'Circus Science' at NMu; Boycott WNET!

This weekend, both Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4:30pm, the Newark Museum hosts its annual "Circus Science" event, which is usually very well attended.

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The most crowded I personally have ever seen the Museum was during the opening reception for the fotograffic art of India show last September 15th. This foto shows part of the crowd, with a little blurring due to their constant milling about.

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Join the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for incredible activities, and discover the circus science that circus performance is famous for, including techniques for balance and theories of gravity.

•Clown performances demonstrate Newton's Laws of motion
•Jaws [sic]of physics explored through the Jersey Jugglers and tight rope walking
•All-day activities including trapeze, balloon artistry, magic and more
•Participatory presentations and shows ***

Museum Admission includes choice of one clown or magic performance
Adults $9; Children 12 years & under, and Seniors $6
Tickets for additional performances can be purchased at $2 each.

I don't know what members have to pay. I guess we get free admission and one clown or magic show but have to pay $2 for another. Hm.
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There is a complete .PDF schedule of events online.

These people just wouldn't hold still.

We sometimes forget that the Newark Museum is a museum of science, natural history (including a mini-zoo), and astronomy as well as of art.
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I chanced across this event in a visit to the Museum one Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, but I was still unsteady on my feet after knee surgeries, so dared not walk amid crowds of little kids. I think it might be a nice change this year, however, to be in the Museum when it is crowded with kids, tho I don't imagine many will be in the art galleries, so if you want to test the waters in the circus areas but prefer to see the Museum's superb art collections, you should still have lots of room and plenty of time to view your favorites. NMu even on a Sunday is not the madhouse the Met is, and you don't generally have to peek between heads to see the prime attractions. And the 50-seat Planetarium (which I have yet to get into; separate $3 fee) is in operation from 11am on.

There was a film crew at that reception doing an interview with some Indian woman whom I did not recognize but Indian readers might. (The rounded object in the foreground is the table I rested the camera on, since I didn't bring my tripod into the Museum.)

I don't anticipate making it to the Saturday session but may make the Sunday session.
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Reminded by the participation of Ringling Bros. in this NMu event, I checked the Ringling Bros. official site to see if they are coming to the Prudential Center or are still going to the Continental Arena (Izod Center). I was delited to see October 16-19 shows here:

We're tentatively scheduled to be appearing at the Prudential Center in October. We're still working out the final details of specific show times, and as soon as we do, complete performance schedule information will be posted here -- so please check back soon!

Here's a foto of the Prudential Center at nite when the video billboard shows the Seton Hall Pirate mascot, not perhaps clear at this angle.

Then I looked further in the site and found that the troupe coming to Newark is the "Red Tour", which has fewer dates than the "Blue Tour", the latter of which includes TWO sojourns at the Izod Center, a month apart in the spring, separated by a long stand at Madison Square Garden, whereas the one Newark appearance is not until the fall. Hm. No wonder Essex County Executive DiVincenzo and other public officials here want the State to close down the Izod Center if it receives any public funding.

He also blasted the state agency that runs the Izod Center for signing an agreement with the Nets that imposes fees up to $12 million if the team moves anywhere other than New York City.

"That, to me, is beyond belief," DiVincenzo said, addressing a gathering he called of about 50 people, including city council members, county freeholders and state lawmakers. "How can they penalize the Nets for coming to Newark?"

It seems to me that the State of New Jersey, owner of the Izod Center, should be able to have a court void that provision as contrary to public policy, in that Bergen County, where the Izod Center is located, is a rich county, and part of the reason for building the Newark Arena was to bring development to Newark, one of the State's poorest cities (on average).

Downtown buildings are reflected from two sides of the Prudential Center, October 14, 2007.

The Arena was intended to spark development all around it, so that the reflections a few years from now would be even taller and denser, but Newark and Essex County officials fear that competition from the Izod Center will impede development here. Izod Center execs are resisting the downsizing to a theater of about 4,000 seats originally planned for after the Newark Arena opened, and insist that there will be plenty of business for the Izod and Prudential arenas, especially once the Xanadu complex is completed around Izod. I don't understand why a $2 billion commercial complex is being built in a county that still has blue laws that force retailers to close on Sundays. That seems to me super-stupid (if not also racist), to site such a project in Bergen County and lose a minimum of 14% of a week's potential sales to Sunday-closing laws, and probably much more, given that more people are free to shop and more rested to do so at leisure on Sunday than on any other day. Or was there some kind of backroom deal cut between the developer and the Bergen County government to rescind the Sunday-closing law once Xanadu opened? Absent such a covert deal, it seems to me that if a megamall were to go up in North Jersey, it should have been in Newark, within easy reach not just of the private car but also copious public transportation by land, sea, and air. Xanadu, at least as originally conceived, is likely to prove a major tourist draw, so easy access from the Airport should have been thought important.

The foto above shows the unpaved streets and construction equipment at the Prudential Center site, and the Center in context, less than a week before its public opening. They got a lot done between October 14th, when this picture was taken, and October 20th, when a free show was held.

Boycott WNET! PBS is in another of its disgusting begathon breaks, in which it broadcasts some of the worst crap ever to find airtime on PBS: doowop from aging singers, including many not original to the groups they represent; you-can-have-anything-you-want-just-by-visualizing-it bull from that vile con artist Wayne Dyer; etc. Do not let generous impulses mislead you into supporting Newark's stolen PBS station, WNET, which the FCC assigned to Newark but which devotes almost no time whatsoever to this city, preferring to tout New York, the city it was hijacked to.

Here's a view of NJ from high up in a Downtown Manhattan skyscraper. See Newark? If not, see the zoomed view below.

If you feel the need to support public broadcasting, please give to the New Jersey Network and/or WBGO, genuine New Jersey public broadcasters who have an actual base in Newark. If New Jerseyans generally boycotted WNET and funded NJN and BGO generously, the New Yorkers who stole WNET might wake up and start paying attention to their city of license, NEWARK, and the state around it, New JERSEY.

Newark is largely obscured in the haze at this distance, 10 miles, but you can just make out 744 and 1180.

Heliplex

Gaetano has sent me links to articles about a multi-plane heliport to be created in North Newark, not just for the Newark Police Department but also for commercial aviation. A blog I was not familiar with, "Ironbound Newark Blog 2.0", has an excellent piece on the subject, including an artist's rendering.

The Air Pegasus Metro Heliplex heliport will service the:
• Newark Police Department
• Other Law Enforcement Agencies
(at all levels of government)
• Air Ambulances
• Corporate and Charter Operators
• News Media
• Express Delivery Services

The author of that blog entry, "Ironman", noted something that seemed strange to me too, the location at the far northeastern corner of the city. He says it's three miles from the Four Corners, but the claim was made by the City that this new facility would speed response times for our police helicopter. Oh? Where does it take off from now, Teterboro (14 miles from the Four Corners)?
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I put a Hagstrom Streetmate map of Newark up on the wall of my hoffice. 2 x 3 feet in size, and a pale-red triangle seems to mark the center of the city, touching on City Hall and the main post office. The heliport, however, is to be built way off at Grafton Avenue and McCarter Highway, nowhere near the bulk of the city's area and population. Ah well, that might be an attractive location for Manhattan-based businesses and media, which is all to the good, for bringing outside money in.
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I took a couple of flying lessons many years ago out of Teterboro (fixed-wing aircraft, not hellycropters). One of my brothers (who later worked in aerospace) had taken seaplane lessons years earlier, but had not pursued a pilot's license. On my first flite, the instructor had us fly down the middle of the Hudson River, with Upper Manhattan off to the left and the Palisades to the right, and directly over the George Washington Bridge by a couple of thousand feet on a clear, sunny day. It was glorious. A couple of weeks thereafter, Yankees catcher Thurman Munson was killed flying his own jet, and I decided I'd leave the flying to professionals.
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The artist's rendering of the heliplex shows 9 circular landing targets (helipads) that appear to be too close to each other for all to be in use at the same time. I hope the rendering is out of scale, and the actual facility will have the landing places spread out farther. At least if there's an accident there, and helicopters do bump into each other, rotor blade fragments won't shower down on pedestrians below, as happened with the notorious crash atop the former Pan Am Building (now Met Life) in Midtown Manhattan. And it had seemed such a good idea to put a heliport atop a skyscraper, just like the great idea of putting a dirigible mooring mast atop the Empire State Building (which could never be used because of 'high' winds). Jay Leno pointed out how stupid the idea of flying cars is when he said you know there would be accidents all over the place and debris falling from the sky onto our heads every day.
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I don't have any fotos of the heliplex, in that it hasn't even been started. Nor do I have any pix of the Airport. For one thing, it's nowhere near me. For another, the Department of Homeland Security (headed by Michael Chertoff, born and raised in Elizabeth, in which lies part of the Airport) looks askance at people taking pictures of a major metropolitan airport. So today's foto is of the closest thing I do have pix of: a "skyway" over Market Street from Gateway Center to the Prudential parking structure. Beyond it you can see another overpass, which is the upper portion of Newark Penn Station, where the tracks run — to, among other places, the airport. Yes, I know that's not very close to pix of an airport, but it will have to do for the moment.

Note the tasteful black barriers against car bombs that surround Gateway Center now, on the left.

The new double streetlites have an N for Newark on them. I've shown pix of one from the side, showing the two sprouting from one pole outside Bears & Eagles Stadium (4th foto of November 14, 2006). I like them.

This is the kind of lower, classier streetlites we need around tourist sights such as the Old Courthouse, which is lited at nite but has tall, obtrusive streetlites that can ruin tourists' souvenir fotos. See, for example, the third foto of February 8, 2008. Or we could have streetlites that are in themselves so striking and appealing that people would be glad to include them in their fotos, such as these outside the southeastern corner of the Prudential Center.

The City must form the mental habit of seeing Newark as potential tourists would see it. Who knows, within a couple of years, someone may offer helicopter package tours of Manhattan and Newark from the Newark heliplex.

Message from Malta

I got an interesting email today from a woman who works for Uniblue Registry Booster, the program that caused me trouble yesterday. She didn't think the program responsible for my having to reboot three times (and, in all fairness, I was playing around with other programs around the same time, and I generally have to reboot this old machine at least once a day anyway), and offered a full version for evaluation, free of charge, but I declined, first, because I was afraid I'd have the same problems with my machine, and second, because I prefer to use freeware and shareware so that if I find something really good I can recommend it to friends so they can enjoy the benefits I find without having to spend $30 for each useful bit of software we could conceivably use. I saw a "(+356)" area code and eight-digit phone number at the end of her email, and had noticed a British spelling in the text of the message, so looked up 356: Malta, a little island nation in the Mediterranean, south of Sicily.
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Malta is best known for the Maltese cross and the film The Maltese Falcon. Oddly, the national flag of Malta contains a George cross (a British medal awarded to the people of Malta by the then colonial power, the British Empire, for bravery in WWII; that medal contains a Greek cross!), but the merchant flag has a Maltese cross! A few geography nuts (like me in days past) might also know that there is a little enclave in Rome under the jurisdiction of the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta" that has diplomatic relations with a bunch of countries, not including the United States.
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I told her I didn't think that anyone in Malta had ever read any portion of my blog. It turns out she has an electronic service that alerts her whenever her company is mentioned, and my blog came up. I suppose the furthest away anyone has read this blog is Indonesia, which reminds me that now that the weather will be getting warmer, and hopefully sunnier, I have some foto locations to check for the guy from Jakarta who attended Rutgers-Newark many years ago and wants to see what his old haunts look like today.
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I don't have any pictures of Malta or Malta-in-Newark (such as a consulate, which some countries but not Malta do have here), so today's foto is just of an oddity I noticed on my way Downtown one evening, the many missing and one erroneously flipped letter on the movie-list sign at Newark Screens on Springfield Avenue, at Bergen Street. Memo to management: buy some letters! (and hire people who know the alphabet). By the way, Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the roman alphabet. How nice.

Bumps in My Road

Today's fotos are intended to help you hold out a little longer, a reminder that tho there may still be snow on the ground, spring is coming, and spring in Newark is glorious. Newarkers will know that all these fotos were taken in Branch Brook Park. And now non-Newarker visitors know too.

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't posted since Thursday. DC in Washington Heights actually sent an email today to urge me to keep posting. But I was apparently a tad under the weather for a couple of days and slept more than usual. That is in part because I am again trying to move my sleep cycle earlier, and the best way to do that is to sleep longer rather than wake earlier to wear yourself out earlier, tho part of my weariness has to do with my trying that approach too. I got up hours earlier than usual but was worn out early so got little done.

Today I woke from a long sleep (I forced myself to stay in bed until a reasonable hour, 9:25am) and was raring to go. So I tackled the slowness of my computer by trying something my brother suggested, installing a comprehensive spyware program more extensive than what comes with AOL. I found the program Spybot Search & Destroy on the PC World website, but also saw some other things I should probably do, like clear the Registry of stray files, conflicts, etc. So I installed a program called CWS Shredder, which found nothing, so I eliminated it. Then WinPatrol spyware eliminator, which presented me with a list of programs that start up automatically, but insufficient information for me to know whether they are valid programs or spyware. I had assumed the program would tell me which were spyware, but it didn't. So I uninstalled that too. Then Uniblue Registry Booster. I installed it but had to reboot for it to work. (That's one.)

The initial instructions did not say you had to buy anything, but after it claimed to find 836 problems, it said it would clear 15 of them but I'd have to spend $30 for the full version to clear the others. No thanks. Uninstalling it caused huge problems that required me to reboot three times. (That's four.) Then I went to Spybot S&D and installed that. The basic program installed, then urged me to check for and install updates. That amounted to a second installation, all of this eating up my time and energy. Once it was operational, it took about an hour and a quarter to "immunize" the machine and scan the system, then eliminate the 31 items it found. But the machine was, if anything, even slower after that, and the hard drive kept running and running. Not only that, but I couldn't log onto AOL, where almost all my email and some webpages reside.

So I had to go into Spybot S&D and undo everything I'd just done to my system, then Uninstall the program itself. The Uninstall process shut my machine down again! (That's five.) Only after all that — FIVE HOURS spent trying to get my machine to run faster — did my machine return to functionality so I could get onto AOL. So after five hours I ended up right back where I started. Ain't computers wunnerful?

Maybe Spybot S&D works well with other people's machines, because PC World contained no warning about it, but it didn't work with mine (a Dell Pentium IV — do not ever buy Dell!). Be warned. I still have to find a registry cleaner and spyware program to try to find and remove those 31 items Spybot found, but 5 hours on this crap in one day is more than enuf for me, thanks. Maybe AOL's own download area, where I have found some nifty free programs, is a better place than PC World. Maybe ZDNet. Cnet?

In the Olden Days of DOS, I knew everything that was on my machine, because I had to put it there. Now, however, thousands of files are installed and generated when you install and run a handful of programs, each enormous, taking up far more space than early hard drives even contained. My first PC had a 10MB hard drive, and we thought that was a lot. I have individual programs now that occupy 40MB! And when you uninstall some programs, bits and pieces of them are left behind, which is why you may need a registry cleaner. But I wouldn't recommend Uniblue Registry Booster. No way in ... heck.

I will probably backfill Friday to Sunday, because I did have things to 'show and tell'. (If I do put in prior days' entries, I'll post a note on the most recent to that effect.) But I have to eat and feed the kitties first. I'd like to get goldfish again.

The cats love to watch them, and watching fish in aquariums is supposed to be soothing. On a day like today, when frustration abounds, that would be a good thing. I've got two 20-gallon tanks on hand. I should put them back into use, and goldfish are a good choice because they don't need a heater and aren't fussy eaters.

SEED, Max

Gaetano found mention of a multimedia art event tomorrow nite from 8pm-3am(!) in Downtown Newark that you might like to check out. Called Mana-Fest, this is to be an evening of performance art by several artists at SEED Gallery (239 Washington Street, which Mapquest indicates is just north of Market Street).
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I don't know whether SEED is intended as an acronym (or the past tense of "see", as it should be). The Founder & Director of SEED is "Gizem Bacaz". Not knowing whether "Gizem" is male or female, I went to the artist's website and found a very suspicious avoidance of any gender-specific pronoun or foto of the artist, so was pretty sure it was a woman. I checked the Internet for what kind of Turkish name "Gizem" is and found, as I suspected, that it is female. Is Ms. Bacaz ashamed of being a woman? Does she feel it necessary or even just advisable to hide her gender on her website? That's despicable, or sad. This is a country that wants to believe itself ready to elect a woman President, but ordinary women are still hiding their gender behind Internet anonymity.
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Curiously, a different website linked to at the bottom not of the SEED Gallery website but of the Tribe.com site above, shows a picture that is probably of Ms. Bacaz, which plainly shows a woman. Of course not all the visuals shown on Tribe.com pages are actually fotos of the person at issue. One foto on a user's profile that I saw is of a cat. I have cats. They don't create webpages. Well, at least mine don't.
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The evening is described at the SEED website thus:

Join us for a collaboration of sound, light, video and performance[.] Bring all needed materials to create any work of art. Drumming and Dancing [and various types of music]. $20 at door $18 with flyer[.]

The young man playing the drums above is not from SEED but from an event in January 2007 at Gallery Aferro. He's not really a drummer, but an artist who was just relaxing during the time when he was not himself actively drawing a continuous line on paper over the course of several hours, a task shared by several artists.

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I don't imagine I'll be able to get there, because it's supposed to snow tonite, leaving something like 2-4 inches of wet snow on the ground before Friday evening. I expect my car to be snowed in, and I don't dare even to walk the sidewalks, because knee surgeries have left me unable to adjust quickly if I lose my balance, and I dare not fall, lest I reinjure myself. But the gallery should be within half a block of lots of buses that pass along Market Street.
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Max Weinberg. Continuing the musical/performance theme, I thought today to look up Conan O'Brien's bandleader, Max Weinberg, to see if he is from New Jersey. I knew that he has gone on tour with Bruce Springsteen as part of the E Street Band. Springsteen is from Monmouth County, where I grew up, so I thought maybe Weinberg is from down that way too. When I checked the Internet, however, I found that he was born in Newark! Actually, some sources say Newark, others South Orange. In that he was born in 1951, I imagine he was born in a hospital. There is, to my knowledge, no hospital in S.O., at least not now. The only hospital I see listed for S.O. is South Orange Animal Hospital, my vet! So maybe Weinberg was born in Newark.

He went to college in S.O., however: Seton Hall. He then went to Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University in NYC, but dropped out. "Max Weinberg, Esq." didn't happen.
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I found an interview with Weinberg which contains this interesting passage:

DM [Dominick A. Miserandino]) Some critics have talked negatively about late night show bands as being something just to play the music between commercials. What's your usual response to those critics?

MW) When you look at the original Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson and the Doc Severson band, it doesn't get much better than that. That big band was modeled after the Count Basie sound, so that no matter if they played late at night or earlier in the day, it was a swinging, driving band. That's kind of the perspective I took when I got involved with Conan, to hark back to those days when a band really played some music.

This is a foto of what is now the Count Basie Theatre but was when I was growing up the Walter Reade Theater and was apparently, judging from the carving in stone at the top of the façade, originally the State Theater.

Count Basie was "The Kid from Red Bank", a mile and a half from the house I grew up in. Springsteen is from Freehold, farther away. And Wikipedia says:

Max and his family are season ticket holders and avid fans of the New Jersey Devils.

It all comes back to Newark.

Forgot NMu Event

I missed the Newark Museum's 98th Annual Members Meeting yesterday. I had written it down on my printed calendar, but neglected to put it into my AOL electronic calendar to have AOL send me an email reminder. On that same day's space, I had written a notation about the WNET showing of the Clement Price tour, but when Gaetano reminded me that the WNET program was Monday, not Tuesday, I drew an arrow from the WNET item to Monday, and thereafter saw BOTH items for Tuesday as being moved. So, once Monday was over, I had the sense that everything was clear for the rest of this week. I have also been using that hardcopy calendar, printed out from AOL, to record the topics I have addressed here, so those notations produced visual clutter. Now I know to use AOL email reminders for events and to separate handwritten notations into two printed calendars, one for events and one for topics I plan to or have addressed.

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Today's fotos are nite views of the Museum from the Washington Park area at nite, in winter. This first shows the Museum in the distance and the Veterans Administration building on the left. That building was originally built in 1920 for the now-defunct Globe Indemnity Insurance Company.

I had wanted to see if the Members' Meeting would address the plans for a major expansion, and show an artist's rendering. Now I don't know. Gaetano didn't go either so couldn't say.
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On November 9th I sent the following inquiry to the Museum's public relations office.

A friend sent me an item from NJ.com about approval for a $235 million addition to the Museum that raises questions your website does not answer. For instance, it says two buildings are to be demolished, but doesn't say which they are. And it does not contain any architectural rendering, map, or any other visual information. If there is not presently an area on the Internet about this project -- I don't see any at newarkmuseum.org (did I miss it?) -- there certainly should be.
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I am a member of the Museum but do not recall receiving any info about the project, and am most interested in seeing information and pictures of what is planned, both for my own information and to tell the readers of my fotoblog (as below). Where can I find information such as how tall (in stories and feet) the addition will be; how Polhemus House, the facade of the YMCA, the old building, and Ballantine House will be integrated (or if the old building will be demolished); how this compares in size to other major museums (e.g., the Met, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, etc.). If there are pictures and maps, I would be especially interested in seeing them. Please advise. Cheers.

This next foto shows the Museum's original building
plus Ballantine House on the right, both of which are lited at nite.

No one answered. That makes me doubly indignant, first as a Museum member whose inquiry was ignored; second, as a blogger who wants to provide this information to readers. I'm also concerned that the Museum is not telling enuf about its plans to people who might contribute money or even suggestions. So Museum management would appear to be not just arrogant but also stupid. That would explain their bizarre expansion plan, to stitch together a bunch of disparate buildings rather than start from scratch and create a single unified masterpiece. It's as tho an artist found a canvas someone else started and painted his own work only in the patches not already occupied, sacrificing his own vision because the canvas already had stuff on it.

"Newark Is Not Your Maid"

(I took Presidents Day off. It should have been my holiday, but destiny seems to have made yet another mistake.)
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I was up unusually early today, stirred by the sun thru my windows, and decided to clean up trash from my frontage and the street alongside it (there was no streetsweeping this week on my side of the street because of the holiday). I could see from my windows that there was lots to pick up. There are large numbers of slobs who drop trash wherever they go because Newark takes absolutely no interest in punishing garbage-strewing pigs ("litterbugs"). I took my reacher (a device by which you can pick things up from the ground without bending; also called a "grabber") and two plastic shopping bags (which I abbreviate to "plag"), one for garbage, one for recyclables, and headed down my front steps. More than half an hour later, I was done, having picked up about 103 individual pieces of trash strewn by barbarians over the course of perhaps 12 days since I did this the last time.
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The message that the Newark schools' "Beautiful Newark" program has plainly not succeeded in getting thru, needs to be hit and hit hard to make Newark an attractive place for the middle class of every race: Clean Is Beautiful. Mind you, most of Newark is cleaner than much of New York City, but it is still much dirtier than it should be.
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How do we change the mindset that it's OK to strew the city with trash? The behavior of adults can be changed mainly by punishments, not persuasion. So we need to crack down with great severity on "littering". Children, however, can be shaped by role models and education. And once children become indignant about filth in THEIR environment, they can make life very uncomfortable for older kids and adults who continue to throw garbage everywhere they go. If they can't stop the older people around them by nagging and exclamations of, for instance, "Litterpig!", then they might be able to shame them by picking up after them and carrying the trash around until they can find an appropriate receptable. They can, indeed, keep a folded plag in their pocket or bookbag and whip it out to accommodate any litter their parents and neighbors might toss. If they do this in front of other people, the offenders might become really embarrassed and alter their behavior in the future.
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I'd like to see little kids become "trash narcs", in part to legitimize the term and concept of "narc", people who turn in drug dealers, because fiting drugs, not just environmental filth, is a major responsibility of all citizens. Parents should be afraid that their kid might, behind their back, call Sanitation Police (do we have such in Newark?) and report them.
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I'd like to see schools adopt a nearby park or just a stretch of the grounds and sidewalks all around the school, with one class keeping 100 feet, or meters, of the schoolyard or X Street clean, and another doing the same on Y Avenue. Indeed, the first step might be, with permission from the City, having the class measure off and mark the appropriate distances in neatly painted lines with numbers on the sidewalk, with an arrow pointing to the name of the class responsible for that segment. Kids could learn to visualize the differences between the metric system and our traditional measures by marking traditional distances in black paint and metric in red. Once each class's segment is assigned, by vote or lot, competition would set in between classes not just to clean each segment better than the others but even, perhaps, to put in flowers around treepits, murals on blank walls, and otherwise beautify their area. Naturally, measures would need to be adopted to prevent and punish destructive competition, such as one class deliberately littering another class's area of responsibility.
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The schools should sponsor contests among kids for slogans, poetry, essays, posters, songs, raps on why it matters to them whether the city is clean or dirty, with prizes that would appeal to the target audience. Indeed, we should ask the kids what prize they'd want, within stated limits. If the schools don't have the budgetary means to fund such prizes, perhaps we could find sponsors that would like to be associated in people's minds with cleanliness and orderliness, perhaps a Sanitation Department union or social group; Waste Management, Inc. and/or other private carters; etc. Adults might promote their own slogans — "Orderliness: Indispensable to Success", "Trash on the Street is Trash on the Mind", "Your Neighborhood, Your Life Can Be Clean", the old standby "Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness" (for parents, not religiously neutral public schools), whatever) — but what ultimately matters is not what we think but what they think. And the first thing they think is that they know better than adults, and indeed anybody else. Their group knows it all; everybody else knows nothing.
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We can use competitive local jingoism, so Newark kids will want to make Newark cleaner than Jersey City. A poster with "NewarK" with a tall K dropping down to form the start of "Kleen City" might make the point. We can use anti-suburb resentments, and competition against predominantly white cities in the Midwest to motivate people. Use racial appeals: "White people think blacks are dirty. Show them they're wrong." Why not aspire to be the cleanest city in the United States, and even give Singapore a run for its money as the world's cleanest major city?
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Today's foto is of the First Avenue Elementary School on North 10th Street in the North Ward. Note the litter visible in this picture. Kids have the energy to clean up their environment, but do not as yet have the motivation, in part because we do not expect it of them. Kids like to live up to expectations, so perhaps we need to set our expectations higher in the cleanliness department.

Murder Billboards to Come Down; WNET Showing

The Associated Press, in an article Gaetano alerted me to, reported yesterday that the @#!*% president of the Newark Teachers Union who put up billboards saying "HELP WANTED: Stop The Killings In Newark Now!" has decided to take them down, next month, in consideration of the steep drop in murders in the city. They should never have been put up, and for Joseph Del Grosso to suggest that they had anything to do with the drop is outrageous. It was a campaign willfully to hurt Newark, not help, and he should be voted out by Newark teachers at their very earliest opportunity.

I couldn't get a good foto of the billboards that the @%$#&*'s at the Teachers Union put up. Here is a foto, however, showing one such billboard in the context of a busy road complex. (Gaetano found a closeup of another at a mainly-hostile discussion of Newark's month without murders.)

As should be obvious from how small and hard to spot from regular streets those billboards are, the audience for the message was not Newarkers but out-of-towners. The billboards were not and are not designed to help Newark but to hurt it. The creatures who rented them are enemies of Newark, and should be treated as such. Tho I am ethically Christian, there are times when it is really hard to turn the other cheek.

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This being "Church Day" at Newark USA, I present pix of Saint Casimir's Polish Roman Catholic Church which I took on the Newarkology walking tour of the Ironbound, August 11, 2007.

In that AP story, the Teachers' Union President tried to justify the signs:

Del Grosso, who was criticized by Booker for promoting a negative image of the city when he put the billboards up last year, said his sole intent was to draw attention to an escalating problem — Newark ended 2006 with more than 100 killings for the first time in a decade — that was driving away teachers and discouraging others from applying for jobs in the city.

What a load of crap. Did he think we weren't aware of the problem until the billboards went up? Those billboards weren't intended for Newarkers, to get us to focus on a problem we were already focused on. They were directed to suburbanites and out-of-towners passing by, deliberately to keep them hating Newark.
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I'm pleased to report that a sign with the same text that was displayed on a lawn of a private house on Sandford Avenue in my neighborhood has already come down. Perhaps that's because the house now displays a "FOR RENT" sign, and it's not good to advertise murders when you're trying to rent a property. But, then, it wasn't good for Newark generally to call attention to murders when trying to promote itself to outsiders, was it? Apparently the owner of that property didn't care about Newark's reputation suffering until it struck home as regards the viability of his own property.

St. Casimir Academy. Note the color-change in the brick, marking an older section (to the right) and liter addition. Question: why didn't they replicate the original school's appearance in the newer section?

Unfortunately, the #@*$% Teachers Union (or at least the present leadership) now wants to put up other billboards to attack Newark's reputation, about another issue of which we are already acutely aware.

With violent crime declining, Del Grosso said he's shifted his target to Newark's politicians and that the union will put up new billboards decrying alleged corruption at City Hall.

East end of St. Casimir's school, church façade beyond.

Del Grosso is out to harm this city. He apparently has some special animus to Newark. This makes me doubt that he is even a Newarker. Is he a suburbanite who should not even be employed by the City of Newark, much less be the president of a group of Newark employees? If Newark does not have a residency requirement for employees of all city government entities, it had better enact one and enforce it fiercely. If anyone is using a phony address to take a job away from a Newarker and force Newarkers to send their tax dollars out of the city, they should be arrested for fraud, prosecuted, sent to do hard time in state prison, and made to pay back every cent they received in salary for the period they lived outside the city, then pay as well for their own incarceration so we don't have to suffer that loss too.

How about devoting more time to teaching and less to politics and group slander? This sign appears, as can be seen from the foto above, on the east end of Saint Casimir Academy, a school. Perhaps the Newark Teachers Union doesn't represent teachers in Catholic or other Christian schools. I don't know. But somebody has got to tell administrators in schools not to permit illiterate signs on their buildings.

Could Del Grosso possibly put up such destructive billboards without approval from the members? Maybe we should pay Newark teachers less. Maybe five years without a raise will weed out the anti-Newark *#%@$'s, and then we can pay better salaries to authentic Newarkers, who care more about Newark than about the city money that current teachers take off to the suburbs. Slashing salaries and benefits might break the union. What good is a teachers union anyway? Aren't public employees forbidden by state law from striking? Let's provoke a strike, and then not only fire but also jail every striker. Newark should not let itself be pushed around by anti-Newark teachers. Love it or leave it. Hell, I could teach English, history, civics. You'd just have to move the start time for my classes to noon or so. That would benefit high schoolers anyway (see below).

A Star-Ledger reporter told me by email that he knows for a fact that half the Newark Police and Fire Departments live in Ocean County! How about teachers? How many of them live in the Circle of Fire that too many of our suburbs form to hem in and ravage Newark? 'Fire' all these City employees who live outside Newark, every single one of them, and give those jobs to Newarkers. Then the money that the genuine Newarkers, hired in their place, make from those jobs will recirculate in Newark to alter for the better the economic conditions that have contributed to our elevated crime rates.

Because of endless anti-Newark propaganda, don't expect a quick change in perceptions to result from more than a month without a single murder in Brick City. To quote the present Police Chief of Miami from a New York Times story yesterday that Gaetano also found:

[T]he chief, a former first deputy commissioner [of police] in New York where he served with Garry F. McCarthy, the [present] Newark police director, added a note of caution. "Perception lags reality," he said. "You have a high homicide rate, and you start to get it under control, but you suffer from the hangover of perception, and that lasts awhile."

I have observed here that, worse than lagging reality, perception trumps reality, every time. The bulk of the Nation thinks that all of Newark was ravaged by the Riots, whereas most areas were physically untouched. It is the fear engendered by the Riots and an influx of blacks around the same time that prompted a massive outflow of (white) population, business, and investment, as people felt that things were worse than in fact they were. Decades later, even after things started to rebound, the perception persists that Newark is an urban hellhole, a vast wasteland of murderous violence — that not one square inch of the city is ever really safe, nite or day. And there are a lot of people who want to make sure people continue to think that. These are the people who fled, and who have felt it necessary ever since they turned tail and ran like rabbits, to justify their racism and cowardice by proclaiming that they "had" to leave because things were just too dangerous. The people who stayed, we are to believe, had no choice, and would have left too, had they had the chance. But today's Newarkers, those who stayed and those who have moved in, in recent years, do have choices and made their choice, for Newark, when others were making decisions against Newark. It is the authentic Newarkers, who stayed, who held the line and fought the barbarians to a draw, who are now winning. The savages are on the run, and Newarkers black and white are winning the war. Finally.

Murders and other crimes are down, but not enuf. Gaetano has sent me a couple of items about a month without murders in Newark. I emailed him to say, "Wouldn't it be nice if murders were as rare in Newark as in the suburbs?" It then occurred to me to ask myself, "Why aren't they?"
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We've got to cure the urban pathologies that lead to hugely divergent murder and other crime rates. We must start from first principles: ask "Why is there so much more crime in Newark proper than in its suburbs, or in small towns or rural areas, in NJ or elsewhere in the Nation?", and not just assume we don't need to do this kind of analysis. "We know very well what causes crime" is really no answer. If we really knew, wouldn't we have been able to fix the problem by now?
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There are drugs in those other places. There are dropouts in those other places. Ignorance and bigotry; teen boredom, angst, and feelings of worthlessness; bad parents — every single "cause" of crime in Newark is found in places that don't have anything like our crime rate. Why don't they matter as much elsewhere? Or have we completely misanalyzed the problem?

Sometimes you have to go back to basics. We all have devices we think we know inside-out, but if we read the instructions or manual, we find, to our surprise, that there are things we really didn't know after all. Even something as simple as the instructions on a bottle of Liquid Paper may differ from the way many of us use it:

SHAKE WELL BEFORE USE
Apply fluid in one directon with a smooth stroke. Allow to dry. Recap tightly. Avoid contact with fabrics.

I've seen people take a bottle that's been standing on their desk for hours or days, not shake it, then dab at each and every character individually. And people even leave the bottle either loosely recapped or with the applicator partly askew when they think they might need it within a few minutes.
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The instructions for a staple remover say to support the underside of the staple (to hold it in place and push the top edge higher above the upper surface of the paper). How many of us do that?

Solving social ills is a lot more complicated than using white-out or a staple remover, and there isn't an instruction manual, one brief paragraph for each problem. If you don't do the proper analysis, you may misdirect resources to things that have nothing to do with the problem. Even something as simple as moving start times in schools later for teenagers has been shown to improve attendance rates and academic performance.
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Social "science" is not really science, but it can employ some of the techniques of hard science, such as the control group. You compare two populations with different behaviors and find out why each behaves as it does but which differs from the other group. Then you adjust something in the one to approximate the other, and see if it produces the same effect in the other. I'm not persuaded we have done anything like what we need to do.
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Street crime is, for the most part, the province of the young. So our attention properly focuses on the schools, where the young abound. But do we really know if it's the schools, or the family, or the kids themselves and the value system they convey to each other by word and deed? It cannot be society overall, because suburbs, small towns, and rural areas are all part of the same overall society. Indeed, some socially destructive influences, like hyperviolent video games, are more prevalent among suburban middle-class kids than among inner-city kids.
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People in cities tend to think that suburbs have nothing to teach them. Suburbanites, for their part, just want to get away from the urban pathologies rather than understand them or offer solutions. Each group thinks itself better than the other.

The last foto today is informational, showing the order of services and languages used in them. It might surprise some people that Polish is still spoken in Newark.

Maybe we need massive re-education in both groups: city-suburb exchanges and conversations. Move an entire class from a Newark school to a Livingston or Millburn school, and vice-versa, for a week. Heck, move 200 kids from each school to the other for a month. This wouldn't be long-term busing of individuals but a mass movement for a limited time, keeping some relationships intact and breaking others. Find out what happens when you radically change the circumstances the kids are in and the people they are surrounded by. Then let the kids talk about their experiences, with each other within each school and with the kids from the other school; with parents; with teachers and principals; with the politicians who fund and oversee the schools. I suspect we'd find out that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do.

P.S. Gaetano wanted me to be sure to tell you that tomorrow (Monday, Feb. 18th) at 5:30pm, WNET will broadcast The Once and Future Newark, a documentary "that celebrates the rich cultural and historical heritage" of this major American city, third oldest in the United States, after only Boston and New York. I already saw it, because despite the FACT that WNET is assigned by the FCC to Newark — NOT New York — NJN showed it months ago. Booker really must sue to take back WNET from New York and return it to Newark. We need the powerful voice of a major over-air TV station to do for Newark tourism and development what WNET has improperly been doing for New York for decades. If you don't have Monday off, so miss this showing, which should NOT be on so early, given that many people in this congested three-state metropolis don't get home from work until well after 7pm — yet another insult from the New Yorkers who control our WNET — there will be another on Friday, March 21st. Alas, that showing will also be at 5:30pm, a deliberate choice to make it unavailable to most WNET viewers. The @&#*%'s!

A Tale of Two Supermarkets

I went to two supermarkets Friday, my first day out after being snowed in earlier in the week. I had hoped to get a lot of dry food for my cats, so that next time I'm stuck in the house I don't run out. I couldn't count on just my nearest Pathmark having enuf of the big bags. Besides, meat prices at ShopRite are almost always starkly better than Pathmark's. ShopRite also has its own brand of cat food, in large cans. Well, the ShopRite in Kearny does. For some reason, the East Orange ShopRite does not stock it.
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ShopRite is a cooperative of owners of individual stores:

From a small, struggling cooperative with seven Members – all owners of their own grocery stores – ShopRite has grown into the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the United States and the largest employer in New Jersey. The cooperative is comp[o]sed of 43 members who individually own and operate supermarkets under the ShopRite banner. Today, more than 50,000 people are employed by Wakefern Food Corporation, the merchandising and distribution arm of the company, and the 190 ShopRite stores in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. ***

Wakefern[1] is headquartered in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and operates 2.5 million square feet of warehousing. Our transportation fleet, one of the largest private fleets on the east coast, consists of 400 tractors and 2000 trailers, and traveled more 23 million miles in 1997. ***

Another focus is to educate and train special needs [mentally disabled] students for meaningful careers in the supermarket industry.[2] This innovative and groundbreaking program, called Supermarket Careers, was created by ShopRite in 1989, and is now in place in 42 schools in our five state area. The program has received local, state and national awards, including the Secretary of Education’s Award, the highest honor available to vocational programs.

ShopRite is also a major sponsor of the New Jersey and Connecticut Special Olympics Games, providing logistical, volunteer and food support for these annual events that attract more than 1,800 athletes and 20,000 attendees.

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Today's fotos tie together today's two themes, supermarkets and disability/health. The Bergen Street Pathmark is directly opposite the Newark Campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (better known locally as UMDNJ, tho it took me a while to learn to say that, and I had to stop to think what it stood for to know what order to put the letters in). The Pathmark is actually part of a small shopping center that also includes a Subway sandwich shop, Dunkin' Donuts, and offices for social services offered thru the New Community Corporation, which built the shopping center. This view out the entrance to the Pathmark parking lot is of the ambulance entrance and the second parking structure added when a number of new buildings, including a Cancer Center, produced more demand for parking than could be met by the theretofore lone garage, on 12th Avenue.

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One effect of ShopRite's dispersed ownership is that there can be wide variation from store to store. The Kearny store has a wider selection of brands and sizes of pet food than either the East Orange or Millburn store. So I struck out in the cat food department in E.O. Meat prices were great, tho. In fact, while I was looking at a special on fruit juices, I had to move my cart a short distance away to make room for an employee who was running a mechanized pallet-mover, and a guy from Belleville asked if that was my cart (it might have been a store cart), because he liked what he saw in it: "Those are my [kind of] prices." That is to say, we're both careful shoppers. We spoke briefly. He's from Belleville (one of the 5.36% of Belleville that is black) — and asked if I knew where that was. I said yes, I've been there — and we agreed that Pathmark's prices on meat are usually ridiculous as against ShopRite's. We both wondered how Pathmark can get away with charging so much more. One obvious reason is that there is no ShopRite in Newark. There should be.
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ShopRite also has an excellent house-brand cola (that is, I like the taste; and price: 3L bottle for 99¢). I don't like Pathmark's house-brand cola at all. They used to have a great birch beer, but discontinued it. I have no idea why.

UMDNJ provides more than the typical emergency room. Ours is "the sole Level I Trauma Center for the densely populated region of northern New Jersey."

Just because a store is better on price on some items doesn't mean it's better on everything. This is a mistake a lot of people make with, for instance, Wal-mart. The E.O. Pathmark had no 22oz. cans of dog food, and no specials on any cat or dog food I would buy. And a gallon of whole milk was $4.49, 50¢ more than Pathmark. As the song advises, "You'd better shop around." While waiting on the checkout line at the ShopRite, I heard an announcement that store hours have been extended to 11pm. The sign on the door had shown 10pm, and the website says 9! I guess business is booming. Still, I couldn't get everything at the E.O. ShopRite (alongside the Brick Church Station), so had to go to the Bergen Street Pathmark too.
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Pathmark didn't have any of the big bags of dry cat food either! And both stores are very bad about showing price labels for all items, aligned properly with the stock. I don't know what's wrong with these stores. It used to be that every single item had to be individually price-stamped, so all you had to do to find a price was look on the item. Now, all that a store with price scanners at the register has to do is put one label for dozens of individual items, and they can't do even that right?

Clara Maass, a nurse after whom the medical center in Belleville is named, is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, by West Side High. Here, Julius Spohn of the Old Newark Group, poses alongside the commemorative plaque describing her travail. Jule is by profession a nurse, and worked for years for the military or V.A. or some such, so wanted to be seen by perhaps New Jersey's most famous nurse, "the first nurse honored on a United States postage stamp, as well as the first nurse for whom an American Hospital was named". The first Clara Maass Hospital was in Newark. The new Clara Maass, part of the Saint Barnabas medical empire, has a school of nursing. So does UMDNJ Newark, up Bergen Street from the Pathmark.

But Pathmark did have a special on big cans of dog food that I buy. My cats can eat dog food (much less expensive than cat food) or dry food only. Given that choice, they will eat dog food. Pathmark also had a great special on Angus beef, London broil, even a tad better than ShopRite's beef price. But that's unusual.
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I have noticed an incremental increase in nonblack faces in the Bergen Street Pathmark over the past few months. I used to be the only pinko (not a political reference; exactly) most of the time. As I walked in from my car last nite, however, I saw two handicapped white people, one male, limping slitely but without a cane, the other female and limping badly even with the use of a cane. I was struck by how many people in this country are limping nowadays. I guess it's better that we're alive to limp. But plainly either the state of medicine is not what we'd thought, or the availability of quality healthcare is not what we'd like. (There's the political pinko!) Have you noticed all the commercials on TV nowadays for mechanized wheelchairs?! There's the Scooter Store, the Hoveround, and others, all guaranteeing that they can give disabled people the mobility they need, even to get around in tight places — and that if you are approved, they will get you one even if Medicare turns you down. How big a business is this?

Gaetano found an item about a Newark woman winning the title "Ms. Wheelchair New Jersey 2008" today. NJ is one of 25 states and DC that hold yearly pageants under the aegis of the Ms. Wheelchair America association.

Titleholders are expected to serve as advocates for the causes of disabled people and to promote awareness about the hardships many disabled people face.

[Cynthia DeSouza said] "I'm hoping to really make more places accessible to the disabled so that they can live the fuller lives they'd like to," *** DeSouza, who suffers from a motor neuron disease, owns a technology and development firm. ***

"I hope to be somebody who exemplifies the ability for disabled people to still be active and engaged in the world around them[.]"

Certainly some stores have done good work in offering mechanized shopping carts, and I see people self-sufficiently shopping from their own scooters in the Pathmark at all hours. But I dread the thought of being confined to such a chair myself. I think most of us who have mobility problems fear that if ever we sit in one of those, even 'temporarily', as after an operation, we will never get up again. So I'll skip the Scooter Store and park my car far from the front door, then push my own shopping cart around this region's great big supermarkets plus a couple of hundred feet back to the car to keep myself walking.
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P.S. Newark's own Queen Latifah should be walking more easily in a few months. She just replaced Kirstie Alley as celebrity spokeswoman for Jenny Craig, duties she will share with Valerie Bertinelli. The Jenny Craig website now features the new Queen Latifah commercial first in its visuals. I find it commendable that a 'big-boned' woman recognizes aloud that tho you might be in good health with some extra weight, fat is really not good. Mo'Nique, by contrast, is a 'hugely' irresponsible apologist for morbid obesity.
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[1] "The Wakefern name, an acronym, was developed from the w from Weiss, the a from Aidekman, the k from Kesselman, and fern from Dave Fern. The extra e [Wak(e)fern] was added to make the name both agreeable and pronounceable." (From a long online article that I did not fully read, about the origins of ShopRite at Answers.com.)

[2] Employing the mentally handicapped can be very good business as regards hard workers who are very loyal. One reason ShopRite runs such programs is to fite high turnover of employees, which is very costly. I saw a report on ABC World News February 11th about a Walgreens distribution center in South Carolina where 40% of staff have some kind of disability, including many who are retarded. (And no, that is not offensive but descriptive. Now, "retards" might be offensive. But I would never say that of people who are actually retarded.) Altho many people would like to see programs like ShopRite's and Walgreens' as perfect examples of how you can do well by doing good, a more jaundiced view is that the disabled will work cheaper than normal people. The ABC report claimed that that was not the case with the Walgreens program, and that disabled and nondisabled workers get the same pay, but that might merely mean that once significant numbers of disabled people were hired and proved loyal, wages stopped rising for everyone, so that what was once equal pay at good rates becomes over time equal pay at bad rates.

Yellow Boxes

Last July, I saw this yellow metal box in a parking lot at Stuyvesant Avenue and Valley Street opposite the post office in my area, Vailsburg. I walked closer to investigate, and found that it is a collection box for an organization called Planet Aid.

I went to the website shown on the box and found this info.

Planet Aid is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the environment and creating sustainable development in Africa and Asia.

We collect and recycle used clothing and shoes in 19 states in the USA. Items donated to Planet Aid are resold and proceeds are used to support education, community development and HIV/AIDS programs in Africa and Asia.

We partner with individuals, schools, organizations, companies and government agencies to inform about and contribute to community based development.

Altho the collection box specifies clothing and shoes, the website says:

The Planet Aid warehouse in Clifton, NJ is used to sort clothing, shoes, toys, books, and other used textiles collected from New Jersey, New York City, eastern Pennsylvania and Connecticut. *** The staff operating from this unit have placed over 900 boxes in these geographic areas 500 in New Jersey alone and the demand continues to grow!

I decided to check the Internet to see if this was a legitimate charity. The first item I found is a long discussion from 2002 of fraud and questionable activities connected to Planet Aid and its European affiliates, including what the French government classed as a "nonreligous cult". That article says that only 6% of the proceeds of Planet Aid's operations goes to development projects in the Third World. The 'charity' explains that its operations make money from running stores that resell the used items collected, and that these stores not only pass along their profits but also provide jobs. They also claim that their collections remove masses of clothing from the solid-waste stream that would otherwise go to landfills at public expense, thus qualifying Planet Aid as an environmental charity.
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Well, I thought, if in 2002 Planet Aid was under investigation, yet it was still operating in 2007, perhaps it was cleared of all charges. Then I found an item from 2007, which says that Planet Aid donates 31% of its revenue, from 11,000 collection boxes in the U.S., to development projects.

The American Institute of Philanthropy, however, questions whether Planet Aid is meeting its stated objectives. In its December “Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report,” the institute gave Planet Aid an “F.” The grade is due in part to the institute’s evaluation of how much of Planet Aid’s expenses are spent on charitable programs, which the institute reports is 31 percent. The institute’s goal for charities is 60 percent or greater.

In addition, it costs Planet Aid $73 to raise $100, according to the institute’s report. The institute maintains that $35 or less to raise $100 is reasonable.

That 2007 article, from the Religion News Blog, says that Planet Aid's yellow collection boxes, and red collection boxes from an affiliated for-profit entity, U'SAgain, have cut deeply into clothing donations to the Salvation Army.
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Religion News also says plainly that Planet Aid is connected to Tvind, a "cult".

I take no side in this controversy but merely pass along the information to my readers in order that they might decide on their own whether to drop off clothing at Planet Aid boxes — or not.

Another Leno Crack

Both Gaetano and I separately heard another jibe at Newark by Jay Leno. He showed the mugshot of Heidi Fleiss from a recent arrest for drunk driving and illegal possession of prescription drugs. She looked really bizarre and twisted, whereupon Leno remarked:

That's the Hollywood Madam. What's the Newark Madam look like?"

That's supposed to be funny. On Tuesday, when, for some reason, Leno was doing his usual "Headlines" bit a day late, he said, "There's something about New Jersey" that's funny. Comedians do seem to think there's something funny about New Jersey, which may help to explain why Leno was for a while regularly 'joking' about (attacking) Newark. As I speculated here last August 8th:

Perhaps Leno's writers are running out of inventiveness and have to fall back on old comedic standbys, like jokes about New Jersey and places whose names have K's in them. Hm. "Newark" is a placename with a K in it — and it's in New Jersey. You'd think the biggest name in late-nite would have plenty to talk about without falling back upon formula writing.

Leno's writers were still on strike Tuesday, so his observation that there's something funny about New Jersey is his own. But the writers returned Wednesday after something like 100 days off. Surely they should have been able to come up with a fresh point of view in all that time. But then, perhaps a hack is a hack is a hack, and 100 days off may not be time enuf to find something new to say. Maybe they should go away for a year or three. Or 60.

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Right Block. I mentioned here Monday that I inadvertently, due to an oddity in Newark's street grid, took pix on North 11th Street when I intended to take pix on North 10th. I went back the next day and took pix on the right block, the one around 182 North 10th, which is opposite the Schools Stadium and near St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church. I show those pix today. This first is of the building a former Newarker now in Albuquerque hoped I would show, his first home. The lited doorway is on the side of the building his family lived in.

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Newark's rebound is handicapped by the disrespect shown the entire state of which Newark is so important a part. What, pray, is so funny about New Jersey? Is it that for the past several years it has been the first or second richest state?
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Gaetano sent me this on January 11th:

U.S. & WORLD NEWS: NJ tops US in number of millionaires
New Jersey has the most millionaire households in the country, according to a marketing company's fifth annual ranking. The Garden State moved up from No. 2 in 2005 and 2006 to No. 1 last year on the index, compiled by Phoenix Affluent Marketing Service, which does research for companies that sell luxury products, investments and the like to the wealthy. According to the service, in 2007, 7.12 percent of New Jersey's 3.2 million households had a total of $1 million or more liquid or investable assets. That includes items such as savings, stocks and bonds, precious metals, the cash value of certain life insurance policies and retirement accounts not controlled by employers, but not equity in homes. The Associated Press

I walked south on 10th to get an overview of the block and a better view of the Stadium. The shallow red roof halfway up the closest building is covered in ceramic tiles, Mediterranean-style.

Wikipedia says:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that New Jersey's total state product in 2004 was $416 billion. Its per capita personal income in 2004 was $41,636, 2nd in the U.S. and 126% of the national average of $33,041. Its median household income is the highest in the nation with $55,146. It is ranked 2nd in the nation by the number of places with per capita incomes above national average with 76.4%. Nine of New Jersey's [21] counties are in the wealthiest 100 of the country.

In 2005, NJ was the richest state, bar none:

The median, or midpoint, of household income in the nation was $44,684 last year, while in New Jersey it was $61,359. National per capita income — the average income earned per person — was $24,020 nationally, but $30,485 in New Jersey. Connecticut was No. 2, at $60,528.

I liked the liting towers, even tho they weren't in use when I was there.

Well, that's certainly funny — funny that New Jersey should be treated with so little respect, as all being what I've heard termed a "moonscape" as seen from the Turnpike. One observer noticed this oddity, in 2004:

The Garden State may be a contender for the dubious distinction of most politically corrupt state and the state most frequently the butt of jokes. But word came yesterday from the U.S. Census Bureau of a title that, although it comes with caveats, could be a source of pride: New Jersey is the wealthiest state.

Here, nature's towers, mature trees, do not obscure the view of a man-made tower, thanks only to winter leaflessness. I trust the renovation of the Stadium will not entail tearing out any trees.

AOL recently hilited a Forbes Magazine list of the 20 richest counties in the Nation:

The conventional wisdom is that the country's richest areas are in places like Beverly Hills or Manhattan, where single paychecks cover $20 million houses for financiers and entertainment moguls. However, if you parse it out on the county level, the richest places in America, based on median household income, are overwhelmingly in the Washington, D.C., metro area and New Jersey, and sprinkled throughout Colorado and Georgia.

Three of the 10 richest counties are in NJ: Hunterdon (4th), Somerset (6th), and Morris (7th). All are outer suburbs of New York and Philadelphia. They are also, however, all nearer-in suburbs of Newark.

I hope the renovation does, however, tear away the ugly fencing around the Stadium and either let the structure stand without a fence around it or behind dignified wrought iron. This view of most of the eastern wall of the Stadium shows its strong but graceful Roman arches.

Tho a 2007 report says that NJ is no longer the richest state (Maryland bumped us all the way down to 2nd, due to the massive amounts of money focused on adjacent DC; the rich lobbyists and such may work in DC, but they live in MD and VA), it concedes that "Hunterdon, Somerset and Morris counties rank among the nation's 10 highest-income counties."
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Everyone knows there are 50 states, so New Jersey is richer than 48 or 49 of them. Few people, however, know that there are 3,077 counties in the United States, and 3 of the richest are in New Jersey.

Tho a Stadium is mainly a utilitarian structure, what must be seen should be worth seeing. A chain-link fence of this height is not worth seeing.

So what is funny about New Jersey? Oh, I know: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Charles Addams, Ernie Kovacs, Jerry Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Joe Piscopo, Rich Vos, Jason Alexander, Jay Mohr, Janeane Garofalo, Meryl Streep, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and other comedians, comedy writers, and comic actors/actresses. That must be what's funny about New Jersey. OK then.

We end with another foto of 182 North 10th Street, at nite, which I took as I returned to my car after wandering around the neighborhood taking fotos. I'll show other pix from that little walkabout over time.