Pretty green triangles with decorations.

Well, great.

Why is it that when Rhode Island makes the national news, it’s always about something stupid and/or embarrassing? Why is it always bankrupttowns and pension debacles and mob musicals, and never newborn okapis or princess visits? Why can’t we just for once do something awesome and get recognized for it?

Rhode Island’s most recent embarrassment is this whole “Holiday Tree” debacle. In case you haven’t yet heard anyone on Fox News keen and wail about it, our governor decided to refer to the decorated conifer in the State House this year as a holiday tree, not a Christmas tree, and the sky fell. When I first heard about it I put my head in my hands, not because I’m offended as a celebrator of Christmas, but because I knew that there was a good chance that Governor Chafee’s choice would become the 2011 flash point for this “war on Christmas” nonsense we hear every year. And you know what? It did! It totally did. Even though Chafee isn’t the first governor to call it a holiday tree. Oh, you didn’t know that? It’s true. The last governor – a Republican, no less – did the same thing.

HE DID THE SAME THING.

Of course, when he did it, the people who didn’t like him weren’t as loud or as organized, or they plain didn’t care, so no one made a stink about it. Or perhaps there were more egregious offenses against the baby Jesus to preoccupy them. I don’t know. What I do know is that yes, of course it’s a Christmas tree, and yes, calling it a holiday tree is probably a bit of a misguided, if earnest, attempt at inclusiveness. (Although I’m not sure what Carcieri’s reasoning was.) However, I also know that it’s worth little more than a headshake and a chuckle before you just move on already. If you want to host a “rival” Christmas tree lighting in front of your office, fine. Whatever. What you don’t do is get together a bunch of your asshole friends and go to the official lighting just to sing “O, Christmas Tree” really loudly out of spite. And you don’t, in doing that, try to drown out the children’s choir on hand. The one that is full of children who’ve spent who knows how many hours rehearsing for this big deal and aren’t yet old enough to understand why grownups would engage in such childish behavior over semantics. And then you know what you don’t do? You don’t take to the comments section in the Providence Journal,* try to call out the choir director for being rude because she had the gall to interrupt your interruption, and then chalk it up to an imaginary conspiracy:

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8:46 PM on 12/6/2011
Some people started to sing, then realized the children were singing another stanza of their carol. Everyone stopped singing, then when the children finished that song, they started again. The choir director than motioned for the children to begin another song, AFTER "Oh Christmas Tree" was well under way. If anyone was rude, it was the adult directing the children. It was such an obvious set-up, everyone there could see it. Of course, it was intended to give the governor and his supporters something to complain about, as they look kinda stupid complaining about 200 plus people singing a Christmas carol.

Oh, for criminy. Yes, that's the stupid part. On the bright side, the whole mess made theDaily Show! Go Rhode Island.

In other news, I’ve decided that I shall rename my own Christmas tree Mrs. Timothy Mortimer Fancypants, and when my daughter complains, I shall blow an air horn at her. And Mrs. Timothy Mortimer Fancypants will be decorated with every single one of these ornaments, because they may be the best ornaments ever. 

* Sorry. I just couldn't stay away from the crazy. Comment on, you hilarious lunatics!

Ew.

Johnston. Stink lines added. (Map: RI Sea Grant)

I have a problem with Johnston. I admit it. Not the people in Johnston, necessarily; a good friend lives there, and my husband’s cousin, who’s a lovely person, does too. But Johnston also gave us Pauly D., and ruined zeppole day for a bunch of people last year. Also, it stinks. Literally. Johnston is where we Rhode Islanders send our garbage, and it gives the whole town the unmistakable odor of a pay toilet in Times Square. You know you’re passing through Johnston on 295 because that’s when you roll up your windows and hold your breath.

Lately, Johnston has gotten even stinkier. So stinky, in fact, that instead of the usual two or so complaints it receives each month about the smell, the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC  the dump) has gotten close to a hundred in November alone, and some have come from neighboring Cranston.  From ecoRI:

The "active face" of the 100-foot trash pile is getting about half the amount of trash from four years ago, so there is less material to cover the older, exposed and decaying waste… [and] heavy rainfall each of the past two years has flooded the system of pipes in the trash mound. The pipes typically vacuum the methane to a nearby power plant. But the water has slowed the system, allowing the methane to release into the air.

Wait wait wait. There’s a hundred-foot trash pile in Johnston? That’s the width, right? Please tell me they don’t mean it’s ten stories tall. And it’s because we as a state are producing less trash that the smell has gotten worse? That… well, it stinks. Apparently the dump has sent letters of apology and explanation to everyone in Johnston and Cranston, and they say that the solution is going to be to lay a foot of topsoil over all of the garbage, which will happen in a few weeks. This, however, is not fast enough for the state senate. One of Johnston’s state senators, Frank Lombardo, wants it done a whole lot faster, and he’s introduced legislation to make sure the dump never gets that smelly again, ever. From GoLocalProv:

Senator Lombardo will submit legislation to ensure that RIRRC is acting to effectively contain gases and odors on an ongoing basis. The legislation will prohibit the use of construction debris, including wall board, as part of the soil cover that caps the active area of the landfill. Further, the bill would allow independent inspectors access to the landfill on a random basis, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, to ensure they investigate and monitor the material being used as cover.

The legislation will also mandate air quality testing in Johnston and nearby communities, as well as a health-oriented analysis to protect the Johnston residents living closest to the landfill. It would assess a $5,000 per day fine for each day that air quality and odors exceed a certain threshold.

To recap: there is a smelliness threshold in Johnston. It can be smelly, but not too smelly. Then, we’re changing some laws.

Nature? Not in My Backyard!

Look at this.

Isn't that nice? I took this today at the crack of dawn while I was walking my dog. We went to the nature preserve across the street from my house, which we didn't even know existed when we moved to Cumberland. But it's there, and it's a great place to walk, especially now that the leaves are turned and the path is (relatively) clear. There's a little pond in this preserve, and the remains of old stone walls, and the whole thing abuts the Monastery, a town-owned piece of land where monks used to make jam until most of their buildings burned down in 1950. (The monks fled to Massachusetts, where they remain today, still making delicious jam.) Today the remaining buildings on the property house our town library and a few social services, and the land is covered with beautiful walking trails that go on forever.

Not many people use this preserve. There's nowhere to park if you drive to it, so it's pretty much used only by those of us who live in walking distance. Once in a while I'll come across another human being on the trail, but not often. And yet nothing will ever be built on this land, or on the hundreds of acres in similar conservation areas around town. I had to do some research just to find out where the other areas were, because they're not widely advertised. The one I use is marked only by a small sign that you can't even really see if you're driving by. It's all very New England. If you need to know it's there, you will, and if you don't, it's none of your business.

So I was kind of surprised to read in my little local paper that a handful of people in Lincoln, the town next door, are up in arms about someone who wants to build on a piece of land there. This developer owns a handful of acres and wants to build 20 houses, and then he wants to turn the rest of the land into a conservation area. I understand why people might be concerned about new house building, especially in the current economy, but it turns out that they're none too happy with the idea of a conservation area, too.

Wait, what?

What I gather is that certain residents don't want people like me, with my obvious riffraff ways, walking their dogs and such so close to their homes. One guy's deed bars him from building a fence, so he'd be forced to see me, and another lady thinks only dangerous criminals enjoy undeveloped nature:

"Look at your police records. Do you want those people in your back yard?" She [also] said she does not want to have to change how she lives in her own house, and putting a public space or a development of houses in her back yard would do so.

Seriously. I am dying to know who she's talking about in these police records. Also, what I wouldn't give to have my house back up to a conservation area. It's a selling point in real estate, for crying out loud. If there was nothing but wilderness behind my house, I might never draw the curtains at the back of my house, ever, even if I wasn't wearing pants, which would be always. The thing is, there's already vacant land behind these houses. What they don't want is for other people to know about it, and be free to enjoy it; i.e., walk through it silently, perhaps with an adorable dog, first thing in the morning.

The neighborhood might never recover.

Halloween: it happened.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Say, did you get a big pre-Halloween snowstorm? We did! We got the kind of late-October snowstorm that dumps six inches of incredibly wet, heavy snow on you, breaks your trees in half, makes a giant mess, and then melts away within hours of falling. We had 10- and 12-foot sections of maple break off in our front yard, but, thinking the worst was over, I managed to move them aside enough for my daughter to make a tiny, adorable snowman. Later that day another 12-foot section broke off and crushed it, leaving me to wonder in horror what would have happened had we been building that tiny, adorable snowman at a different time. Anyhoo.

A few days earlier a coworker passed along free tickets to the Roger Williams Park Zoo Jack-o-Lantern Spectacular, which is kind of a big deal among some around here, so we counted ourselves $24 richer and headed out on Friday evening to see what was what. We got there just as the sun was setting, and I was a little disappointed that the animals weren't staying up to join in the fun with us; they turned in as usual while we were guided along a very specific path to the pumpkins. In any case, it was... nice? It's one of those exhibitions of thousands and thousands of pumpkins - some intricately carved, some simply - lit up along a walkway along which many, many people move very slowly. Personally I find large groups of slow-moving people to be incredibly irritating, but I find large numbers of softly glowing anything to be very pretty, as long as those anythings are not lava pits or plutonium rods. There were some smoke machines and piped-in music thrown in, too.

Tell me: when did an approximation of a human face become an inadequate design for a jack-o-lantern? Somewhere along the line people moved away from faces and toward just about anything else. There were recently-deceased business visionaries:


Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Bumper Stickers:

Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Golden Girls:

Photo by Svenstorm on Flickr

And Dexter next to Lightning McQueen, because why not?

Oh, right: all those reasons why not. There were also Snooki and Pauly D pumpkins, but I'm having a hard time finding pictures of them. Maybe those abominations won't photograph. Like vampires.

It turned out that this was all a very roundabout way of finding out that my daughter is terrified of jack-o-lanterns. But really: why wouldn't she be? With the exception of the ones that are used as artists' canvases, these are big vegetables with faces on them that are burning up from the inside while looking at you malevolently. In this instance, by the thousands. And hundreds and hundreds of people are puttering through, drinking hot cider, eating fried dough, and taking picture after picture after picture. It's cool, but it's also really surreal. I can't even imagine how confusing it must be for a three-year-old. Maybe we'll wait a few more years before we go again.

In the meantime, let's take a minute to thank our sponsors:

Self-evident: Necco wafers are awful.

Awful. Just awful.

Photo: Necco

When it comes to products, there must be a certain security in being terrible. Even if your product is so terrible that most people won’t come near it, that means that some people will love it, and those people will have a hard time finding such terrible options anywhere else, so they’ll be your customers for life. Sure, eventually they’ll die, but there’ll still be a tiny population of people who actually find your product appealing, so you’ll never totally go out of business. It seems like a comfortable place to be as a businessperson. So why would you mess with a good thing?

A little while ago, the world’s leading manufacturer of awful candy, the New England Candy Company, or Necco, decided to fiddle withthe recipe for its disgusting Necco wafers, switching to natural colors and flavors. Because apparently, artificial colors and flavors were keeping Necco from capturing the wider bad candy market.  How many of us have said to ourselves, “Well, I want a candy that tastes like slightly sweetened dried drywall mud, but darn it, I don’t want all those icky chemicals!” or “Why can’t I get a clove-flavored candy that makes communion wafers seem tasty, but colored purple with beet juice extract instead of red #6?” Because, you know, the purple Necco wafers are clove-flavored. Clove.

This didn’t go over well. Apparently, there are Necco wafer enthusiasts who actually eat this so-called candy, and don’t just buy them to give to teenage trick-or-treaters or shingle the roof of a gingerbread house. And they don’t just eat them: they like them! They like them so much that they assailed Necco with complaints until they got the original recipe reinstated. Even worse – they stopped buying them! Sales fell 35%. I guess Necco doesn’t sell enough of their other terrible candy – mary janes, conversation hearts – to be able to withstand that kind of blow, so back they went.  

 I never realized that people actually ate Necco wafers until I moved to New England. I thought that they were only useful for projects, like gingerbread houses, where the goal was to make everything edible, even if only technically. Necco wafers are the kind of candy that passed for candy before there was good candy. Like hoarhound candy and anything molasses-flavored: these are the candies of the beforetimes, before Milton Hershey was born. There is no longer a need for these candies. Necco wafers, ribbon candies that come in a can, pillow mints. They should be eliminated from our collective human consciousness. But at my local market they sell them right next to the tasty candy, and someone must be buying them, right? Just like someone must be drinking Moxie. (That is, outside of the stateof Maine, where they use it to tell the native Mainers from the outsiders.)

Read and laugh: check out this article that claims Necco wafers have health benefits, due to the beet juice and purple cabbage and turmeric and stuff. (Someone needs to tell Livestrong that they’re going back to non-nature.)

Lists!

Lists! I love ‘em. Bulleted, numbered, whatever. They break things down and make them easy to understand. In general, the world confuses and alarms me, but when bits and pieces are presented to me in list form, it’s a little less threatening. The media has long since figured out that people like me are much more likely to pay attention to a story when it’s be-listed, and even more so when there are pictures involved! Pretty, soothing pictures…

Lately I’ve noticed an influx of “best state” and “worst state” lists, especially over on Bundle.com, which comes through on the picture angle as well. I always check lists out immediately to see where Rhode Island ranks. Because you know that if they could get away with it, the listmakers would just exclude the Ocean State entirely, because who cares? And really, can comparing anything about Rhode Island with, say, anything about California be considered statistically significant, even if you’re operating on a per-capita basis? The answer is no. And yet, we’re a state, so you have to include us. Ha! High five, Delaware.

Unfortunately, it seems like Rhode Island rarely wins in any of these list-based contests. And oftentimes, if we do win, it’s entirely erroneous: you’ll remember that a while back, we were considered one of thebest states to retire to and one of the best to be a commuter in. Both statements, of course, are lies. But what else are lists informing (or misinforming) the rest of the world about when it comes to Rhode Island? Let’s review. In list form.

• We rank 9th in the nation in monthly auto expenses. This actually might make sense, as it's kind of hard to rack up a lot of highway miles in a state this small. Also, foot-deep potholes, gigantic metal plates, and the most dangerous drivers outside of Italy are daily facts of life here, and they really wear out an automobile. Do you know what they do about potholes here? They don't fix them. No, if they do anything, they plop a cone in them. Do you know when you realize there's a cone in a pothole? When you're driving through that pothole, because most of the time it's just shy of cone-deep. It's only a matter of time before I have to replace one or both axles on my car.

• We are the 4th most expensive state in which to have a baby. Note how, on the infographic, the Rhode Island piece looks nothing like Rhode Island. No graphic designer is going to bother with all the islands, and honestly, how many people are going to know it's wrong? Moving on. While I don't dispute most of these costs, I would like to meet the person who pays $77 per month for school and childcare. Did the statistician responsible for these numbers figure in the childcare spending of people who don't have children? Because having a bunch of zeroes in the mix is the only way I can see $77 being right. I have a child in daycare, and $77 is accurate only if you add a zero and double it.

• There are only 15 states worse for business than Rhode Island. I really have no first-hand knowledge of this. I only know that it's a big point of left/right contention, with one side complaining that no one wants to do business in this state because of all of the taxes, and the other side telling them to shut the hell up. I do know, however, that we are considered better than New Jersey, which, you know: duh.

• Speaking strictly in terms of sexual health (and who doesn't?), we have some of the halest and sickest college students in the nation. Hallowed statistics factory Trojan and something called Sperling's BestPlaces came up with a sexual health report card, and, wouldn't you know it, Brown came in at number #4. Providence College, on the other hand, came in at #134 out of a total 140 schools. It's not that big of a surprise, given that Brown invites you to a campus-wide sex party during freshman orientation, while Jesuit PC requires mean old Sister Mary Mansname to accompany you on all of your dates, where she tells you constantly how much you disgust her and God.

• Lest you think that Rhode Island is number one in no category, be comforted: the Ocean State is #1 in suicide plans and attempts! Yeah! Suck it, everyone else. Wait. That's... that's terrible. God, that's depressing.

But you know what? I question the methodology of all of these lists. (Except the suicide one, which was done by the CDC, which... you know what? Just go with me on this anyway.) Know why? Look at this one about how much people in each state spend per capita at candy shops. Rhode Island doesn't even crack the top 20, but we're also not in the bottom 10. But candy... shops? This isn't about a population's penchant for sweets, as the title claims. This is more about the states in which candy shops survive. And even where they do, how many people are going to pay $20 a pound for handmade sel de mer caramels when they can go to the supermarket and get eighty pounds of M&Ms for ten bucks? Not many people, that's who. You know who's at the very bottom of this list? Mississippi. Tennessee. Other deep south states. You're going to tell me people down there don't have sweet, um, teeth? Have you been there? Parts of North Carolina make the the jolly, cheese-loving people of Wisconsin look downright svelte. My point is: I take these lists, even the pretty ones, with a grain of salt. Except when I agree with them.

It's official: ProJo = feh.

Look, I admit it: I have a lot of fun poking fun at the Providence Journal, but that’s only because it’s terrible. It misses stories other outlets in the state pick up (and in a state this small, that’s pretty much inexcusable), and half the time its journalism – if you can call it that – is inflammatory rhetoric intended only to provoke its army of crazy commenters. I mean, you can’t run the headline “Rep. David N. Cicilline, in danger of losing his seat in Congress, is running his campaign checkbook like there's no tomorrow” under a “NEWS” header. It’s someone’s opinion, complete with hyperbole. It’s news like Us Magazine is news. Also, the ProJo’s website has been obstinately holding onto its 1998-style website like it thought that style might come back around someday.* You know, the style people favored before the internet started to figure itself out: almost impossible to navigate, completely impossible to search, has ads everywhere, and leaves stories from ten months ago in sidebars to make them look like they’re fresh.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I clicked over to the ProJo site to see what, if anything, was going on (and something was!), and I found a clean and somewhat streamlined site that sort of makes sense, kind of! Even if it’s a little over-simplified, but whatever. Oh happy day! But what prompted the change? Was it a publication finally realizing that to serve its stated purpose to inform and educate its city’s citizens about what’s going on in their world, it had to do so in a way that was actually accessible and marginally cohesive?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no. Of course not.

"Like other major newspapers across the country, we've come to the realization that giving away our content free is not a sound business plan," said Howard G. Sutton, publisher, president and chief executive officer of The Providence Journal. At first, the eEdition will be free to all web users, to allow them to see how it works. "People can experiment with it," Sutton said. After about a month, a paid subscription will be needed to view the eEdition. Those who subscribe to the printed newspaper seven days a week will receive access to the eEdition at no additional cost. Those with less-than-daily subscriptions will have to pay a nominal fee for the eEdition. Subscriptions only to the eEdition will also be offered.

So, to recap: reading the ProJo online will now cost money. Actual American money. Okay. That’s…. well, hold on. How much money are we talking about?

Pricing has not been set for any of those options. The Journal plans to offer an option to buy single copies of the eEdition, but is still working out technological issues, Sutton said.

Oh, for crying out... All right. You know, what, ProJo? You are fired. You are fired. You think you’re the only terrible paper in Rhode Island? Think again. Your headlines are barely better than this, and that’s in a paper that’s free (although sometimes I think they should pay me to read it). Good luck to you, ProJo, and may all your crazy commenters who’d rather die than pay for content find another outlet for their crazy craziness. 

* It won't.