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Archive for the ‘Charles Layton’ Category

MUSIC: How About A New National Anthem? 2011 Super Bowl re-post in Ocean Grove.

Posted in Charles Layton, Music, tagged on January 13, 2026| 11 Comments »

By Charles Layton.

Editor;  Blogfinger.net.   2011 Super Bowl.

Christina Aguilera at the Super Bowl

When Christina Aguilera flubbed the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner “at this year’s Super Bowl, it revived the perennial argument that America needs a new national anthem.

It won’t happen, of course, but it’s fun to review the issue once in a while.

The most persuasive argument against “The Star Spangled Banner” is that most people can’t handle its range of more than one and a half octaves. At a baseball game or other such function, you’ll see people silently mouthing those unreachable high notes. Or they’ll drop down an octave when they get to “laaaand of the freeeeee…” Or improvise a few lines of alto harmony. (Aguilera switched very awkwardly into falsetto and still didn’t quite nail the high note.)

Another beef you’ll often hear about Spangled Banner is that it’s too militaristic. It’s about bombs.

Any song proposed as an alternative, though, needs to meet three tests:  Are the lyrics appropriate? Is it singable? And (my favorite) does it meet what has been called the “Casablanca challenge”?

Alfred Gingold, writing in Slate, once proposed that a national anthem, when sung by patriotic partisans, should be able to silence those arrogant Nazis in Rick’s American Cafe. The French anthem, La Marseillaise, met this test splendidly in the movie. I think Spangled Banner would also succeed in that situation — but only if the people singing it could reach those stirring high notes. If not, it would be pathetic.

So, here are the two most commonly suggested alternatives:

America The Beautiful. Are the lyrics appropriate for a national song? Yes, they are; they declare that the country is beautiful. Is it singable?   Yes, it is.   Does it pass the Casablanca challenge? Unfortunately not. Waves of grain, fruited plains — that won’t scare very many Nazis.

This Land Is Your Land. Many people champion this song as a national anthem on the grounds that it’s assertive about democracy, expansiveness and inclusiveness on a continental scale. And I agree. It is easily sung, for sure, spanning one note less than an octave. It passes the Casablanca test in my opinion. Furthermore, it’s often sung to guitar and/or banjo accompaniment — what’s more American than that? And it’s structured like an American folk song, with a repeating chorus; it’s designed for group singing.

Here it is, performed by country music artist Lee Greenwood. Sing along if you want to; it’ll make you feel good.

 

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For all we know we may never meet again…..”carpe diem”

Posted in Blogfinger Presents, Charles Layton, tagged on September 10, 2025| 1 Comment »

A churchyard in France—the last rose of summer. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Paul Goldfinger photo.

 

By Charles Layton,  Editor @Blogfinger.

 

Good morning, class. Today we’ll study the poetic tradition known as carpe diem, which means “seize the day.”  It’s a phrase from the Roman poet Horace, who felt that life is short and unpredictable so let’s bring and make love and party on.

The poet Robert Herrick was in this tradition when he wrote his poem “To the Virgins, to Make much of Time.”  Its most famous line is  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. But it’s not about gardening.

Here is an American popular song in the carpe diem tradition. It’s been recorded by Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Wynton Marsalis. Johnny Hartman sang it on the soundtrack to the movie The Bridges of Madison County. I especially like the concluding lines:

For all we know this may only be a dream.
We come and go like the ripples in a stream.
So love me tonight tomorrow was made for some,
Tomorrow may never come for all we know.

JOHNNY HARTMAN.   From The Bridges of Madison County

 

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Aretha and Me, the Early Years: A Blogfinger feature by Editor Charles Layton of Ocean Grove, NJ

Posted in Charles Layton, Music on July 27, 2025| 1 Comment »

By Charles Layton, Editor, Blogfinger.net.  2012 .

It must have been sometime in the winter of 1961-62. We were two soldiers on leave, exploring the mysteries and enticements of New York City for the very first time. Probably on someone’s recommendation, we sought out a place on 7th Avenue called the Village Vanguard, eager to hear some jazz. The chairs were uncomfortable, the tables were tiny and crammed together to make the most of the space, and the cover charge and liquid refreshments cost more than we could afford, forcing us to nurse our drinks all evening in spite of the waitress’s judgmental looks. It was one of those situations where you have to hang onto your glass for dear life lest the waitress scoop it away before it’s empty.

The featured artist that night played jazz piano with a heavy gospel flavor and sang with an air of authority rare in one so young (she was probably not yet 20). She had an enormous voice. I was gobsmacked by her performance. I remember writing a letter to a friend back in Texas, a fellow jazz lover, saying, “You’ve got to listen to a singer named Aretha Franklin. See if you can find any of her records.”

I don’t think I heard of her again until four or five years later, by which time she had altered her repertoire and become the “Queen of Soul.” I never hear her music now without thinking of how she sounded to me on that cold, long-ago night, as I sat huddled in that overcrowded club on 7th Avenue.

This song, a standard from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, provides a good approximation of how she sounded that night.

 

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Lost in the Stars — A Reverie

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article, tagged on September 30, 2023| 2 Comments »

The Milky Way. Photo from the Internet

 

Re-post from 2012.  Charles Layton was a member of the Blogfinger staff when he wrote this marvelous piece. Charles now lives in Philadelphia.  He is a professional editor from the Philadelphia Inquirer, now retired.

 

By Charles Layton

A few years ago we lived for three weeks in Nicaragua, in a house at the edge of a small, very remote fishing village called Casares. It was a spectacular place. Instead of shooshing and murmuring, as they mostly do in Ocean Grove, the waves on that shore towered and crashed and sucked and splattered and spat. They were never subdued.

From our porch, looking out on the Pacific Ocean, we watched pelicans dive bombing for fish. Each afternoon huge flocks – a hundred or more at a time – would fly right past us, headed for their nesting grounds.

But even better was the sky at night. After all the meager lights in that little town went dark, the sky became a light show of blazing stars and star clusters, plunging meteors, wandering planets. Sometimes, very late, when the call of nature roused me from bed, I would walk out on the patio alone and stare and stare at the universe, and especially at the Milky Way, wheeling above me. Stars by the thousands, unbelievably distinct and clear.

In Ocean Grove, on most nights, you can actually count the number of visible stars. Often it’s no more than a dozen. Sometimes it’s none. Living under a permanent scrim of light pollution, we forget how many stars are out there. Many of us have never actually seen the night sky in its true state – as I saw it on the coast of Nicaragua, and as our ancestors knew it.

In a couple of weeks we’ll hear jokes about the Mayan calendar coming to an end, and how that will be the destruction of the earth and all mankind. No need to do your Christmas shopping or pay your taxes now, our doom is written in the stars, har har. What idiots, those Mayans.

But really, the Mayans and all ancient peoples lived their lives in constant communion with the teeming, moving lights in the natural sky. The ancient peoples had no idea what those lights were. They noted that the lights moved in strange ways. Sometimes one could be seen to streak and fall out of the sky. Sometimes a comet would appear, ominously hovering. (What did that portent? Something important, right?) The night sky was those people’s television, fraught with drama and bad news.

The constellation Orion. The three middle stars are his belt

Religions arose to explain all those moving lights. Stories were told. People saw pictures in the sky – a lion, a crab, a hunter named Orion holding a bow in one hand and a club in the other. Because the planets moved independently of the rest of the turning firmament, the ancients associated those special lights with gods – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

But because the sky was so brilliant, prominent, ever-present and mysterious, ancient people studied it methodically. They built observatories and took and recorded measurements. They found that the heavenly bodies displayed repeating patterns which, when plotted, yielded information useful to hunters, farmers, nomads and sailors. Astrologers tried to discern when “the stars were right” for planting or marrying or doing business or giving birth.

The Bible says the “wise men” (men who understood signs in the sky) were guided to Bethlehem by a star. If such a beckoning star rose in the sky now, I doubt we’d even see it — unless JCP&L suffered a major blackout.

Hurricane Sandy taught us the value of electricity, and I’m happy to have the power back on; I would never want to do without it. Still, it’s not a trivial thing, our loss of that ancient awareness of the richness of the sky.

 

 

BILLIE HOLIDAY  (this song added on 4/23/21):

 

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A Slightly Subversive Christmas Wish

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article, tagged on November 30, 2012| 3 Comments »

A portrait of the author

By Charles Layton

Here is my problem: I don’t want anything for Christmas.

I don’t need clothes, I’m retired. My daily uniform is jeans and flannel shirts. My closet and attic are bursting with stuff I never wear. I put on a suit and tie about once a year – twice if it’s a really bad year.

Do I need gloves? Not really. I have two pairs.

A new parka? – got one last year, and it’s great.

How about a watch? Don’t wear one anymore. Like I said, I’m retired.

People used to give me music CDs and books at Christmas, but now I download all that to iTunes and Kindle. There’s nothing to wrap and put under a tree, unless it would be an Amazon gift certificate, which is embarrassingly unfestive.

I have all the electronics I can use. Desktop computer — check. Laptop — check. iPhone — got a new one. iPod – got one. Digital recorder — got one, seldom use it. Camera equipment – I use my wife’s. Don’t need more.

I don’t have an iPad or any other kind of tablet device, but that’s because I can’t figure out what I’d use one for, or why I’d want to carry it around.

What about some tools? I have all the tools I need. Anyway, I really don’t know how to fix anything.

You would think that having all the possessions one wants in life would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? And for most of the year it is. I am happy, I am blessed, my cup runneth over.

But come December, thanks to the commercially oppressive nature of the season, having all my earthly needs already fulfilled is awkward. Not wanting more makes me seem standoffish, alienated, uncooperative. I remember that my father used to feel something similar. “Christmas ought to be just for children,” he would say. I now think I know what he was getting at.

I stroll the malls, checking out the stores, and there’s just nothing there that appeals. If they were selling extra closet space, I would ask people to give me that.

I understand that people like to give gifts, that the impulse is natural and good, and I hate to be a Grinch, although I do recall that in the Dr. Seuss story the spirit of Christmas survived and flourished after the Grinch stole all the presents.

Here’s what I’m thinking. What if, this year, I just ask all my loved ones, instead of giving me something, to make a donation to the local food pantry or to Hurricane Sandy relief.

Would that be so awful? It’s what would really make me the happiest.

But OK, if anyone still insists on giving me something, I guess I could use some socks.

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The Blogfinger Grammarian — A Bunch of Malarkey

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, tagged on November 22, 2012| 2 Comments »

By Charles Layton

The Blogfinger Grammarian makes no apology for being totally out of it.

He does not apologize for the fact that his fashion consciousness is about the same as it was in high school. Nor for the fact that, of all the performers at the Bamboozle music festival, the only one he’d heard of was Bon Jovi. Nor for the fact that he doesn’t know who the Kardashians are, has never once watched American Idol, and has never heard Lady Gaga sing.

He no longer follows any sports teams except the Lakewood Blueclaws, having decided that performance-enhancing drugs, money, television, childishly egotistical acting-out and pedophilia have made big-time sports unworthy of serious attention.

When the Blogfinger Grammarian passes the magazine racks at the Wegmans checkout counter, he doesn’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers (except for Brad and Jen, whom he does kind of hope may one day get back together, although he knows they never will).

Being ignorant of so many cultural references, the Blogfinger Grammarian no longer gets half the jokes on Saturday Night Live, and so he doesn’t watch it any more. (He wishes Chevy Chase and Dan Ackroyd would come back, although he knows that would be a disaster.)

However, one thing that I (let’s drop the third-person affectation) do know something about is the English language, since I made my living off of it. At least I thought I knew the English language; I thought I knew words.

But now I’ve just read that the Oxford American Dictionary has announced its annual “word of the year,” and it is a word I’d never heard of. The dictionary claims that its word of the year is chosen for being “a word that has attracted interest and that embodies in some way the ethos of the year.” Well if that’s true, I must have wandered right out of the ethos and right into the anti-ethos.

Because the word of the year is – ta-daaah! – GIF.

But not GIF as a noun – that’s supposedly old-hat. What’s new and exciting, according to Oxford American, is that people are now using GIF as a verb. To GIF means to perform the act of creating a GIF. Or posting a GIF online, or something.

This is a travesty. In the first place, show of hands, how many of you know what the heck a GIF is, or what the verb “to GIF” means? If you were asked to GIF, what would you do? (It’s pronounced with a soft “g,” by the way, as in “giant.”)

I looked it up. Turns out the letters stand for Graphics Interchange Format. And a GIF is a series of images put together via computer in a short, loop-repeating sequence.

Here’s a link. Check out a few GIFs and then hit the back arrow and come on back.

Back now?

OK. Although GIFs are empty calories, they can be kind of fun. They’re all over the Internet. People share them in emails.

Still, if I’d had a vote I certainly would not have supported GIF as word of the year. Just because some Internet geeks with too much time on their hands started using it as a verb? Please.

Some of the other choices Oxford American considered but turned down seem way more appealing to me. They turned down “Super PAC,” which has the advantage that you hear and read that word constantly. It really is part of the ethos of the year 2012. So is “superstorm,” but the judges passed on that one as well.

 “Malarkey” was even a contender, because Joe Biden used it in the debate with Paul Ryan. It has been reported that moments after Biden said “That’s a bunch of malarkey” people on the Internet went wild appreciating the word, discussing its meaning, its derivation, variations on its spelling. Malarkey reportedly was mentioned on Twitter 30,000 times in one minute.

It’s a good word. A great word. Maybe not deserving to be anyone’s word of the year, but it beats the heck out of GIF.

Can I please get an amen on that?

MUSIC by Ella Fitzgerald:

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Heaven and Hell on the Internet

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article, tagged on September 28, 2012|

St. Isidore — patron saint of the Internet?

By Charles Layton

This week, in a restaurant, I happened to glance at a man and woman sitting at a nearby table. The man had his hands in his lap, his head bowed and eyes lowered, and I just assumed that he was saying grace. But then, when I was able to see his hands, I noticed his thumbs were moving. He wasn’t praying, he was text messaging.

Actually, he could have been praying. Many people use their Internet gadgetry for religious purposes. They attend live-streamed church or synagogue services. They log onto prayeronline.org, where one can submit a prayer request to the website’s “prayer team.” Or they teleport themselves to any number of little cyber-chapels where one can do one’s own praying in peace and quiet. These sites are the natural descendants of Dial-A-Prayer, which dates from the 1950s, when telephones actually had dials. (Today, of course, we have Dial-A-Prayer.com.)

Some years ago there was a movement in the Catholic Church proposing Saint Isidore of Seville to be the patron saint of the Internet. There was even a prayer people could recite as they went online. It asked that, through the intercession of Saint Isidore, God should “direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and let us treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.” (If only.)

It’s hard to think of any aspect of our lives that hasn’t immigrated onto the Internet. Religion, yes. Education, yes. Commerce and shopping, definitely yes. Filing income tax returns, yes. Work, yes; millions of people telecommute from home, and millions more, even if they’re in an office, conduct business online. This includes those many millions worldwide who send emails telling me I’ve won the Spanish National Lottery.

Our children and grandchildren are showing us how social life will be in the near future; it will be centered online, with messages and photos and videos flashing at ever-increasing speed throughout the neighborhood, the school, the city, the world. Have you not noticed that, unless forbidden to do so, children will text message at the dinner table? Or while sitting beside you in a car? Or late into the night, lying in the dark in their little beds, their intent little faces dimly illuminated by the phone screen?

Courtship and sex online? – Let’s not even go there.

Politics and diplomacy? Just recently we’ve seen an interesting example in the movie “Innocence of Muslims,” which seems to have originated in California and led to riots and murder in North Africa. It’s not unthinkable that our next war will not only be covered on YouTube, as wars are now; it will be started by YouTube.

In the early ‘90s Ross Perot, as a presidential candidate, promoted the idea of electronic democracy, or E-democracy as it is now called. He argued that direct democracy, the kind the Athenians had, was preferable to indirect (representative) democracy, and that, thanks to computers, this would now be practical. We could hold town meetings via computer, we could vote via computer – and not just vote to elect our public officials; we could all, as E-citizens, vote to decide specific policy.

For instance, should we bomb Iran? That’s a question too important for a relatively small group of government officials to decide. Let’s have a national E-poll of all the citizens.

But if we ever do go that far, I might have to take refuge at Dial-A-Prayer.com.

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Confessions of an Academic Cheater

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article, tagged on September 12, 2012| 5 Comments »

By Charles Layton

The Harvard cheating scandal was in the paper again this morning. Every time I read about this it reminds me of my own career as an academic cheater.

Like the cheating at Harvard, mine was complicated. But here’s the difference: my cheating turned out to be one of the high points of my life as a student. Let me explain.

I wasn’t much of a student in high school. My early school years had been too easy. I had pretty much gotten by on glibness. So when I reached high school I had no idea how to study. And by then, I was at a point where I could no longer finesse my way through a test. It was study or flunk.

This became apparent in Miss Barkley’s American history class, where, at the end of the first semester, we faced a massive final exam, which would determine the greater part of our grade. And because I had (as usual) goofed off in class, I wasn’t at all prepared.

So I decided to cheat. And not in a small way. I was going to cheat on a colossal scale. I enlisted my friend Bobby, another goof-off, in the enterprise. We got excited about it. We were going to be the best cotton-pickin’ cheaters that school had ever produced.

We spent the better part of the weekend preparing elaborate “cheat sheets,” which we intended to smuggle into class on Monday morning and consult secretly during the exam.

We poured our most devoted energies into preparing those cheat sheets, which were to be miniaturized so we could hide them up our sleeves. We condensed the semester’s material into a shorthand outline, which we then painstakingly copied out in tiny lettering on long, inch-wide strips of paper – just enough info to answer a “what was” type of question.

“Whiskey Rebellion, 1791, grain farmers, tax.”

“Louisiana Purchase, 1803, Jefferson.”

“1st bank of the U.S, chartered 1791, Alex. Hamilton, Secy of Treas”

We wrote on both sides of these paper strips, and then we Scotch taped all the strips together to make one long strip, maybe four feet long. Then we rolled these long strips into double rolls, so that, with a deft flick of thumb and forefinger, we could scroll them this way or that way to retrieve the facts we needed for a given question.

Having accomplished this, we practiced looking up those various facts. Bobby would say to me, “XYZ Affair,” and I would scroll the strips until I found the notes on that.

“War of 1812,” I’d say, and Bobby would scroll to that spot on his sheet.

By Monday morning we had it down. We were pumped. We were confident that we could find any fact, quickly, and inconspicuously enough so as not to get busted. We were really going to put one over on the hawk-eyed Miss Barkley. Oh boy.

The bell rang. In we went to class. The tests were passed around.

“Begin.”

I answered the first question just fine, without resorting to my cheat sheet. Then I answered the second question – again without consulting the cheat sheet. I remembered the pertinent facts just from having copied them down so carefully.

And so it went. I ended up going through that entire test without a single peek at my beautiful cheat sheet, which remained coiled like a sleeping worm just up my sleeve.

As I handed in my test paper and walked out the classroom door, it struck me that while I had thought I was preparing a clever way to beat the system, what I had really been doing was studying. Yeah. So that’s what studying was.

I had distilled the relevant information from the textbook, I had sorted and organized it, written it down, reviewed it… Totally by accident, I had discovered how to cram for a test. By hook or by crook, you might say.

I felt like a total idiot of course. Because instead of being the devilish, romantic outlaw I had set out to be, I’d turned myself into a studious nerd.

I used that stumbled-upon method of study, though, for the rest of my days. Omitting, of course, the part where you compress the information into a small paper roll and hide it on your person. That part – the unethical part — was the one step in the process that turned out to be a waste of time.

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The Blogfinger Grammarian: In a Daze Over Punctuation

Posted in Blogfinger Grammarian, Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, tagged on May 29, 2012| 7 Comments »

By Charles Layton

In the midst of all these recent stories about Day’s Ice Cream, the Grammarian has noticed a nagging problem of punctuation. In fact, the Grammarian has concluded that it’s an issue our community can no longer ignore.

I refer, of course, to the lack of an apostrophe in the name of the place. The sign in the window says, simply: Days.

See? There’s no apostrophe.

Elsewhere, though — on websites and in promotional material — one does find an apostrophe. In fact, the owners’ new outlet in Asbury Park calls itself Just Another Day’s. A clever name. But notice that, unlike its Ocean Grove parent, it does have an apostrophe.

Photos by Mary Walton

The Ocean Grove Chamber of Commerce’s website also spells the name with an apostrophe. But in reviewing various other websites that list Day’s –including merchantcircle.com, menupix.com, company.com and bringfido.com — we found that some do use the apostrophe and some don’t. Inconsistency reigns.

We at Blogfinger have been a part of this problem. We’ve sometimes gone with the apostrophe, sometimes not, as the spirit moved us. So we now feel obliged to clear things up.

On first consideration, our conclusion was that the name requires an apostrophe. It’s a possessive noun.

But not so fast! A question remains as to where to put that apostrophe, and that question leads us into a grammatical briar patch.

Day’s is reported to have been founded in 1876 by two brothers, William F. and Pennington Day. So if the business belonged to two individuals, both named Day, one would think it should properly have been spelled using the plural possessive form — Days’ Ice Cream. The apostrophe should go after the “s” that forms the plural, not before it.

Later in its history, the place fell into the hands of Agnes Day, the sister of the two brothers. If the ownership was then solely hers, she might have wanted to change the word from plural possessive to singular possessive, which would be Day’s.

Early photographs of the building, however, show the name Days on the front with no apostrophe at all. What could that mean? Could it mean that the original owners, the Day brothers, didn’t know their grammar and punctuation? Or could it be that they didn’t think of the name as being in the possessive case at all? That would be valid. While many businesses and products named for a person are cast in the possessive case — examples would be Macy’s Department Store, Hershey’s Chocolate and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream —  many others are not. Think of Ford Motor Company, Reynolds Wrap, Pillsbury Pancake Mix, Oscar Mayer Bacon, Calvin Klein Underwear. In these cases, the persons’ names are not treated as possessive nouns but as modifying adjectives, which don’t take an apostrophe.

It’s just possible that the two Day brothers knew exactly what they were doing back in the 19th century. They didn’t think of the use of their name as a possessive. They thought of it the way Calvin Klein and Mr. Pillsbury did, and so didn’t use an apostrophe. Later, probably some time in the 20th century, other owners must have started to assume that the name Days was meant to be possessive, so they started adding the apostrophe. But since the glass on the storefront of the building has historical value, and is a work of art, you can see why no subsequent owner would have wished to replace it — or, worse yet, to paint in an apostrophe. Sometimes history and aesthetics trump grammatical correctness.

But what I’m saying is that, seen from one point of view, the original spelling — the spelling on that storefront window — is correct after all. But that doesn’t mean the Chamber of Commerce and the bringfido website and the Day’s outlet in Asbury Park have it wrong. The arguments for and against the apostrophe seem equally valid, depending on the original intent of the founders, which is impossible to know. (The Day brothers might not have given a rip. They might have left it to the discretion of the sign painter. Where does that put us?)

So here is the Grammarian’s final ruling:

The lack of an apostrophe has a strong historical precedent. We should go with that.

Case closed.

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The Blogfinger Grammarian: The Proper Suffix

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, tagged on May 1, 2012| 7 Comments »

By Charles Layton

I’ve posed this question before but never received an adequate answer. What do you call a person who lives in Neptune? I’m not originally from here, and I honestly don’t know, but I have some thoughts about it.

I grew up in a part of the country where the suffix “ite” is used a good deal. We Texans have Houstonites and Dallasites and Austinites. “Ite” is sort of our default setting. However, it’s a big state and we have plenty of exceptions. (For some reason, people in Paris, Texas, refuse to refer to themselves as “Parisites.”)

Neptunite

“Neptunite” would be my automatic choice for a Person From Neptune (a PFN) except for the distracting fact that neptunite happens also to be the name of a rare mineral. Like our township, it is named for the Roman god of the sea. Unlike our township, it is mainly found in scattered parts of Asia and North America but not, I believe, in New Jersey. I don’t think a PFN should be called that.

So how about another common suffix, the one we apply to people from Ocean Grove, from New York, from London and from (I believe this is true) Hamburg. The trouble is, “Neptuner” sounds as if it should be spelled Nep-tooner, and as if it ought to designate an old-time cartoon character: Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig. To my ear, it just lacks dignity. Plus, it reminds me of the Looney Tunes theme song, which then sticks in my mind and torments me for days. (“Th-th-that’s all, folks.”)

So if Neptuners doesn’t quite work, we’re stuck with the following options:

Neptunians. — No good. It suggests alien invaders from a giant frozen planet.

Neptunans. —  Something to do with tuna fish? Sounds like it.

Neptuner

Neptunistas? — Well, hey, that has a ring to it. Anybody want to second that?

Ocean Grover

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Next Week Will Be Momentous for Neptune Democrats —— Mary Beth Jahn Says She’s Not Giving Up

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Neptune Township News, Ocean Grove news, tagged , , , on April 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

By Charles Layton

By this coming Monday — if not sooner — the Democratic Party will probably have made up its mind whether to endorse incumbent Mary Beth Jahn or her challenger, Nicholas Williams, for Neptune Township Committee.

Whichever of those two gets the party’s blessing will have a significant advantage in the June 5 primary, which will decide the party’s candidates in the general election next fall.

Two members of the Township Committee are up for re-election this year: Jahn and Dr. Michael Brantley. Normally, the Neptune Township Democratic Party would have backed those two incumbents, but at its March 24 meeting the party’s district leaders chose to replace Jahn with Williams. That action has caused an acrimonious split within the party, with Jahn refusing to step aside and Mayor Randy Bishop supporting her.

The county party and its chairman, Victor Scudiery, get to make the final call, either reinstating Jahn as the party’s choice or following the endorsement of the Neptune party.

But whatever Scudiery decides, the remaining contender, be it Williams or Jahn, can still appear on the primary ballot, but in a far less favorable position.

In an email on Wednesday to some of her supporters, Jahn said, “I will not know until early next week as to whether the Monmouth County Democrats will choose to endorse me or the Neptune Democrats’ choice, but either way, I will be running in both the primary and general elections.”

Jahn also told The Coaster: “I think the public and citizens of Neptune should decide at the polls who they want to represent them rather than it being brokered by a small handful of people at a meeting.”

Williams has not made any public statements about the controversy.

Any candidate who seeks to be on the ballot must submit a petition signed by at least 18 voters who are registered either as Democrats or independents.  Those petitions have already been submitted to the office of Municipal Clerk Richard Cuttrell, and if one were to judge by the petitions alone, Jahn would seem to have an edge. According to Cuttrell, her petition contains 68 valid signatures. Williams and Brantley filed a joint petition with only 23 signatures. However, Scudiery is not obliged to consider the size of the candidates’ petitions in making his choice.

The backing of the party is important because voters in primary elections tend to be party stalwarts, and many vote the straight party “line.” This is a formidable advantage for those who get listed on the line. Also, a candidate not listed on the party’s line doesn’t get party financial help.

Ocean Grove is one of the bases of Jahn’s support. At least half the names on her petition were the names of Ocean Grovers. Her popularity here is due in part to positions she has taken on controversial Ocean Grove issues. For instance, she took a more determined stand than any other Neptune politician against high-density condo development at the North End. She has also been active in efforts to clean up derelict buildings in the Grove.

Scudiery’s decision is expected to be announced on or around next Monday. Whatever he decides, it seems likely that the power struggle within the Neptune party will not soon end. The party’s current municipal chairman, James Mowczan, is said to be on the side of Williams in this dispute, while Mayor Bishop is in Jahn’s camp. Feelings are running very high.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have had a much easier time choosing their candidates. They will be Donald Beekman and Kevin Sheehan.

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For background on the Jahn-Williams controversy, go here.

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Camp Meeting to Sell Great Auditorium to Taco Bell. Whilden: “The offer was just too generous to turn down.” Zoning could be a problem though.

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article on April 1, 2012| 3 Comments »

Photo by Paul Goldfinger

By Charles Layton   (Reposted for April Fools Day 2018 but, because of Easter Sunday on April 1, this will appear on April 2,  from April 1, 2012 on Blogfinger.)

The hoax is a venerable journalistic tradition — such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe indulged in hoaxes — but these days a good hoax, like a good man, is hard to find.

Not impossible though. Burger King once published a full-page ad in an April 1 edition of USA Today announcing the introduction of a “left-handed whopper.” A 1957 BBC news story announced that, thanks to a mild winter, European farmers were harvesting a record spaghetti crop. An April 1998 issue of a science newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama legislature had voted to change the value of pi from 3.14 to the “Biblical value” of 3.0.

The Taco Bell Corporation took out big newspaper ads in 1996 saying it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. (According to museumofhoaxes.com, hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia to complain.)

Flying penguins

But these are not hoaxes in the true sense, they’re just jokes. Likewise the April 1, 2008 BBC story about a flock of flying penguins. The report, complete with video, explained that instead of enduring another long Antarctic winter these penguins had taken to the air, bound for the steamy jungles of South America.

Likewise the 1975 report by an Australian news program that the country was about to convert to “metric time” — 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour. Likewise the report by a New Zealand radio deejay who told listeners that a mile-wide swarm of wasps was headed for Auckland. He urged people to protect themselves by wearing their socks over their pant legs. Some did.

While being interviewed on BBC radio on April 1, 1976, the astronomer Patrick Moore said that a freakish, once-in-a-lifetime event was about to happen. Pluto was about to pass behind Jupiter, causing a temporary lessening of the Earth’s gravity. Moore said if people jumped in the air at exactly 9:47 a.m. they would feel a floating sensation. At the appointed time, the radio station started to receive phone calls from people who said they had felt the sensation. One woman said she and eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room. (I’m not sure who was kidding whom.)

But once upon a time a hoax was more than just a joke of the moment. In Denver, in June of 1899, four reporters for four different papers conspired to report what later came to be called the Great Wall of China hoax. The reporters were all desperate for news that day. While commiserating with one another at a hotel bar, they decided to just make up something. The story they concocted was that a certain American capitalist was on his way to China to tear down parts of the Great Wall and use the material for road paving. The story was picked up and republished in papers throughout the country.

I guess my favorite hoax story would be “The Great Moon Hoax,” which is also one of the oldest. Published in the New York Sun in 1835, it was a series of six articles, with elaborate illustrations, telling how a new, extremely powerful telescope had revealed life and civilization on the moon. The articles described fantastic animal forms — bison, goats, unicorns and tail-less beavers — and, the most spectacular of all, human-like creatures with bat-like wings. These discoveries were attributed to an actual astronomer of the day, Sir John Herschel.

Life on the moon. New York Sun, 1835.

It’s never been established for certain who authored this hoax, and I’m not sure The Sun ever retracted the story. But from what I’ve read, it seems that there might have been some satirical intent. A certain minister, Rev. Thomas Dick, had published popular writings around that time in which he calculated that the solar system contained many trillions of inhabitants, including approximately 4.2 billion creatures on the moon.

Sometimes a good hoax story will contain subtle clues confirming the fact that it’s a phony. In the April 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated the writer George Plimpton related that the Mets had signed a new pitcher, Sidd Finch, who could throw a baseball 168 miles per hour. The story said Finch had learned to perform this feat while studying with a Tibetan Lama.

The clue Plimpton left for his readers was in the sub-head of the article, which read; “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball.”

If you extract the first letter from each of these words, they spell: Happy April Fools Day — Ah Fib.”

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Why kids don’t “drive their Chevy to the levee” anymore — Blogfinger Commentary

Posted in Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, Feature article on March 27, 2012| 4 Comments »

From the movie "American Graffiti"

By Charles Layton

The other day, The New York Times carried a front-page story that pretty much shattered my faith in the United States of America. Here is what it said: “Many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars.”

What? American youth don’t care about cars? Have they all gone off and joined The Taliban?

Apparently they have.

The Times story says General Motors is struggling to re-connect with young consumers. They’re hiring market consultants to help them figure out how to do this – how to replace the good old “American Graffiti” “Grease” “Rebel Without a Cause” “Miss American Pie” culture that had once placed slick, souped-up “rods” at the very center of teenage life.

(Notice: Anyone younger than 55 can stop reading this article now, because the rest of it is a geezer rant.)

In my day, we cruised aimlessly up and down the streets in Corvettes and Thunderbirds, slouched low behind the wheel, dressed in our chino pants, white t-shirts and windbreaker jackets. Or we daydreamed about doing that if, as was mostly the case, our families couldn’t afford such cool cars. Cruising around aimlessly, in whatever kind of car, was the meaning of life. It was heaven.

We boys hung around the Diary Queen in packs, arguing about fluid drive and twin carburetors and Smithy’s mufflers. Most of us didn’t know what the heck we were talking about — I sure didn’t — but so what? Occasionally we’d raise the hood of someone’s car and poke around. It was simple in there, not like the mishmash of unidentifiable components jammed under the hoods of today’s cars. Our cars just had an engine, a battery, a radiator and some hoses. You could drop a softball in there and it would fall right through and land on the ground.

Our entire social life was centered on the car. You picked up your date in the car and you drove off to the high school dance — the “hop.” Do today’s youth even dance? Do they have dates? I don’t think so. They just text message one another and email the occasional lewd photo. You don’t need a car for that. But where, I wonder, do they go when they want to have clumsy, fumbling, irresponsible romantic interludes? In our cars was where we did that.

These days, the Times reports, young people aren’t just indifferent to cars; they have actively negative feelings toward them. Cars hurt the environment. They give you asthma. Parking is a hassle. Gas is expensive. A market consultant told the Times that young people consider a car “a giant bummer. Think about your dashboard. It’s filled with nothing but bad news.”

In 1998, 64 percent of potential drivers under the age of 20 had drivers’ licenses; in 2008 only 46 percent did. In a survey, 3,000 consumers born between 1981 and 2000 were asked to name their favorites of 31 product brands. Not one car brand made it into the top 10. The most popular brands were companies like Nike and Google.

Cars used to be all about speed — zero to 60 in X seconds. Nike is about walking. Google is about just sitting still for hours on end.

Here, for old time’s sake, is some music by Bo Diddley:

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