South Coast Shellfishing Ban

You might want to skip the clams tonight, player,

The state’s Division of Marine Fisheries has banned the harvesting of shellfish in the west side of Buzzards Bay and in Mount Hope Bay until further notice.

The ban is due to an outbreak of toxic algae. The algae is a form of phytoplankton known as Pseudo Nitzschia. If Pseudo Nitzschia doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger.... and a nihilist.

Pseudo Nitzschia leads to the development of Domoic Acid. Domoic Acid can cause Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning, which gives the person who suffers from it vomiting, cramps, diarrhea and incapacitating headaches followed by confusion, disorientation, permanent loss of short-term memory, and in severe cases, seizures and coma. Other than that.... no probba!

Harvesting or collecting shellfish from the affected areas is now prohibited. Towns with the ban include Bourne, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Falmouth, Gosnold, Marion, Mattapoisett, New Bedford, Swansea, Wareham and Westport.

I had Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning once, but I forget what happened.

Sonic Expanding Into Massachusetts

Smithfield, RI

I have friends who don't eat fast food in any form. They're the smart ones, no doubt, and nature should reward them with longer lives and slimmer waistlines. Pulling into one of these fast food joints literally takes minutes from your lifespan... but we're all dying at some point, right?

Once you go all in and commit, part of the fast food lifestyle is discriminating between different brands. Some people have no brand loyalty at all. Others will deliver an Eff Wendy's rant while holding a quarter pounder that, when you peel the bun off of it, looks like that Noriega guy who used to run Panama.

What kills the fast food lifestyle for many is the paucity of choices. You have the King, you have Wendy, and you have Ronald. If your town or mall rules, you may also have a KFC or a Taco Bell... maybe even both in one store! The presence of a KFC/Taco Bell nearby was a selling point for me when I moved to Buzzards Bay, although this was before I met Jessica and started getting food that comes from the stove and so forth. A man can get used to that.

You still have to pull off the highway and get lunch in 3 minutes sometimes, and I cook poorly enough to invoke a situation where a Happy Meal is a safer nutritional choice than me trying to not burn chicken. At worst, Logan can at least make money suing McDonald's.

Now, Logan will also have the opportunity to get salmonella or Legionnaire's Disease from a new restaurant. Sonic Drive-In is setting her sights upon the virgin territory of New England.

Also known as Sonic, the Oklahoma burger joint has been spreading across the nation since her 1950s inception. She has been slow to come to New England, with just 4 stores in Massachusetts (Peabody, Lawerence, Wilmington and Stoughton) and one in Smithfield, Rhode Island. That ish is about to change, Big Man.

Sonic is expanding the franchise to Somerset, Massachusetts. My sources tell me that the new store opens on April 13th, just one week from when I'm typing this. You'll have to leave pretty early to beat me there. I've never even seen a Sonic, despite going to Florida recently (the only low-rent meal I had there was at a strip bar right when we got off the plane), and I'm long overdue.

I'm being told just now that they also have one working for nearby Swansea. Fall River and New Betty can't be far behind, at that point. Somerset was a bit behind schedule.

The chain has plans to open 36 franchises in the Greater Boston area. "Greater Boston" technically means the eastern third of Massachusetts sans the South Coast and Cape Cod, but it can mean whatever you need it to mean if you think that one will hit it big in Hyannis. I've even read estimates as high s 40 in some articles.They also plan for a smaller amount of franchises in New Hamster and Maine.

You'd better bring a lot of green to the Sonic man if you want to open a franchise. Don't even bother calling unless you have two milly in the bank. My people tell me that it would cost a million to build one up from the ground, or a half million to turn a financially-faltering Wendy's-type building into a Sonic.

If you hurry and establish one before anyone else within 50 miles does, you could have a novelty hit on your hands. Buzzards Bay should try to get one, it would really help their Main Street out.

From what I can see on the Sonic menu, it's the same garbage that you see at the other joints. Burgers, chicken strips, chicken sandwiches, hot dogs, fries and so forth.

They seem to have 8 different burgers, the most impressive being one mashed between two pieces of Texas toast. They also have 8 different kinds of hot dogs, each worse than the last.

They do have cool side order options, including chili fries, onion rings (a must in SE Massachusetts and extra-especially in Rhode Island)  and mother-loving tater tots. They seem to be shake and slush focused for drinks, although I'm sure that you can get a Coke if you need one.

They also have a Taco Bell-ian/Burger King-ish breakfast menu, but you gotta draw the line somewhere, kids.

If your burger sucks (and if you're armed), why not see if you can throw it into the face of the guy in the car next to you?

UPDATE: This column went to the Smithfield Sonic! We had just taken Twin River for a quick $150, and decided to live large for a meal.

You can go inside, or you can pull up to an individualized service screen parking spot. They have people who skate the food out to you... or run it out if you go when it's raining, like we did.

I do wonder if enough kids roller skate these days to fully staff a Sonic in a small ton. At least the Somerset one is within skating distance of Fall River.

If you eat inside, they take your order, give you a number, and run it out to you when it's ready.

I felt just like Richard Petty!

The food blows pretty hard, like the mighty North wind. We only have ourselves to blame, as we just got a Coney (what they call hot dogs), fries and a strawberry-banana shake. The shake was really good, I wish that I had another right now.

The food?

The hot dog was around the quality of what you'd get at a Food Mart-style gas station if you were fortunate enough to grab one right when it neared optimal temperature. The french fries had a Wal-Mart Great Value sort of taste and appearance, but they're edible if you hide them in ketchup. I did have a seagull refuse one, a first for me.

It stayed down, which is saying something. I can see a lot of this food being regurgitated out of a car window on side streets in Smithfield by people who stopped at a Sonic after a day spent defeating a 30 pack.

Mobil-riffic!

That's why they grow the more powerful strains of marijuana, folks.

I don't believe that they are endorsed by the hedgehog from the video game, although it seems that he'd work cheap and would be a natural. He might be in PETA or something.

Some franchises never take off in New England. Krispy Kreme is the most famous example, as New Englanders violently prefer Dunkin' Donuts. You also don't see Papa John, Domino's or Pizza Hut survive here long... we have too many serious Italians and Greeks running house-of-pizza shops around here to tolerate processed pizza. Taco Bell, however, usually does well wherever they put it.

How will Sonic fare? Only time will tell. I hear that Smithfield does 500 orders a day. I have no idea if that is a profitable rate.

Even with a poor review from this column, it behooves the fast food ninja to make the hajj to whatever Sonic opens near your home town. I wouldn't recommend driving to Rhode Island from Plymouth to get some Sonic, unless they open one in Wareham or Kingston.

We only got Sonic because we were gambling nearby, This is important, as we knew that we were writing a Sonic article, and we weren't planning to bother with the drive from Buzzards Bay. Things worked out for the best.

Swansea Hurricane Planner

We have two maps from FEMA to check out today. The map above is a Hurricane Inundation map, and it depicts storm surge from a direct hit hurricane visiting Swansea at mean high tide. It also shows what sort of storm would be needed to soak certain regions, which we'll get to in a minute.

The map is from the combined efforts of FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and the NHC. They use the funny-weatherman-titled SLOSH model of storm surge estimation. They do not depict freshwater flooding.

The colors relate to the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, and break down like this:

Light Green = Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Gloria was one of these, and the offshore Halloween Gale was, too. Although not a tropical system, the Blizzard of '78 did Cat. 1-style damage.

Dark Green = Category 2 hurricane. Hurricane Bob was one of these.

Yellow = Category 3 hurricane. We've only had five of these hit New England since the Other Man arrived in 1620, the most recent being Hurricane Carol in 1954.

Pink = Category 4 hurricane. We've had one in recorded New England history, and it struck in 1635.

Flesh = One Hundred Year FEMA Food Zone. This is the "100 year storm" you hear people speak of, but you have to go pre-Colombian to find them ("going pre-Colombian" means using salt marsh soil samples to look for sand layering associated with large hurricanes). New England has had storms in the Category 4+ level in the 1100s, the 1300s, and the 1400s.

Sorry about Flesh, but my knowledge of color names was and continues to be heavily influenced by whoever was in charge at Crayola in the 1970s.

We shall leave the street-by-street analysis to the reader, who can use the links I'll throw in at the end of the article to zoom in on their own house if it suits them.

Note that you don't need to be in a shaded area to get yourself a quick and sudden Ending. You can have a tree fall on you, have your car washed out in street flooding, step on a downed power line, get purged by looters, enjoy the Robespierre treatment from flying shingles, be summarily executed by National Guardsmen, or even stumble into a sharknado. There's no shortage of ways for you to get Left.

With that in mind, we now present to you the down-there-somewhere Evacuation Zone map.

Remember, you don't HAVE to leave when 5-0 tells you to. Also remember that the cop you read the Constitution to before the storm may be the one who has to fish you out of the drink when the ship hits the fan.

The E-map is easier to read, as it is made up of only two colors.

Red = Get Out.

Yellow = Get the f*** out.

Hurricane Inundation Maps

Evacuation Maps

Worst Hurricanes To Hit New England

List of all hurricanes to hit New England

FEMA

MEMA

NOAA

NHC