Word that Scott Mackay is leaving the Providence Journal has brought a dark cloud over my sunny day. ( Though reading his kick-ass statement made me feel a little better…)

Newspapers are going down the tubes. Downsizing is necessary, they say, as there’s just not a profit in this biz anymore. And what is the Belo Corp. doing to make the ProJo better?

I can’t roll my eyes far enough into my head at the Providence Journal’s new “In Her Shoes” initiative to attract a female audience. What sorts of things will be featured? What makes “women’s news” any different from the news I seek every day? (more…)

Looks like compassion isn’t the only thing that’s disappearing from Rhode Island. Tonight, 7pm at Local 121, a free screening of the film “Silence of the Bees:”

A free showing of the documentary Silence of the Bees. The film provides an in-depth look at the search to uncover clues into Colony Collapse Disorder which is killing off huge populations of the honeybee. Silence of the Bees goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our food supply and takes a look at what’s at stake if honeybees disappear. It further explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals. Meet with members of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association, enjoy a sampling of local honey and foods that we would not have if not for the pollination by the honey bee.

Look, folks over at the Associated Press… I know things are bad. Real bad. Still, when you’re penning the End Times journalism pick of the week, write a decent headline.

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

Twist, damn you!

In other sad news, and a subtle reminder of how ridiculous this headline is, Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is dropping out five days before the the presidential runoff election there.

At a news conference, Mr. Tsvangirai, who leads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., said he was unwilling to ask the party’s supporters to go to the polls on Friday “when that vote will cost them their lives.”

Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision came on a day when governing party youth militia armed with iron bars, sticks and other weapons beat his supporters as they sought to attend a rally for him in Harare.

For readers new to the Dose, let’s get one thing straight: dolphins, those rubbery, sonar-using marine mammals who are probably smarter than us, totally kick ass.

It is, therefore, a tragic day: a dolphin at Sea World in Orlando is dead after colliding with another dolphin in mid-air during a performance in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Officials said the dolphin, called Sharky, hit the other dolphin during a Sunday show at Discovery Cove. The incident was apparently a freak accident.

Sharky was a 30-year-old female dolphin that had performed the trick dozens of times, officials said.

The dolphin will be used for research at the park, Local 6 reported.

Meanwhile, it appears that mean-spirited old buzzard Dick Cheney is blocking the implementation of a federal rule that would set a lower speed limit for large ships, reducing the amount of fatal ship-on-whale collisions. Good thing Whale-defender Henry Waxman is fighting back.

The bottom line: it ain’t easy being marine.

April is my birthday month, and I’m pretty excited about being way on the other side of 25.

I’ve weathered the “quarter-life crisis” that Oprah started talking about just as I graduated from college. I’m done with it!

Now, according to the London Times, another miserable period of malaise awaits me around my 35th birthday.

The cleverly descriptive buzzword: the thrisis.

If you’re in your mid-thirties, hassled by the dramas of juggling work and family, doubting decisions you’ve made professionally and personally, panicked by the aging process and dismayed that your years of snogging in nightclubs are behind you, then you’re probably in the grip of an early midlife crisis – otherwise known as a thrisis.

Okay, so, I can’t look forward to my 30s, or my 40s…Um, can I be happy in my 70s?

How about we create a buzzword for all the joys of old age? I need something to look forward to.

With the 5-year anniversary just having passed, VH1 will be airing last month’s benefit concert:

So it was with a sense of unfinished business that the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence was filled last month for a benefit concert, Phoenix Rising! Musicians United to Benefit the Victims of the Station Nightclub Fire.

Appropriately, concert highlights get a showcase Easter Sunday as “VH1 Classic Presents: Aftermath: The Station Fire Five Years Later” plays on both VH1 Classic and VH1 Sunday at 10 p.m.

Take a break from getting waste off green beer to come out and see “Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers”, which will be kicking off Providence Students for a Democratic Society’s anti-war Week of Action during this the week of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. It starts at 7:30 at MacMillian Hall, Room 115 (on Thayer between George and Waterman) on Brown’s campus. It sounds pretty cool:

The story of what happens to everyday Americans when corporations go to war. Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald ( Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq ( Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, CACI and Titan) and the decision makers who allow them to do so.

Oh and no excuses because admission is free.

Projo Sez:

A Warwick man who impersonated a federal agent and falsely claimed that he could link a gas station owner to Islamic terrorists was sentenced Friday to serve eight months in prison followed by two months in home confinement.

While it’s good that justice is being served, this brazen attempt at extorting money out of a middle-eastern gas station owner seems pretty messed up, and the sentence, given the years we dole out for drug-related crimes, seems kind of light. I guess it’s because he plead out: (more…)

In a real life caper ripped directly from the plot of The Thomas Crown Affair and Ocean’s Nine through Forty One, art thieves made off with some pricey impre$$ionist works:

Three thieves, wearing dark clothes and ski masks, walked into the Emile Bührle Foundation, a private collection housed a couple of miles outside of Zurich’s city center on the shore of Lake Zurich, around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, a short while before the museum was due to close. The collection is considered to be one of the biggest privately owned collections of French impressionists in the world.

While one held a pistol and ordered visitors and staff members to lie on the floor in the main room of the museum, the two other men removed the four paintings from the wall: Monet’s “Poppy Field at Vetheuil,” “Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter” by Edgar Degas, Van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches,” and Cézanne’s “Boy in the Red Waistcoat.” Their total worth is estimated at $163 million.

(more…)

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.

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

It’s Tuesday and it’s time for LOADED! Join Kevin Leavitt, Handsome Pete and myself at the lovely  Local 121 for the very best in britpop, indie classics, new wave, glam rock and sweet new jamz. LOADED! @Local 121 10pm, free,  

Yeah, it’s true, some dudes wheeled their friend’s corp$$$e to the corner store to cash his social security check.

They went inside to present the check, but a clerk said Mr. Cintron would have to cash it himself, and asked where he was, the police said.

“He is outside,” Mr. O’Hare said, indicating the body in the chair, according to Mr. Browne.

The two men started to bring the chair inside, but it was too late.

Whoops! Actually, while I’m sure Weekend is a steller film, I recommend the hilarious and moving Getting Home, also know as 落叶归根, or Luo Ye Gui Gen, which is the best adventure+corpse movie ever. The title comes from an idiom which loosely means, “Falling leaves return to their roots.” Rent that shit.

Unfortunately, Beth’s guess that there might be hard times ahead for the daughter of Mynor Montufa was right on.

PROVIDENCE — Two days after local media featured Mynor Montufar and Carmen L. Marrero as the parents of Rhode Island’s first baby of 2008, federal immigration agents arrested Montufar at his apartment.

Now Montufar is about to be deported.

And David De La Roca — also an illegal immigrant, one of several people who shared the couple’s apartment — is dead in an apparent suicide.