This week on Street Stories, John and I will take anyone who’s willing on the road to life.   The story begins with a high school wrestler who’s about to be pinned.

“Come on Andrew!” you hear someone from the crowd scream.

Moments later, Andrew Dunham does a reversal,  tossing his opponent on his back.  Andrew, now a state champion, was close to pinned in life only a few years ago.

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I would never steal TJ’s thunder (pun intended) regarding science but I wanted to thank the kids from Barrington for allowing me to slime them.

http://www.dropshots.com/teacherhms#date/2009-06-02/08:28:41

I was part of a science day out on the lawn of Hampden Meadows Elementary. I helped the kids make slime but as you can see in this video, there were other awesome experiments. It was a great day for science!

This week on Street Stories, John and I take you inside one of Rhode Island’s most notorious ‘industries’ through the lens of a pair of local filmmakers.

Their first feature length documentary, Happy Endings, captures all the angles of the massage parlour business and the loophole that allows indoor prostitution or what are known as ‘happy endings’.

It’s Not Easy Productions penned its name for a reason. Tracking down every voice and getting them on tape and into production is difficult but these two are part of a growing corp of local fillmmakers.

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I got a note that the link I provided in a recent post did not work. This one does…if you want to check someone’s record.

http://courtconnect.courts.ri.gov/pls/ri_adult/ck_public_qry_cpty.cp_personcase_setup_idx

This week on Street Stories, John Villella and I head north to Woonsocket’s Butterfly House.

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Now that I have your attention, did you see this story on 60 minutes?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/25/60minutes/main4752082.shtml

It’s a ‘re-run’ of a piece about a potential drug of the future called Resveratrol. The pill is drawn from the chemistry in red wine and turns on what the drug developers call your survival gene. You could drink red wine instead but as the headline indicates, you might not survive that particular treatment. The pills contain the healthy equivalent of a thousand bottles of wine. The pill version of that could be on the market within five years.

45 year old Gregg Berube is accused of a sixth DUI! Read that again. Sixth DUI!

http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/local_wpri_plainville_man_charged_with_his_sixth_DUI_20090525_mla

The only time a defendant seems to do DUI jail time is when someone is killed. You’d think after two or three ‘potentially’ deadly mistakes, the law would allow a judge to lock someone up until they realized they have to stop.  Berube has recieved five chances and now, possibly a sixth.

RI ranks one notch worse than Mass when it comes to bad drivers and both are near the bottom. 46th and 45th.

http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/993/where-the-worst-drivers-live/;_ylc=X3oDMTE5ZmdmcGVkBF9TAzI3MTYxNDkEc2VjA2ZwLXRvZGF5BHNsawN3b3JzdC1kcml2ZXJz

I think we all believe we’re better drivers than we really are.  Although, I do have a secret desire…not secret anymore…to ‘track down’ anyone who carelessly pulls out into traffic in front of me. Also –  no patience for drivers who ignore others’  blinkers and never use their own. But that’s only because I’m a better driver than everyone else. (Please check first sentence of this paragraph.)

A Rhode Island farmer who helps abandoned and even tortured animals, continues fighting red tape and foreclosure. John and I head back to North Scituate for this Street Story.

Dan MacKenzie’s foreclosure deadline ended without an extension, leaving Dan and more than a hundred ‘rescued’ animals on the edge of eviction or worse.

“A lot of them were old, crippled, abandoned. Abused. Diseased,” Dan tells us.

“Only one way I’m leaving,” he says to a couple of friends who stopped by the farm.

He says he paid his mortgage on Bonniedale for eight years but when the note was sold, the new bank didn’t get his payments. The foreclosure was underway and unstoppable.

“When the notification went out in the papers, people thought I was out of business.”

His western store that’s attached to the barn suffered. The horse stalls were suddenly empty.

“I can’t rent any stall out until I get it back in my name.”

“And you can’t pay your mortgage until you rent out the stalls?” I asked him.

“Correct.”

He says the only option to stop the spiraling, catch 22 is to buy back the farm that his attorneys claim he should’ve never lost the rights to in the first place.

“A lot of good people in Rhode Island are helping us out. And that’s why I’m doing this. To tell the people exactly what happened.”

He raised almost enough for a down payment on a re-finance but now he needs a new bank or an extension from his old bank.

“We need help. Plain and simple.”

Dan thinks the eviction could come any day and that most if not all the animals would go to slaughter.

You can email Dan directly at snakehill1007@aol.com if you have any questions or can help. Also, take a look at the video version of this story by clicking on this link.

http://www.wpri.com/subindex/on_air/street_stories

As always, comments and ideas are welcome.

Christopher Young’s often-tossed-hat is in the ring for mayor of Providence. His latest run more than likely puts him well into candidacy double digits. I was once criticized by one of his supporters for calling him a ‘perennial’ candidate. . .as if that was an insult. I still think perennial fits but at this rate he’s on his way to becoming an ‘annual’ candidate. Win or lose, he’ll help make the race interesting.