Now winding down a 16-year stint as Mayor of Red Bank, Edward J. McKenna is scheduled to be feted by borough employees at a party scheduled for 5p Monday, Dec. 18, at the Two River Theater.
The event is open to the public. Tickets are $10 each. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
Here’s something else to nosh on. redbankgreen sat down recently with McKenna in a conference room of his law firm, McKenna, DuPont, Higgins & Stone, for a look-back and look-forward interview. And he was as sentimental and pungent as ever.
The accelerating shift of newspaper content from dead trees to the web will be topic A of a special program this Thursday evening (Nov. 30) at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft.
The event, titled “The Changing World of American Journalism,” will bring together an academic and four working journalists, each of whom will give a short presentation on newsgathering and publishing in the digital age. (See shameless plug, below.)
The event is free and open to the public. The audience will be encouraged to ask questions and raise concerns.
Particular emphasis, says event organizer Art Kamin, will be on what web-based journalism might mean to society, and yea, even democracy.
“Newspapers help make democracy work, but digital-age changes in newspapers are here and more are coming,” says Kamin. “This program will examine what the future may hold for journalism and how it will affect our livesespecially in New Jersey and in Monmouth County, where newspapers play a critical role serving as a government watchdog.”
Terry Gross’s National Public Radio interview show, called Fresh Air, could hardly have a more apt name.
The variety of fascinating personalities that cycles through her studio at WHYY in Philadelphia is proof that there is an alternative to the same-old lineup of guests making the talk show rounds to hawk big-budget movies and other dreck.
A recent week’s roster included filmmaker Stephen Frears; the authors of new books on the Bush Administration and the Holocaust; and Ray Manzarek, formerly of the Doors.
But that’s just the beginning. Gross is a seductive can-opener of an interviewer, one who almost always manages to get her guests to reveal surprising aspects of themselves and their relationships to their work.
Then again, sometimes she doesn’t. Next Saturday, Dec. 12, Gross comes to the Count Basie Theatre to show that it doesn’t always work out as well as it sounds on the radio.
Those were two assessments of life at the corner of Leighton Avenue and Catherine Street yesterday, 24 hours after Red Bank officials shut down the controversial Best Liquors store for fire code violations.
And yet, there was a lingering concern among residents that the recently elevated attention being paid by local officials to the store might vaporize after next Tueday’s election, and that proprietor Sunny Sharma might soon be back in business, attracting his usual noisy and messy clientele.
“I’m pretty far to the left,” Al Strasburger told us with a note of caution over the phone the other day, before we met him at his Oakland Street home for an interview.
Looking back, we now see what a considerate gesture this was. Clearly the man has a sense of his own toxicity, as measured by today’s political standards. He was gently trying to spare us from… well, a shock, no doubt.
Of course, the warning only whetted our interest. What passes for the ideological “spectrum” in America today is actually a range from the barely-left-of-center to the far right. We thought it would be refreshing to meet a real hairshirt liberal, the kind who might actually resemble the bogeymen that far-right radio screechers have gotten rich warning us about.
So we eagerly made our way past the cartoonishly overgrown yardwhich, swear to Allah, Strasburger maintains with a sickle, because he doesn’t own a lawnmowerand into his musty, poster-lined living room, where a two-foot-high stack of Cuban art magazines stood in a corner.
A couple of hours later we departed, having met perhaps the most charming, erudite, Chevy-driving, Phillies-loving defender of Stalin we are ever likely to encounter in these parts.
And yeah, the hair was standing up on the backs of our necks.
We got a late start on last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, so this is a few days old. But hey, it’s the doldrums, right?
Rob Walker, who writes the ‘Consumed’ column, has a piece titled ‘Silent Green,’ which makes the case that manufacturers and retailers of ecofriendly products are leery of pushing too hard “on the whole save-the-planet thing” for fear of alienating mainstream consumers.
He cites a product called gDiapers, flushable nappies invented in Australia (and sold there as Baby Weenees Eco Nappy Products) now making their way into American markets via Whole Foods. Jason and Kimberly Graham-Nye, an American couple who own the U.S. rights to the product, decided to give it a vague name rather than emphasize the ecofactor, an approach they thought would restrict the market to what they call ‘dark green’ consumers. (The company’s website, by contrast, doesn’t skimp on the ‘happy planet’ talk.)
In the piece, Walker reports also on a recent article in the journal Environment titled ‘Avoiding Green Marketing Myopia,’ which makes the point that a number of ecofriendly products have failed as a result of save-the-planet marketing strategies. That article cites a light bulb that bombed when it was marketed as Earth-friendly but succeeded when reintroduced merely as a money-saver.
For the record, and because a number of our readers have asked: the ‘green’ in redbankgreen is first and foremost an allusion to the idea of a village green or town square. But we’re happy to be associated with ecofriendliness, and hope to be at least a small voice in discussions about how we grow our food, make our products and dispose of waste. But ‘redbankdarkgreen?’ Nah…
Things are about to get rather messy at the Red Bank Public Library. A $1.6 million renovation that could take up to a year is set to begin as soon as next week.
But here’s a possible consolation for some patrons: the library has entered the Wi-Fi era.
You know you’re in for a horror of a home-remodeling story when it’s got an unseen antagonist and he’s referred to only as “the bad contractor.”
Hey, we don’t even want to know the guy’s name. Given what we’ve heard about his alleged handiwork, this case may be headed to Judge Judy.
But linking up with TBC was only one of the missteps that Sara Swanson acknowledges she made when she tried to flip a house on Madison Avenue in Red Bank.
And now here she is a year later, with a house bought at the top of the market still unfinished, hoping like crazy that her new crew”Elks Lodge guys who I feel safe with,” she calls themwill enable her to finally get it on the market by month’s end.
It’s what you might call an object lesson for any amateur who ever thought flipping a property was easy.
Tom Labetti is a big fan of Verizons new FiOS service. Couldnt be a stronger advocate for the technology. Thinks its so good, in fact, that its going to all but annihilate the competition for both high-speed Internet access and cable, once it catches on.
Rumson resident James R. Zazzali, Associate Justice on the state Supreme Court, is Gov. Jon Corzine’s choice to succeed Chief Justice Deborah Poritz upon her expected retirement in the fall, according to a story by scoop machine Josh Margolin in today’s Star-Ledger.
“By promoting Zazzali, Corzine would be all but assured of a big confirmation victory in the state Senate, while elevating a judge who is a popular Democrat with strong bipartisan ties,” Margolin reports.
Zazzali is unlikely to hold the job for long, if he gets it. The state Constitution requires that justices retire at age 70, a milestone Zazzali will reach in a year. Poritz turns 70 in October.
Zazzali is a former state Attorney General. A Democrat, he was appointed to the high court by by then-Gov. Christie Whitman, a Republican, in 2000.
His nomination is likely to be announced in July or August, the Ledger reports. The story also says that Corzine is “known for making critical decisions at the last minute (and) could still change his mind, but that is highly unlikely.”
The Ledger also reports that Corzine will likely stick with tradition and appoint a Republican to fill Zazzali’s associate spot to maintain partisan balance.
Preservation Red Bank’s efforts to address what it calls serious structural deterioration at the borough train station is featured in the online version of Preservation magazine, a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“In a good wind, it looks like it could be knocked over,” Mary Gilligan, a Preservation Red Bank member, is quoted as saying about the structure, built in 1875.
“The stick-style Victorian station’s troubles started sometime around 10 years ago, when the building’s slate roof was replaced with a temporary asphalt oneand it was all downhill from there,” the magazine reports, citing Gilligan as its source. “NJ Transit says the station is ‘structurally sound,’ but agrees that it could use some work.”
Gilligan tells redbankgreen the best thing about the article is NJ Transit’s statement about the building’s soundness, which she believes would make it harder for the agency to tear it down anytime soon. “Not that I think (demolition) is foremost in their minds,” she says, “but any excuse not to put money into fixing it…”
The station is listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the state’s historic sites inventory, and has seen the likes of Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt on its platforms. In 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England popped in.
According to Preservation Online, the trust is “the only private, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to encourage public participation in the preservation of sites, buildings, and objects significant in American History.”
Gilligan, who is a member of the trust, said her relationship to the organization had nothing to do with the story, and that the magazine apparently learned of the train station’s plight via an article in The Hub.
Just as you can’t have a civilization without sewage, you can’t have a First Amendment without having to put up with the likes of Ann Coulter.
Yesterday, the conservative sump pump appeared on the today show in a little black dress to flog a new book. In the process, she called some of the widows of Sept. 11 “broads” who are “enjoying their husband’s deaths.” Jennifer Braun of the Star-Ledger has a page-one piece on this in today’s paper. The Washington Post quotes Coulter as saying in the book, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
According to the Daily News, the book contains this gem:
“And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy…”
One of the women Coulter attacks is Kristen Breitweiser, who was living in the Navesink section of Middletown when her husband, Ronald, was killed, leaving her with a young daughter. According to the Ledger, Breitweiser now lives in New York City. Two others, Lori Van Auken and Mindy Kleinberg, both of East Brunswick, are referred to in the book as “the witches of East Brunswick.”
As many people familiar with the story of the so-called ‘Jersey Girls’ know, Breitweiser, Van Auken, Kleinberg and a fourth area woman, Patty Casazza of Colts Neck, were political naifs, and strangers to one another, when their husbands were killed at the World Trade Center. Weeks after the attacks, they joined forces to push for an investigation into why the attacks hadn’t been prevented. The Bush Administration fought the idea of a probe for months, but eventually folded. The result was the Kean Commission inquiry and report.
The basis for Coulter’s gripe with the women, she told Matt Lauer, is that she is “not allowed to respond” to the women’s critiques of the administration “without questioning the authenticity of their grief.” And yet, here she is, questioning the authenticity of their grief and doing so with all the tact of a plugged-up toilet.
“Having my husband burn alive in a building brought me no joy,” Van Auken told the News.
“I’d like her to meet my daughter and tell her how anyone could enjoy their father’s death,” Breitweiser told the News. “She sounds like a very disturbed, unraveled person.”
OK, so it gets 10 mpg in the city, and can’t quite fit into a parking space. But it does have "water fording" capabilities. According to the official Hummer website, "The H2 can ford an impressive 20 inches of water with the throttle in 4LO locked."
So what a shame that this little piggy was confined to a tight space at the corner of Broad and Front on a recent afternoon without a puddle in sight. Then again, the Navesink is just a block or so away. That couldn’t be more than 20 inches deep, right?
Summer got off to a literally shaky start at 8:23a on June 1, 1927, when New Jersey’s strongest-ever earthquake struck the northern Jersey Shore.
Attributed to a renewed slipping of an old fracture known as Logans Fault, the quake was felt as far away as Jersey City, New Brunswick and Toms River. But the real action was right here in Monmouth County.
Three shocks over the course of 12 minutes made medicine bottles dance upon the shelves of an Ocean Grove pharmacy, according to the next day’s New York Times; heavy rolls of newsprint in the plant of the Asbury Park Press were moved. Chimneys fell, and plaster came crashing down from the ceiling of an operating room of Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch. Red Bank, N.J., felt the shocks so distinctly that they were believed to have been caused by a heavy explosion, the Times reported. Panes of glass in greenhouses in Navesink Village were shattered by the shocks.
No one was killed or injured.
Why the history lesson? Because today, on the 79th anniversary of that Jazz Age temblor, redbankgreen debuts, and the Quake of ’27 seems an apt metaphor for what this site is about. We, too, hope to shake the ground, bust some plaster, maybe rattle the local media a bit – all without injuring or killing anyone.
