Rhode Island Culture
As an admitted antiquarian, I’ve never met an old building I didn’t think should be preserved and re-used. But that’s just me and I recognize that–beauty being in the eye of beholder–not everyone thinks that the Providence Fruit and Produce Company Warehouse (more here) was worth preserving, restoring or reconfiguring. OK, fine. But what troubled…
On my way to the jobsite, the other day, I stopped at CVS because it’s the only store in which I’ve found my preferred brand of pencil and, because it caught my eye in passing, I picked up a copy of the latest Rhode Island Monthly. It occurred to me, as somebody trying to keep…
In today’s ProJo story on the RI population loss (mentioned here and here yesterday), the Governor, policy experts and academics agree that a shrinking population isn’t a good thing for the economy. Some quotes from the article: John Logan, Sociology Professor, Brown University – “Michigan and Rhode Island have something in common, which is the…
Tipped off by 7 to 7, I went over to the U.S. Census Bureau web site, which has just released population estimates up to July 2007 (raw data here). From the AP summary: Rhode Island is losing residents at a faster clip than any other state in the nation. New population estimates being released today…
I’ve devoted part of my mind — as I’ve worked throughout this pre-Christmas weekend — to an attempt to decipher the anagram that must surely lie behind the name Henry Rosemont Jr. He’s one of the three academics with whom li’l’ ol’ carpenter Katz shared the Providence Journal’s editorial pages on Friday, and I’ve found…
Mike Squatrito is in the local news regarding the just-published sequel in his Overlords series. You’ll note, if you browse his site, that the second book’s cover is a significant upgrade from the first, for which Mike can thank Anchor Rising’s sometime brush-for-hire Colby Cook. Mike also goes to my church, as it happens. He…
Surprised? Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty has not come to work for much of the last three years, staffing what Chief George Farrell said appeared to be a no-show position in the department’s training division instead of working a fire truck. At the same time, Doughty was making extra cash working overtime shifts to…
It’s certainly a laudable act to seek to return $762 dollars found on the ground by an ATM. Few, indeed, would fault a man for predicting the rightful owner to be unlocatable and pocketing the money. Even fewer, I’d say, would find it blameworthy to keep the money if the authorities wouldn’t hand over even…
As an early-grave-working father of three children, whom my wife and I deliberately brought into the world at a relatively young age ourselves (by modern standards), with nowhere near the income nor savings that an accountant might require to balance out the cost of progeny, I find myself strangely split in my agreement with both…
Over at his brand new blog Jon Scott 2008, Jon Scott has a firsthand report on the dedication of Rhode Island’s new World War II memorial, offering his cheers for the members of the general public — and of course the veterans — who attended, but jeers for the politicians who habitually attempt to hog…