This just happened

A conversation with my coworker here at The Big Library:

"Happy New Year!"

"Same to you.  How was your holiday?"

"Nice.  I very much enjoyed doing nothing this year."

"You didn't travel?"

"Nope, first time in years.  You?"

"Yes.  I went home to New Jersey."

"I didn't know you were from Jersey!  What part are you from?"

"South Jersey."

"Me, too.  Where in South Jersey?"

"Oh, right across the river from Philadelphia."

(Pause)  "Me, too."

(Additional pause)  "Really!.  What town?"

I say my hometown.  She laughs.

"I'm from X," she says, naming the town just down the road from mine.  "Did you go to Y high school?"

(Astonished)  "Yes!  You did too?"

"Yup."

"Did you have Mrs. Z for Latin?"

"Yes!  You too?"

(Nods)

"Okay, this is just bizarre."

"It sure is.  How did we never figure this out until right now?"

"No idea."

"Well, at least now we can gossip!"

"Yep."

Lost

Ah, vacation...

Oh. My. God.

Chunky Pam sings "Dirrty Jerzy"...



Link courtesy of The-Broad-Cast.com!

Stalking the wild El Guapo

Okay, so I had an ulterior motive for dragging my wife, my brother, and his bride of just two months with me to the Atlantic City Surf game on Friday night. For you see, I had learned that the Nashua Pride would be in town this weekend, and that if the visiting team could maintain a lead towards the end of the game I might just get to see former Boston Red Sox pitcher Rich Garces (a.k.a. "El Guapo") close it out. Alas, it was not meant to be - although Nashua had broken ahead with two runs in the top of the eighth to take the lead 6-4, the Surf responded in the bottom half of the inning with five runs of their own, effectively eliminating any chance I had of seeing one of my favorite Sox players take the mound.

Not to be deterred, however, I got as far as I could to the Nashua bullpen and yelled out to El Guapo, who was kind enough to acknowledge the well-wishings of a clearly deranged fan:

 

We miss you, El Guapo. Come back to Boston soon!

Best. Comment. Evar.

"When did America get so stupid... I want an exact date so we can have a federal holiday."

- from the comments at Reddit about the upswing in photomat vigilantism regarding 'indecent' family pictures of toddlers

(Bonus points for the article in question being about a New Jersey grandmother.)

Watch out for the puma

Or panther. Or whatever it is. From Philly.com:

Some Vineland residents were keeping a close eye on their small children and pets yesterday, fearful that a panther might be roaming in the woods behind a small cul de sac.

A large black feline with a very long tail was spotted by several residents over the weekend in the rural Cumberland County town.

"It does sound farfetched," said resident Zoe Paraskevas, "but I know what I saw."

Maybe it's the Jersey Devil's pet cat?

(Check out the thread on Cryptomundo.com where the online cryptozoological community analyzes Ms. Paraskevas' photographic evidence. The verdict? Not a panther, but likely a very large domestic cat gone feral, although there is a small contingent of dissenters who think it might be something more interesting.)

Teh yum

Thanks to my dad, who's visiting us this weekend from South Jersey, I'm having Taylor Pork Roll for breakfast. How the rest of the country lives without this stuff is quite frankly beyond me! If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, check out Wikipedia's entry on "Taylor Ham". And if you do know what pork roll is and are drooling all over your keyboard right now because you can't get it where you are, go to JerseyPorkRoll.com, where not only can you have your nitrate fix delivered to you in the mail, but you can also share your "Pork Roll Memories" if you feel so inspired.

(And yes, that really is Ween singing about Pork Roll! How cool is that?)

The Jersey Devil strikes again

Either that or it's Chupacabras - 'experts' say that coyotes are probably to blame for a recent string of attacks on dogs and even a 20-month infant in the Garden State, but we Jersey folk know better:

(Middletown, N.J. - WABC, April 9, 2007) - Authorities say mystery animals, possibly coyotes, attacked an infant boy and apparently killed several dogs in Middletown, New Jersey, over the past few weeks.

In the most recent incident, officials say a 20-month-old boy visiting from Florida was attacked in the vicinity of 626 Kings Highway East on Friday night.

The child was reportedly running around with his cousins and uncle in a yard when a mystery animal attempted to grab and drag him.

The frightened infant was able to break free from the attacking animal, authorities said. The young boy was treated for scratches and minor bite marks at the hospital and released.

(Via BoingBoing.)

For those of you True Believers™ out there, here's one of the best write-ups on the Jersey Devil I've seen floating around on the web, courtesy of Weird NJ. Being born and raised within a stone's throw of the Pine Barrens, I lived in mortal fear of this elusive creature, especially having read one too many books on the topic at my local library. I can still remember a supposed eyewitness account involving a kid in the suburbs looking out his window and seeing a bloody face - it took me years afterwards before I voluntarily looked out any of our windows at night.

Although I've allowed myself to develop a certain healthy sense of skepticism regarding the supernatural, I think a certain amount of fascination and fear about what lies just beneath the surface of our quotidian existence is still an important part of who I am. At the beginning of this year I wrote a brief essay for my local paper, who was looking for reader/columnists to help fill out a regular feature on the neighborhood in the opinion section. Alas, the newspaper never got back to me - I suspect they were looking for someone who'd lived in town for slightly longer than myself - but since it seems oddly appropriate I thought I'd share it here:

Several months ago, my wife was out walking near our home when she noticed something strange out of the corner of her eye. Not more than twenty yards away was a large black cat, sitting quietly in the underbrush behind the Little League field, staring right at her! Frightened, my wife nevertheless had enough presence of mind to cross the street as calmly as possible, but as soon as she was safe indoors she started to wonder about this place we had only recently moved to. We'd heard of Dogtown [an abandoned section of Cape Ann that was infamous in the 19th century for its packs of wild dogs] of course, but nobody told us about wild cats! When she told me, I was fascinated, as was my three-year-old daughter, who now refers to the mystery feline as "the puma."

"Watch out for the puma, Daddy!" my little girl will call out through the window whenever I leave the house, laughing hysterically when I pretend to disappear behind the bushes and make hungry animal noises. She's still young enough to face the world without fear. Is it a puma, or perhaps a black bobcat (which are rare in these climes but have been sighted as far north as Nova Scotia, according to cryptozoological circles)? Or might the Jersey Devil have a cousin up here on the New England coast? Whatever it is, my daughter is endlessly interested in what lies just beyond our doorstep, and so am I. Nevertheless I still can't help but look over my shoulder when I come home late at night, for fear of being stalked by the unknown beast that lives right across the road.

SoJo gets its due

Last month I hailed the creation of TV Jersey, a vlog dedicated to promoting Jersey-made video programming on the internet, while bemoaning its lack of material covering South Jersey.

Well the other day I received an email from Dave Corrigan, the creator of South Jersey Video Magazine. All of the content is shot and edited by Dave, and runs the gamut from Atlantic City to the Cape May County Zoo. The production values are far superior to most of the stuff that gets uploaded to YouTube, and Dave's "local angle" is spot-on to this South Jersey native.

South Jersey Video Magazine has done a great job of evoking the life and culture of my old neck of the woods, so if you're a Jersey Exile like me or simply curious as to what goes on beyond the Cinnabon in the Molly Pitcher Rest Stop on the Turnpike, give it a look-see!

Jersey goes Google

Princeton University's library will become the 12th library to join Google Book Search, according to an article this morning that I found on Lifehacker's Daily News Roundup (credited to Yahoo News, ironically enough!). Score one for the Garden State!

The rest of my entry is over at The Library Ass.

Not New York. Not Philadelphia.

Jeff Jarvis announces that my home State has finally addressed its scandalous dearth of original television programming (wait, don't we have NJN, one of the best public television stations in the country?) with TV Jersey, a vlog billing itself as follows:

New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesn’t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, we’ll promote.

Admirable words, but a quick glance at the site's offerings seem to indicate a distinct North Jersey bias. As the chief architects behind TVJersey are all affiliated with The Star-Ledger in Newark this is perhaps to be expected, but I sure hope that as the site grows they'll venture south of the AC Expressway every once in a blue moon. SoJo needs some love, too!

Nevertheless, reading about this venture I can't help but think about the tagline used by New Jersey 101.5, a home-grown radio station that started up a few years back using the same innovative marketing strategy to bill itself as an alternative to the two metro media markets to the north and west of the Garden State:

"Not New York. Not Philadelphia. Proud to be New Jersey!"

Nonetheless, I wish these guys luck. We Jersey folk -- both North and South -- need all of the good PR we can get!

The road to recovery

So the wedding went well, as did our journey of a thousand miles (some of them by storm-tossed sea, even!), although the long weekend began with a three-hour snag trying to cross New York City that we hoped wouldn't prove to be an ill omen for how the rest of the trip would turn out. Note to self: Friday is not a good day to try to cross the Hudson River via the George Washington Bridge, even when that Friday happens to be a holiday. After positively sailing down I-95 through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and even Connecticut, we should have known that the gods of traffic karma would find a way to even out the balance; sure enough, no sooner had we crossed the border into New York State that we encountered a sea of brake lights, followed by mile after mile of cars stopping and starting all the way to the outskirts of the city. When the exit for the GW Bridge failed to move forward for minutes at a time, we knew that something was terribly wrong, so we opted at the last minute to skirt Manhattan and head for the Verrazano and Goethals Bridges, via Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. That drive wasn't exactly a picnic either, but at least we were moving, and we got some excellent views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lower Manhattan, and the Statue of Liberty at night. And how often do you get a chance to cross a bridge named after a Florentine explorer, followed by another commemorating the designer of the Panama Canal?

Seeing my dad is always fun, as he and my daughter have a special relationship. They spent the next morning puttering around his place raking the leaves, feeding the birds, and just generally enjoying each other's company before we piled onto the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and headed for the wedding outside of Baltimore, where everything seemed to go off without a hitch. My cousin was a beautiful bride, it was a beautiful ceremony, and the reception was a classy affair at a nearby manor with a live jazz/swing/funk sextet called The Swingin' Swamis, who were absolutely fantastic (and they have CDs for sale, too!), and first-rate food as well. This being the Chesapeake Bay Region, you can't very well have a meal without somehow incorporating the blue crab, which appeared during the cocktail hour both in the form of crabcakes and a phenomenal crabmeat fondue that everyone but my brother swooned over. It was great to see my side of the family under happy circumstances, and the little ones did their best to make my daughter feel right at home. I even had a surprise reunion with my sixth grade elementary school teacher, whom I forgot was a friend of my aunt and uncle -- how weird it was to introduce my wife and three year old girl to the guy who taught me long division, graded my book reports, and even ran a Dungeons and Dragons game at lunchtime for the young and nerdly (take that, Jack Chick!).

The day after the wedding we braved the torrential rains and explored Baltimore's Inner Harbor, which I hadn't been to in years and which my wife had never visited before. The City of Baltimore started to revitalize this portion of the waterfront in the 1970's, and since then the area has not only prospered but spurred on a wave of development all along the harbor. The National Aquarium in Baltimore, which was one of the key elements in the original revitalization plan for the Inner Harbor, has also recently undergone a multi-million dollar face lift and now sports a dramatic 35-foot artificial waterfall spilling into a trout pond and an entire pavillion dedicated to the flora and fauna of Australia. The new exhibits are designed in the same vein as the New Jersey State Aquarium, with fewer but larger and deeper tanks designed to better simulate not only the habitat of the creatures on display but which more realistically convey that environment to the people on the other side of the glass as well. This being Maryland, our lunch continued to be all about the blue crab, with "Chesapeake-style" lump crabcake sandwiches from the folks at Phillips, a local favorite and worldwide seafood distributor. The lump cakes were delicious, but considerably more expensive than what were described as "Ocean City-style" crabcakes, which none of us had ever heard of before. Is this a legitimate regional variation, or some kind of dig at Ocean City, Maryland? Inquiring minds want to know!

The boat ride back to Jersey was something of an adventure -- first of all, we nearly missed the 5:15 ferry, which would have obligated to us to hang around in the dark and dreary drizzle until the next boat left more than two hours later. But then once we did manage to get our car on the ship just mere seconds before they pulled up the boarding ramp, no sooner did we make it past the breakwater for Lewes Harbor than the ferry began to pitch and roll in the choppy, storm-agitated Delaware Bay. Ugh. Fortunately the boat sports not only a snack bar but a real bar as well, so after a couple of Yuengling Lagers the ocean swells were going down a bit more smoothly (my daughter got a huge kick out of the rocking of the boat... for about five minutes, although she did find it entertaining to try and walk around without knocking her head into walls, corners, or other similar hazards to those of us who don't have our sea legs).

Then we were obliged to make the inevitable interminable drive back to Gloucester, which all things considered went a lot better than the trip down. Nevertheless a seven-hour drive is a seven-hour drive, and even though we got home reasonably early in the evening on Monday and it's now Wednesday all I want to do right now is crawl underneath my desk and sleep. Of course I may not have helped things all that much by staying up until 3 in the morning Monday night in order to try and play catch-up with my NaNoWriMo writing, but I'll still choose to blame all of those highway miles, thank you very much!

On the road again

If my NaNoWriMo word count doesn't move all that much over the next few days (it currently stands just a little under 16k), have no fear -- we've taken the long weekend to travel down to Jersey to see my Dad and attend the wedding of one of my cousins in Baltimore. Since right now we're just about 20 miles or so from the southernmost tip of New Jersey, instead of backtracking up and around the Delaware Bay to get to Maryland we'll be taking the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, which makes the crossing in just a little over an hour. So maybe I'll get some writing done on the boat...