Hot off the presses, with thanks to Tipster Mom, who watches the 11 o’clock news like whoa: PVD mayor David Cicilline has been asked not to attend HRC’s weekend event here, after firefighters threatened to picket the event over the long running contract dispute with the city.

As you may recall, dear reader, this isn’t the first time the issue has come up: last year, Cicilline stepped down as Clinton’s State Co-Chair after the firefighters threatened to raise hell. At the time, the mayor also said he wouldn’t attend a fundraiser in the Ocean State, also to avoid a picket. Seems like the issue has now come to a head, as Dan Barbarisi reports:

Hillary Clinton has told Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, her former state campaign chair, that he is barred from attending her Rhode Island appearance Sunday afternoon, for fear that his presence would cause disruptive protests by the Providence firefighters union.

Cicilline said he will stay away on Sunday, but this may cause him to question his support for the New York senator, who he has stumped for locally and in New Hampshire during that state’s primary.

“It’s obviously something for me to think about very carefully, because I am very disappointed in the decision of the Clinton campaign. I’m not prepared to say more than that today. I obviously have tremendous respect for Senator Clinton, but I’m very disappointed in the decision of her campaign today,” Cicilline said.

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The Democratic primary has divided many marital beds, including that of former Senator Claiborne Pell and his wife Nuala. The Projo reports:

Former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, who was first elected to that post in 1960, is someone so well-liked by Rhode Island voters that he never lost an election, even defeating the late John H. Chafee, a former Rhode Island governor, U.S. Secretary of the Navy and later senator, in a 1972 race. Pell retired from the Senate in 1996. Pell, 89, has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for years and no longer speaks in public.

But his wife, Nuala Pell, is a spry 84 and often attends political events, most recently Wednesday’s speech at the Providence Biltmore by Michelle Obama. Mrs. Pell is a member of Rhode Island Women for Obama and is voting for the Illinois senator. Mrs. Pell said yesterday that her husband has voted by shut-in ballot for Clinton. “He can’t get to the polls,” she said. “But he worked with [former President] Bill Clinton and he really likes Hillary Clinton.”

Mrs. Pell said she is a bit more focused on the future and believes Obama would make a good president for the 21st century.

Bill O’Reilly grab your notepad, because it looks like you’ve got more fodder for “Ivy League Debauchery.” Harrison Zolnierczyk, a Brown University freshman hockey team member, is facing charges of distributing child pornography. Zolnierczyk, who came to Brown via Toronto, will appear in the Port Alberni Provincial Court in Canada on March 13. Talia Buford reports in the Projo:

Zolnierczyk and his former teammate, Bradley Harding, were charged with four counts on July 9, 2007 of surreptitiously making a recording in a situation where a reasonable expectation of privacy is expected, knowingly distributing that recording, possessing child pornography and distributing child pornography. Harding pleaded guilty to the charges and is awaiting sentencing, said Cpl. Rob Foster, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Foster would not confirm any details of the incident yesterday, but did say that Zolnierczyk was facing charges resulting from an incident in the fall of 2006. The Canadian news wire, Canwest News Service, reported that Zolnierczyk and Harding made a sex tape with a teenage girl and posted it on on the Web site YouTube.

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Not wishing to inflame the passions or offend the sensibilities of its delicate viewers, the censors at Channel 10 News have taken a page from the John Ashcroft playbook. In a story on the recent rash of copper thefts, they reference the theft of an antique, nymph-and-satyr statue (seen here) from the yard of the Edgewood Manor B & B. In the first minute of the accompanying video there are two shots of the statue in question, and they have pixilated out the nymph’s naked breast. Wouldn’t want to pander to all the copper-nipple fetishists out there (you know who you are).

Tonight at the Hourglass Cafe in Brown’s Faunce Hall, Deer Tick and Tom Thumb play live and over the air on BSR’s Liveblock (88.1 FM) The show is at Liveblock’s usual airtime of 8pm, and it’s free.

I was seduced by the new booming-announcer-dude-voiced commercials on Channel 10, telling me how happy I should be with their reporters for passing along information THAT. COULD. SAVE. MY. LIFE.

The crisis at hand? The mall might fall apart — with you, or even me, in it. Channel 10, in an act of their typical benevolence, has spent two months devising an escape plan. Their key finding? Don’t do this:

Bassett did what many shoppers did when the alarm went off that day. He rushed to his car in the mall’s garage to get out of the mall and that was a big mistake.

“It took us 40 minutes to get out in the parking garage,” he said.

But our own crack staff of engineers and architects has done an even more rigorous analysis. Our findings: If you do get stuck in the mall garage as such, you should exit your vehicle, and walk out.

Now, we know the prospect of being on foot on the mean streets of Capital Center is legitimately scary to many a suburbanite mall-goer, but we’re strong believers in the broken windows approach. Francis Street is much safer, now that they’ve cleaned up the Masonic Temple — especially the graffito that said “NERD” in puffy blue letters.

I don’t normally watch the news, because it brings out my unfortunate habit of yelling at the TV every time Gary Ley uses the word snizzle or anybody mentions the president or anybody mentions the governor or TJ DelSanto does anything because OH MY GOD that man annoys the crap out of me, but I happened to watch the premiere of the new Brooke Shields nonsense tonight and then was too lazy to change the channel, so I caught Jim Taricani’s report on nail salons and it was too much for me to watch without feeling compelled to blog angrily at two thirty in the morning.

Taricani profiled a guy in Johnston who owns three Hollywood Nails salons across the state, and thanks to the intrepid reporter’s research (ie. haranguing the guy in his driveway) we learned that the dude is driving with an expired registration and doesn’t want everyone to know what he’s paying his employees. He might be a creep–a number of his female employees live in the Johnston house that his wife owns, and they may or may not be here illegally–but there’s no way to tell because Taricani prefers to accusingly bark at the camera about how the guy drove from one salon to another “at a high speed!” more »

Wow, Ian Donnis really was doing some massive beer research, as his nine million word piece in today’s Phoenix proves. He nails it though; Nikki’s Liquors does indeed rock as thoroughly as he says, and Track 84 down in Warwick is a prime place for some odd craft beers. This, coupled with his report about Narragansett wanting to open a beer garden on the West Side and their latest foray into brewing bocks and porters makes for some seriously giddy beer geek stuff.

From last Wednesday until late last night, I’ve been shuttling to and from New Bedford, Massachusetts with a group of 40 or so Brown students and a couple dedicated alumni to volunteer for Barack Obama. We didn’t do exceptionally well in any of our precincts, where it seems Hillary© is still quite popular. We did, however, get some props from the press.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMNNkWrKe_0]

And look here on Channel 10 for the segment on “South Coast Campaigning” if you’d like to see more excellent footage of us waving signs and waxing poetic about Obama.

Have you heard of the New Bedford Standard Times?

I hadn’t, until I spent some of last week phonebanking and honk-for-hoping for Obama. Turns out they also do some “person on the street” Youtube video journalism, and with Gloria Steinem coming to UMass Dartmouth on Thursday, they asked: who is this Gloria Steinem? Hilarity/depression ensues as one wonders what part of the newspaper business compelled this Letterman-esque shtick.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvZYSM37mfY]

Can you tell if this is supposed to be funny? I can’t and that’s why it’s great. more »

That I dare not post directly, for fear of another smack-down at the hands of the Projo’s legal department.   So I’ll just link to it instead.

(Probably not nearly as funny for those humans who are smart enough to not be stuck in the bubble that is the RI State House.)

The February East Side Monthly has an in-depth spread on the many up-and-coming businesses on Ives St.

The progress appears to be undeniable, however. Two buildings are up for sale and much of the street is zoned commercially, so you can expect additional businesses to join the parade. The new businesses are complementing the long-time businesses, catering to the ‘new neighborhood’ and traffic on the streets is growing. The character of the neighborhood has been minimally affected as the new establishments are nicely blending with the old. What they all seem to have in common is that all of these new pioneers are supplying a lot of sweat equity in making their dreams realities.

This from Charlie Bakst’s column today, about the Governor and his wife and their take on the fiscal mess. Sue invokes the ‘T’-word. (I’m sure she knows much more about terror than do most Cambodians and Laotians…)

Soon she turned the conversation to a protest last month against the governor’s layoff of three Southeast Asian interpreters. At a news conference, a 15-year-old Cambodian girl said, among other things, “The governor is sending a clear message to my community that we are not valued or welcome.” And a 16-year-old Vietnamese boy called his actions “racist.”

I wrote that if I were governor, I wouldn’t rest until I reached out to those two teens and others in the Southeast Asian community.

Now, on Tuesday night, Sue Carcieri suggested that if he were to meet with the teens it would be “rewarding bad behavior.”

She said, “First of all, I think they have mentors who are much older than them who are training them up. You know — how those terrorists have kids blow up, you know, Benazir Bhutto and so forth? You think the kids thought of it? I don’t think so.”

Are we the dregs, for sticking around Providence? Or are we surreptitious geniuses who’ve discovered that this city actually has some pretty nice things to offer? Dave Brussat offers a hopeful “I dunno.”

With the departure long ago of the textile, jewelry and machinery manufactories that gave rise to the motto, Industry with a capital I is gone, but industry with a little i remains: the energy of individual enterprise.

From The Providence Journal: 

“The police said Michael Holston, 32, of Providence, was shot shortly after 2 a.m. outside Club Desire, at 1 Franklin Square off Allens Avenue. Friends said he was sitting in his car, at about the time the club was closing, when he was shot.” 

It was the city’s first homicide of 2008, police are still looking for a suspect. 

Projo has the scoop:

Michael Derderian, who pleaded no contest in the 100 Station nightclub fire deaths, will be released on parole in October 2009, about three-quarters of the way into his four-year sentence, the state Parole Board decided today.

Though the club co-owner was eligible for parole consideration after serving a third of his sentence, the board decided Derderian will be paroled after serving 37 months “with appropriate counseling.”