everyone wanted it back, but once they had it, they were happy to ignore it. The power outage caused by Hurricane Irene seemed to spark something significant and universal in people, even despite the challenges of keeping food and drink cold, cooking, cleaning and doing the wash, or finding our way around the house at night. It felt right to go to sleep to the sound of crickets, wake up to the caterwauling of hungry sea gulls and live the day in concert with the rising heat songs of cicadas. The stars were impossibly bright for a Rhode Island sky too often polluted by excessive human light. You could see Cassiopeia’s W and the Archer’s arrow point and both Dippers dipping in vivid relief, looking like giant-sized versions of glow-in-the-dark stickers plastered on the ceiling above a child’s bed. Neighbors who once barely spoke to one another came out of their houses for no apparent reason and resumed their hurricane-prompted conversations, helping each other clean up, exchanging tools or tips, and sharing new stories about damages and crimes occurring in Rhode Island in the storm’s aftermath. Children grudgingly admitted how much fun it was to play Clue by candlelight and Twister by flashlight. People gathered at the shoreline, marveling at the liquid silver of the bay at twilight, the water lapping in waves of melted moonlight.

It was as if we all knew – whatever we lost when the power went out, we gained something, too. And now that the power was back, we didn’t want to sacrifice our newfound embrace of simple pleasures. Who knows how long it will last? But for the first time since I can’t remember when, the place I call home feels like a neighborhood. Without a doubt, the communities that endured the worst of Irene’s miseries deserve our thoughts and prayers, but in West Barrington, and wherever the storm managed only inconveniences of varying degree, we might want to thank her.

Irene follow-up question: How did you occupy your time while the power was out?

[Note: Half Shell is posting early because of Monday’s Labor Day holiday.]

Irene: A Sketch

The first casualty of Hurricane Irene in my cove neighborhood happened three days before the storm arrived when a tree removal crew chopped down a majestic weeping willow, dressed in its lush summer green, from a yard by a house at the point. The willow had been there for several generations, standing as one of the postage stamp trees of West Barrington. But the neighbor had lost a couple of big branches recently – during one of last winter’s nor’easters and, before that, during a heavy wind and rain storm last summer – and given the dire predictions of Irene’s wrath, he was determined not to risk his home for the notoriously weak-rooted willow in our sandy soil.

Most people spent part of Saturday boarding up and removing potential projectiles from their yards, then went to bed as the storm blew in. The power went out in Barrington at 7 a.m. on Sunday and the worst of the surge followed a couple of hours later, as water splashed over the cove’s edge, swamping some roads, spilling over sea walls and creating little lakes in adjacent parks. Despite steady, strong winds for hours afterward and except for one small stretch of street that appeared to endure a mini-twister, causing large trees to topple onto rooftops, sheds and in yards, our neighborhood was mostly spared, and we were once again able to sigh with relief that a hurricane – a.k.a. God’s bowling ball – only delivered a glancing blow.

We were lucky. Watching during the height of the storm from one of the windows in my folks’ place that wasn’t boarded, the Atlantic appeared primal, with breakers crashing in the middle of the bay and surf as high as a one-story house. At one point, between the wind and the rain, the world was just a wild, gray blur, with no way to tell where the water met the land. It felt like being on the smear end of a microscope.

But the worst didn’t last long. Heavy rains eventually subsided and all that was left was to ride out the winds, nap, drink, eat, play board games, and check out the damage when the lull came later in the afternoon. A friend’s boat had been wrenched from its mooring. They discovered it a long way down the channel, with a gash in the hull, in a completely different marina, where someone had lashed it to a dock to spare it further damage. Neighbors and strangers gathered to survey the scene, sharing condolences with people who sat on their porches under houses crowned by downed trees or otherwise enjoying the fresh air, charged with ions that paradoxically made us feel drugged and drowsy. My souvenir from the day was a quahog shell that was tossed onto the small beach at Allin’s Cove, ringed on the inside with a half-inch of the dazzling purple color used to make wampum.

All the world is investing in gold these days, it seems. But its value is merely monetary. Give me a clamshell offered up by a hurricane any day, if only as a reminder of the blessings and fortunes we always take for granted, and in memory of the friends and willows we lose along the way.

How did you pass the time during Hurricane Irene?

Of Killhags and Gurrybutts

The vacation gods were kind to me. As I returned to my office this morning, wondering what I might blog about later, a brown envelope addressed from Florida was dropped onto my desk chair. Inside was a book and a letter from Mim Harrison, who lived in Sand Hill Cove with her husband back in the mid-1970s and early ’80s. Her book is titled: “Wicked Good Words: From johnnycakes to jug handles, a roundup of America’s regionalisms.”

In her letter she says:

As a former South County-ite, I made sure that Rhode Island and southern Rhode Island in particular, was well represented – down to the mention of River’s Edge Café for its American chop suey. Other Rhode Islandisms are in here as well; I don’t think anybody else in the country drinks cabinets. Bubbler is in here, too…although there’s some surprising (and perhaps disturbing) news about its use.

[Side note: River’s Edge Café is now Meldgie’s Rivers Edge Café, a concession by Meldgie to the fact that Rhode Islanders will always call things by what they once were instead of what they are. So when Quick Rick’s in Wakefield, which has been a fast eats pit stop for generations, turned over to a woman named Jessica it became Jessica’s Quick Rick’s. And when the Joyce Family Pub (or “Joyce’s”) in Matunuck was sold a few years back to an Irish woman named Tara, it became Tara’s Joyce Family Pub. That is, until recently, when she renamed it Tara’s Tipperary Tavern. But it will be at least 40 years before folks around these parts stop calling it “Joyce’s.”]

For the record, Harrison traces “bubbler” – meaning a water fountain where the water bubbles up from the spigot – to the Midwest, where the earliest known reference dates back to 1911. Most Rhode Islanders grew up with the word pronounced “bub-luh” but meaning the same thing, although there aren’t many of us left who date back to 1911 to tell the rest of us whether we were drinking from bubblers back then.

The book begins with a New England chapter titled “Wicked Pissa.” Most New Englanders will recognize the majority of expressions, although I was taken with “the frog run of the sap” (meaning the last batch of maple syrup you collect during the season, just about the time the frogs appear) and “gurrybutt” (the empty bowl that accompanies orders of clams, mussels or lobster at a fish shack or seafood restaurant and used for shell discards). A “killhag,” common to Maine and New Hampshire, is a trap used to catch a variety of animals. To “put the oakum on him” is to shut a guy up for good. (Oakum is a tarred hemp mixture used to seal the seams on boats.)

As for people living in the Other 44, some Southerners call a heavy rain a “frog strangler.” “Old Scratch,” a term for the Devil, was coined in New England but is still in use in parts of the South. That region also has more than one term for “the blues,” including the “mulligrubs,” which traces its etymology to a medieval English word for migraine, and “the weary dismals,” an expression heard in Tennessee as well as Virginia and North Carolina, which share the Great Dismal Swamp.

Iowans will eat a “loosemeat sandwich,” a concoction of ground beef and onions on a bun, known elsewhere as a “sloppy joe.” Lottery cards are known as “pickles” in Nebraska because they’re traditionally sold out of pickle jars. Avocados in Louisiana are known as “alligator pears” and French toast in New Orleans is “lost bread.”

Residents of Seattle have an expression, “the mountain is out today,” meaning those rare occasions when it’s clear enough to see Mount Rainier. (A local variation in praise of sunny weather, not mentioned by Harrison, is “it’s a three-bridge day,” spoken by residents of the East Bay on clear days when they can see the Mt. Hope, Newport (Pell) and Jamestown (Verrazzano) bridges bending over Narragansett Bay.)

Alaskans call whisky “arctic wine” and snowmobiles “iron dogs.” A “beignet” is a New Orleans-style doughnut without the hole, similar to Rhode Island’s (and New England’s) “doughboy,” which tends to be rounder, like the bellies of its eaters. In the Southwest, the same plump, powder-sugared confection is called a “bunuelo.” Other New England expressions for doughnuts include “boil cakes,” “cymbals” and “huffjuff” or “huffle juffle.” Some Connecticutites call them “holy pokes” while Mainers might refer to them as “Baptist bread” (or “Baptist cake”) in honor of the dough being immersed.

This week’s question: What’s your favorite regionalism?

State of the State

Following up on last week’s post on the “State By State” essay collection, published in 2009, I thought a summary of the addendum might be of interest to Rhody readers, wherein each state is ranked in a variety of categories.

Rhode Island ranks:

43rd in population.
42nd in population increase.
12th in foreign-born population.
29th in population born elsewhere in the U.S.
45th in birthrate.
9th in median age. All six New England states were in the top 10, including Maine (1), Vermont (2), New Hampshire (7), Connecticut (8) and Massachusetts (10).
18th in gross state product per capita.
34th in bankruptcy filing rate at 28 percent. (Tennessee came in first at a whopping 109.9 percent.)
21st in mean travel time to work.
47th in unemployment rate. (From the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Feb. 2008. We all know what happened later that year, when the economy collapsed. Since then, Rhody’s unemployment rate has nearly doubled and ranks consistently in the top five.)
43rd in military recruitment rate.
18th in percentage of population claiming no religion.
9th in public education expenditure per pupil.
32nd in voter participation rate.
42nd in oil consumption per capita.
43rd in gasoline consumption per capita.
44th in violent crime rate.
41st in incarceration rate.
35th in breastfeeding rate.
43rd in population without health insurance.
34th in toothlessness rate at 17.9 percent. (West Virginia is first at 40.5 percent.)
44th in obesity rate.
5th in alcohol consumption. (Only Wisconsin, North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa drink more.)
26th in cigarette consumption.
43rd in divorce rate.
47th in suicide rate.
47th in highest monthly temperature.
27th in lowest monthly temperature.

Also, Rhode Island is one of seven states with no roller coaster.

Most importantly, Rhode Island was at the top of the list in one category, ranking first in Table 17, “Classic Movie Theaters and Drive-Ins Per Capita,” with a score of 143.1. (Source: Cinema Treasures.)

What does this mean? We drink a lot, but typically aren’t violent or criminal in nature. We stay married. We don’t tend to jump off bridges. We’re thinner than the average Americans. We don’t severely deplete energy resources. We spend more than most on education. We used to have jobs. There aren’t that many of us, all things considered, but those of us who are from here tend to stay here. We miss the Cyclone, the Corkscrew and the Flume*, and we still like to watch movies in places that have a little character.

Leading to this week’s question: What’s your favorite old movie house in Rhode Island?

[Blogger’s note: Starting next week, Half Shell will be burrowing in the sands of Lambert’s Cove, enjoying a Monday-to-Monday beach rental on the Vineyard, which means…look for our return on Tuesday, Aug. 23, when we’ll be rocking some serious surfer tan and clam belly. Until then…]

*Technically, a log ride, not a roller coaster, but it belongs in the discussion of lamented amusement park rides.

Jhumpa's take

To write the Rhode Island entry in the book, “State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America,” featuring 50 writers opining on 50 states, editors chose Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who grew up in Kingston. The book itself is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Americana. Essays are wildly inconsistent in tone and presentation, which is part of the appeal. Like the old joke about the four blind men touching different parts of an elephant and describing something other than what it is, these authors don’t capture sense of place comprehensively, but by not even trying to go for the whole elephant, collectively they do convey a sense of what is peculiar.

(Some partnerships are odd. Massachusetts gets native son, John Hodgman, best known for his appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and TV commercials for Macintosh computers. Now a transplanted New Yorker, Hodgman’s Bay State rambling seems to miss its mark: “I guess that I am from Massachusetts. But I never felt at home there, and, really, no one ever does.” Yeah, well. No. Having lived there myself, and having shared conversations with countless residents from the Cape and the Islands to Boston to the Berkshires over the years, I’m fairly confident in saying that many feel very much at home in Massachusetts and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Hodgman does allude to the state’s sports mania, which he doesn’t share…a point emphasized by the error in the following sentence: “The local sports teams – which I am told are the Baseball Red Sox, the Football Patriots, the Basketball Celtics, the Hockey Bears, and of course the famous Boston Lobsters of the World Team Tennis League – are an obsession.” Yeah, well. No. Lobster sarcasm aside, it’s the Hockey Bruins. Your Stanley Cup champion Hockey Bruins. The Bears are a football team that plays in Chicago.)

Lahiri is a good choice to represent Rhode Island, even though her short stories and novels often draw upon her autobiographical experiences of feeling alienated in the culture she grew up in. After some cursory geography and history, she moves into memoir, sharing details about her upbringing in “a place originally called Little Rest.” She’s at her best when engaging in the tactile sensations of the place, as in this paragraph:

The Atlantic I grew up with lacks the color and warmth of the Caribbean, the grandeur of the Pacific, the romance of the Mediterranean. It is generally cold, and full of rust-colored seaweed. Still, I prefer it. The waters of Rhode Island, as much a part of the state’s character, if not more, as the land, never asked us questions, never raised a brow. Thanks to its very lack of welcome, its unwavering indifference, the ocean always made me feel accepted, and to my dying day, the seaside is the only place where I can feel truly and recklessly happy.

Another wonderful section follows in which Lahiri contrasts her father’s contentment about living in Rhode Island with her mother’s agitation…including a sad passage about her mother getting racist notes and anonymous hate mail while teaching at a South County elementary school. The anecdotes balance the state’s charms with its under-the-surface ugliness, but Lahiri resists the temptation to catalog the litany of little injustices that occur here. So I’ll return to the section on her father, because I think she gets at what makes Rhode Island an appealing place to live for many of us who choose to do so:

My father, a global traveler, considers Rhode Island paradise. For nearly four decades he has dedicated himself there to a job he loves, rising through the ranks in the library’s cataloging department to become its head. But in addition to the job, he loves the place. He loves that it is quiet, and moderate, and is, in the great scheme of things, uneventful.

Two quibbles: Throughout the article, Lahiri refers to “Dell’s” – instead of Del’s – lemonade. And she mentions the “Ghiorse Beach Factor,” which was actually just the “Ghiorse Factor,” a meteorologist’s numerical shorthand for describing the inherent beauty of any particular day, well known to all Rhode Islanders. After noticing Hodgman’s “Hockey Bears,” and these two typos in the only two pieces I’ve read so far, I have an idea. Next time, how about 50 editors from 50 states?

What makes Rhode Island unique as a state?

Art, Unanchored

There’s a big boat hanging out in Newport this summer that describes itself as a “floating art gallery.” Dubbed Sea Fair, the world’s first mobile mega-yacht art gallery chose Newport as its Summer Hang, docking at the Newport Shipyard, where owners hoped to attract lovers of art and fancy boats to its 228-foot-long luxury digs.

The plan was to interest tourists in viewing three decks worth of sculpture, glass, jewelry, fine furniture and contemporary photography and painting, while also giving them a look-see at a handful of masterworks by the likes of Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Most of the works range in price from $3,000 to $35,000. There’s enough space leftover for two outdoor bars, an international coffee bar, an open-air bistro and a glass-walled restaurant. But after a flurry of early interest this summer in Newport, the fourth largest privately owned yacht in the U.S. has pulled anchor on the idea for a few weeks, citing vendor disappointment at the relative lack of daily patronage.

The yacht plans a trip to Martha’s Vineyard later this month and a return engagement in Newport during the lead-up to Labor Day.

Organizers thought the Newport destination made sense, given the art yacht’s popularity in Sarasota earlier in the season. But last year’s yellow lobster drew a bigger crowd to Newport. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Tough economy everywhere – especially here in Rhody. Newport skews the data somewhat, and there are plenty of rich folks zooming around these parts in July and August, but the state on the whole is a collective of proud, working-class folks with ties to family traditions and the old world (Ireland, Portugal, Italy) that values a bargain and distrusts anything that comes with too many dollar signs – unless it’s the lottery.

We are home to the nation’s first bargain stores and family restaurants that live by the credo of selling big portions for cheap. We make art but rarely buy it. And during our glorious summers, we have a million ways to get on a boat or on the water without paying admission or feeling as if we’re underdressed.

Still, the under-whelming support for the art yacht has given me an idea for a classified advertisement.

WANTED: DINGHY
(Or reasonable rowboat facsimile, such as a whaleboat, dory, lifeboat or currach. Perhaps even a raft. For purposes of artistic experiment.)

Bottom Feeder, a.k.a. Art Dinghy on the Half Shell, would be the world’s first rowboat art gallery. Small enough to dock anywhere on the Rhode Island coast, the boat needs to have enough room for the rower, one patron and one work of art. Maiden voyage to launch with a viewing of “Dogs Playing Poker.” Refreshments will be served at our outdoor coffee thermos and flask of rotating spirits.

Outside of traditional galleries and festivals, where would you like to see art in Rhode Island?

The Sunny Side of the Tweet

A good friend once described me as a “social media Quaker.” Another called me a “social media snob.” Both may be right. I don’t deny the pervasive influence or potential benefit of the social media revolution, but I’ve mostly chosen not to join the party, remaining friendless on Facebook, having exactly one tweet to my name (a crude and snarky post that may end up being my Twittertaph) and only signing up on LinkedIn to try to locate someone I couldn’t find any other way. Even though, working for a newspaper, there’s a certain amount of pressure to stay plugged in to everything, everywhere, at all times, I resist the impulse personally for reasons of health and sanity, and professionally because I think in today’s culture the intensity of 24-7 cyber-immersion results in communication that is skewed to being almost entirely reactive rather than reflective. And what’s missing from the debate in the political arena, on the airwaves and on Internet comment boards, where so many of the participants prefer to act like monkeys throwing feces at one another, is the measured, reasoned and thoughtful approach to argument and analysis that can result in positive progress. Social media is a ceaseless echo chamber. Some of us just need more distance, space, quiet and time to think through problems, consider solutions, become inspired, stoke our imagination, create, invent or discover what's meaningful and valuable in our lives.

Another friend and I once had an idea – that we’ll never follow through on, so I’ll give it up to the universe – for a T-shirt company to compete with Twitter. We’d wear a different shirt every day, each bearing a new message. Some examples:

HAD A BAGEL TODAY.
LESS FACEBOOK. MORE FRESH AIR.
WHAT WOULD JESUS GOOGLE?

That kind of thing.

In the meantime, for those who are interested, the most popular Rhode Islander in the Twitterverse is Audrey McClelland, a working mom, writer and former fashion executive, who “vlogs” (video blogs) daily fashion advice. The last time I checked, which was also the first time I checked, she had 16,906 followers, ranking No. 1 overall in the Ocean State, ahead of such members of the Rhody Twitterati as Gov. Lincoln Chafee (No. 29), Rhode Island Monthly Bride (No. 93) and Rhode Island Weather Alerts (No. 98).

What Rhode Islander would you most like to follow on Twitter?

Crackerjack Memories

Baseball passion cuts deeply in New England, where being manager of the Boston Red Sox is the most scrutinized job in the six states. The earliest written mention of the game in the United States was a 1791 ordinance in Pittsfield, Mass. that banned playing it within 80 yards of the town meeting house. After the American Industrial Revolution was born in Pawtucket, the game became religion in mill cities up and down the East Coast, where immigrant communities spent precious leisure hours playing the sport – while their rich robber baron overlords in places like Newport preferred yachting, polo, golf, tennis and rambling around in horseless carriages.

Few books capture the relationship between baseball and the working-class players and fans hooked by the game better than Dan Barry’s “Bottom of the 33rd,” subtitled “Hope, Redemption and Baseball’s Longest Game.” Barry, a national columnist for the New York Times and former Providence Journal writer, revisits April 19, 1981, a cold and raw night in Pawtucket, when the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox played the longest game in professional baseball history – a game that didn’t end until later that summer after being mercifully suspended at the end of the 32nd inning.

It’s a book full of gems, and its accordion-like structure, in which we experience a moment imbedded in the game – an at-bat, a player on base, a pitcher toeing the rubber – before pulling back as the author frames the life, moving from boyhood dreams to (mostly) broken dreams, captures the hard road and loss of innocence for the many who don’t make it. Rhode Islanders will enjoy the local history and colorful details that bring the book to life, with references to Pawtucket landmarks like the Mei-King, the Modern Diner, the Wiener Genie and McCoy Stadium’s slow transformation from dive to minor league field of dreams.

Barry captures sense of place beautifully, as one short sequence illustrates:

Hope, after all, is the motto of Rhode Island. Hope has a seat on the public buses, those thirty-five-foot green whales, their insides musty with urine at certain hours of the day, sighing through their blowholes as they stop and start past machine shops and old mills. One of the drivers, Scott Molloy, who will soon embark upon a long career in academia, is occasionally assigned the Pawtucket route. And for all the urban despair he sees, especially late at night, when that despair assumes the drape of gloom, he is struck by a small group of ragtag Pawtucket regulars, a couple of white guys, a black guy, and a woman, who routinely make the transfer to the dog track in Lincoln. Broken people, really, but made whole somehow by one another, and by the shared hope of a winning day at the track – of returning home on a RIPTA bus with a hundred-dollar score on a two-dollar bet. Never happens. Maybe tomorrow.

For lifelong Red Sox fans, there is much to savor, even if it is mostly painful memories. Playing for Rochester during baseball’s longest game was Cal Ripken, Jr., who would be the sport’s golden child in the majors, breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak and quite possibly saving MLB from years of apathy following revelations of historic records shattered with the help of steroids from some of the game’s biggest stars. Playing for Pawtucket that night were Wade Boggs, Bruce Hurst, Marty Barrett, Rich Gedman and Bobby Ojeda, all of whom would meet a few years later when Ojeda’s Mets would defeat a Red Sox team made up in part of former PawSox teammates in a World Series that wrote another dramatic chapter in Boston's litany of epic collapses. Here’s how Barry writes it:

All of this is five years in the future, and far, far from Pawtucket. That ground ball hit by Wilson; that error made by Buckner; that series-ending, knife-in-the-heart moment when Jesse Orosco launches his glove high into the New York night after striking out Marty Barrett. Marty is here now, harvesting and tossing away the infield pebbles that might lead to bad hops around second base. And Wade Boggs, who will weep in the Boston dugout after that World Series, is here, muttering curfew, curfew, isn’t there any such thing as a curfew. And Rich Gedman, who will be unable to block an errant Bob Stanley pitch in the 10th inning of that fateful Game Six, allowing the Mets to tie the game, is in the bullpen, having left the game hours ago. And Bobby Ojeda, Hurst’s brother in the slightly odd fraternity of left-handers, somehow convinced Joe Morgan to let him go home a few innings ago. Ojeda will also appear in the 1986 World Series, but for the New York Mets. In the moments leading up to the climactic seventh game of the World Series games, the two former teammates will spot each other, one in a Red Sox uniform, one in a Mets uniform, and their eyes will lock in wordless communication, conveying so much, including: Pawtucket.
Of all the Shea Stadium revelry that followed the last out of the World Series, Ojeda will remember one moment above the rest. He sees them now, two Red Sox players making their way through the champagne-soaked chaos of the Mets jubilant clubhouse, through a party at their expense. Boston’s starting battery for Game Seven: Bruce Hurst and Rich Gedman, his Pawtucket brothers, coming to hug him and offer their heartfelt, heartbroken congratulations.
“I won’t ever, ever forget it,” Ojeda will say.

What is your favorite McCoy Stadium memory?

Santa sighting

Earlier this week, just a few short months after passing Pogo Dave on the highways of Rhode Island, I discovered another Rhody original whizzing along the asphalt artery of I-95 – Santa George. Also known as George Martin, owner of a Rhode Island vanity plate that reads “SANTA,” Santa George zoomed by me at a high-octane 80-plus reindeer-miles-per-hour on his way home to his summer North Pole in North Smithfield on his day off from Theatre By The Sea duties in Matunuck, where this month he is playing the Padre in “Man of La Mancha.”

On Independence Day Monday you can see Santa George riding in the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council’s “Polar Express” float at the Bristol Fourth of July Parade. After that he’ll appear in the Pine Acres Resort Christmas in July. Apparently, there’s no off-season for Santa. Look up “Santas for Hire” in Rhode Island and you’ll find Santa Lester and Santa James, both from Warwick, also in the mix for whatever stirs your eggnog. (Just fill out a Santa Request Form.)

In light of last Monday’s posting on the Believe It Tour, it appears that the Folklore component of Rhody Believeitology is alive and well with the likes of Santa George, Love 22 and Pogo Dave roaming around or beyond the state. Santa George has been spreading Christmas cheer for more than 30 years, including the last 11 as a Real Bearded Santa. (He’s listed No. 1322 on the National Beard Registry and is a past member of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.)

You can follow Santa George on Twitter or My Space. Or just wait until Christmas.

What is your favorite Rhode Island vanity plate?

[Blogger’s note: Posting early because of Monday’s Fourth of July holiday, when I expect to vanish into a world that is half-hammock, half-cooler.]

'Blood Simple' Meets 'Complex World'

The Believe It Tour came to Rhode Island last Friday to host a vampire-themed blood drive at the R.I. Blood Center and celebrate the season premiere of HBO’s “True Blood.” The company promotes something called “Believeitology” and encourages exploration of the weird, folkloric and supernatural – all in good fun.

There are five fields of study: Cryptozoology (study of “cryptids,” or animal-like creatures such as Bigfoot, Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster and Chupacabra); Paranormal (mostly ghosts and hauntings); Extraterrestrial (aliens and UFOs); Monsters (zombies, vampires, dragons, werewolves, mummies or any creatures bent on destroying humanity); and Folklore (the beliefs, rituals and stories contained within a culture, including such seasonal and holiday customs as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Green Man).

Believe It Tour (or BIT as we’ll call it from now on) is a national organization but it’s hard to imagine a better place for them to detour than Rhody, home to the grandmaster of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, two Roto-Rooter plumbers turned Ghost Hunters and enough legends of vampires, devils and phantom ships to fill a crypt. Rhode Island has its own state folklorist in Michael Bell. Providence cemeteries are sometimes converted into public art galleries. Edgar Allan Poe once spent a few months pining for a lost love on Benefit Street. Back when Rhode Island was a colony, records of visits by ghosts, witches and devils were legion. Zombie walks occur with increasing regularity in the capital city. Somewhere a few years back in Hope Valley, a Rhode Island couple converted an empty strip mall store into an extraterrestrial reporting center.

Here’s a guarantee: Spend a day walking through Providence and you’ll run into a cryptid. Probably more than one. It may not have a fancy name like Clam Man or Swamp Yankee Thing but you can be sure that it will be only vaguely human – although, oddly enough, quite often erudite.

What is your favorite example of Rhode Island folklore?

Our Cup Runneth Over

The Bear came out of hibernation, and suddenly 39 New England winters of discontent just melted, as if by magic, like the moment in “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” when Aslan returns to Narnia. The Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup last Wednesday night, and ever since it has been a nonstop love-fest between the fans and the team. The game 7 win, the plane ride back from Vancouver, the Stanley Cup popping up in neighborhood bars everywhere, the Rolling Rally on duck boats through Boston and streets lined by more than a million fans, and the surreal scene at Fenway Park yesterday, culminating in Bruins wearing Red Sox caps throwing out first pitches to Red Sox wearing Bruins caps. As celebrations of tribal euphoria go, it will be hard to top.

And that’s saying something for a region that has been blessed to see seven world championships from its four major sports teams in less than a decade. The Patriots (three Super Bowls), Red Sox (two World Series titles), Celtics (one NBA finals trophy) and Bruins (one Stanley Cup) have accomplished something that no group of teams in any city or region in America can claim. Boston is Banner Town, and now the Bruins legacy has another piece of hardware, adding a glint of silver to the generations of stories spanning Eddie Shore to Milt Schmidt to Bobby Orr to Cam Neely to Tim Thomas.

We’ve said it before when the B's were alternating seasons of heartbreak and futility. Even though basketball was invented in Springfield, Mass., and the modern American gridiron version of football evolved out of games on the Boston Common, where the Oneida Football Club of Boston became the first organized team to play any kind of football in the United States, this is a hockey and baseball region first and foremost, representing our winter and summer souls. The Red Sox are the oldest team still playing in Boston, a charter member of the American League, winners of the first World Series, a storybook franchise playing in a storybook park. The Bruins are the second-oldest, one of the Original Six, and the first club from the United States to join the NHL.

Yesterday at the Fens, the Bruins were the toast of the Olde Towne. Speakers blared team anthems: “Dirty Water” by The Standells, played after every Bruins (and Red Sox) win; “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by The Dropkick Murphys; “Black and Yellow” by Wiz Khalifa (apologies to Pittsburgh fans, since the anthem was written for them; then again, the Penguins took the Bruins colors when they came into the league, so maybe we can call it even); and most enjoyably, “Nutty” (a.k.a. “The Nut Rocker”) by The Ventures, a surf-rock instrumental version of “The Nutcracker Suite” beloved to all fans that grew up watching Bobby Orr and The Big, Bad Bruins through the fuzzy static and twitching rabbit ears of Channel 38. To top it off, during the Red Sox’ romp over the Brewers, every time Boston scored a run fans heard the Bruins’ goal celebration of a foghorn followed by Zombie Nation’s “Kernkraft 400” sample from the soundtrack of “Shaun of the Dead.” (Even the Celtics were represented, with Ray Allen sitting in the box seats with his children next to the Red Sox dugout.)

Great stuff. And the Stanley Cup, the world’s greatest sporting trophy (ah, the stories it could tell…), will be starring all summer in a local version of “Where’s Waldo?” called “Where’s Stanley?” We’ve already seen it on a rooftop apartment and in a baby stroller in the North End, at Tia’s on the waterfront, Stella on the South End, at Gypsy Bar, Foxwoods Casino and even the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park.

Amazing. Summer starts tomorrow and everyone is still talking hockey. Earlier this spring, while trying to get some sleep at 3 a.m. at Blackwoods campground in Acadia, Maine, I couldn’t help eavesdropping at the campfire conversation next to me, a dozen or so young people talking excitedly about the Bruins-Tampa Bay series. The next morning, at Trailhead Café in Bar Harbor, one after another Bruins fan came in, asking the owner whether the B’s could contain Vancouver’s dynamic Sedin twins (they could) and whether Timmy Thomas, the University of Vermont graduate who spent the early part of his career sweating it out in Finland and Sweden and minor-league outposts such as Birmingham, Ala., and Houston and Hamilton, Ontario, could summon up one more stellar series (he could). After Wednesday’s victory, Sen. John Kerry phoned a sports talk radio show in Boston (J.K. from D.C.? The Senator from a van down by the Potomac?) just to exult in the triumph and relive some of its highlights.

Part of the reason for such universal joy about this year’s team is how unexpected it was, following so many seasons of epic collapses, Game 7 losses, high expectations dashed and – some years – little to root for. In that way, it was like the Patriots winning their first Super Bowl and the Red Sox toppling the Yankees then sweeping the Cardinals for their first World Series title in 86 years. Like those seasons – the Snow Game, the Tuck Rule, Adam Vinatieri’s Greatest Field Goal Ever (45 yards in a blizzard), followed by an overtime kick and winning the Super Bowl as time expired for the Pats; the Dave Roberts steal, Big Papi walk-offs and Curt Schilling’s Bloody Sock game for the Sox – this Bruins year had the stuff of magic about it. Tim Thomas’s Greatest Save Ever (“stick save and a beauty!”) against the Lightning. Bobby Orr waving the giant, black-and-gold No. 18 banner in honor of injured Bruin Nathan Horton. Former Providence Bruin Brad Marchand (forever known as “Marshmont” to loyal listeners of 98.5 The Sports Hub, the B’s flagship station) completing the holy trinity of hockey antagonism in 30 seconds, beginning with a Kevin McHale-like clothesline of one Canuck, followed by a ducking up-and-under to topple another oncoming skater, then an immediate fists-up skirmish with a third Vancouver player. Horton smuggling melted Garden ice and pouring it on the rink in Vancouver just prior to Game 7. Or the stoic captain Zdeno Chara, who stands 7-feet on skates, hoisting the Cup higher than it has ever been lifted before and uttering a Slovakian primal scream.

What was your favorite moment of the Bruins’ run to the Stanley Cup?