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Thanksgiving Mad Lib

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This week families get together to celebrate Christmas’ younger and distinctly more chill sibling, Thanksgiving. Sure it’s only one day not a whole ‘season’ and there are only a couple of TV specials and that one Adam Sandler song everyone pretends is funny (it is not funny) but there is certainly parity in both holiday’s ability to leave you stranded in transit with nothing to do. Whether you’re splayed out across the terminal seats at a crappy regional airport or stuck in the off-smelling waiting area of a small-town service station held-up until “Chester” can look at your Honda after it started making that weird grinding noise on the Interstate, we’re here to help. You and your traveling companions can while away some fruitless minutes with:

THE CLAM’S THANKSGIVING MAD LIB

Not pictured: small pox

Not pictured: small pox

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! It’s a special time to get the whole clan together for meal fit for a [title of William S. Burroughs Novel]______________________. Our family has many traditions, some you’d recognize and a few carried over from [unfashionable foreign country] ______________.

We’re a little old-school, so around here the [exploited group] _____________ are up early to start cooking first thing Thursday morning. By noon the house is full of delicious smells and [negative emotion typically responsive to medication] _________________.

 Soon the family begin to arrive. Some travel by [unaffordable and unnecessarily oversized vehicle] ____________________ others we have to pick up from [neglected public transportation hub] _______________. Uncle [first name of 20th Century European dictator] ___________ will no doubt pour himself a glass of [mass-produced brown liquor] __________________and tell his story about the time he shared an overcrowded restaurant table with [regular guest cast member from Love Boat] __________________ when visiting Los Angeles.

Soon we’re sitting down at a table full of meats dripping with [human hormone] _______________ and and roasted [vegetable that will inevitably be passed over in favor of potatoes] ______________. Also, there is always plenty of [different vegetable with some kind of processed sugar added to make it remotely palatable] ___________________! And let’s not forget a big bowl of [food in the “NEVER” column on the list handed to you by the cardiologist] ___________________with lots of butter. Every year we try a new stuffing recipe. This year will be one featuring [nut and dried fruit combo on sale at Trader Joe’s] _________________________!

 To remind us of the true origins of the holiday Mom reads a prayer by [Native American chief, but it was actually written by a white college professor in the ‘60s] _______________________reminding us of our connection to the Earth and all we have to be grateful for.

 Now it’s time to eat! We always have lively conversations about [topic that is not: immigration policy, climate change, the statistical unlikelihood we live in a universe controlled by a just god and the nature of the relationship of the female “friend” your sister has brought for the past three years running] ___________________. There are a variety of opinions, but the one thing we always agree on is desert! [Person who actually has Master’s Degree in topic everyone else is spouting off uninformed opinions about] _____________ will always be the first one to say, “Hey Mom, isn’t it time for [heated combination of dextrose and carbohydrates] _________________?”

 After the meal we all sit down to watch [Screw it, just write ‘football’] ____________ . Dad always likes to comment on his love for his favorite player [Athlete with multiple arrests and a history of violent behavior] ________________. It’s always great to see our guys out on the gridiron not matter if they wind up with a win or a [permanent, debilitating injury] __________________. Sometimes cousin [overused millennial name like ‘Justin’ or ‘Ashley’] ___________________will suggest we head outside to play a little ‘touch,’ but it usually depends on the [thinly veiled excuse] ______________ if we actually make it out or not.

Eventually Dad succumbs to [chronic, unacknowledged medical condition] ________________ and falls asleep on the couch while mom cleans up and listens to [band that reminds her of a carefree youth oh so many years ago] __________________. That’s the signal head downtown and catch up with old friends. Maybe you’ll even run into [the girl who said, “I’ll wait for you’ and then when you came home from freshman year told you she was confused about her feelings for ‘Jake’ and you’re like, “Who the fuck is Jake?”] ____________________!

 I hear they have two kids now.

 

 

The Open Door Is Awesome, So Pay Attention.

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If you hadn’t noticed by the incessant commercials and the fact that it gets dark at 2:45 PM, the holiday season is upon us. And unless you live under some kind of overturned fishing vessel, conversing only with passing whales, you know that the holiday season can be the toughest for families already struggling financially.

 

maslow

 

The above is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which you may remember from your Marketing 101 class Freshman year. The basic premise is that higher levels of the pyramid can’t be reached without satisfying the lower levels first. So without food, nothing happens. A family without food security can’t even begin to advance until that need is met. There is also a Maslow’s New Hierarchy of Needs for Clamtributors, which is below.

 

maslows-new-hierarchy-of-needs

 

 Let’s be honest: food is the pretty much the best thing ever.

 

So with that in mind, we all need to give a huge high-five to the folks at Open Door. I took a trip over there (don’t worry, they had wifi) and sat down with Julie Lafontaine, the executive director, to talk about their holiday programs and all the awesome they’re doing for the community. Hint: it’s a lot of awesome. Like a few dump trucks full of awesome straight from the awesome quarry.

First of all, something like one in six residents of Cape Ann is served by the Open Door. And the people who receive services may not be who you think. Julie says she asks her teenage interns who they think visits the food pantry, and most assume it’s the homeless. However, they are surprised to learn that many clients are holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet, having had their hours reduced or losing their job altogether. They’re trying to hold on to their mortgages and car payments. And again – without food, you can’t even think about looking for a higher-paying job. Even more enlightening is that the majority of clients don’t use the food pantry as often as they are allowed to, instead coming once a month. For so many families, the pantry is a safety net – or more like a safety trampoline that helps them bounce back (That is the first time the words “safety” and “trampoline” have ever been put next to each other, by the way).

The Open Door doesn’t just serve meals in-house and provide a food pantry – they have a whole range of sweet-ass services they provide to the community. There’s summer meals for kids – providing lunch for kids who relied on school lunches for a square meal. There’s an after-school supper at Veteran’s School. They run mobile markets full of fresh produce out of schools and assisted living centers. They offer nutrition-specific boxes for clients who have medical issues as well as food stamp advocacy. And they also have a garden out back!

They also do a heck of a lot for the holiday season.

 

This upcoming Saturday is their “Super Saturday”, where they plan to distribute hundreds of baskets with a turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, apples, and vegetables to families who have signed up for the program. They give out about 1,000 of these baskets for Thanksgiving, and do about 800 more around Christmas as well. It’s such a large program that they’re putting a 20×40′ tent in their front parking lot and setting up out there. I mean, that’s a pretty big freakin’ tent.

Also on Saturday, they’re running a Holiday food drive from 9AM-3PM at Market Basket, Stop and Shop, and the Eastern Ave Shaws. Ann-Margaret Ferrante, Bruce Tarr, and North Shore 104.9 will be there. The items that are most needed are staples like tuna, peanut butter, cereal, and 100% juice.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday they’ll be distributing for the holidays. The turkey baskets ensure that families who want the traditional family Thanksgiving at home can have it. They also pair up with other agencies like the American Legion, North Shore Health Project, Wellspring, and Action to provide food for those agencies to cook and serve holiday meals at their locations or deliver to members of the community.

So pretty much what I’m saying is that Open Door is pretty badass, and they do so much for our community. If you’re shopping, get a few staples for their food drive. Or, donate on their page.

 

The Gloucester Clam’s Tournament of Crappy Intersections: Finals!

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Wow, we’ve finally made it to the last battle in our Tournament of Shitty Intersections. We started with 16 of the most awful intersections in town, and we’re down to our last two. Let’s take a look at our contestants:

intersections1

 

 

Last round, Flannagan Square took on Centennial at Washington St. It was a tough battle with a close margin – Centennial and Washington is quite the quarter-panel destroyer of an intersection. But Flannagan Square just has so much more crazy swirling around it. I mean, just yesterday we were discussing how this city doesn’t like change, especially regarding traffic habits. So naturally, one of the worst intersections in town will be the ONE THAT JUST CHANGED THE STOP SIGNS AROUND. And by “just” I mean, like six years ago, but that’s barely any time at all on the island. And no one, NO ONE coming west from Rogers to go down Main ever actually successfully navigates the stop. You have to stop. At the stop line. After the car in front of you proceeds. It’s not an option, you are not a train. When there are two stopped lines of cars, the person who stopped first goes. Not “the person who stopped and then the DeVille behind him.” I’m looking at you, old lady who I beeped at in a terrified manner because you kept on truckin’.

Flannagan’s is most definitely deserving of its spot in the finals. I have barely even scratched the surface of how annoying it is when there’s approximately seventy-three people trying to get gas after work at the exact same time, or how LITERALLY NO ONE on Rogers St will let you take a left – seriously, anywhere else in town, you’re likely to be let into traffic quickly. It’s like people go through a cloud of nerve gas that makes you be a dick about driving just in the general vicinity of Flannagan’s, but usually it’s just a cloud of burning fish fryer oil.

Our other finalist is, unsurprisingly, Maplewood, Railroad, and Prospect. Whoever designed this intersection really pulled out the big guns on this clusterfuck. “Let’s take three super busy roads and make them intersect in a K, but make it so there’s no stop signs anywhere in the entire intersection. No, make one stop sign, just to mix it up a bit. Make the crosswalks kind of faded. Make sure you stick a buoy right in the goddamn middle. It’s genius! I have clearly been paid off by the local chapter of the Horn, Bumper, and Taillight Plastic Manufacturers Union.”

So make sure you vote on the winner! We’ll be back next week to crown the champion!

 


 

LET’S ALL DISCUSS PROSPECT PARKING, SHALL WE?

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Here at the Clam, we like to do a little bit of good-natured ribbing around the fact that at times, Gloucester doesn’t particularly enjoy or welcome change. On the scale of how much the island accepts change, we’re somewhere between “We are a cannibal tribe who eats all who make contact with us” and “I suppose the Internet isn’t a fad after all.” It’s no surprise, then, that a simple, small modification that most of us realize is so glaringly necessary for safety can become a huge debate, steeped in local tradition and “but we’ve always done it this way!”

There are literally twenty topics that the introduction paragraph could have been written about (thanks for the constant source of content, townspeople!) but this time: parking on Prospect Street.

We covered a little bit of how abysmal the parking and driving situation is around Destino’s, Our Lady of Good Voyage, and the Portuguese Club when we ran our Tournament of Crappy Parking Lots. The Good Voyage lot is kind of a pain in the ass parking lot, and the spillover from church leads to the parking situation.

I understand that the parking situation is tough in that area. But this? The parking along Prospect? It’s dangerous, and it shouldn’t be allowed. End of story. That determination is simply based on the physical realities imposed on us by the laws of our universe that plainly state: Outside of a black hole, dimensional space is finite and therefore a given thing can only fit in a space large enough for that thing to occupy.

Pictured above: not a black hole

Pictured above: not a black hole

Look at this clusterfuck above, as captured by Prospect St resident Thomas Fernandes. Jesus Christ, what a disaster. The white Corolla with its lights on? That’s not a car traveling in the correct lane or pulled over to let an ambulance go past. Oh no, he’s parked. The cars behind him are parked as well. And that’s no ambulance with warning lights and sirens, it’s the CATA bus probably full of seniors, schoolchildren and newborn puppies from the shelter driving DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD in order to get down one of Gloucester’s major thoroughfares.

There is simply no way to navigate this stretch of road legally.

You are forced to break the law here by traversing over the middle line. We can get rid of the freaking wind turbines and generate more reliable electricity by just attaching the dynamos to the corpses of generations of driver’s ed teachers spinning in their graves. Look back at the photo: there is about enough room for a vegan on a Vespa. It’s about 4′ of space between the parked car and the yellow line.

Now, we know that Gloucester has some crazy streets where you have to creatively squeeze two cars into the space that usually only one can physically occupy. We’re used to it. We know where our mirrors will get knocked off. We carry around small shoehorns to parallel park on anywhere but the comfortably massive parking spaces on Main St.

But Prospect St is too busy and important for the kind of parking fuckery that we let slide everywhere else in town. I mean, if I had a dollar for every questionable parking spot I’ve seen within the city limits, I would have many sacks full of dollars. But this is the worst of it. It’s not an East Gloucester side road where the only place anyone has to get to is wherever the hell they sell ukulele strings. It’s a major road connecting downtown to the train station and Bayview.

City Councilor Melissa Cox took the initiative to face the problem head-on starting a few months ago, scheduling a site visit and getting the matter addressed at a city council meeting. She brought up salient points also known as “physical reality”: It isn’t wide enough – streets should be 11′ wide for each driving lane, and 8′ for parking, and Prospect is only 34ft wide there (where parking is legal across the street, as you can see to the very right of the above photo). Melissa also took a look into who is parking there: “most of the residents have parking. It’s mostly church and club events that use the area,” she discovered. She’s also pointed out that Gloucester’s police and fire are against having parking there for safety reasons. It should be a pretty cut and dry thing to do. Yet, the matter didn’t get voted on at the first meeting – it was moved to tonight. Because….why?

Why, you ask, would such a glaringly obvious issue that threatens not only the safety of drivers, pedestrians, and bikers in the area, but the ability for our police, fire, and ambulance services to do their jobs quickly and effectively, not be voted on immediately? So why are we delaying the vote? Why?

According to some members of the City Council, because people park there for church, which means  that the cars somehow fit. It’s a miracle, apparently.

Yep. You guessed it. One particular member of the city council thought it important that people continue to be able to park in an easy spot on a street that isn’t legally wide enough to contain said spot, so that he invoked something called “rule 2-11-c”, which postponed the vote. We don’t get the rule, but we’re wondering what the postponement could possibly change in terms of the measurements that determine what the laws should be.

Just get a fucking tape measure. It’s not wide enough. Unless this councilor is going to personally widen the road somehow using spackle over rolled up newspapers, we’re not sure what the question is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a church or a club or whatever, the road is not wide enough to accommodate cars in that section if people park there. What is there to even debate? Wormholes? Extradimensional spaces? If the particles making up the cars are vibrating strings? There is simply no discussion to have. It’s not big enough.

So the meeting was moved to tonight. Public input is helpful, so if you’re like the police and fire departments or anyone with a basic grasp of physics and think that we should do the safe thing, show your support.