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?

Road Island

First, apologies for the late blog. Flu, fever and a wild Monday snowstorm conspired to send me into a state of delirium. (Even managed to lose my cell phone, despite spending most of the past 48 hours in bed or on the couch.) When your body is achy, and you have a one-hour commute, you tend to feel every pothole, so it’s just bad luck (and bad weather) that this is the worst season for potholes in Rhode Island in years. On Stony Fort Road in Kingston, I struck potholes deep enough and frost heaves high enough to challenge the topographical maps that suggest Rhode Island is a state without canyons and mountains.

But the sorry state of the road in Rhode Island isn’t limited to torn-up asphalt. Our bridges are among the worst maintained in the nation and trying to park in places like Newport and Providence may soon take over from standing in line at the DMV as the most frustrating quintessential R.I. experience. The parking garage at the Providence Place Mall - an existential concrete void so lacking in common sense that a group of Providence artists actually lived in it for more than a year without anybody noticing - is the physical manifestation of Sartre’s “No Exit.” Closer to home, the chaotic comings-and-goings at the parking lot contained within Belmont Shoppers Park in Wakefield seems purposefully designed for accidents, sending pedestrians, vehicles and shopping carts into a free-wheeling blitzkrieg of human Frogger.

This week’s question, for those of you who only visit online: Where is the worst pothole or parking lot in Rhode Island?

Otherwise, this Thursday the Arts & Living section will reveal its new design, a more contemporary look with the added benefit of creating more editorial space. For those of you who get the paper: What do you like or dislike about the new Arts & Living section?

Oscars edition

Taking a cue from our music columnist, Dylan Sevey, who gives his Grammy wrap-up in this Thursday’s edition of The Independent, I decided to devote today’s blog to random observations about last night’s Oscars. With two Rhody-connected actors up for awards (Viola Davis for Best Supporting Actress in “Doubt” and Richard Jenkins for Best Actor in “The Visitor”) and former Rhode Island School of Design student Gus Van Sant a Best Director nominee for “Milk,” this year’s Hollywood love-fest had an Ocean State tint. And since I skipped Riverside’s best Oscar party, held annually at the home of longtime friends Tom, Liz and Samantha Viall, I dealt with my guilt the only way I know how, by keeping a notebook going:

It all begins with the fawning sycophants with microphones on the red carpet asking insipid questions to shell-shocked celebrities. The red carpet is like a NASCAR track. People watch for the crash (whether by fashion or interview) more than the race.

Davis and Jenkins both get their turn in the red carpet spotlight but are victimized by dim-witted queries that produce painfully forced answers. At the tail end of an awkward interview with Jenkins, Robin Roberts finally acknowledges his wife, sputtering: “He’s wonderful to live with, I’m sure.” Off-mike just before a cut to commercial we hear the response: “He is.”

The three most wincing red carpet moments: 3) Mickey Rourke announcing that he had a tuxedo made for his longtime companion and Chihuahua Loki, which passed away six days prior to the Oscars. 2) The look on Marisa Tomei’s face when the interviewer said: “Mickey Rourke says he likes seeing you with your clothes off but I love seeing you with your clothes on.” 1) The following exchange between the microphone-in-a-tux and Anne Hathaway: “What are you wearing tonight that actually belongs to you?” “I actually can’t tell you that. It is a bit too intimate.”

The engaging and likeable Hugh Jackman starts strong and ends up giving the best performance of the night. Not only is he a triple threat as actor-singer-dancer, Jackman seemed at ease in the host gig. While most know him for his role as superhero mutant Wolverine, Jackman is equally adept at drama and comedy. There was no signature moment that defined his night, and he just about disappeared from the stage after his musical montage number, but there has never been an Oscar host that has shown more diversity.

Best opening moment: Jackman wooing Kate Winslet with the phrase, “I would swim a sea of human excrement.”

Thumb’s up to the Oscar nod to our nation’s economic woes. Despite a lavish set that recalled the style of old Hollywood, the high concept for the opening number was a low budget. Jackman deftly played along with the celebration of cardboard glitz and carnival kitsch, culminating in a finale with giant cut-out Oscar figures.

Eight minutes into the show, we had our second standing O. By my count the standing ovations made it to double digits during the evening – at least 10 in all. While I don’t begrudge Hollywood its love-in, the standing O itself has jumped the shark, as anyone who attends plays locally will attest. In fact, I can’t remember the last time a play didn’t get a standing O, which begs the question: Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the standing O? What happens if we actually see something transcendent? Where do we go from there? Pogo O? Stage dive O? Bodysurf O?

What seemed like a good idea in theory – getting five former Oscar winners in a particular category to introduce this year’s nominees – was a little clumsy in practice. For every good moment (Robert De Niro introducing Sean Penn), there were two that made you cringe (including Adrien Brody, who seemed like the kid who crammed for his exam an hour before the test as he stumbled through his tribute to Jenkins). The way all five entered the stage you’d have thought they were competing on a celebrity edition of “The Weakest Link.” Bottom line: It dragged.

Writer’s bias here, but I absolutely loved the Steve Martin-Tina Fey collaboration as co-presenters for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. Tina: “It has been said that to write is to live forever.” Steve: “The man who wrote that is dead.”

Most awkward moment of the night was watching Jennifer Aniston attempt comedy with Jack Black with Brangelina sitting in the front row. The former better half of Brennifer seemed unnerved.

Loved Ben Stiller’s parody of the Joaquin Phoenix Letterman appearance. (If you haven’t seen Joaquin's Andy Kaufmanesque turn, YouTube it.)

By and large, the tributes were good, including Seth Rogan and James Franco’s stoner review (with sidekick cinematographer Jadocs Kaminsky) of 2008 comedies; video montages of love stories and action flicks; and the inventive top hat-and-tails musical medley featuring Jackman, Beyonce and Zac Efron.

The Abbafication of the Earth has reached new levels.

Most self-serving moment: Bill Maher using his role as Best Documentary presenter to complain that nobody watched his.

Biggest tearjerker: Tie: 1) Heath Ledger winning for his remarkable performance as The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” prompting an eloquent tribute from his family as celebrity eyes welled around the room. 2) What the Riverside Oscar party likes to call “the Dead Roll,” reminding us of the Hollywood icons, including Paul Newman, who passed away since the last awards ceremony.

Most exciting moment: The Bollywood-inspired performance of Best Song nominees.

Best acceptance speech: Penn for Best Actor (in “Milk”). He was self-effacing but passionate and eloquent in promoting the cause of gay rights. But his most gracious words were saved for last, when he acknowledged Rourke’s comeback, closing with: “He is my brother.”

What was your favorite Oscar moment?

Presidents Day edition

There has never been a U.S. president from Rhode Island and, while you should never say never, let’s face it, the chances of it happening are slimmer than the odds that people will get tired of these computer thingamabobs and go back to newspapers.

Rhode Island’s irrelevance is such that many presidents don’t even bother to stop by for a wiener and a coffee milk while they’re campaigning. George W. Bush only managed one trip, late in his term, when he flew to the Naval War College in Newport and spoke for 45 minutes. Of course, W had an aversion to Blue States, but Rhode Island’s odd history with presidents goes all the way back to the beginning. In 1789, George Washington, upset that the colony still hadn’t agreed to statehood, made a horseback journey through all of the territories comprising the new union while pointedly omitting Rhode Island from the tour. One year later, he came back for the chowder after Rhode Island became the last of the 13 colonies to ratify the Constitution.

Abe Lincoln, who is trendier than Brangelina all of a sudden after President Barack Obama was sworn in with his Bible and created a Cabinet (not the Rhode Island ice-cream shake kind) based on his “Team of Rivals” concept, visited Little Rhody thrice. The first time, in 1848, he did nothing more than change trains in Providence. But in 1860 Lincoln made two visits, speaking about slavery in February at the old train station in what is now Kennedy Plaza and again in March in Woonsocket. This year, in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth, R.I. Lincoln scholar Frank J. Williams created the Web site “Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial 2009-RI,” which, among other details, chronicles Honest Abe’s Rhody adventures.

George H. W. Bush famously held his R.I. fund-raising dinner at The Rhode Island Shore Dining Hall at Rocky Point Park. The late, lamented amusement park was also the site of the first presidential phone call. Rutherford B. Hayes, enjoying a summer clambake at Rocky Point, got up from a plate of steamers to take the call from Alexander Graham Bell, who was staying in Providence. His famous first words? “Please speak a little more slowly.”

What is your favorite story involving Rhode Island and a U.S. president?