Kris Humphries, Laura Prepon, and Chelsea Handler

I saw on TV or Internet news that the husband of Kim Kardashian's short-lived (72-day) marriage is a New Jersey Net, and was booed when he took to the court for the first time after the divorce was announced. I was astonished at that unfairness, given that Kris Humphries is manifestly the victim here. And why would a basketball crowd take the side of an empty-headed nobody of a bitch like Kim Kardashian, over a legitimate, remarkable basketball star?
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When I did a search today of this booing business in preparation for this blogpost, the first search result was an odd story in The New York Observer, entitled "Brooklyn Nets’ Kris Humphries Booed Off D.C. Court". I had found the info I wanted, but was indignant at the absurd reference to nonexistent "Brooklyn Nets". So I left the following comment:

There is no such thing, yet, as the Brooklyn Nets. The team is the New Jersey Nets. New Jerseyans are very tired of being disrespected by New Yorkers. The present Nets could -- indeed should -- be called the Newark Nets, given that their home court is at the Prudential Center in Downtown Newark. The "New York" Giants, Jets, and Red Bulls all play their home games in NJ. Believe it or not, New York City ends at the Hudson.

I hadn't known that Humphries has played for the Nets since 2010. But, then, I don't follow sports in general, and have never seen a pro-basketball game (tho I'm working on Gaetano to take me to a Nets game before that team departs for Brooklyn; I can't afford a ticket of my own, and am not about to go alone even if I could afford a single ticket). Indeed, none of the coverage of the Kardashian divorce that I have seen on TV made any mention of Humphries' playing for NJ. Why is that?

Plainly, I would have no fotos of Kris Humphries, Laura Prepon, or Chelsea Handler to place here (tho I do show, below, a screenprint of a video from the Chelsea Lately website that shows both Mses. Prepon and Handler). So, instead, I display some pix of Kris Humphries' home venue, the Prudential Center in Downtown Newark. I have THOUSANDS of pictures of Newark for which I may not have ideal connections to use here, but I also have many topics for which I have no fotos, so I shall use such fotos as seem at least tenuously appropriate here, until I have exhausted all fotos that are only vaguely appropriate, which is not likely EVER to happen, in that I continue to take many Newark fotos for which I have no immediate use.

I heard that Ms. K objected to living in Minnesota, Mr. Humphries' home state, but not that the Mr. played for a New Jersey team, so the couple were staying in a Manhattan hotel — rather than their own house or apartment in New Jersey. At least Ms. Kim did not publicly decry the idea of living in Newark (thank goodness). Humphries' team is based in Newark. Why doesn't he live in Newark (as in the luxury, highrise apartment tower 1180 Raymond Boulevard)? I might boo him myself, for that, except that I wouldn't want anyone to think I was taking the side of the publicity-whore twit, Kim K. (Oddly, K. Humphries has two sisters, whose names also start in K, "Kaela" and "Krystal".) (In my Fanetik spelling system, all K-sounds are represented by the letter K, never by the letter C.)
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New CBS Sitcom's NJ Connex. Laura Prepon, best known for her role in That '70s Show, was a guest on Craig Ferguson's late-nite talkshow tonite, and something she said made me think she's from NJ. She is: from Watchung. It seems to me from a little reading, that "Watchung" is an inappropriate name for any muncipality in Somerset County, because the Watchung mountains are(?) northwest of there. There is, interestingly to me, a "Newark Mountains" portion of the Watchung Range. The Wikipedia article's "Geology" section of its Watchung Mountains article contains this information:

200 million years ago, magma intruded into the Newark Basin, then an active rift basin associated with the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea. The magma was initially contained within the sedimentary strata of the basin, forming large intrusions like the Palisades Sill, but it ultimately broke out to the surface through large, episodic eruptions. The Watchung Mountains were originally formed from these eruptions, consisting of three separate flood basalts that may have filled nearly the entire Newark Basin. Each time the basin filled with basalt, which cooled into blocky trap rock, a period of limited volcanic activity followed, allowing sediment to be deposited on top of the previously erupted layer of basalt. In this way, the Newark Basin became layered with alternating strata of Watchung basalt and Jurassic sedimentary rock.

I didn't know that. I suspect almost nobody else knew it either. But it's interesting, no? — if not for the geological deposition (deposits) information, then at least for the "Newark basin" stuff.

Chelsea Handler co-stars with Laura Prepon (pronounced prée.pon or prée.paun) in an upcoming NBC sitcom that is to start next Wednesday, Are You There, Chelsea? In it, Ms. Prepon is to play Chelsea Handler, who is also in the cast, but playing someone else (Chelsea's sister?, a "bitch", according to Chelsea)! Ms. Prepon, in response to Ferguson's obvious question as to why Ms. Handler wouldn't just play herself, said that Chelsea didn't want to go back to those days. She had done that already.
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Here's the program description from Wikipedia:

The series follows an outspoken woman, Chelsea Newman (a character based on the real Chelsea Handler and the show's main protagonist) and her circle of working-class twenty-something friends in New Jersey. Though the narration and observations [are] of the fictional Chelsea, most of the situations were inspirations from Handler's book, which is based on her early career in her twenties.

In the show, as I see from the promos airing now, the Chelsea Handler character is brunette, tho Chelsea's current TV persona is blonde. Hm. ("Blonde" with an -E is the feminine; "blond" is masculine. How nice. While I'm discussing linguistics, the male form of "brunette" is "brunet", pronounced the same, tho you'd think, since it is from French, that the masculine without the -TE would be pronounced with a long-A and silent-T, like "ballet" or "bouquet" — or Hyacinth "Bucket" (that's a PBS Britcom reference), but it's not. The usage note at "blonde" on Dictionary.com is wrong about "blond" being the more common form. "Blonde", for both women and men, is far and away the more common form, following the rule I have long observed, and which helped make me a spelling reformer: the worse spelling is almost invariably the one we remember and tend to use. For instance, "gage" is never seen, but "gauge" is all over the place.)

Wikipedia says that the program is based on Chelsea Handler's actual life, and is to be set in New Jersey somewhere. But where? Chelsea was raised in Livingston, a suburb in western Essex County, 8 miles west of my house in Vailsburg, western Newark. Is Newark, the county seat and main city of the region of Chelsea Handler's youth, going to be featured in the show? That would be great, if the mentions of Newark are favorable or neutral. But did Chelsea herself, and will the show, ignore Newark to skip directly to Manhattan when it goes beyond Livingston (or whatever the base town is to be called in the series)?
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I am offended that a lot of celebrities with substantial Newark connections do not proudly mention those connections. Is it really possible that Chelsea Handler, who left NJ for L.A. when she was 19 — so much for the sitcom's "circle of working-class twenty-something friends in New Jersey", in that Chelsea left for L.A. before her 20s — had no connection with Downtown Newark, less than 12 miles from her family home in Livingston?

The foto above shows the vicinity of Prudential Center before three small buildings that front on Market Street closest to the camera were torn down to make a larger Championship Plaza.

Chelsea Handler has a cable television show, Chelsea Lately on the E! cable network, that I used to watch occasionally when I had cable TV instead of just cable modem (because of the absurd costs of cable nowadays). Wikipedia says:

From her work on Chelsea Lately, Chelsea Handler is ranked on the Forbes Celebrity 100 at number 98.

That Wiki article shows a foto of her as blond, with, perhaps, some gray coming in. (More than incidentally, Forbes Magazine was established by the father of Malcolm Forbes, who lived in, and was politically active in, NJ.) What is Chelsea's natural hair color?
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There is currently, on the Chelsea Lately website, an interview with Laura Prepon that discusses why Prepon plays Handler in the NBC sitcom, and mentions their both having NJ connections. I'm glad I had to research this topic, in that I now know there are some videos from Chelsea Lately online.
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There are so many NJ connections that the general public does not know about. If they did, this much-disrespected state would be drastically better appreciated.