Category: default || By jt3y

I had to go out of town for a few days. Mea culpa. I actually had to drive to Philadelphia, and then down to Cape May, N.J. It cost $3 at the Walt Whitman Bridge to get out of New Jersey, and let me tell you, it was the best $3 I've ever spent. (Rimshot.)

Actually, I'd never been to the Jersey Shore before, and although this wasn't a pleasure trip, I liked it much better than I thought I would. I'd been to the Delaware Shore years ago, and I wasn't impressed; the Cape May area was surprisingly uncruddy, and I could see vacationing there. Perhaps my impressions were colored by the fact that one of the people I had to meet with lives literally directly on the beach (he bought the house for $38,000 in 1973. It's now worth a few million ... eeek), but I also enjoyed killing time in the towns of Avalon and Stone Harbor while waiting for our appointment.

It always surprises me how rural much of New Jersey is. Pennsylvanians tend to think of New Jersey as ugly abandoned industrial areas, declining cities and beat-up highways, but it's more than that. It's also toxic waste dumps. (Ha! I slay me.) But seriously, there is a lot of unspoiled land in New Jersey. On the expressway between Camden and Atlantic City, there are practically no towns of any size, but there is a lot of preserved wetlands.

I also have to admit that I couldn't get Hurricane Katrina out of my mind, particularly after I saw some of the houses around Stone Harbor, which are built right to the edge of the beaches and causeways. Have these people learned nothing from, oh, 150 years of recorded weather events in the United States?

Anyway, I'll try to cough up a new Almanac soon.

In the meantime, Officer Jim says people should stop blaming President Bush and his political appointees for botching the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. The President's just an optimist, he says. Many people see New Orleans as half empty, Officer Jim says, but the President prefers to see New Orleans as half full.

And David Letterman says he's enjoying the new HBO miniseries "Rome." According to Letterman, in this week's episode, Rome was burning while Nero refused to cut short his vacation. He can't wait for next week's installment, in which it takes FEMA five days to show up in Pompeii.