Christie calls the kettle black

Image by ahemler via Flickr

Strained yogurt goes into a Greek dip called tzatziki. Elisa Ung, The Record's restaurant reviewer since 2007, reports today she enjoyed such a dip "mixed with ... drained English cucumbers."

Governor Christie says he's cut down on pizza and beer -- and lost weight -- but a photo on the front page of The Record today clearly shows he's still a formidable presence.

So where does he get off calling the unfinished Xanadu retail project an "offense to the eyes" or saying, "They have to change the god-awful ugly outside"? Couldn't the same things be said about him?

You know the Woodland Park daily is firmly in his corner when the words on his town hall meeting banner, visible in the A-1 photo -- "reform agenda" -- also appear in the lead paragraph of the A-3 story, without attribution.

What the Republican bully calls "reform" could be seen by others as visiting misery on the middle and working classes to balance the state budget while preserving the wealth of such multimillionaires as the jet-setting Borgs.

Budget blind

But you wouldn't think we're weathering an unprecedented fiscal crisis by the decidedly tabloid front page thrown together in desperation by Editor Francis Scandale -- with three court stories out of four elements on A-1.

Why is a scheme by a couple of Essex County morons worthy of leading the front page of the former Hackensack-based daily? The sub-headline, "get ex to pay up," suggests the main suspect's former girlfriend owed him money, but that's totally untrue.

Former state Sen. Joseph Coniglio was to be freed from prison today, another A-1 story reports, when Thursday's A-1 story said a judge's ruling cleared the way for his early release in a "matter of weeks."

Still, today's story doesn't belong on the front page.

In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, two inside pages are given over to higher education news -- a sure sign her sub-editors can't fill that space with municipal news -- and other pages, L-1 and L-5, are dominated by law-and-order and court news.

Food puzzle

On Page 17 of Better Living, what could Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung possibly mean today by describing a Greek yogurt dip "mixed ... with drained English cucumbers"?

Maybe the fluid pressing on her brain needs to be drained, too.