I need to go to Rhode Island!

Down here in Maryland, we don't know much about Rhode Island, except that it's our tiniest of the 50 states, and that Family Guy is filmed there, featuring a local family from Quahog with a brilliant baby, a talking dog, an idiot dad and a mayor who was once Batman.

Huh? It's a cartoon? Whaaaaa?

Well, alls I knows about Quahog, the town in which Family Guy takes place, is that they seem to have a great educational system, with a high school named in honor of local resident and one-time movie actor James Woods, and Buddy Cianci Junior High, named for the former mayor of Providence, R.I., who had to resign from office twice due to felony racketeering convictions.  Twice! That's a record for Baltimore politicians to aim for. I mean, anyone can be escorted out of the mayor's office in handcuffs once, but twice! Go Buddy!

He is gone, as a matter of fact, having passed away in 2016, but not before he got out of prison after four years and started a spaghetti sauce company. A friend of a friend got me a jar of his tomato gravy, and I have to say it was molto saporito! (Very tasty!)

Meanwhile, among the living, in North Providence, the mayor, Charles Lombardi, ordered Dr Anthony Farina to tear down a building Farina owns, claiming that it's a public health hazard, since it's filthy in hizzoner's opinion.

Farina is not a man who cares to be told what to do with the building he owns, but he did try to spruce things up a bit by painting the building, and hired Paul Morse to do just that.

Morse went to work and, at Farina's direction, painted a tribute to the mayor on the outside wall.



Morse told the local news,“I hope the mayor is not too mad at me.” 

NBC 10 contacted Mayor Lombardi, who was out of town and had not seen the magnificent mural, to see how he liked the artwork.

“He has the right to, you know, how I can say, ‘showcase,’ if you want to call it, his property. It doesn’t bother me," Lombardi replied.

“In a longstanding dispute with the doctor and some of his actions in the past, this doesn’t surprise me,” Lombardi told NBC 10.

“Good stuff,” says Morse, reaping the whirlwind of artistic notoriety.

There has been no further comment from Dr Farina, who seemingly wishes to let the painting he commissioned speak for him.

And the fight over whether the building should be demolished still goes on.

One last tidbit about Buddy Cianci: he claimed that the profits from the sales of his spaghetti sauce would go toward the education of children, but once the company went out of business, their ledgers showed a net profit of $3. No word on what they bought with it...maybe some paints to encourage future artistic endeavors in Rhode Island, a state that might be called "Baltimore In Miniature"?