Brad and Billy's

It looked like the world was coming to an end yesterday at the Rhode Island Country Club in Barrington, where the sky and ocean turned a dozen different shades between blasts of sunshine and whirling dervish clouds whipping through like the Tasmanian Devil. Splintered rays turned the fairways leprechaun green until thunderstorms flooded them to the point where you needed an oar, not a pitching wedge. Lightning came from seemingly everywhere, flung like party favors from Norse Gods on a bender. Black clouds pounded the course with golf ball-sized hail. Then it was done, and the site of the CVS Caremark Charity Classic - known to all Rhode Islanders as "Brad and Billy's tourney" for its founders, childhood friends and PGA pros Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade - shimmered in streaks of blue, green and gold.

Left Coast golfer Paul Goydos, inexperienced with New England weather, looked shaken, saying, "We don't have that in California." (True. You only have earthquakes, mudslides and wildfires the size of Rhode Island.) But the weather was an afterthought for the decade-old event that has brought the likes of Arnold Palmer and Gary Player to the bandbox Donald Ross course in Barrington. The tournament has raised more than $10 million for children's charities in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts.

Andrade, from Bristol, and Faxon, from Barrington, have been around the world, but they've never really left. They're with us, whether walking outside to pick up the morning ProJo, cheering for the Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots and Bruins, complaining about the road construction on I-95, or ending a long, hot day on the course with a cold 'Gansett. As global ambassadors for Little Rhody, they have no peer. (Apologies to James Woods, G.I. Joe, the Farrelly brothers and Mr. Potato Head.)

Rant of the Week: Crossing Main

Those bright orange-red "crosswalk flags" haven't worked. Nor have the crosswalks themselves, painted in large white stripes, big enough for a squash court. Signs urging drivers to yield to foot traffic? Who drives slow enough to read them? In the village of Wakefield, don't bother trying to walk across Main Street. Too many cars trying to break the sound barrier. Too many drivers too busy talking on their cell phones to notice what's in front of them. Too many people who don't want to be inconvenienced into obeying the law if it means having to put their foot on the brake and wait five seconds for anyone. Town officials even had to install an extra traffic light where the bike path crosses the road, to save cyclists from getting killed. You'd have better luck as a squirrel chasing a nut from the northbound to the southbound lanes of I-95 than you would making the trip from All That Matters to Brickley's Ice Cream shop. One day last week I stood at the crosswalk near Town Meats and the Wakefield Fish Market and counted how many cars wouldn't let me pass: 17. Finally a guy in a Jeep rolled to a stop. The car coming from the other direction was going to blow through anyway, but its driver made the last-second decision to come to a screeching, rubber-scorching halt a few feet away from me. Jeep Guy rolled down his window and yelled out: "They'd just as soon kill ya." Sit on a bench and watch for a half-hour. You'll see these asphalt cowboys who don't stop for people with canes, in wheelchairs, on crutches. Forget the village stroll. Main Street's gone NASCAR.

Blue plate special

Many Rhode Islanders suffer from obsessive, compulsive license plate disorder. Symptoms include: 1) A belief that status in this state hinges, not on the kind of car you drive, but on having the lowest possible number on the license plate hanging under it. 2) A belief that the world wants to know that you are the RI-BADBOY or RI-HOTCHIK. 3) A belief that your closest relative didn't truly love you if he/she didn't bequeath the rights to their plate number or vanity message.

Our license plate angst is historic. The state's official colors are blue and white, but from 1972 to 1980 Rhody's license plate colors were black and white - because most of the state legislators were Providence College men's basketball fans. But things are better now. From a graphic design standpoint, few states can match the blue wave on the current edition of the Rhody plate. And in recent years, legislators have offered up the state plate to local charities. The R.I. Community Food Bank raised money with a Mr. Potato Head license plate. Save the Bay followed up with an environmentally friendly Osprey plate. Now lawmakers have introduced legislation allowing the state Division of Motor Vehicles to issue a special license plate to benefit Providence WaterFire. An extra $40 surcharge would support the popular bonfire-world music carnival, with half the money going to the state's general fund and the other half to WaterFire organizers.

The mottoes may change (just as "Discover Rhode Island" gave way to "The Ocean State") but the mores never will. How does a state solve a $434 million budget deficit? One license plate at a time.

Goodnight and farewell

There are better things in the world to do on weekends than watch television. But if you found yourself in front of the idiot box on Sunday mornings or Saturday afternoons, Tim Russert and Jim McKay made sure that you weren't wasting your time. In a profession overpopulated with talking heads, white noise, agenda journalism and baa blah blog sheep, both broadcasters, who died within days of one another, brought civility, fairness and just the right touch of poetry or storytelling to their reporting.

Russert was one of the best interviewers in the business, tough and tenacious, but nonpartisan and never malicious. He did what so many journalists don't: held people accountable for their words by digging up past quotes and pointing out contradictions and hypocrisy in their statements. The fact that he was an unabashed blue-collar Buffalo guy made Americans everywhere, including here in perpetually irrelevant Rhode Island, feel that their voices mattered as much as the power elite in Washington.

McKay, wearing that horrid trademark ABC yellow jacket, elevated sports journalism to the level of news, making it a vital part of our daily cultural discussion. As host of ABC's Wide World of Sports, and the network's coverage of the Olympics, he guided Americans through our growing pains with sports not named baseball, football, basketball and hockey. I was a 10-year-old when Munich happened, and was riveted to McKay throughout those Games. His remarkable ability to convey humanity yet maintain dignity and professionalism while describing horrifying acts of terrorism left an indelible impression, and had a calming influence, in the same way that Walter Cronkite's teary reporting of the JFK assassination is recalled by a slightly older generation.

With the passing of Russert and McKay, Americans have lost more than a couple of great journalists and good men. We've lost a reason to tune in on Sunday mornings and Saturday afternoons.

Green Week: Cat people

Reports of big cats roaming the wilds of southwestern Rhode Island are nothing new. During the past decade, folks in rural South County have called the Independent with sightings of mountain lions in their backyards. They're convinced, and they're vocal, but so far they don't have proof in the form of photographs, video or other viable evidence (although one cougar watcher claims to have a skull, scat and pictures of tracks to indicate that panthers prowl in these parts). Arguments against the big cats: They don't show up as roadkill and, strangely, they don't seem to go on cat-like killing sprees, terrorizing domestic animals or wildlife. Conspiracy theorists believe that state environmental management officials know the cats are here in limited numbers. They point to the fact that for years officials were reluctant to admit that black bears were back, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. (All it took to silence the doubters was for one bear to go public a couple of weeks ago, eluding officials from Narragansett to North Kingstown, turning all of Rhode Island into bear paparazzi. But "Fluffy" the bear, like the Warwick manatee from two summers ago, wanted no part of the publicity, and high-tailed it to Connecticut.) We know that mountain lions once hunted here, and they are increasing their range throughout the U.S. With the emphasis on cleaning up the environment over the past few decades, preserving wilderness and preventing toxic chemicals and pesticides from polluting air, water and soil, wildlife has made a comeback, even in the second-most-densely populated state in the union. Rhody is exploding in deer (a.k.a. big cat food) and a state that was once logged to near baldness is now more than two-thirds forested (a.k.a. cougar cover). So maybe it's not a matter of if but when for the first documented case of the Eastern puma returning to Rhode Island. After all, the only thing that matters to all animals except humans is habitat, not borders.

Green Week: Beetlemania

If someone made a bug's life version of "CSI," the American burying beetle would star as the forensic investigator. Say a mouse dies on Block Island. Within an hour, the beetle would be on the case. The only difference between the TV detectives and the Block Island bug is that once the beetle finds the corpse, the show is over and dinner is served. The insect can smell a dead mouse from two miles away. Carrion eaters aren't the most loveable creatures on Earth, but American burying beetles are on the endangered species list, and Block Island is the extent of their range east of the Mississippi, so in one way or another they are the envy of almost every other species of Rhode Islander.

The Roger Williams Park Zoo, as part of its beetle conservation program, breeds them in captivity, monitors them in the wild and even transplants some of the Block Islanders to Nantucket. Zookeeper Lou Perrotti, speaking to me a few years back, admitted that most people think the beetle's stalk-strip-secrete-and-devour approach to dead animals sounds more like a horror show than fine dining, and are skeptical that they're worth saving. "The usual response is, 'You're doing what? Shouldn't you be getting rid of these things?'" Sharon Begley's column in last week's Newsweek quotes Quentin Wheeler, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, praising the bug: "Think of the potential if we could mimic that for finding earthquake victims." According to Perrotti, saving, not squashing, the beetle is one of those big-picture deals. "If there were no more insects then life on this planet, including us, wouldn't last a month."

Green Week: Making the cut

The endangered species list contains 1,985 species of plants and animals recorded as either "endangered" (next stop: oblivion) or "threatened" (hanging out at the rest area just before the exit). Most of the media attention and charity love goes to totemic animals like wolves, whales and polar bears or greeting card/desk calendar models like the Karner blue butterfly. Few people are clamoring to "Save the Dung Beetles." The very idea of saving species has critics among the top end of the predator food chain, who argue that millions of species have been wiped out since the planet first exploded with life. That's true, of course, with the one major distinction being that those were acts of nature and the cosmos, not the conscious behavior of a single species that can't be sure of which links in the environmental chain are essential for its own existence.

Sixteen Rhode Island species are listed on the Endangered Species Act. Some are residents (the American burying beetle), others visit annually (a variety of whales and sea turtles), while a few make rare or rumored appearances - the wildlife equivalent of celebrity sightings (Eastern puma). Up until March 28, the gray wolf was on the list. In Wyoming (the state out West not the village in southwestern Rhode Island), a few days after the wolf came off the list, 16 were shot dead, including a limping canine known to locals as "Hoppy." So now that wolves are no longer endangered, they're being slaughtered in mass numbers. Memo to other species: Do not leave the list. Thriving can get you killed.