Mini-mystery of the week: the trailer truck that’s been blocking up the west end of Mathewson Street for the past couple of days.

At first I figured it may have been disabled, hence the barricade, but it has been making a humming noise night and day as if the engine–or some other machinery–is running.  It’s plastered with graphics for Smith & Nephew, bragging about repairing and healing the human body, particularly via knee replacements.

Are the S&N folks actually performing knee replacements in the back of the truck?  Can I get in line?

[Additional Note: You can get in line if you want, Annie, but it's full of human body parts. The answer to your question happens to be on the front page of today's Providence Journal. Hmm, I wonder where they got the idea for the article? BC]

And what’s wrong over at abc6 News? Aarrghh! Thanks to Dose pal, Kim Ahern, who nearly choked on a pretzel while watching the news last night. Not only is this not a picture of David Segal, it is in fact an image of political shape-shifter Richard Rodi. Of all people! Rodi ran as a democrat against Segal in 2008 — losing badly — and he recently got booted from the newly formed Moderate Party. As a politician, Rodi suffers from a rather crucial personality defect — nobody enjoys his company. R.I.’s Future had a great piece in March examining his various opportunistic party affiliations and self-serving community efforts.

abc6 has since rectified its error (watch the segment here). New screen grab after the jump.

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Kudos to ABC News who broke the story of Trijicon, the Michigan arms contractor who has been selling rifle scopes to the United States Army that have bible citations added onto the ends of the serial numbers.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

The example pictured here refers to the Book of John, Chapter 8, Verse 12 — “the hell with the loaves and the fishes, eat lead” or something like that. (full slideshow at abc news)

*Moe the Bartender, The Simpsons

A DC cop pulls a gun on snowball fight:

Wet? Yes. But drowning? Really?

Not to take anything away from the heroic actions of the bystanders who selflessly rushed to aid the gentleman struggling in the Waterplace Park basin Tuesday night — anyone willing to touch the Woonasquatucket is a hero in my book — but exactly how deep is the water there? Was he caught in the rapids? (ProJo)

If you answered, “Must Be Santa” give yourself a star (we also would have accepted Hunter Thompson as a correct answer).  And then be sure to check out this new straight-up weird Bob Dylan music video for his Christmas song of the same name.

It’s quite hard to say at first what to make of this song/video, but as an avid Dylan listener, I’ll try to expound.  First thought is that this puts to rest any doubt that Dylan’s main artistic purpose in life these days is to be as unpredictable and odd as possible.  But for a person who for some time now I’ve assumed to be loveless, cynical, and fairly contemptuous of his fame, this video also exhibits Dylan’s weird sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd.

I mean, the guy is wearing a ridiculous wig (either that or he’s been conking his Jew-curls straight) under a series of hats the whole video, including a Santa hat, which takes place at a raucous X-mas house party, possibly in the 1950’s.  And the entire song is just drums, accordion, and Dylan and a chorus singing children’s lyrics about Santa, at one point with the singing of the names of Santa’s reindeers with the names of the Presidents since Eisenhower interspersed (curiously, he ends at Clinton).

Then of course there’s the matter of what it means that Dylan–the once-proclaimed spokesperson for a generation who made a career out of criticizing American society, including its consumer culture, and who is also Jewish–has just put out an entire Christmas album.  But I guess that’s exactly the point: it doesn’t mean anything.  Anybody who tries to read any meaning into this song or video would be a fool.  Even Dylan can have some fun, especially if it’s at the expense of making his hardcore fans ask, WTF?

UPDATE: The Colbert footage is now posted, here.

ORIGINAL: During last night’s Word, over the funeral rights bill. We’ll post the footage when it goes up on their website. For now, here’s Cypress Hill’s new song, written in response to the Don’s recent doings. Sad as it’s been, it’s encouraging to see people across the country being so vocal about what’s going down in Li’l Rhody.

Just so we are all clear on this — Pan’s Labyrinth is not a children’s movie. Not even close. The Providence Public Library is holding an open house today from 1pm to 4pm. Almost every event described at the library website is for children — cartoonagrams, children’s songs — but then at 2pm they are showing this horrifying, and very adult, movie as part of the Hispanic Heritage Month movie series. Jeez, there must have been a better choice than this. I loathed this movie and found scene after scene ugly, violent and distressing. I hate to think that an uniformed parent might stumble into it with kids on a rainy day.  What were the planners thinking?  Come on in kiddies and watch the man getting his skull caved in with a hammer. Every frame of this movie is nightmare fuel; this was the most benign image I could find.

The movie ‘10′ was tagged “a comedy for adults who can count”. Yeah, we could use more of those. From the Money & Markets column in yesterday’s Providence Journal, a Thomson Reuters item starts, “We have just four months left until the end of the decade.” Say what? The last year of a ten-year period is the tenth year, right?  The decade will end December 31st, 2010. (Poor Bo, turns out her braids were too tight and she turned into a Republican.)

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

This post obviously calls for a lyric or song title as headline. I have a thing for John Wesley Harding — Apologies if the song is too obscure for a hackneyed headline-pun. Music below.

The story is just ridiculous in too many ways to enumerate.  To our former cop, Beth — standard procedure to ask someone for ID because they’re caught taking a walk at 5pm?

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.

“I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Woolley said.

For many of us, the Governor Sanford debacle was the first we heard mention of C Street, the Christian fellowship house on C Street in Washington D. C.  It was where he turned to find ’support’ and where he undoubtedly found it.  For an organization that holds Hitler and Pol Pot in high esteem, a little philandering is not going to register as much of an infraction.  The perverse and terrifying ideology of ‘The Family’ was laid out by author Jeff Sharlet last week on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ (book now in paperback). It is the first time I have ever seen Mr. Maher at a loss for words.  Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Mr. Sharlet last summer when the book came out. Rachel Maddow has also interviewed Sharlet (vid after jump), Huffpo has a comprehensive write-up of this story, and ‘Doonesbury’ has started a C Street storyline as well. Good. This story needs wide exposure. For most people it was the hypocrisy of the place that was so appalling, but the depravity of this cult goes way beyond that.

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Can I report a statue to the SPCA? It’s bad enough that this poor guy is wearing a collar like those wretched Russian circus bears, but he is clearly quite ill. The statue was donated to Brown University by Theodore Francis Green and is tucked away on Magee Street for fairly obvious reasons.

Attention Cox: my phone service went out on Thursday. Happily, my computer is still up and running so I thought it would be a very simple matter of going online to your website and clicking on ‘report a problem’ somewhere. If such a page/link exists I cannot find it. There is also no useful help on the newly redesigned bill statement. (Ooh, it’s just lovely, thank you guys.) If a Cox representative is reading this, please fix my phone service — you know my number. (And I know the fastest way for me to fix the problem involves making some brand new friends in the digital age.)

[Update: I have been contacted and have a 10:30am appointment for Monday. Meanwhile I am getting the caller id notice on my TV screen of people trying to call me which is kind of weird.]

Swansea parents might want to think again next time they try to attend a town meeting with kids in tow:  the South Coast Herald reports that they won’t be allowed inside.

April Sousa wasn’t allowed inside a special town meeting on Monday, because she couldn’t find a sitter and made the grievous error of bringing her two-year old along.  That didn’t sit well with meeting moderator Paul Burke, who explains his rationale for banning the pair from the meeting: more »

And glorious:

Session’s out for somewhere between 2 and 28 weeks, so they say…