Kelly's shit-eating grin, Ung's heart attack on a plate

Waiting for the NJ Transit bus on Paterson Plank Road in the Meadowlands. Recent coverage of the antiquated Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan was spurred by letters to the editor from angry commuters, but local bus riders have never had a voice at The Record.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Plowing through Staff Writer Mike Kelly's tedious column on The Record's front page -- direct from Omaha Beach in France, according to the dateline -- readers can only conclude his flight to Europe left him constipated.

His first sentence amounts to a weather report, focusing as it does on "barbed wire atop Point du Hock [that] still glistens in the afternoon sun just as it did 70 years ago."

Did his editors check if the sun was shining on June 6, 1944? That's doubtful.

Same old clichés

Kelly's D-Day column is full of the same clichés he has used time and again when writing about war, terrorism or related subjects (A-1).

And there -- in Kelly's dated thumbnail photo on Page 1 -- is the same unflattering, shit-eating grin the layout editors have been using for more than a decade, as if the reporter knows he is getting away with being such a dull writer.

Moreover, the veteran reporter simply fails to convey the terror experienced by the invading American troops, who were weighed down by heavy packs and literally ripped apart as they advanced on the beach toward withering defensive fire from  Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Eyewitness account

On Thursday's front page, D-Day survivor Lee D'Arminio, 90, of Hackensack summed up his experience and the experiences of thousands of other soldiers in just two sentences:

"The beach was like a cemetery. A lot of bodies," recalled the onetime Army medic, describing the shores of Normandy on the second day of the invasion.

Kelly's hundreds of lame sentences are no match.

Two more veterans

The most compelling story on the Local front today isn't the Road Warrior column on the declining death toll among drivers under 21 (L-1).

I like the two local obituaries on veterans, young and old, stacked on top of each other:

Robert Drelich, 31, of Wallington, a veteran of Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan; and German-born John Norton, 97, a D-Day veteran who became the paint king of Paramus.

And for a change, The Record's habit of playing up animal news bigger than human news is put in perspective by Paterson residents, who told animal lovers their children are more important than a cat that was tortured by schoolboys (L-1).

Carnivore news

The most misused word in Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung's vocabulary is "quality," and she must have been drunk when she gave 3 stars to Mighty Quinn's Barbecue, a joint with counter service in Clifton (BL-18).

In her data box, Ung claims prices at Mighty Quinn's are on the high side for barbecue, "though most of it with quality to match."

But there is not a word in the review itself to back that up, and she tells readers nothing about how the beef, pork and chicken served there are raised, likely because all of it comes from factory farms.

So, it's probably easy to overdose on animal antibiotics and growth hormones at Mighty Quinn's, which probable has nearby hospital emergency rooms on speed dial.

The Better Living cover shows a large beef rib and fixings ($23) -- a heart attack on a tray.

Ung even dismisses "health nuts who accidentally wander in the door," recommending a "delightful mixture of edamame and caramelized onions."

Who is a nut?

You're a "health nut" to Ung, if you don't spend every waking moment, as she does, obsessing over the "funk" of dry aged meat or trying every artery clogging dessert on the menu or swooning over low-quality hot dogs sold from trucks.

Some of her readers may be "health nuts," but Ung is a sellout to restaurant owners who cut their costs and boost their profits by serving the cheapest food they can get away with.