A giant rat and a cool moose
Your superior correspondents woke up screaming in the middle of the night last week. Earlier in the day, we had read an Associated Press story about the discovery of the fossil of “a rodent as big as a bull” in Uruguay, and in classic Casa Diablo mind-meld fashion, conjured up a related dream: we were handcuffed to the floor at the Big Nazo workshop, getting terrorized by the aforementioned giant rodent.
 
Mercifully, Big Nazo Head Ramrod Erminio Pinque came to our rescue before turning back into another Nazo character and scaring the shit out of us again.
 
“Its skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1700 to 3000 pounds,” the story read. The curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, Bruce Patterson, noted that eight-foot-long, one-ton rodents are “totally different from the rats and mice we are accustomed to.” That’s one way of saying that Mr. Patterson has never resided in lower South Providence or Olneyville.
 
P&J suspect that there may be more to the giant rat discovery than meets the eye. It’s not just our suspicious nature that leads us to detect a hoax whenever someone discovers a giant rodent carapace or a tie-dyed variation of the Shroud of Turin, but that the story emanates out of Uruguay.
 
That’s because a Casa Diablo regular, Vo Dilun political legend and notorious jokester Bob “Cool Moose” Healey, is known to haunt the beaches and boites of Montevideo. Does surreptitiously planting a giant rat fossil on the outskirts of town not sound like the sort of thing that might come to the Bobster as he’s lolling in a cloud of Cohibian smoke?
 
Obviously, if Bob were to successfully pull off an archeological hoax of this magnitude he couldn’t plant the relic in Warren, since people would just assume it was a resident of Barrington who had crossed the town line and fallen asleep.  
 
Let’s just say: we’ve got our eyes on you, Bob.

Kudos + Congrats . . .
. . . to Mark Arsenault, ace BeloJo reporter (and, let’s not forget, first-rate mystery novelist), for Sunday’s installment of what promises to be a thoughtful and well-researched look at LGBT culture in the Biggest Little.

Many superior behaviorists may be skeptical about the prospects for this series of articles (and with good reason; the idea of the Providence Urinal producing an incisive look at the state of queerness in Vo Dilun does not sound promising). Yet we at least know that they are making a real effort by assigning the task to the very excellent Mr. Arsenault. We anxiously await the coming installments.

Send the pit of winter and Pulitzer-grade tips to p&j@thephoenix.com