Editors fiddle while New Jersey burns

Image by beedubz via Flickr

Owners of Xanadu hope there is a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Editor Francis Scandale leads The Record today with a front-page story on political bickering between Governor Christie and the most powerful Democrat in the Legislature -- while New Jersey burns (A-1).

Instead of reporting when Xanadu construction will resume or whether a makeover is in the cards, Scandale runs another story on its weird exterior (A-1). Is this the 19th or 20th piece by Staff Writer John Brennan on the same subject?

Rich man's toy

Did anyone bother reading more than the first few paragraphs of Mike Kelly's boring, long-winded column on a wealthy man who wants to blow $10 million on a skating rink for his kids that would be disguised as a house  (A-1)? Now, Kelly has become a rich man's toy.

An OpEd piece by PSE&G defends the safety of solar panels mounted on telephone polls (A-11). It's too bad they weren't designed to fall and knock some sense into drivers of gas-guzzling SUVs.

Image via Wikipedia

Japan v. Korea

On the Better Living front, Bill Ervolino's Jersey Scene column classifies a big, expensive Japanese supermarket in Edgewater as among "the little known, unusual and sometimes weird things in New Jersey."

A Japanese supermarket has operated there for more than two decades -- what's so weird about that?

Unfortunately, his guides at Mitsuwa Marketplace are two men -- one Japanese, one American -- who preside over the store's annual "cutting" of the giant bluefin tuna, a performance many shoppers boycott because the Japanese are driving those huge fish toward extinction.

Ervolino also treats the Japanese with deference, something he didn't do for the Koreans he wrote about when he visited a big Korean supermarket in Ridgefield, as Eye on The Record reported Nov. 1:

"What happens when you turn a clown loose in H Mart in Ridgefield, a large Korean supermarket that has one of the best selections of fresh fish, Asian greens and other produce in North Jersey? 

"See the Better Living front, where Staff Writer Bill Ervolino chooses to buy and eat mystery pork and beef, and in the process makes fun of one of his Korean guides' English and parodies her diet, focusing on live octopus while ignoring all the healthy tofu and vegetables Koreans eat in main and side dishes."