Thus far we’ve gotten 7.2 inches of rain and it hasn’t stopped yet. Did get a brief respite this afternoon but we’re getting more rain this evening.

The first indication that something isn’t quite right:

You can see the section of Atwells Ave, right next to the fire station, that the river is overflowing. Now keep in mind this river runs about 3+ feet below grade level almost all the times so this means there is about a 4 foot swell.

In this shot you can see the river in the left hand background.

Here is where Eagle St. connects to Valley St. There’s a reason they call it Valley St btw.

They’ve already declared state of emergencies in most counties in RI including Providence. They’re saying this is a flood you get once every hundred years.

And now I’m hearing this is a 500 year flood. Interesting.

Here’s the DOT map of flooding:

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take a walk over to the barrier and get pix there.

Click here and read the Op-Ed. It summarizes what I’ve said ever since Obama became a candidate for President.

Short summary – all of the Tea Party, or as I like to call them Tea Bagger rage is rooted in racism. Even though Obama is half white they’ll still apply the old one drop rule. I dare say that if you know about what genetic scientists have been doing, we ALL have at least ‘one drop’. I’m talking about the likelihood that Homo Sapiens originated in Africa.

And here is what I’ve always said ever since Obama became a candidate for the presidency.

If you really want to bring out the racists, the misogynists, homophobes and general bigots against the disable and the poor, run a disabled, black lesbian. You cover all of it in one swoop.

So early (9AM) this morning I got a tour of the West Broadway School and the Asa Messer School.

It was sponsored by the WSPEC, WBNA and NOMADS (Ok, lets break em’ down: West Side Public Education committee, West Broadway Neighborhood Association, and I cannot for the life of me decipher or remember what NOMADS means!).

Apparently the Providence School Department is looking to shuffle things up and re-open the West Broadway school on Bainbridge Ave. in the city. So we went to brainstorm about what we want to see in schools.

One woman was adamantly opposed to splitting k-2 and 3-5 between two buildings that are one half mile apart The reason being, she has siblings that are only two grades apart, on in 1st the other in 3rd. But here is my point, the schools (West Broadway and Asa Messer) are only about .4 miles apart. A healthy adult can walk that in < 10 minutes, a child maybe 12-15 minutes.

I don't buy her arguments. I also heard that West Broadway was closed due to egress issues. The main reason, because younger kids move a little bit slower they didn't want them trampled by the older kids. My experience going to a K-8 Catholic school says you had regular fire drills and you showed kids how to evacuate the building in orderly fashion.

Another thing that came out was maximum class sizes. The number of students per classroom suggested by groups was 14 to 18. Right now the range is 20 to 26, hence my astonishment because in the Catholic schools they really pack em' in at 40 kids to a classroom. .

A couple of the groups brought up better math and science curricula. But as I alluded t in another post reading is a big problem. I even brought that up with the newest member of the Providence School Board who I believe is Kathleen Crain.

It was noted by several people that attendance at this forum was for the most part white people. Not only very white but older. I often wonder why it is we don't see the people in our community at these things.

Other pols in attendance, city councilman and candidate for mayor John Lombardi, Rep. Steven Costantino (D District 8 – Federal Hill, Broadway), Rep. Anastasia Williams (D District 9 – Western end of the city toward upper south side).
and Sen. Paul Jabour (D District 5, downtown, Federal Hill, Olneyville) and if I missed anyone my apologies.

Some interesting things came out of the brainstorm. Greater use of technology, an outdoor garden space (You can do it indoors too!) and more arts and music programs were suggested. We've gotten far away from that in the quest to make the test these days. And there really isn't any room to hire and art or music teacher. It's sad but it's the reality of education in the 21st century.

I’m considering starting a class action against Apple under ADA statutes.

The reason, I have hearing problems. I love my Motorola S9’s because it gets the sound right to the eardrum but I’m miffed that Apple doesn’t support the track select or microphone in the 2G iPod Touch running the iPhone OS 3.1.3. With the recent introduction of Line-2 (A cheap, $15 a month solution for voice telephony when in range of Wifi) I’d like to use the earphones I paid for in that fashion. And since I have hearing problems, the use of the S9’s is pretty much required.

So what say you all? We really need to knock Apple’s “We do no wrong” attitude to the curb.

There used to be a memory fix for older versions of Firefox 2 but when 3 came around the folks at Mozilla felt confident it’d be better at memory management. They were wrong. It did stuttering wonders to iTunes because Firefox and iTunes are the two biggest memory users.

Well, now there’s Memory Fox. It’s reduced my Firefox memory usage from over 200MB down to 100MB. It just flushes the memory on a constant basis that way the turds that Firefox leaves don’t accumulate and cause your system to do stuttering wonders.

Go and read the article and then come back. My apologies to Heretic Tom for scooping this in the blogsphere.

The most damning part of the article is this:

Yet this is exactly what we are forced to read about every day. The happiness and the health of countless children was systematically destroyed by men who could count on their clerical bosses to shield them from legal retribution and, it seems, even from moral condemnation. A bit of “therapy” or a swift change of locale was the worst that most of them had to fear.

And Benedict XVI is in the center of this both from his time as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980, as well as his time in the Vatican prior to his becoming pope when he sent a letter to all Bishops telling them that “…to refuse cooperation with any inquiry…”

He’s pretty much neck deep in this scandal. And it isn’t just confined to Ireland where his pastoral letter danced around an actual apology and instead tried to transfer some of the blame for molested children onto the parents.

For this to come from the titular head of the Catholic church amuses me greatly. Benedict XVI knows his goose is cooked.

And in more news, Bishop Thomas Tobin puts his foot in his mouth with this statement when asked about abortion by Chris Matthews:

“…on laws that protect and preserve human right..”

Little slip up there Tobin? Do you mean to say that perhaps I have rights as a gay person? What??? What???