Thanksgiving edition

By tradition, the Norris clan travels to North Portland, Maine, every Thanksgiving, to celebrate with lifelong friends and former Rhode Islanders, the Conforti family. One year, after clearing plates cleaned of turkey, walnut-and-wild rice stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce (both homemade and canned), sweet potato, antipasto, Italian Wedding soup, roasted chestnuts, green beans, carrots, squash, pies of pumpkin, apple, pecan (and occasionally strawberry rhubarb), glasses of red wine and ale, and cups of coffee, my father reached into his pockets, spilling the future of Thanksgiving onto the dining room table.
Pills, in bottles and bowls, tumbled onto the tablecloth. They made small piles of harvest colors – sienna capsules, egg-yellow ovals, oblong blues and breath mint-sized medicine colored orange, white, beige and blue-green.
“This is for my prostate,” Dad said, swallowing three orange ovals. He paused for effect, a twinkle in his eye. “And this is for my colon.” Three big beige capsules disappeared in a mouthful.
Our friend Joe joined in the chant, whenever he heard the appropriate affliction.
“This is for my arthritis.” Three white capsules vanished while Dad reached for something blue.
“This is for my depression.” Something yellow next. “This is for my blood pressure.” Then he held up a pill called ginkgo biloba and tapped his head. “For my memory.”
Fingers plunged into another bowl, grasping a vitamin C and two echinacea capsules.
“For the cold I’m fighting.”
The drug store Thanksgiving lasted as long as the feast.
“This comes from African tree bark,” said Dad, holding up his final pill.
Then Joe: “These use flower pollen from an unpolluted part of Sweden.”

Leading of course to this week’s question: What was your funniest or most memorable Thanksgiving experience?

When Size Meets Universe
Here at Half Shell, we believe in the separation of church and state, but not when it involves the “size of Rhode Island.” The following items referencing the research of Smithsonian astronomer Margaret Geller were plucked from the Web sites The Real Truth, maintained by the Restored Church of God and Watchtower, the online site for Jehovah’s Witnesses. (For those who don’t like proselytizing, we’ll keep the links a mystery. Feel free to Google away to your heart’s content.)

1) Made in the 1980s, the first 3-D visualization of the universe was chosen for the northern sky. Although that survey covered a spectrum of [more than] 500 million light years, Geller likened this panorama to trying to visualize the structure of the continents and the oceans of the earth by examining a map the size of Rhode Island.

2) Interpretations of cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far from definitive – more like trying to picture the whole world from a survey of Rhode Island, USA.

Not for nothin’, but here in the birthplace of G.I. Joe, Dee Dee Myers and religious freedom, the notion of picturing the whole world from the vantage point of Rhode Island doesn’t sound that far-fetched.

Extreme makeover edition

The lively experiment of Blog on the Half Shell continues. While building on our obsession with “size of Rhode Island” references and anything with an Ocean State of mind, we’ll also be asking a question each week. So post a comment and we’ll see if Half Shell can get a half-life…

Budget blues
A friend of mine, a waitress, spent a recent Saturday afternoon waiting for customers.
“You know the worst part,” she asked. “Everybody who walks through the door looks at me, shakes their head and says, ‘It’s the economy, isn’t it?’ Well, you know, maybe it’s just a slow Saturday. We had those when the economy was good, too.”
Point taken, but my friend would be the first to admit that Easy Street is a dead end these days. The same waitresses and bartenders who paid their heating and electric bills by working a double on Saturdays have seen their income cut by half. Shoppers aren’t shopping. Some businesses have closed. And the daily drumbeat of bankruptcies, foreclosures, debts, defaults and layoffs has the sound and fury of a Keith Moon solo.
Everybody I know is cutting back. Clipping coupons. Eating in. Buying only what we absolutely need at the grocery store. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are juggling bills more than ever before, getting by paycheck to paycheck.
Several polls reinforce what we see around us on a daily basis. All of them, from Quinnipiac College to Gallup, indicate that consumers are already implementing huge cutbacks in dining out, entertainment and leisure, heating or cooling their homes, vacations and charitable giving.
For what it’s worth, I began by putting the plastic in solitary confinement, locking up my credit card for good until the debt is paid. I refused to turn on the heat until November and continue to keep it low enough to require fleece and sweatshirts some nights. I shop for groceries judiciously, using only whatever dollars happen to be squirming around in the wallet. I use the weekly Borders coupon to buy a single book at a reduced rate, stockpiling gifts for the holiday season. I eat out socially just once a week (a far cry from my devil-may-care pub-crawling past). I jog more and golf less. I spend one night of the week at the library, where I check out books instead of buying them for myself. I’ve postponed travels and vacations and will be sticking closer to home for the foreseeable future, although I refuse to call it a “staycation.” I have also, I admit, stopped giving as much to non-profits, charitable causes and in-store tip jars. I’m rolling quarters, dimes and nickels again and depositing them in the bank (not quite ready to plunge into the pennies yet). I’m breaking out bottles of red wine that have been sitting in a rack for years. I’ve agreed with my friends to cancel our Christmas gift exchange and just enjoy dinner and a night of board games together instead.

How are you cutting back in these tough economic times?

Post a comment, and maybe we can all figure out how to endure the recession together.

Size of Rhode Island alert
The adventure travel Web site World Hum entices us to visit post-nuclear Chernobyl, where “The flora and fauna in an area the size of Rhode Island are still radioactive…”

Bluest of them all?

Not quite, but based on the recent Presidential Election, Rhode Island is closer to indigo than sky. Rhody ranked third in states showing the greatest margin of victory for President-Elect Obama (28 percent), just behind Hawaii (Obama's native state) and Vermont and just ahead of Massachusetts and New York. By contrast, McCain's largest margin of victory came in Wyoming and Oklahoma, with Utah a solid third and Idaho and Alaska also seeing red. Local Republicans are frustrated by the ritualistic dominance of Dems, but they're at a symbolic disadvantage since the last thing you ever want to see in an Ocean State is a red tide.

Decision '08

Sign of the times: Java giant Starbucks offered free coffee to anyone who votes today, then had to pull the promotion after discovering that the give-away could violate federal election laws. So the company decided to hand out a free "tall brewed coffee" to anyone who walks through the door, voters, non-voters and anarchists alike. The upshot? This morning the lines at any Starbucks are longer than the lines at the polls. My experience voting in Barrington: No line, voted in less than 2 minutes. My experience trying to get coffee in Wakefield: Line out the door into the parking lot with an anticipated 45-minute wait surrounded by people ordering their free tall brewed coffee along with something called a venti double half-caf extra foamy with legs.

Halloween Edition

Only in Rhode Island could two Roto-Rooter plumbers become famous as TV ghost hunters. But Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, who head up The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), are now enjoying their fourth season stalking spirits on the Sci-Fi Channel series, "Ghost Hunters." When moonlighting they trade their plumbers' snakes and Drano for white noise generators, ion generators and thermal imaging cameras to investigate the paranormal around the country. Got ectoplasm?

Ocean State Job Not

The news gets grimmer in Rhode Island, a state that has earned a blue ribbon for black clouds. Yesterday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures that ranked Rhody worst in the nation for joblessness. Unemployment reached 8.8 percent in September, the highest rate in the country. Even worse, the figures were compiled before the recent nationwide financial collapse, indicating that more bad news can be expected next month. The signs are equally gloomy locally. At the Jonnycake Center in Peace Dale, the number of families enrolled in its emergency meals program has already risen from 261 last year to 905 today, a number that is expected to grow to more than 1,000 before year’s end. And the good times keep on rolling here in Phil Gramm’s “mental recession”…

Rhody's rank

Another survey, another reason for Rhode Islanders to cringe. Recently the Yahoo! Finance section reported figures provided by Business Week ranking the states according to their budget shortfalls in tax revenue. The data, based on a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, indicates that Rhode Island has the fifth-worst budget gap in the nation by percentage. Rhody is $430 million in the hole, which represents 13.1 percent of its total budget. The report was completed long before the stock market plunge and financial bailout, factors that will continue to adversely affect federal, state and municipal budgets for months, if not years. Here’s the thumbnail critique:

Rhode Island’s economy has been weakened by its housing market, one of the worst in the nation. Lawmakers are trying to make up for a $430 million shortfall in their budget with proposed cuts to the public college system and aid for municipalities, as well as tighter limits on welfare benefits.

The only four states in worse shape than Rhode Island? California (-$22.2 billion, a budget gap of 22 percent); Arizona (-$2 billion, 19.9 percent); Florida (-$5.1 billion, 19.9 percent); and Nevada (-$1.2 billion, 16 percent).