Days of Yam

Weather is wardrobe. As a “fresh air fiend,” to steal a phrase from writer Paul Theroux, I have something in the closet for every condition - a fleece for all 40 kinds of Inuit snow, a layer for every 10-degree drop in temperature. I have jackets for every micro-season, shoes that I can wear in the ocean, shirts that repel insects and screen out the sun. Dig deeply enough and you’ll find something that wicks, something that reflects and something that can double as a tent in a pinch.

So with spring slow to warm, I content myself with the next wave of outdoor catalogs selling items I no longer need at prices I can no longer afford in language I no longer understand. I get them all: Patagonia, EMS, REI, L.L. Bean, Cadillac Mountain Sports. They speak in catalog-ese, which is a strange dialect of marketing that apparently means “this will cost you at least $200 more than it should.” Still. I can’t resist.

I mean, who doesn’t want to outfit themselves with a line of running shirts in “sharkskin,” “grasshopper” and “yam” (or gray, green and orange to the uneducated eye)? I look good in yam. I don’t have enough yam in my wardrobe. Fifty bucks for a yam shirt? Bargain.

Of course I need polyester gym wear with “antimicrobial treatment” that “manages perspiration with aplomb.” It would be nice to sweat with aplomb. Dripping with aplomb is so much more civilized than just plain stinking up the joint. And I’ll consider upgrading to running shorts that contain “an internal audio pocket.” I’m guessing it’s a place to put your iPod. Otherwise, maybe I don’t want noises coming from my pocket. Or I could go with the shorts that have “an integrated moisture wicking brief,” even though that sounds like a lot of stuff going on down there.

Anyway, it turns out that the next running shoes I buy will have “gusseted tongues.” And also “medial posts.” I’m not sure what these are, but until I do, I’m going to stay away from the sweatpants that come with a “gusseted crotch.”

How would you describe Rhode Island in catalog prose?

Trying Rhody on for size
It has been a while since we’ve spotted a good “size of Rhode Island” reference, but here’s one from the archives of Green Perspectives, the blog of The New York Botanical Garden. It was posted on March 25 under the heading, “Adding Rooftop Habitat the Size of Rhode Island”:

Steven Peck, the founder of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a green roof industry association, estimates that 5-10 percent of all existing buildings in most American cities could support a green roof. Let’s be conservative, then, and settle for a potential expanse of green roofs in the United States totaling, say, 10 billion square feet. That’s approximately 1,800 square miles, an area somewhat larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Bad boys, bad boys

From fraudulent misdeeds to blowing a gasket, nobody takes a backseat to Little Rhody in the bad behavior department. Last month’s news that Rhode Island ranked No. 1 in the nation for mortgage fraud was met with a collective yawn in a state where scandal is the only recession-proof industry.

According to a report from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, Rhode Island had a Mortgage Fraud Index of 315. That of course means nothing to you or me, but to the folks at MARI it means that the level of fraud in the state’s residential mortgage market was more than three times what anyone expected. The breakdown: Fraudulent application (31 percent); appraisal or valuation fraud (38 percent); false financial documents (23 percent); verification of deposit fraud (15 percent); closing documents (8 percent) and false credit report (8 percent). That’s the whole 123 percent ball of wax right there. In other words, here in the Ocean State, even the numbers refuting the numbers don’t add up.

Pulling a nutty
There must be something in the water. What else explains not one but two professional athletes in Rhode Island becoming popular YouTube fodder for going ballistic?

A couple of weeks ago, Providence Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask went crazy at The Dunk after a referee blew not one but two calls during a shootout, costing the Baby B’s the game. The first shot Rask poke-checked. By rule, the puck should’ve been dead, but the shooter followed it up with a wrist shot into the net and the referee allowed the goal. During the second blown call, the puck hit the crossbar but the ref thought it went into the net first. Mount Tuukka then exploded.

Maybe Rask is just getting ready for his Boston call-up. The unofficial theme song for the Big Bad Bruins is a version of “The Nutcracker Suite” (from the ballet performed annually at Christmas in Boston), re-dubbed “Nutty” and played by 1960s surf-rockers The Ventures. (An earlier version was called “The Nut Rocker.”)

Rask’s antic rant supplanted the histrionics of former Pawtucket Red Sox outfielder Izzy Alcantara, who in a 2001 game objected to a high, hard inside pitch and decided to charge the mound at McCoy Stadium. Most of the time batters never get to the pitcher, because the catcher grabs the player from behind before he can leave the batter’s box. Izzy came up with a novel way to solve that problem, by taking care of the catcher before moving on to the pitcher.

Just another day in the Rhody Universe, where English is a second language, just behind slapstick. Where else could a guy named Tuukka and a guy named Izzy – a hockey player from Finland and a baseball player from the Dominican Republic – earn beers for life from locals who can say they were there when Tuukka went bazooka and Izzy had a tizzy?

What is the biggest meltdown you have ever witnessed?

RI stimulus money goes to the dogs

PROVIDENCE – State officials have determined that the estimated $1.1 billion in federal stimulus money is “not enough” to help residents survive a deep recession, so they are proposing a risky scheme to eliminate Rhode Island’s budget shortfall once and for all.
“Basically the plan is to take the stimulus check and place it all on a greyhound to win Saturday at Twin Rivers/Lincoln dog track,” said Leslie Gowk, spokeswoman for the nonprofit organization Stimulate Rhode Island. “The payoff would solve the state’s problems for the next 20 years.”
Stimulate Rhode Island is an ad hoc, de facto committee of economists and citizens advising Gov. Don Carcieri about how to maximize the returns on Rhode Island’s stimulus money.
Committee member Manny St. Hilaria of Cumberland, a regular bettor at Twin Rivers, who keeps a barn of “frisky” retired greyhounds on his property, said the plan isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
“It only sounds radical if you don’t know anything about the dogs,” St. Hilaria said. “Without getting into specifics, one of the guys on our committee knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a dog that’s going to win on Saturday. It would be foolish not to take advantage of the situation. We owe it to the taxpayers.”
Neither Gowk nor St. Hilaria would confirm the name of the dog, but a source close to the racetrack believes it to be Blue Note, a greyhound that has placed in seven of its last 20 races, winning three, since moving to Rhode Island from a Florida kennel. Today’s tote board lists Blue Note at 20:1 odds, meaning that if the bet were placed now, the state’s take would be $22 billion.

Jester's holiday

Wednesday is the international day of hoaxes, frauds and practical jokes, better known as April Fools Day. One of the best Web sites of any ilk, the Museum of Hoaxes, chronicles every known prank, deception and flimflam in history and its ranking of “The Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of All Time” is essential reading for fans of the con. Rhody-files will note that ranking No. 97 on the list is “Providence Closes for the Day.”

Carolyn Fox, a disc jockey for WHJY in Providence, Rhode Island, announced in 1986 that the ‘Providence Labor Action Relations Board Committee’ had decided to close the city for the day. She gave out a number for listeners to call for more information. The number was that of a rival station, WPRO-AM. Reportedly hundreds of people called WPRO, as well as City Hall and the police. Even more called into their offices to see if they had to go into work. WHJY management later explained that it had never imagined its joke would have such a dramatic impact on the city.

Given the media’s widespread role in perpetuating hoaxes, you’d think that on April Fools Day the world had been taken over by The Onion. Media organizations were directly responsible for 62 of the 100 all-time hoaxes. The breakdown: Newspapers (29), radio stations (16), magazines (10) and TV (7). The rest of the hoaxes were inventions of corporations (7), the Internet (7), scientists or academics (6) and stunts by professional pranksters or practical jokers (13). A final miscellaneous grouping (5) includes a theater, nonprofit organization, record company, Greek Ministry of Culture and a fake almanac created by satirist Jonathan Swift.

Personal favorites include:

No. 8: The Left-Handed Whopper

1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

No. 41: Dogs to be painted white

1965: Politiken, a Copenhagen newspaper, reported that the Danish parliament had passed a new law requiring all dogs to be painted white. The purpose of this, it explained, was to increase road safety by allowing dogs to be seen more easily at night.

No. 70: One-way highway

1991: The London Times announced that the Department of Transport had finalized a plan to ease congestion on the M25, the circular highway surrounding London. The capacity of the road would be doubled by making the traffic on both carriageways travel in the same direction. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the traffic would travel clockwise; while on Tuesdays and Thursdays it would travel anti-clockwise. The plan would not operate on weekends … A resident of Swanley, Kent, was quoted as saying, “Villagers use the motorway to make shopping trips to Orpington. On some days this will be a journey of two miles, and on others a journey of 117 miles. The scheme is lunatic.” Thankfully, the scheme existed only in the minds of the writers at the Times.

When was the last time you were taken in by a hoax (or perpetuated one yourself)?

Past is prologue

The spring edition of South County Living magazine focuses on preservation issues in southern Rhode Island in advance of the state Historic Preservation Conference next month at the University of Rhode Island. In South County, preservation is bubbler talk, as much a part of the daily conversation as the weather and the Red Sox. Just in this week’s South County Independent, there is a letter to the editor bemoaning the loss of Anawan Farmhouse and Blacksmith Shop on Boston Neck Road in Narragansett, a story about a pending deal to preserve Carpenter Farm in Perryville and a front-page story on the controversial state Department of Transportation plan to replace the Dillon Rotary in Narragansett (and its landmark Narragansett beer sign).

Rhode Islanders have a reputation as folks who don’t like change but that’s partly because the changes we’ve seen haven’t rocked our boats. McMansion-houses on ecologically fragile coves. Garish skyscrapers blotting out the sun and creating wind tunnels in Providence. Ocean-hugging condos restricting the average Rhode Islander’s constitutional right to public access of the shoreline. Strip malls and big-box stores turning old horse farms into the homogenous asphalt-and-concrete wasteland of Anywhere, USA.
As I wrote in the magazine:

At the forefront of any conversation about preservation is the threat posed by rampant development and the perils of sprawl, especially in South County, which has experienced the most dramatic population growth in the state in recent years. Preservationists, like environmentalists, are seen by some as obstructionists to growth and economic development. Occasionally they can stop a project in its tracks.
For their part, developers have begun co-opting the language of preservationists. On Old North Road in Kingston, on the outskirts of the URI campus and conference site, a swath of trees has been cleared to make room for a development called Kingston Preserve. A couple of miles away, off Slocum Road, there is a new development called The Preserve at the Oaks, a neighborhood created by chopping down most of the oaks, with an asphalt road leading through the development called Preservation Drive.

The good news is that few states have a better record than Rhode Island when it comes to preserving its architecture and cultural landscapes. Of course, new development is essential to every community, but let’s put an end to the cookie-cutter quick-buck approach to building and insist on projects that embody creativity and sensitivity to the surrounding environment. So stores and apartments in Westerly pay homage to the town’s granite-carved legacy and complement the natural features of the Pawcatuck River. Construction in North Kingstown should acknowledge the vitality of a region once dominated by mill villages. The casual beach community of Narragansett benefits when projects are built on a small scale and don't try to replicate Florida’s Gold Coast.

Because building without vision and foresight isn’t construction. It’s destruction in disguise.

What special places would you like to see preserved in Rhode Island?

Mirthful mondegreens

A green spirit strikes today, heralding spring and St. Patrick’s Day. This week’s blog is devoted to the art of the mondegreen, a product of faulty hearing and our human nature to sing the wrong lyrics for years, even when they don’t make any sense. The term was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in a November 1954 issue of Harper’s Magazine, when she described mishearing the final line of the first stanza from the 17th-century Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Murray.” The stanza goes as follows:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And laid him on the green.

But whenever Wright heard the song, it sounded like:

They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Wright recognized that hers was a common failing, falling into a category of folk custom that had no name. So she dubbed them mondegreens, and a new form of misheard-lyric poetry emerged. As a longtime, chronic mondegreener, I’ve butchered my fair share of songs. Among them:

In Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance,” there’s a line: “When some cold tomorrow finds you, when some sad old dream reminds you,” that I always sang “…when some sad old me reminds you.”

When belting out the Ike Turner part in “Proud Mary,” I used to sing “pumped a lot of Tang down in New Orleans,” instead of “pumped a lot of tane down in New Orleans,” until I realized he meant pumping gas (octane) and not that sweet orange-powdered astronaut drink.

My Rhode Island-centric nature caught up to me when the Red Hot Chili Peppers released “Scar Tissue.” The song used to blare on the speakers at the old Fitness Depot in Plymouth, N.H., where I worked out for years. I kept hearing the phrase, “Young Pawtucket girl in a push-up bra…” Why would the Chili Peppers be singing about a young Pawtucket girl, I wondered to the point of obsession. Until I finally bought the CD and read the lyrics, when it turned out that they were actually singing about a “Young Kentucky girl in a push-up bra,” which made a lot more sense.

What song lyrics have you misheard over the years?

Spring Fever

I’m grabbing at spring. A few weeks ago, I lingered in bed, listening to the first mourning dove of 2009 calling eerily in the pre-dawn light. A couple of weeks later, I watched the first robin drop into my yard, poking under the snow and white shell, looking for frozen worms in the unthawed earth. I’ve seen migratory sea birds coming and going in the cove, resting before resuming their long journeys. I even keep a spring checklist. Pitchers and catchers report to Florida. Check. Move clocks forward to save evening daylight. Check. Hear the first peepers of spring...hello? Are you out there?

A few weeks ago I attended the R.I. Spring Flower and Garden Show, which forces the season to bloom in the dank cave of the R.I. Convention Center. For gardeners and nature lovers, the flower show is a lift-your-spirits kind of activity, despite the jostling crowds and hawking vendors. While the ice and slush outside make a mess of things, indoors spring lives in a dimension of familiar sights, sounds, smells and textures. Mary Chace, a volunteer for the R.I. Wild Plant Society, said the joy of the flower show is “finally seeing some color after seeing no color or being tired of shoveling the white color.”

Flower shows are mid-to-late-winter rituals in northern climes, usually coming about six weeks after the polar plunges of early winter on the non-traditional seasonal calendar of activities for sun-deprived northerners. First, we jump into the frigid ocean to face winter and the coming year. Then, we duck inside to sniff the perfume and remind ourselves that spring will come eventually. It always has. It always will. Right? The Green Man delivers. He's not as punctual as Father Christmas, but Mother Nature will shove him out the door one of these days.

The good news is Rhode Island got one right for once. Because this year, all across the northern U.S., from Boston to Bangor, Cleveland to Allentown, flower shows have been pruned from the winter calendar, including the New England Flower Show. A regional tradition and the nation’s most famous outside of Philadelphia, the New England Flower Show was started in 1929 and survived even the Great Depression. And it wasn't the only one to be weed-whacked. The Greater New York Orchid Society canceled its annual exhibition and longtime flower shows in Seattle and San Francisco are also in peril. In a quote from a New York Times article on the death of flower shows nationally, Duane Kelly, founder of the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, spoke of the event's appeal.

Gardening is extremely visceral. You want to smell, you want to see firsthand, you want to touch. The first time I went to the Philadelphia and Boston shows, I was transported from the end of winter to the middle of May or June. It was a very heady experience.

In a column I wrote for this week’s newspaper, I spoke of the loss of a famous Galway bookstore in the same way. Ultimately, it is the loss of visceral experience, as much as anything, that makes the digital era so difficult for some of us to embrace. So spare the flowers, Rhode Island. New England winters are made bearable by omens of spring, and Thoreau reminds us that “we need the tonic of wildness.” Or in the case of frozen February, we’ll settle for the tonic of the illusion of wildness, thorns and all.

What is your favorite sign of spring?