Rhody Size Reprise

Followers of this blog know that I am a sporadic collector and sharer of size of Rhode Island references, but recently while trolling for fodder I stumbled onto Lexacat, posting down the road in Kingston, who has raised the genre to high art. Among Lexacat’s blog oeuvre is one called, “The Size of Rhode Island.”

While adding to the litany of SORI references, Lexacat goes a step further, analyzing and assessing each item for accuracy. In a recent post, for example, Luxembourg was definitively determined to be NOT the size of Rhode Island. One important note: Lexacat appropriately uses the standard 1,545 square-mile figure, which includes such watery acreage as Narragansett Bay – the Ocean State’s most distinctive feature – and not the 1,045 square-mile number, which measures land mass only.

The entertaining blog examines such SORI of lore as the BP Gulf oil spill (bigger than Rhody), the Yellowstone caldera (within the acceptable plus-minus range to be considered a viable SORI), Iceland (no), ammonia refrigeration units (no), Fort Benning in Georgia (no), Alex Rodriguez’ elbow pad (no), the area of timberlands purchased by Weyerhauser in 1900 (maybe), some guy’s father’s oil stain (no), the Copper River Watershed Area in Alaska (no), Basque Country in Spain (no), North Cascades National Park in Washington (almost), Aiken County in South Carolina (almost), Nancy Pelosi’s heart or airplane (both no), Alonzo Mourning’s basketball jersey (no), the scoreboard at Yankee Stadium (no), Antarctica’s ice chunk (maybe), disappearing wetlands at the mouth of the Colorado River (maybe), Chevron’s “worst oil catastrophe on the planet” (maybe), destroyed rain forest (maybe) and pregnant with sextuplets lady (no).

What Lexacat and the good folks at Quahog and the staff here at Half Shell are perhaps most curious about is why anyone outside of Rhody even cares about measuring its calamities, communities, extremities and other oddities in Rhode Islands? Whatever the reasons, so many reporters now reflexively use the phrase in their descriptions that it won't be long before "size of Rhode Island" has a spot in the AP Stylebook between "sister" ("capitalize in all references before the names of nuns") and "skeptic."

This week’s question: What remains in the universe to be measured in Rhode Islands?