The Delaware Destroyer

The American political landscape is rife with the caricatured corpses of presidents and vice-presidents. Cartoonists and comic impersonators exploit their physical characteristics, but each politician also exhibits certain behavioral ticks that, fairly or not, will define him for posterity. So Nixon, waving his arms and telling the country “I am not a crook,” only emphasized to most Americans that he was. Ford was a klutz (even though he had been an elite athlete in his day…that’s what happens when you hit a few spectators with stray tee shots, stumble down the steps from an airplane to the tarmac and start your presidency at about the same time that Chevy Chase begins his television career). Carter had lust in his heart and ran away from killer rabbits. Reagan forgot everything, including the fact that a little thing called “Iran/Contra” was being run out of a walk-in closet just a few steps away from the Oval Office. Bush Sr. never had “the vision thing.” Clinton is remembered for his predilection for late-night cheeseburgers and cigar innuendo. Gore was the stiff geek who thought he was smarter than everybody else, probably because he invented the Internet. Bush Jr. was lambasted for his Dubya-isms (“I think we can all agree, the past is over.”) and his premature flight suit fashion statement. Cheney was the misanthropic evil genius pulling puppet strings from a series of hidden bunkers. And, according to the Daily Beast, “the prevailing caricatures of Obama are solidly fixed. To the right he is a socialist, to the left a middling messiah.”

And then there’s “Botch It” Biden. As in, give Joe a simple task, he’ll botch it; let Joe speak on behalf of the administration, he’ll botch it. Generally thought of as a genial and caring guy, Biden is equally known for his gaffes, thanks in no small part to Jason Sudeikis’ sharp portrayal of the veep on “SNL.” So last week, when Biden’s publicists sent out a press release announcing that he would be visiting “Road Island” to campaign for U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at the “Built More,” the only real surprise was that Sheldon’s last name wasn’t spelled “White House.”

Now, we know Biden doesn’t write his own press releases. No doubt his staff relied a bit too heavily on Spellcheck to produce the boilerplate. (We learned firsthand the dangers of Spellcheck long ago when one of our first editions of the software consistently replaced every reference to the word “black” with the phrase, “African American,” inspiring some truly imaginative news copy.) But the Biden mistake virus is apparently so infectious it has spread throughout his entire entourage. Just for punishment, we should make the Biden contingent come back to Rhode Island and visit the villages of Annawamscutt, Cocumscussoc and Quonochontaug while they’re here.

“Road Island” is, of course, particularly ironic, given the decrepit state of the roads in these parts. Suppose it could have been worse: i.e. “Rode Island,” as in “he rode shotgun; I rode island;” or, “Rowed Island” as an appellation for The Dinghy State. But here’s hoping Biden, who hails from the second-smallest state in the union, enjoyed his time in Little Rhody. For our part, two consecutive weeks of Delaware – or maybe we should say Della Where? – intrusions to this blog are enough to hold us for awhile. But we don’t want to leave before addressing the commenter, “Misplaced Floridian,” who posted to the WPRI blog about the “Road Island” typo:

Let’s face it…with only two electoral votes, and certain Democrat votes at that, RI isn’t worth spell checking. They’ll never misspell Florida, California, Texas or any other state that matters.

Couple o’ things “Misplaced”: First, as Rhode Islanders, we love our irrelevance. We revel in our irrelevance. Our irrelevance feeds our collective irreverence. So keep the irrelevance coming and let the Other 49 wallow in the delusion that they matter. Second, wasn’t Florida, a “state that matters,” single-handedly responsible for botching the 2000 presidential election after designing ballots with chads hanging, dangling, pregnant, pimpled and dimpled, which confused elderly Jewish residents into voting for Pat Buchanan over Al Gore, thereby setting into motion the reality of our national election being hijacked by nine people who go to work everyday wearing black robes, and politicizing the institution of the Supreme Court to such an extent that it lost all credibility with roughly half of the American populace?

Sheesh. Even Biden couldn’t botch things that badly.

This week’s question: Where in “Road Island” should we send Joe By Done?

Some possibilities:
Pee Pack
Riz Dee
Coven Tree
Egg Sitter
Roger Will Yum Spark Sue

Rhodyware? Delarhode?

There’s been a new development in the frequent media use of “the size of Rhode Island” as a unit of measurement. Lately, some reporters have done the math and found a way to lump us in with Delaware in their descriptions of territory. No offense to Delaware, but Rhody size is already watered down (depending on whether you count Narragansett Bay or not). We don’t need some mid-Atlantic poser honing in on our folksy demarcations.

We first noticed this in a recent article in The New York Times, perhaps the most prolific employers of “size of Rhode Island” references of any media making noise anywhere these days. The article by Timothy Williams, headlined “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation,” refers to a Wyoming reservation named Wind River:

A rambling stretch of scrub in central of Wyoming the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, Wind River has a crime rate five to seven times the national average and a long history of ghastly homicides.

About a week later, we read the following headline in a Web site touting “Solar Reviews”: “Solar Turbines: To Power New York with Solar, We Only Need an Area the Size of Delaware and Rhode Island?”

Yes, that’s exactly what Rhode Island aspires to be…New York’s wind farm.

Doing a little digging, we discovered this nugget going back to last summer in the Science Daily, under the headline, “Gulf of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ could be Biggest Ever”:

Researchers from Texas A&M University have returned from a trip to examine the scope and size of this year’s “dead zone” and have measured it currently to be about 3,300 square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but some researchers anticipate it being much larger.

The question is: How much larger? New Jersey larger? Vermont larger? Large enough to eliminate Rhode Island from the calculation entirely? This is one of the problems with global warming – for every Rhody-sized chunk of floating ice it creates, it turns the Rhody-sized dead zones and deserts into something more closely resembling Connecticut.

What would you like to see measured in Rhode Islands?

Valentine's Blush

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Wiener Love

A little blog-on-blog love today, as Half Shell gives props to Fork in the Rhode, an Ocean State food blog, for its annual ranking of the top 10 New York System Wieners in Rhode Island.

Nice to see they included Rod’s Grill, my wiener local, in Warren. No surprise that the West Warwick wiener joints of Ferrucci’s Original New York System and Nick’s New York System made the list, along with the Providence classic, Olneyville N.Y. System. Three Warwick locales are featured, including perennial favorites Cosmic Steak, Pizza & Wieners, along with Sam’s New York System and Timmy’s Restaurant. The Cranston standby Wein-O-Rama also returned to the top 10, which this year extended a long arm to Ben’s Chili Dogs of Newport and Santoro’s Pizza of Coventry.

Fork in the Rhode’s RhodeCrew and 48 other judges visited 50 wiener joints around the state to make their selections. All wieners were ordered “all the way,” as they should be, (meaning dressed with meat sauce, chopped onion, mustard and celery salt). Each individual wiener was scored based on the following categories: Appearance, Steamed Bun, Wiener Texture, Meat Sauce, Onions and the vampiric-sounding Overall One-Bite Taste.

South County was shut out, even though locals have plenty of wiener options. On the other side of the parking lot from the Independent offices, Jessica’s Quick Rick’s serves them, while just down the road Kingston Pizza (the long-ago Anton’s on the back side of the Peace Dale Flats rotary) advertises “WILD WIENER WEDNESDAYS!” Even the University of Rhode Island is well-stocked, wiener-wise, with a handful of establishments in the Kingston Emporium offering them. Last week, prior to an interview at URI Theatre, I stopped in at Albie’s Place as a young man next to me asked for “nine wieners all the way.” The cook didn’t even blink at the request.

Fork in the Rhode, founded by bloggers David Newell, Scott Friedman and David Tagliatela, was created to cultivate a greater appreciation for Rhody’s unique cuisine (most of which involves wieners, clams, coffee, fried dough or some combination) and ordinary places (diners, pubs, greasy spoons, clam shacks, grinder joints, pizza houses and the like) in which you can partake in the Rhodyliciousness of it all – the dives and drive-ins and stay-a-long-times that are a staple of the Rhody gastronomic landscape. It’s a worthy quest. Here’s hoping Fork will one day consider Half Shell as a wiener judge. We would be humbled and honored to serve. All we ask is a coffee milk chaser to go.

Where can you find the best wieners in Rhode Island?

Howdy Doody Time Warp

While talking with Rhode Island marionette artist extraordinaire Dan Butterworth last week, I was reminded of an odd, only-in-Rhode Island conversation I had more than a decade ago during a visit to Westerly.

Sparking the memory, the puppet master from Pascoag related a story about Howdy Doody, America’s first puppet star. The unlikely TV celebrity got his start in 1947 on a show produced at NBC at Rockefeller Center. The people who first worked on the show didn’t really know puppeteering and didn’t expect the series to be such a hit. When it became a success, Howdy went Hollywood, where producers hired professional manipulators, aiming for a slicker, more polished puppet. According to Butterworth:

They quickly found out that the people didn’t want that. That wasn’t Howdy Doody. So in the parlance of puppetry, “Howdy Doodying” means to just bang the puppet around.

Flashback to Westerly, circa 1999. I was walking by The Washington Trust building downtown, near the Pawcatuck River, when a man nearby pointed to the bank and said:

“Howdy Doody’s trapped in there.”
I looked at him blankly.
“You know the puppet? Howdy Doody?”
I told him I had heard of him.
“They’ve got him in a bank vault in there. He’s being held for safe keeping until they can settle a lawsuit.”
“Howdy Doody?”
“The original Howdy Doody. He’s been stuck in a bank vault in Westerly for over a year now.”

As it turns out, the stranger was telling the truth. Howdy Doody spent more than a year of incarceration in a Westerly bank vault, the victim of a custody dispute. After the death of Buffalo Bob Smith, who hosted the show, providing Howdy’s original voice, a legal battle erupted between the heirs of Smith and Rufus Rose, one of the original puppeteers, and a museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, to which Howdy Doody had been bequeathed. The puppet’s saga made headlines around the world. One of the better ones was “Original Howdy in Deep Doody.”

During one day of the deposition, a puppetmaker named Alan Semok, who had worked on the first Howdy marionette, was asked to unseal a trap door on the back of the puppet’s head. According to Wikipedia:

Velma Dawson, the puppet’s original builder, who was 88 years of age at the time of the deposition, was present and given the opportunity to examine the inside of the head in an effort to verify that the puppet in question was the original that she created. Despite 50 years of numerous repairs, repaints, and replaced body parts, Dawson eventually declared the head of the puppet to be the one she originally made in 1947. The Detroit Institute [of] Arts, which has one of the largest collections of historically significant puppets in North America, ultimately prevailed in the case and now has custody of the original Howdy.

Back when I was in college, a satirical, LA-based TV show called “Fridays” used to spoof Howdy Doody. It featured a voiceover by Larry David (of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame). Howdy Doody, never actually seen on camera, was presented from the camera’s point of view as the stereotypical Hollywood celebrity, always being fawned over wherever he goes. In the inaugural sketch, David plays a plastic surgeon who agrees to give a patient (Bruce Mahler) the face of celebrity – turning him into Howdy Doody. Next we see scenes from Howdy’s viewpoint as he enters various locations in his distinctive, staggering, herky-jerky style, while David would be heard fawning: “Good morning, Mr. Doody. How are you, Mr. Doody. Nice to see you, Mr. Doody.” Great stuff from a sketch comedy series that is severely underrated in the annals of TV history. (The same folks did a brilliant breaking news segment on the brutal practice of “Muppet bashing” on southern California beaches. So they had the puppet demographic covered.)

This week’s question: What was the strangest Rhode Island court case?

White Out

Apparently, reports of the death of Old Man Winter were greatly exaggerated. Last Thursday’s overnight snowfall followed by Saturday’s all-day white-out left New Englanders with the sense that the universe had righted itself again – a feeling accentuated by yesterday’s victory/escape by the New England Patriots over the Baltimore Ravens sending the home team back to the Super Bowl for the fifth time during the Belichick/Brady era.

A weekend of bunkering, shoveling, football and stew cooking – Narragansett porter turns out to be a good water substitute when simmering in combination with pork, potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic – felt like Rhode Island in January again. So maybe those fat backyard squirrels (referenced in a previous blog) were onto something after all. (One is pictured here indulging in a bit of leftover fruit from the compost pile at my parents’ property in Barrington, courtesy of a photo taken pre-snowstorm from my sister, Kai, visiting from England.)

For nature lovers, one of the signature signs of a Rhode Island January is the sighting of snowy owls. According to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s “bird alert,” one has been spotted for the past couple of weeks at Island Rocks off Sachuest Point in Middletown. The owls nest in the Arctic tundra but winter south and have been reported in Rhode Island with regularity in recent years. They primarily feed off lemmings up north but will make do with any small rodents, birds, rabbits, fish or carrion in the Ocean State (in owl circles, Rhody road kill is known as New York System Carrion). Adult males are virtually pure white, which combined with their large size and hunting skill, gives the birds a mythic reputation.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a story on America’s “unusual spike” in snowy owl sightings. According to Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Mont.:

One showed up at the airport in Hawaii, and they shot it. It’s the first ever in Hawaii and they shot it!

As reported by Jim Robbins: “The owl was killed on Thanksgiving by federal officials who feared that the bird would interfere with landings and takeoffs.” A valid concern, perhaps, although Boston’s Logan Airport, which attracts large numbers of snowy owls “because the airfield looks like tundra,” traps and removes them – 21 so far this year, closing in on the record of 43 in 1986.

Why so many are showing up all of a sudden remains a mystery. But with a plethora of white owls suddenly in our midst, coupled with last year’s sighting of a white hart in Dartmoor, England, isn’t it about time we saw a white lobster pop up in Narragansett Bay? (For the record, by “white lobster” we mean the albino crustacean. White lobster is also the term used in Central American fishing villages to describe the bounty of discarded cocaine from drug dealers fleeing federal agents that washes ashore or circulates in local fishing grounds, inspiring a trade that turns thatched hut communities into islands of mansions and satellite dishes.)

What is your most memorable animal encounter in Rhode Island?

Squeezebox Idol

Among the many classic Gary Larson cartoons that form “The Far Side” oeuvre was a split-panel showing on one side an escalator of the dead going to heaven with St. Peter at the top handing out harps to the incoming angels while below on the down escalator the devil greets rookie demons with accordions.

The much-maligned squeezebox, although a staple of folk music around the world, barely ranks above the kazoo in the minds of many. But a Rhode Island man may change all of that.

Cory Pesaturo, a 23-year-old Cumberland native, recently won the World Digital Accordion Championship in New Zealand. Like breaking the 4-minute mile or landing on the moon, he has done for mankind what was once considered impossible: Making the accordion cool. (In fact, he does for the accordion what Hawaiian Jake Shimabukuro does for the ukulele.)

The guess here is that Pesaturo is already on the short list for the newly created R.I. Music Hall of Fame, which inducts its first class next month. The inaugural roster includes Roomful of Blues and John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band, along with Dave McKenna, Eileen Farrell, Oliver Shaw, Ken Lyon, Anders & Poncia and Gerry Granahan.

I’ve told my Beaver Brown story before, but it’s worth repeating here. Once, when I was on a bus in Australia’s Outback, the driver played the band’s "Eddie & The Cruisers" soundtrack album (featuring “On the Dark Side”) over and over. Eventually I worked my way up to the front of the bus and casually mentioned that it was nice to hear a Rhode Island band so far from home. The driver asked what I meant by that.
“Beaver Brown. They’re a Rhode Island band.”
“Sorry, mate. That’s an Aussie band.”
I started arguing with him, but he got more animated, no doubt thinking yet another stupid septic (rhyming slang: septic tank = Yank) was trying to take credit away from a hardworking, blue-collar Oz band. At that point it occurred to me that I was in the middle of a vast wasteland of red clay and scraggly bush, and getting in a heated argument with the bus driver was probably not the best use of my time.
“How long to Darwin,” I asked.
“About 14 hours.”
“Right. Aussie band it is, then.”

This week’s question: What is Rhode Island’s signature instrument?

Rhode Sized
Kudos to Betty Cotter, managing editor of Independent Newspapers, for catching the following size-of-Rhode Island reference in a recent edition of The New York Times. The item appeared in the second paragraph of a story about New Year’s Day violence between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Moldova, which just celebrated 20 years of independence.

Russia has roughly 1,100 troops based in the separatist enclave of Transnistria, a ribbon of territory roughly the size of Rhode Island that has large ethnic Russian and Ukrainian populations.