Hockey Talk

If there was such a thing as a hockey edition of the running feature, “You Know You’re A Rhode Islander When…” it would go something like:

Outside of Bruins-Canadiens, it doesn’t get any better than Mount St. Charles vs. Bishop Hendricken.
If a pond isn’t frozen, you’ll find a tennis court.
When the substitute teacher never showed up, you played eraser hockey with yardsticks in junior high school.
You sat behind the chicken wire at the old Rhode Island Auditorium.
You think “Slapshot” is the funniest movie ever.
You buy your pucks at Manny’s.

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a kid, the Big, Bad Bruins were the most popular sports team in New England. Our hockey roots don’t run as deep as Quebec’s, but only Minnesota and maybe Michigan match this region’s puck-loving intensity in the Star-Spangled 50. So on New Year’s Day, when the Fenway Park diamond went white, and the Boston Bruins beat the Philadelphia Flyers in overtime at the Winter Classic, a lot of Rhode Island was watching. Despite the close score, the game wasn’t a classic, but Mother Nature got the winter part right. It was played on crisp day sandwiched around a weekend of snow. Baseball and hockey, New England’s two most primal passions, morphed together into as pure a celebration of sport I’ve seen around here since Lonnie Paxton made snow angels and Patriots fans spontaneously erupted in synchronized snow-throwing during two of the previous decade’s football-with-a-blizzard-chaser games.

It wasn’t always like this around here. Back in the 1800s, while Canadians were busy refining the sport of hockey, New Englanders were the undisputed masters of a game called ice polo. According to the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (published in 1911):

Ice Polo, a winter sport similar to Ice Hockey, is almost exclusively played in the New England states. A rubber-covered ball is used and the stick is heavier than that used in Ice Hockey. The radical difference between the two games is that, in Ice Polo, there is no strict off-side rule, so that passes and shots at goal may come from any and often the most unexpected direction. Five men constitute a team: a goal-tend, a half-hack, a center and two rushers. The rushers must be rapid skaters, adept in dribbling and passing and good goal shots. The center supports the rushers, passing the ball to them or trying for goal himself. The half-back is the first defense and the goal-tend the last. The rink is 150 feet long.

Rhode Island’s legacy in hockey evolved rapidly. Brown University played the first game of intercollegiate ice hockey in the United States, drubbing Harvard, 6-0 on Jan. 19, 1898. Eighteen natives have gone on to play in the National Hockey League. And for 51 years Providence had a franchise in the American Hockey League called the Reds that played in the raucous old Rhode Island Auditorium. (Some people called it the Rhode Island Arena. Part of the confusion was that the building featured the word “Auditorium” on the marquee and “Arena” on the facade.)

Named after the state bird, the team developed a loyal following. But it wouldn’t be Rhode Island unless there were a few quirks: Outside the state, the team was known and marketed as the Providence Reds. Locally, most folks called the club the Rhode Island Reds. Also, when the team became affiliated with the New York Rangers (perhaps the most despised Bruins rival after the Montreal Canadiens), locals seemed to have no problem rooting for players as Reds then against them as Rangers – at least when they competed against Bobby Orr and the gang about an hour’s drive north.

The Reds are gone now. The modern Bruins have their farm club firmly entrenched in Providence, but the feeling isn’t the same. At the Auditorium, sometimes you couldn’t see the ice by the third period because of all of the cigar and cigarette smoke. And when the building replaced the chicken wire with Plexiglass, if the Reds were losing (which they usually were in those days), fans would start chanting “Bring back the chicken wire!” Ah, old time hockey.

Like most of Rhode Island’s once-great landmarks, the Auditorium was reincarnated into a parking lot. If you’re interested in how the game was played there, check out the DVD “When the Reds Ruled the Roost.” Otherwise, what old Rhode Island landmarks do you miss the most?

Leftovers

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Look closely into the DNA of the average Rhode Islander and you’ll find lottery numbers. Scratch tickets in the Christmas stocking have become such a Rhody tradition that this year the state lottery director felt obligated to issue a public declaration suggesting to parents that giving instant tickets to children as stocking stuffers might not be the best way to ensure that celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas doesn’t turn into enrolling in a 12-step program.

White Christmas, Brown New Year
A rose care product company will pay tribute to the history of the Rose Bowl this Friday with a 32-foot tall, 55-foot long float made up of thousands of dried and live flowers, including four large “floragraphic” images of historic games on the gridiron. One of them will feature Brown University. Rhody’s Ivy League school gets the full rose treatment from Bayer Advanced for the landmark 1916 tilt between Brown and Washington State. That game marked the first time an African-American student, Brown’s Fritz Pollard, played in the Rose Bowl, the oldest of all the college bowl games, which kicks off annually on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Calif., shortly after The Tournament of Roses Parade. Pollard was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005. For the record, Brown lost 14-0.

What Cheer?
A recent National Park Service study of Rhode Island’s Roger Williams Memorial offered little to cheer about. Among the criticisms: There’s no memorial at the memorial. Almost nobody knows where it is and those who do aren’t sure why it’s located on North Main Street. None of the park’s resources have national significance. The place can’t decide whether it wants to be a park or a landmark. There’s trash in the well that may (or may not) indicate the location of the stream where Williams originated his settlement. The state DOT even refused to put up signs for the memorial on the highway, citing the landmark’s insignificance. The lesson? Sometimes you founder when you try to honor a founder.

New Orleans on the Narragansett
Providence is considering adding streetcars to ease congestion and get traffic flowing again in parts of the city. Given Providence’s rich traditions in blues, jazz and dining, some locals already like to think of it as a cold New Orleans. The back-to-the-future tram look could bring us even closer. Providence residents, like those in New Orleans, already adopt a fatalist attitude toward big storms. The Hurricane of ’38 was the Katrina of its day. Locals celebrate bad weather by drinking near the Hurricane Barrier. And while the city may never have a streetcar named Desire, there is an adult entertainment club by that name.

Downsizing
One deeply disturbing but underreported consequence of climate change is the potential extinction of “size of Rhode Island” references. While ice shelves continue to break apart and float off to places like Australia and New Zealand, their remnants fall far short of Rhody length. Consider two of the most recent moving icebergs, variously described as “the length of seven football pitches,” “the length of Beijing’s ‘Bird’s Nest’ Stadium,” “twice the length of Hong Kong island” and “twice the size of New York’s Manhattan island.” Not a single Rhody reference in the bunch. Talk about an inconvenient truth. Not for nothin’ but when the world stops measuring its natural disasters and cataclysms in Rhode Islands, maybe it’s time to dust off those Mayan calendars.

This week’s question: What is your New Year’s tradition, or your favorite New Year’s memory?

Prose and Cons

Maybe it’s just a knee-jerk survival response to being the smallest fish in a big pond, but Rhode Island breeds self-obsession the way Glenn Beck breeds conspiracy theories. Four books have been published in the past four years chronicling the fables, foibles, fallacies and quirky cultural attractions and behaviors found in the Ocean State.

Ryder Windham’s “You Know You’re In Rhode Island When …” and Roberta Mudge Humble’s “The RIght to Crow: A Look at Rhode Island’s Firsts, Bests & Uniques” were published in 2006. Seth Brown’s “Rhode Island Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff” came out in 2007. The latest, “Rhode Island 101: Everything You Wanted to Know About Rhode Island and Were Going to Ask Anyway,” written by Tim Lehnert and published earlier this year, is the best of the bunch.

MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, Inc., chose Rhode Island to launch its 101 Book Series, producing guides to all of the United States compiled and written by local scribes, after a similar venture proved successful with the Canadian provinces.

The most impressive thing about the book is that even lifelong, all-things-Rhody mad residents will learn something new. Small enough to fit into a purse or coat pocket, the volume comprehensively details the state’s oddities and trivial pursuits, while fleshing out the facts with 26 engaging opinion columns by prominent Rhode Islanders.

Anecdotes and tidbits trace Rhode Island’s “mobsters and lobsters” legacy, a sobriquet made popular by Providence Phoenix columnists Phillipe and Jorge (who emerge in the book). There are also stories of mills, mansions, vampires, ghosts, pirates, stuffies, bubblers, dynamites, Plunder Dome, Dollar Bill, the Ancients & Horribles Parade and everything that makes Rhode Island what it is today.

In between, there are lists galore (“Five Quebecois Rhode Islanders,” “Top Five Legendary Weiner Joints”) and carefully selected quotes compiled in a running “They said it” feature. The guest columns are especially enjoyable (among them “Rory Raven’s Top Five Tales of Haunted Rhode Island,” “Ted Widmer’s Five Ways Rhode Island Influenced the United States,” “Robin Kall’s Top Five Rhode Island Reads,” “Tony Petrarca’s Top Five Forecasting Challenges.”)

In sum, it’s a field guide for travelers to the strange ways and byways of Rhode Island and a keepsake for Rhode Islanders who can’t read enough about their home state.

Skeptics Wanted
With so many scandalmongers around, Rhode Island is a haven for skeptics. Thankfully, North Kingstown’s Tom Sgouros is one of them. His “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Rhode Island,” published earlier this year, is billed as “a skeptical look at government, economics and recent history in one lively little state.” Sgouros, an independent journalist and editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, a political newsletter, compiles and expands his columns and writings into a book-length analysis of the state’s financial shenanigans and bad decision-making at the highest (and lowest) levels. In doing so, he debunks conventional wisdom about business as usual (a.k.a. the Rhody follies), pointing out the flaws and hypocrisy in many of the traditional arguments about the ills and problems of the Ocean State. Just an edited glance at the index will let you know that this is not your typically dry white paper:

Beast, Starve the, 147; boogeyman labor, 23; Bruce, Lenny, 135; Gekko, Gordon, 26; I-boondoggle state debt, 15; Jamestown two police cars, 72; lemons market for, 51; lottery, projections, bad, 11; mall not useful investment, 61; music stops eventually, 41; Oedipus, 42; orange drivers, 142; paradise this isn’t, 23; sea bass vs. cod, 141; self-freezing Popsicles, 57.

By taking a closer and more thoughtful look at Rhode Island’s infrastructure, tax collections, debt service, municipal aid practices, police budgets and salaries for white-collar and blue-collar workers, Sgouros describes a state in crisis and how it got there. His insightful skepticism puts him in good company with the dissidents and critics that have helped define this state since it was little more than a humble settlement running uphill from a Providence stream. (Nobody is sure where that stream is today, although some believe its source to be located under the Roger Williams National Memorial on North Main Street, under a well now clogged with litter and crushed beer cans.)

Oceans Three
Three Rhode Islanders collaborated on a new book about a decade-long effort to survey life in the world’s oceans. That volume, “World Ocean Census: A Global Survey of Marine Life,” serves in part as a preview for a final report to be released next year. It’s filled with stunning pictures, including dramatic images of such creatures as the jeweled squid, cownose ray, football fish and Hawaiian monk seal, along with several colorful corals and everything from scallops to sharks. Fans of maritime New England will enjoy scenes ranging from logbooks of whaling expeditions, vintage postcards of beached black fish and finbacks off Cape Cod and a collage of coasters and placemats from old seafood restaurants. Even the names – The Oyster Boat, The Lobster Claw, Anthony’s Fish Grotto – conjure days of platters and bibs in southern New England. My favorite picture in the book is a 1910 postcard of a 270-pound halibut caught at Provincetown, a fish as big as a dune shack that dwarfs the fisherman who caught it. Today Evelyn’s or Flo’s could serve fish ‘n’ chips for a month from a fish like that. Like many white fish, halibut have just about disappeared from the North Atlantic. Go to Jim’s Dock in Jerusalem and take a look at the snapshots on the walls if you want to see the giants that didn’t always get away in the old days.

R.I.P. Myopic
One sad note of prose to add: Myopic Books in Wakefield recently announced that it would close at the end of January. The store, located at 343A Main St., featured an eclectic selection of used books and routinely hosted intriguing solo art exhibitions on site. Owner Kristin Sollenberger said that the Myopic Books on Angell Street in Providence will remain open and that in the meantime all books at the Wakefield location will be 25 percent off. The closing of Myopic, on the heels of the body’s-still-warm loss of Mom and Pop’s on Robinson Street in Wakefield, is just more kindling for the bonfire of lost bookstores in an age of Kindle and iPod Touch.

This week’s question: What is your favorite book that you discovered in a used bookstore?

'Curiouser and curiouser'

Looking Glass Theatre, the longtime Rhode Island children’s theater company, must have fallen down the rabbit hole. One day it was here, applying for state arts grants, performing at local schools. Then suddenly, as Lewis Carroll might have said if he had grown up in Woonsocket, “there they were…gone.”

So maybe Alice doesn’t live here anymore.

If so, that would be a shame. The first time I saw the company, I was a student at the late, lamented West Barrington Elementary School. (Where one brick building once stood now dozens of homes squeeze together in a garish parody of a Hollywood set. Wisteria Lane meets Washington Road.)

A traveling company from Looking Glass performed some of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in the cafeteria-auditorium, where they always sent us for meals, indoor gym class and whenever they wanted to show us movies about the Harlem Globetrotters or the evils of smoking. The story I remember best was “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the one where three men are told that they will meet Death under a tree. They discover gold coins instead and praise their good fortune, but inevitably greed consumes them and the prophecy is fulfilled. It was a transforming experience, opening my eyes to the instant magic of theatrical storytelling. It also served as my introduction to the rich world of Chaucer.

Eleven years later, I was out of college, working as a cub reporter for a weekly newspaper in southern Rhode Island, with Saturdays off. I noticed a small advertisement: Looking Glass was looking for actors for Saturday presentations of an Old Stone Bank - (also late, not as lamented) -sponsored series telling little-known stories of the American Revolution. I was chosen to act in one of the short plays, chronicling the lively narrative of Tempe Wicke, a New Jersey woman who played an important role in the war. My role was a narrow-minded American soldier – somewhat blustery, quick-tempered and chauvinistic, like a cross between Yosemite Sam, Foghorn T. Leghorn and Tom DeLay. Every Saturday, we traveled to two libraries around the state, carting our set, changing into costume and improvising the play a bit to fit the space and keep us sane. It was a chance to act and get paid for it. More importantly, it was an opportunity to explore the quirky communities of my native state as I visited places like Hope and Chepachet for the first time. I don’t remember much about the actual play, except that I got my comeuppance twice a week, and the kids loved it. The run ended, and I haven’t been asked for my autograph since.

At its peak, Looking Glass presented more than 300 performances a year throughout New England. There are Looking Glass Theatres in New York, Chicago, San Diego and Pennsylvania, but apparently Rhode Island is no longer part of Wonderland. Does anyone out there know what happened to the company?

Abbreviation deviation
As one might expect of the smallest state in the nation, Rhody is a place that likes its diminutives. The state’s daily newspaper, The Providence Journal, is known colloquially as the “ProJo,” (PRO-JOE) while Rhode Island College is “RIC” (RICK). The former Providence Civic Center, now the Dunkin’ Donuts Center – home base for “Friartown” and Providence College men’s basketball – is “The Dunk.” The old Ocean State, now the Providence Performing Arts Center, goes by the horrid nickname of “PPAC” (PEE-PACK). It brings to mind the reason the Community College of Rhode Island system changed its name from Rhode Island Junior College. Because too many locals referred to RIJC as “REE-JECK,” which offered the best of both worlds in Rhody slang, combining a memorable diminutive with the hardcore Vo Die-luhn accent.

What is your favorite Rhody diminutive?

Going Rogue

Once upon a time in America, in a galaxy far, far away from the one that inhabits the mind of Sarah Palin, “Going Rogue” meant acting like a Rhode Islander. During Colonial days, Rogues’ Island or Rogues’ Land was the Puritan put-down for Rhode Island. "The fag end of creation" and "the cesspool of New England" said Calvinist Cotton Mather, unable to contain his contempt at the neighboring land of crazed exiles, common crooks, sinning scoundrels and soul-trading ne’er-do-wells.

In short, it was a place where anything goes and everyone kicked out of everywhere else went. Then, like today, folks tolerated each other, but few got along.

Undoubtedly the freest colony in America, and the major source of anarchistic thought and institutions, was little Rhode Island, which originated as a series of more or less anarchic settlements founded by people fleeing from the brutal politico-religious tyranny of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay (who referred to the new territory as “Rogue’s Land”). Unsettled and untouched by the land grants or the Crown, the Rhode Island area provided a haven close to the Massachusetts Bay settlement. (Source: “The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in America,” by Murray N. Rothbard.)

The First Rogue of Rhode Island was Roger Williams. Banished from Massachusetts, he founded the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which later became a state, and gave a burgeoning nation its first taste of religious liberty, a Narragansett-English dictionary, and free speech without the threat of government clampdown. Now vandals are defacing his statue, a tree root consumed his skeleton, revisionists want to knock down his monuments and some people want to truncate the name he gave us. Roguishness never goes out of style, but apparently it never rests in peace, either.

Williams was actually a pretty complicated man. His tolerance became less expansive as he aged and the “lively experiment” of Rhode Island, a utopian ideal of free thinking, free living, free wheeling libertarianism degenerated into a free-for-all of selfish and scandalous behavior. Rhode Island turned out to be a cauldron of tempers and egos. Communities formed, then split along political/religious lines. They formed somewhere else, then split again. This process continued ad nauseam until you have what we have today – 39 towns with almost no shared or centralized resources among municipalities. By the end of his life, Williams had hardened his views.

But then, he was never a true anarchist. Not like the Rhode Islanders that followed. According to Rothbard:

The honor of being the first explicit anarchist in North America belongs to Williams’s successor, a leading religious refugee from Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson. Anne and her followers, who had become far more numerous a band of heretics than Williams had amassed, emigrated to the Rhode Island area in 1638 at the suggestion of Williams himself. There they purchased the island of Aquidneck from the Indians and founded the settlement of Pocasset (now Portsmouth).

Follower and fellow founder, the wealthy merchant William Coddington, had a political and religious falling out with Hutchinson. So he left to form a new settlement called New Port at the southern end of the island and almost immediately declared war upon Portsmouth. The settlements eventually united, but Hutchinson’s radical views on liberty got her in trouble in her own colony. She was forced to abandon Rhode Island for New York, where Mahican Indians killed her in a raid.

Another prominent Rhode Island individualist was Samuell Gorton. Rothbard says:

An English clothier, his libertarian political and religious views and individualistic spirit got him persecuted in every colony in New England, including Providence and Portsmouth…Fleeing Anglican England, Gorton successively had to escape from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Providence. In the Providence incident Roger Williams began to display that totalitarian temperament, that impatience with anyone more individualistic than he, that was later to turn him sharply away from liberty and towards statism…Accused of being “anarchists,” denounced by Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay as a “man not fit to live upon the face of the earth,” Gorton and his followers were forced in late 1642 to found an entirely new settlement of their own: Shawomet (later Warwick)…

On and on it went. New idealists included The Rev. Thomas Olney, John Field, John and Rebecca Throckmorton, Catherine Scott (sister of Anne Hutchinson), Robert West, Ann Williams, William and Robert Harris. These Baptist anarchists fought tooth-and-nail with Williams, who by that time was up to his neck with individualists and was eager to ship them all to Oliver Cromwell. When the mad Puritan ordered Rhode Island to punish all “intestinal commotions,” the colony greased a new law to send “ringleaders of factions” to England for trial.

Two points: It is interesting to note that all of these religious and political free thinkers had multiple followers, even though they didn’t have Twitter accounts.
It is also curious that people are so divided as to whether being a rogue is a scarlet badge of shame or pride.

Earlier this decade, the blog “Snarkout” concluded a post with the following:

Rhode Island has been called (and may well be) the most corrupt state in the Union, but if arguing in favor of separation of church and state and the essential worth of the Narragansetts made Williams a rogue, “Rogues’ Island” is a title Little Rhody can bear with pride.

Last year, in his blog “Liberty and Culture,” Jason Pappas brought up the phrase “Rogues’ Island” in conjunction with historian John Fiske’s charge that Colonial Rhode Islanders, in trying to evade economic law, printed paper money but got no quarter from the merchants, plunging the colony into a financial abyss. As farmers and merchants fought and factions took sides, said Fiske:

These outrageous proceedings awakened disgust and alarm among sensible people in all the other states, and Rhode Island was everywhere reviled and made fun of…and forthwith the unhappy little state was nicknamed Rogues’ Island.”

So Pappas wonders: “Have we become a Rogues’ Island nation?”

Answer: Not until every state’s founder rests in archival eternity as a tree root.

Who is your favorite Rhode Island rogue?

Make Way for Rhodylicious

For the past couple of weeks, digital screens located over the highways of Rhode Island have warned drivers about the new state law that bans texting while driving. Lost is the irony that drivers are basically reading a giant text message sent by the state. Still, the law makes a lot of sense, especially to those of us who commute long distances to work, dodging the texting, phoning, shaving, movie-watching, coffee-spilling, GPS navigator-adjusting traffic around us. The truth is that many Rhode Islanders should be banned from driving while driving, but taking away texting is a good start.

The law is also a good lead-in to this week’s blog, since “intexticated” (being distracted because you were texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle) was recently announced as a 2009 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year finalist. According to the Web site, Urban Dictionary, the term has been around for a while and also means sending a drunken text message or photo to someone (sometimes accidentally, almost always regrettably). The Telegraph of London made note of a 29-year-old businesswoman who scrolled down her phone’s contact list to send a salacious “sextext” to her boyfriend “Dan,” only to realize to her horror by checking her outbox much later that she had instead solicited her “Dad.”

“Sexting,” or the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone, is in fact another Word of the Year finalist, proving the influence of technology on today’s lexicon. Other tech terms that made the dictionary were “hashtag” (the # sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets that contain similarly tagged items or thematic sets), “netbook” (a small, portable laptop with limited memory) and “paywall” (a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site, which is only available to paying subscribers).

The economy is on everyone’s minds these days, reflected in the language as “freemium” (a business model in which some basic services are provided for free in the hope that users will be enticed to add premium features or content), “funemployed” (deciding to enjoy one’s newly unemployed status by taking trips, having fun or pursuing other interests) and “zombie bank” (a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support).

Our growing concern about the environment has given rise to “green states” (where environmental laws are strict) and “brown states” (where they aren’t) – which seems like just another way of saying “blue” and “red” if you think about it. Another eco-word is “ecotown,” denoting a community built and run on environmentally friendly principles.

In the realm of politics and current affairs are the “birthers” (who don’t believe President Obama was born in the U.S.), “teabaggers” (who protest President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package) and “death panel” (a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live when care is rationed or, alternatively, a weapon on an old “Star Trek” episode). Bridging the generation gap are “choice mom” (a person who chooses to be a single mother) and “Ardi” (for Ardipithecus ramidus, the oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced - “intexticated?" - to the public in 2009).

Novelty words include “deleb” (a dead celebrity) and “tramp stamp” (a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman).

The dictionary also cited two notable word clusters.

Twitterisms: Twitterati. Twitterature. Twitterverse. Twittersphere. Retweet. Tweetaholic. Twittermob. Twitterhea.

Obamaisms: Obamanomics. Obamarama. Obamasty. Obamacons. Obamanation. Obamafication. Obamanator. Obamalicious. Obamania. Obamacracy. Obamanon.

The winning Word of the Year was “unfriend,” the act of removing someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Left unsaid is if “unfriend” is the Word of the Year, what does that tell you about the year?

In the meantime, Half Shell would like to nominate Rhody for next year’s word cluster. Some examples:

Rhodyverse: Anything that myopically chronicles Rhode Island, including this blog; the Web site Quahog; Phillipe & Jorge’s Cool, Cool World column in The Providence Phoenix; the late, lamented OSO.com; the old Cox TV show, Rhode Trip; the Web site Art in Ruins; the store Only In Rhode Island; and folklorist Michael Bell, to name a few.

Rhodyrati: Celebrity Rhode Islanders, such as the Farrelly Brothers, Jhumpa Lahiri, Buddy Cianci and Mr. Potato Head.

Rhodyfication: Tangible proof of your Rhody cred, such as wearing a Narragansett Brewery Father’s Day tie, even when it isn’t Father’s Day, or carrying the business card of a R.I. State Trooper in your wallet, tucked behind your driver’s license, just in case.

Rhodylicious: Something only a Rhode Islander can truly appreciate, i.e. wiener joints, sleeping to the sound of a foghorn and weekly scandals.

Leading to this week’s question: What belongs in the Rhodyverse?

Waste Land

Wanna buy a dump? The State of Rhode Island, in desperate need of ready cash, is considering selling or leasing the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the major repository of Rhody waste, which manages the state’s recycling programs and the Central Landfill in Johnston. Apparently, running a landfill isn’t the trash cow it once was. The concern now is that the dump may be yet another potential black hole in the state’s seemingly bottomless pit of money problems.

According to a report by the ProJo’s Mike Stanton, revenues have dropped from $70 million to $45 million at Resource Recovery. Not all of the losses can be blamed on the economy. In typical Rhody fashion, scandals outnumber recycling bins at the landfill, where $75 million disappeared amid the banana peels, broken bobble-heads and computer cartridges. In his Nov. 3 article, Stanton chronicles a laundry list of abuses overlooked by past leaders: “…flawed construction projects, questionable land deals, cronyism, suspected fraud, apparent bid-rigging, bogus workers’ compensation claims and phony overtime scams.” In other words, when it comes to business as usual in Rhode Island, something stinks to high Jerimoth Hill.

There is a long and colorful history to refuse in the Ocean State, where even former governors have been known to dive into Dumpsters in a frantic search to find wads of cash in a tossed-out brown bag.

Ritualistically, many Rhode Island school kids visit the Central Landfill on field trips. Artists, especially in Providence, have long recycled trash into sculptures and artworks that have appeared on the city’s streets and in galleries. Andre the Giant may have been known worldwide as a wrestler and the strong man in the movie, “The Princess Bride,” but in Providence he will always be known as that guy plastered all over Dumpsters, telephone poles and stop signs.

The Trash Man Cometh (Then Goeth)
The city of Providence has the worst recycling rate in the state, with fewer than 10 percent of residents sorting out plastics from cardboard, glass from paper and dumping them into green or blue bins. Instead, each week the curbs and corners of Providence streets fill up with random refuse, overstuffed bags and broken furniture. Now the city is fighting back. Starting this month, Providence residents had to put out two recycling bins for every trash barrel, or else collectors wouldn’t pick up the garbage. The bins are supposed to be placed outside even if they’re empty. So far most city residents have ignored the “no-bin, no-barrel” policy, resulting in uncollected garbage lining the streets of Providence as far as the eye can see. As Olneyville resident Maria Medeiros said in Friday, Nov. 13 edition of The Providence Journal:

We’re going to have a city full of garbage … They thought they had a rat problem before, wait until this garbage stays out for a week.

Throwaway Lines
At the Rose Hill Transfer Station in South Kingstown, there’s a cinderblock building with a bunch of books and magazines inside that someone, years ago, sign-posted as the Rose Hill Free Library. It works on the honor system. Drop a book or two off, take a book or two home. There are no due-by dates or late fees, and no shortage of trashy novels.

What is your favorite trashy Rhode Island story?