[T]his town is an intellectual wasteland without any sense of humor. I’ve been living here for 17 years, and if you asked me to tell you when I last had lunch with anybody but my wife or someone that came to see me from India or New York or Boston or Germany, I couldn’t come up with a name.
The founder of TED complaining about Newport, RI (where he lives in a mansion often mistaken for a museum). It’s such a surreal profile, I don’t even want to spoil it—just please please go read for yourself.
Welcome to Narragansett Beach! Unfortunately, the Atlantic Ocean grew this year.
Rhode Island shall make no law
RI’s republican governor vetoed 25 bills today. In so doing he:
- prevented long term domestic partners from arranging each other’s funerals
- protected school officials’ right to surveil students via GPS
- blocked the formation of a Green Jobs Task Force
- kept prisoners in jail who’d been acquitted of the probation violation that landed them there
- defended his power to fill a vacated senate seat himself instead of putting it up for election
- maintained the foreclosure process’s ease and swiftness
Meanwhile, New York’s democratic governor failed to persuade the democrat-controlled senate to vote on his signature issue, gay marriage. The virility gap between democrats and republicans yawns.
how RI became the only US state to allow sex work
and more important, gave us the term “indoor prostitution,” which guarantees the whole episode will become an irrelevant but charming four page digression in a maximalist novel about the foibles of human governance & entwined gay multifaith immigrant families
RI politicians’ crimes getting more and more banal
Ex-governor of Rhode Island terrorizes my hometown:
At URI, where Sundlun has an office as “Governor in Residence,” the police have gotten so many complaints that Vice President Robert Weygand and police Maj. Stephen Baker have talked to Sundlun about his driving.
Last year, Sundlun was referred to the university’s human resources office after he yelled at a police officer who was trying to stop him from driving down a closed road, and nearly ran over a professor, who uses a cane, when she was in a crosswalk. After Sundlun drove on a sidewalk last month, sending pedestrians jumping out of the way of his black Buick, Major Baker noted in his report that sanctions or citations may be necessary. A week later, a woman parked in a university lot said Sundlun hit her vehicle and drove off.
For these and other adventures, the DMV has been asked to revoke his license.
gay marriage & excretion
The gay marriage argument is so played out that having to read either side feels like when you’re at a delicious pizza place and they suddenly turn on Lite 107. NOOOO!
But then there’s Rhode Island, which can hit an original note on any topic because it is uniquely stupid. Yesterday, for example, the governor’s wife spoke against gay marriage:
As a mother and former junior high school teacher of life science and biology, Mrs. Carcieri said she is concerned for children, having taught “all about animal behavior,” and the bodily functions of “nutrition, excretion, growth, reproduction, respiration…But I did point out that human beings are a lot more than that… that our spirits and our souls and our intellect are so important, we can’t just allow us to think we’re only physiological beings, and that’s that.”
In most states bigots claim biblical impramitur. In Rhode Island they say “I am an expert on human feces.”
PORK!
My hometown of South Kingstown—a sparsely populated puddle in Southeastern Rhode Island—is receiving $30,185 of federal stimulus to pay for cops.
That sucks! The police station in SK is already fancier than the high school. The streets are just about secluded but the woods next to them are jam packed with speed traps. Marijuana laws are enforced. One of the several times the cops pulled over my brother for Driving While Young, they called his friend a faggot.
The SK police force is overstaffed and overvalued. My guess is that small towns across the country are in the same position, with bored cops making everyone else’s lives miserable.
When Republicans speak out against over-funding police forces half as much as they bash healthcare spending, they’ll have my ear for the first time since high school.
indoor prostitution
Have you heard of Indoor Prostitution? It is a real term in Rhode Island, where the prositution statute has a loophole. It only bans streetwalkin.
An elevator in southern Rhode Island, where people don’t ride elevators very often.
