I live in a shit-hole!

I was browsing my local news on news.google.com today after I got back from my psychotherapist appointment (surprised? no, you're not :b) and was treated to this headline:

Providence cancels holiday fireworks display

Wow.

Providence routinely lights huge bails of wood floating in a river on fire (they call it "Waterfire", I call it "touristy bullshit"), so you'd think they'd be fairly good at managing burning stuff. You'd be wrong, though.

Apparently Providence has been launching fireworks from a plot of land near various state buildings since 2005. That's important because it's only just this year, with not enough time to find an alternate site to launch them from, that the fire marshal has "remeasured" (you can probably read this as: "bothered to measure for the first time") the distance between the fireworks and the buildings and discovered they're too close together to be safe.

And why remeasure now? Because of the "discovery of burns on the roof of the state medical examiner’s office". That's right: for 3 years Providence has been almost but not quite burning down, at a minimum, the state medical examiner's office.

Splendid.

And, partly to give credit where credit is due, and partly to convince you I'm not actually creative enough to make this shit up, here's a link to the original Boston Herald story: http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1104356&format=comments#CommentsArea

and a longer story in the Providence Journal: http://www.projo.com/news/content/PROVIDENCE_FIREWORKS_07-01-08_BJAN5R2_v10.3e822ea.html