Servant of the people

Phillipe and Jorge owe our readers an apology. We're a week late bringing you important news about state Representative Vincent "Family Man" Mesolella's detestable draining of Echo Lake. An honest misunderstanding with the editorial powers that be (translation: a screwup that wasn't your superior correspondents' fault) delayed our delivery of a juicy item.

This is especially critical, given the bid by Mesolella's colleague, state Representative Brian "Walking Eagle" (he's so full of shit he can't fly) Kennedy, to wrest the title of Biggest Political Whore for Developers away from Vinnie -- a title we're sure Mesolella would like to retain. (Nevertheless, in recent months Walking Eagle has been a close contender with his widely ridiculed DEM reorganization power-grab legislation and his brainless bill to turn Rhode Island's public hiking and bridle paths into freeways for off-track motorcycles.)

P&J merely wanted to point out that Mesolella, our favorite jumped-up greaser, was reportedly boasting to friends at the Z Bar on Wickenden Street in Providence that he planned to bilk the state out of a million dollars on the Pascoag money grab. Of course, P&J would not for an instant think that a person with such a high sense of moral conduct as Family Man would consider cashing in at the Vo Dislun taxpayer's expense. We just wanted to nip that rumor in the bud.

You see, only by exposing such egregious scandal-mongering can P&J help protect upstanding public figures such as Mesolella from suffering at the hands of scurrilous gossip. As anyone who has done business with him would surely testify, avarice is so patently unfamiliar to Mesolella as to make the suggestion that he bragged about taking the state to the cleaners absolutely outrageous.

You're quite welcome that we're defending your honor, Vinnie, which, as Groucho Marx once quipped, is more than you've ever done.

My johnson's a whale

As is our habit, P&J were watching Jeopardy one evening last week when our boy Alex tossed out a little factoid that stunned us into silence. The answer (in the form of a question) was "Who is Herman Melville?" But the lead-in noted that, 10 years before the great American novelist wrote his magnum opus, a European writer had penned another seafaring tale of a great white whale titled Mocha Dick.

Needless to say, your superior correspondents were greatly confused. We could have sworn that Mocha Dick was a thinly veiled erotic account of the many adventures experienced by the offspring of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Silly us -- that book was Pubes Lait. We mention this merely as a public service to those of you who might run across the mighty tome Mocha Dick in your local library and become unnecessarily aroused.

e sometimes wonder if you, dear readers, get as upset as we do when viewing the ongoing erosion of what we whimsically refer to as "Our American Culture" by the greedhead forces of corporate world. This movement is particularly irritating when it invades our schools.

As a result, P&J's "Hero of the Week" award goes to Michael Cameron, the Evans, Georgia, high school senior who earned himself a one-day suspension from school last week for wearing a shirt with a Pepsi patch on it on a day when his school was nuzzling up to the Coca Cola Company, headquartered a mere 130 miles away in Atlanta.

At the time, Michael's school, Greenbrier High, was conducting Coke Day as part of a national competition sponsored by the soft drink company in which students are being asked to come up with "the most creative method of distributing discount cards to students." For helping flog Coke sales, the winning school will receive a whopping $500.

Naturally, many schools have been more than happy to whore themselves out to the mega-corporation. But our boy Mikey threw a little monkey wrench into their plans by showing up on Coke Day displaying the colors of their main rival.

Although school administrators thought this to be "disruptive and rude," P&J believe that, in the face of schools' bending over to accommodate greedy corporate assholes and their "creative" marketing strategies, being disruptive and rude is the least a student can do.

Speaking for himself

Phillipe and Jorge have always had the highest admiration and respect for farmers, having spent parts of our youthful summers toiling in the fields of Ohio with our relatives. So we were a bit baffled to read a recent op-ed piece by William Stamp in the BeloJo that called Department of Environmental Management employees "brown shirts" (a.k.a. Nazis) while supporting the widely ridiculed DEM reorganization bill now before the House.

We appreciate the rantings of a deranged frother in the Urinal as much as the next pair of queens, but we became a bit disturbed upon reading Stamp's bio at the end of the column. In it, he was described as president of the Rhode Island Farm Bureau, which possibly led readers to surmise that Stamp was representing the views of the entire membership.

The truth is that we are fairly certain that other farmers would not exactly enjoy being portrayed as endorsing rhetoric that sounds more like David Koresh or Timothy McVeigh than a typical upstanding, hard-handed tiller of the soil.

Unfortunately, attempts to contact someone at the Rhode Island Farm Bureau (if there is indeed such an entity that exists anywhere but in William Stamp's overcooked brain) through the listed phone number in Cranston produced no luck on numerous occasions, not even an answering machine.

And this again led us to believe that Stamp had misrepresented himself and, in the process, had made other members of his bogus bureau look like roaring, right-wing militants with eyes-a-poppin' and guns galore. (There is also guilt by association to consider.)

P&J would love to see just how many members of the Farm Bureau (if there is indeed such a group) would be willing to stand by Mr. Stamp's delusional and degrading public pronouncements.

Getting a handle on a hurricane

While out on the town this weekend, P&J encountered two of our dearest friends -- US Representative Robert "Dorian" Weygand and his effervescent wife, "Hurricane Fran." Upon seeing them, we were quick to compliment the pair on the wonderful photo of them with President Billary and Hillary Rodham Cuckold that had accompanied a recent column by Merrill Chuckie Bakst in the Urinal.

Hurricane Fran, as shy and demure as always, then offered us the information that Billary had looped his hand completely around her trim waist while posing for the photo, leaving his hand not a million miles away from her breast on his opposite side.

When P&J mentioned that we couldn't see that in the BeloJo's reproduction, Hurricane Fran quickly attempted to explain that it must have been accidentally cropped out, at which Dorian rolled his eyes to the ceiling, clutched his head, and headed for the exit. No doubt a subpoena from Kenneth Starr will arrive at the Fountain Street photo lab forthwith.

Aimee Grunberger

Flags are at half-staff once again at Casa Diablo as we join the many folks here who mourn the passing of a dear old friend, Aimee Joan Grunberger. A former Vo Dilunduh and an award-winning poet, Aimee passed away in Boulder, Colorado, last week at the age of 44 after a long illness. Brilliant and witty, she and her husband, architect Michael Holleran, spent many an hour screening some of the worst-produced films of the 20th century with Phillipe & Jorge and enjoying every minute of it. Besides Michael, she leaves her twin sons, Max and Sam. What a wonderful person! Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family.

Alternative politics hotline

On Saturday, reform-minded political progressives will get an opportunity to meet and hear Sam Smith, a founding member of the Association of State Green Parties and longtime editor of the Progressive Review. Smith will speak at the spring meeting of Vo Dilun's Greens at 1 p.m. at the Rochambeau branch of the Providence Public Library (708 Hope Street). At 7 p.m., he will speak in Room 102 in Wilson Hall on the green of Brown University. He'll be available to sign his latest book, Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual: Rebuilding the Country So the Politics Aren't Broken and the Politicians Aren't Fixed (W.W. Norton).

Our friend Richard Walton, the jolly veteran peace, human-rights, and justice activist, notes that Smith is the "successor to the late I.F. Stone as dean of Washington's alternative journalists." P&J highly recommend both of these sessions.

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