And the Word of the Decade Is...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803692.html?hpid=topnews

The American Dialect Society named its Word of the Decade. "Google". I suspect you've heard that word once or twice, but hard as it is to imagine, it wasn't in everyday usage back in 2000.

Update on the Light Phobic Neighbor

On Sunday evening the landlord (who lives far far away from here) calls. She said she had gotten a letter from our neighbor across the road, code name Fargo, complaining to HER about our insensitive insistence on keeping a lightbulb lit on our front porch after dark. The landlord said she called her uncle (who lives here) to ask and when she gave him the name of our friend Fargo, he laughed. Because he had just seen a letter from him to the local newspaper complaining about porch lights, commercial lights, car headlights, etc. Though he didn't name any names.

About an hour later somebody knocks on the door. It's 10:45 PM on a cold and very snowy night (we'd gotten about 15 inches). I knew who it would be. I was right, it was our old friend Fargo.

I opened the door and said "I'm sorry but I'm leaving the light on, you might as well go home". He said "You're leaving it on because you're a stubborn asshole." I repeated my line, he repeated his, I closed the door, he left.

As encouraged before, we called the cops. A couple of patrolmen came by a few minutes later, I told them the above. They looked at our blinding 60-watt lightbulb, and shook their heads. They trudged across the snowy street to talk to Fargo. But curiously, Fargo's house was pitch black. It's NEVER completely dark at his house. You can see lights in his house (and now his Christmas tree) until late at night because he NEVER closes any blinds or curtains... which might help him to blot out the terrible bright lights that inflict his sensitive little eyes.

The cops stood outside of his mysteriously dark house for about 10 minutes, knocking. I don't believe Fargo ever answered the door.

So the count: two personal visits; two stolen light bulbs; one letter to our landlord; one letter to the local paper. That doesn't include him smashing his immediate neighbors' lightbulb in their driveway, coming to our neighbors on our left in his underwear late at night to scream about his lights, following the same neighbor (a tall, big burly guy) home from the local convenience store late at night screaming at him about his lights, etc.

Truly a charmer.

The Saga of the Disappearing Light Bulbs

A few weeks ago, a lightbulb disappeared. It was from the outside light on our front porch. And it disappeared yesterday, as well.

In between was much drama.

It seems that this lightbulb offended a guy who lives across the road. Not DIRECTLY across the road - across the road from our neighbors to our right. With the leaves coming off of the trees, now this 60 watt lightbulb shines directly into his house, deeply disturbing him.

How do I know this? He told me. After the first bulb disappearance (a Saturday), we received a letter on that Tuesday from this person, which said (paraphrasing slightly) that our outside light bugged him, so we should spare him and turn it off. That same Tuesday evening our esteemed neighbor from across the road knocked on the door, reeking of booze. He again asked me to turn off the light, which he said was designed to bother him. Many insulting things crossed my mind, including the impulse to tell him to draw his blinds or close his curtains. But I was really pissed, so I kept it short and civil. I told him that I would leave the light on at night, period. We went back and forth a few times, getting nowhere. I finally said "good night" and closed the door. A few minutes later I checked - he had unscrewed the lightbulb. I screwed it back in. The combination of the letter, his harangue, and the unscrewed lightbulb seems to me to be pretty strong circumstantial evidence that this person was the lightbulb thief.

Now this same guy had back in August come out late one night and screamed at our neighbor on the left about HIS light. So he has a track record. On the Wednesday after our Tuesday encounter, he followed our left-neighbor (a very nice guy) home from a convenience store, haranguing him the entire way about HIS light. Our neighbor called the police, but Mr Easily Disturbed By Distant Lights stood there yelling at him anyway. The police showed up quickly.

Mr Easily Disturbed By Distant Lights has been warned about his behavior at least twice now by the police. I thought maybe he had gotten over it, but the disappearance of the lightbulb again shows that perhaps he hasn't. This is not a particularly narrow road. Both houses are reasonably well back from the road as well, unlike some streets here. The STREETLIGHT that is directly in front of this guy's house doesn't seem to bother him. But our feeble little 60 watt bulb somehow does.

Who is this clown? He's nobody special. However, he is nobody special who has had a film made about him by a family member! You can check out the trailer for this documentary, and learn our neighbor's name and see his face, here. I haven't watched the whole thing yet.

Halloween Stats

So tonight in Newport, we had 15 kids come to the house for trick or treat. Youngest was really little, probably three. Oldest maybe 12 or so. They came in three large batches, and two singletons.

About what I expected. But not like when I was a kid when it seemed like a hundred kids would come by, and when we were out trick or treating we could see kids all up and down the block.

Different days.

Thought for the Day

It's hard to shoplift online.

Oh No, There Goes Sydney

Wow, things have really gone downhill since I left Australia...

Food, Rhode Island Style

It's a whole new language up here food-wise. In Rhode Island, you can drink cabinets and eat grinders. And of course, plenty of chowda.

And searching you can find an article from the Washington Post from a few years back describing Rhode Island food terms, copied below for your culinary convenience...

Rhode Island Food Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

Sunday, August 13, 2006

· Cabinet: When a Rhode Islander ("Row-Die-Lundah") asks for a coffee cabinet, he's not ordering a kitchen cupboard but a dense shake made with ice cream and coffee syrup. Called a frappe in Massachusetts and a milkshake elsewhere, a cabinet comes in all the usual flavors, but coffee's like the official state flavuh.

· Chourico ("shoo-reese"): A spicy Portuguese sausage served grilled like a hot dog, sauteed with green peppers, scrambled with eggs or sliced into seafood chowder. Its milder cousin is linguica ("lingweese").

· Chowda: Okay, chowder. Three versions of that primordial soup with the tang of the sea are offered here. All typically contain chopped clams and clam juice, potato cubes, onion and herbs. Purists divide between New England (creamy) and Rhode Island's unthickened version, which may be called plain, natural or broth. The third version, Manhattan-style, is for those whose curious notion it is that chowder should contain tomatoes. The first New England chowder recipe was published in 1751; tomatoes didn't begin creeping in until the 1830s and still haven't made it far north of Connecticut.

· Clam cakes: No kin to the crab cake, the clam cake is a fritter. Minced clams are mixed in dough and deep-fried. Variables include spices, frying oil and the quantity of clams. The cost of clams now makes them widely scattered in some cakes.

· Coffee milk: A mixture of milk with sweet coffee syrup. It was named the Official State Drink in 1993, barely beating out Del's Frozen Lemonade.

· Del's Frozen Lemonade: A slushy summertime drink sold from a fleet of trucks that roll up to beaches, parks and event venues throughout the Rhode Island summer. From an Italian family recipe using fresh lemon juice, Del's has been synonymous with Rhode Island summers for nearly 60 years.

· Doughboy: No relation to the Pillsbury softy, the Rhode Island doughboy is typically a big square of pizza dough that's deep-fried and dusted with sugar.

· Fish and chips: Fish and chips came to Rhode Island during the Industrial Revolution when English and Irish mill workers brought their appetite for hot fried fish with them. They ate the accompanying potatoes with vinegar; Rhode Islanders still do.

· Grinder ("grinda"): Elsewhere, a sub, torpedo, hero or hoagie.

· Jonnycake: A traditional cornmeal-based pancake served for breakfast at some shoreline diners. ("The Sopranos" got it wrong by locating breakfast jonnycakes in New Hampshire. In northern New England, a johnnycake is singular, a sort of cornbread, and spelled with an "h.")

· Quahog ("co-hog"): A large clam whose shells live on as ashtrays in summer rentals. Their tough meat is chopped or ground for chowda or 'cakes.

· Schrod ("scrod"): In Rhode Island it is usually understood as small codfish, delicious when broiled and served with lemon and butter or Dijon sauce.

· Stuffie: A stuffed quahog. The stuffing includes bread, chopped clams and other ingredients such as green peppers, potatoes, eggs, garlic, onions, spices and sometimes chourico -- but not corn. It is heaped on a quahog shell and baked.

· Zuppa: In Italian, soup. In Rhode Island, zuppa is a light marinara sauce served with seafood over linguine.

-- Carol McCabe

New Bedford

Made a quick trip yesterday to New Bedford, Massachusetts, about 40 miles from Newport. New Bedford is still a working fishing town, and we poked around the port looking at all the fishing boats. Definitely not built for comfort. Can't imagine being out one one of those suckers. There were a lot in port, partly because of the approach of Tropical Storm Danny, which is soaking us all today.

The main reason was to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It was pretty cool. Some fun facts... New Bedford was the center of American 19th century whaling, and the main reason for the whaling was whale oil to burn in lamps and candles. This is before we discovered oil in Pennsylvania and figured out how to refine and use it, of course. At one point, there were around 750 whaling vessels world-wide, and 400 of them were based out of New Bedford. Pretty impressive.

Downtown New Bedford is nice. Still some cobbled streets, especially near the port. Still a lot of maritime businesses so the port is definitely not a museum piece. Up from the waterfront are a lot of art galleries and artist studios for rent - helped by the fact that UMass and Bristol County College both have set up art schools in downtown NB.

Netflix, This Is REALLY Aggravating

So we're watching our latest arrival from Netflix, the quirky Canadian comedy "Corner Gas." Season one, disc 2, episode 11 - "Hook, Line and Sinker".

We get halfway thru that episode, and the show stalls. No problem, we'll try washing it with a little Windex. Doesn't work. Report the problem to Netflix, put it in the mail, a couple of days later, we have a second disc.

We get halfway thru that episode, and the show stalls. No problem, we'll try washing it with a little Windex. Doesn't work. Report the problem to Netflix, put it in the mail, a couple of days later, we have a third disc.

We get halfway thru that episode, and the show stalls. No problem, we'll try washing it with a little Windex. Doesn't work. Report the problem to Netflix, put it in the mail, a couple of days later, we have a fourth disc.

We get halfway thru that episode, and the show stalls. No problem, we'll try washing it with a little Windex. Doesn't work.

Uncle. How many identically faulty discs will Netflix send us?

The first three discs all looked a bit dinged on the business side. The fourth disc looked PERFECT. But it isn't.

Which leads me to ask, is Netflix making copies from a bad master disc? How many people have had this problem with this episode of "Corner Gas"?

It is extremely aggravating.

Oh and despite this, I highly recommend "Corner Gas." A very funny show.

Kookaburra Feeding

Essayist and humor writer David Sedaris has a piece in the New Yorker about his trip to Australia, and his encounter with a kookaburra. Worth a read.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=all

Some First Impressions of Newport

So we made it to Newport, Rhode Island. A few first impressions.

It's Old!

Seriously, by American standards it IS old. It was founded in 1639, and there are some 17th century buildings around and PLENTY of ones from 17-something. It's so old when you see a house built in 1898 you think of it as new.

Most of the old houses are occupied; some look like they're falling apart, but many are still in good shape and/or are being restored now. I'd think this is a good place to be in the restoration business - just up and down the street are three or four old houses with crews swarming over them.

These are the "regular" old houses - haven't gone to check out the mansions of Newport built by the robber barons I mean the Captains of American Industry back in the late 19th century.

Traffic, Good and Bad

Newport isn't a big city, about 36,000. But it's pretty densely populated - and even MORE crowded in August with all the tourists. It hasn't taken me long to sneer at tourists' getting lost or making mistakes behind the wheel, with my solid two weeks of residency here. People here tell is it will be much quieter by October, when most of the tourists have gone home, and the fogs roll in.

And the streets are mostly very narrow. "Broadway" (a main drag) isn't ALL that broad, really! So traffic is kind of at a crawl here - 25 mph speed limits in many places. On the other hand, it's not a bad place to be a pedestrian - cars actually STOP (mostly) when you start crossing the road on a pedestrian crosswalk.

Friendly

Most of the locals we've met - neighbors, restaurant servers, store employees, etc - have been very friendly. So far, so good.

Stuffed French Toast

Okay, I'd never heard of stuffed french toast - but we've seen it on at least four different breakfast menus here. What is it? Two pieces of french toast with bananas, strawberries, or other fruit in between. A couple of places have had an icing of cream cheese and confectioners sugar in the middle; another place had some sort of fresh cream with the fruit.

Oh and in at least one place, it was made with Portuguese sweet bread - a thick, sweet bread just like you'd think. Big Portuguese influence here - Rhode Island is the top destination for Portuguese immigrants to the US, and lots of restaurants have "chorico" (in Spanish, "chorizo") on the menus (a spicy sausage).

The eating here is good - lots of restaurants, from the fancy to the cheap homey sort. Not unexpected in such a big tourist destination.

I've heard some complaints about the PRICE of eating out here. I have to say it hasn't been that bad to me. Maybe that's because I was in Australia, where restaurants were more expensive. Although once you add 8% sales tax and 15% tip you're getting close to Aussie prices!

Alas, Australia; Adios, Canberra

Alas, Alas, Yorick is leaving Australia this week, after three wonderful years living in Canberra. (That wasn't sarcastic by the way, I really LIKE Canberra.)

So long, Australia. Hope to make it back some day.

300

Randy Johnson won his 300th game. Pretty impressive. And deserved, he has been one of the great pitchers of the past 20 years.

I like this line though, from Johnson: "I mean, it sounds funny, but you know, I played 21, 22 years, I'm 45 and I've come up with 300 wins, and I'm thinking, 'I only have 211 more to catch Cy Young.' "

RIP

You may never have heard of Hubert Van Es. But you've certainly seen at least one of his photographs. Van Es just died, aged 67.

ANZAC Day

It's ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, to remember those killed during the Gallipoli campaign in World War One, and since then in different wars.

It was a key element in the national psyche for Australia, the first time (except against Germans in New Guinea in late 1914) that Australians had fought as AUSTRALIANS, not as troops from New South Wales or South Australia, etc.