A Site for Shore Eyes

I’m glad the Press of Atlantic City rewrote the headlines for Wildwood Crest’s elections to read that the elections were moved from May to November, instead of the original headline which read that the May elections were moved to November. Anyone could figure out that May elections can only be held in May.

In other exciting news, a Middle Township man set a state record for bird sightings. Of course, we have to take his word for it, but even if he’s correct, so what? It’s not that I don’t like birds – in fact, when I lived in Georgia I kept two bird feeders in the back yard and I liked sitting on the back deck and watching birds, but not to the point of making it my primary achievement in life. We had robins, cardinals, brown thrashers, grackles, grey catbirds, chickadees, nuthatches, rufus-sided Towhees, red bellied woodpeckers, and even an occasional pilieated woodpecker, as well as a few others. But I considered it a form of relaxation, rather than a sport.

These people talk about state records and nationwide records as if they accomplished something really significant, rather than just wasting a bunch of time looking through binoculars. This guy says he’s traveled thousands of miles in New Jersey during 2011. Okay, well, New Jersey, from the very bottom to the northwestern corner is 168 miles, so that’s a lot of driving.

Of course, another dude had to say that there’s an element of climate change in scarce birds turning up here. There’s always an element of climate change now that everyone has figured out that man-made global warming is a hoax, although they bring up the warming thing every time there’s some unseasonably warm weather. They ignore the fact that Alaska is going through a terrible winter and one town up there was rewarded with 26 feet of snow since November.

Look, I could understand someone getting excited if he spotted a dodo bird, but I think the real dodo is the person who goes out looking to see birds. Contrary to popular myth, the dodo wasn’t really stupid. It couldn’t fly and had no natural enemies in its habitat. Everything changed when people brought dogs, pigs, and other animals onto the island, and they also hunted it to extinction.

I could probably go on Google Earth and spot lots of birds all over the country, instead of driving thousands of miles, but why would I do that? My point is that these people could spend their time doing more important things, such as hunting quail, ducks, and geese. Even better would be pheasants and the many wild turkeys running around causing havoc.

Oh well, the mayor of Wildwood once again is threatening residents and I’m glad I don’t live there. He says he won’t try to impose a beach tag fee this year, so everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Imagine, if you will, Wildwood charging a fee for using the beach and North Wildwood and Wildwood Crest keeping the beaches free. This guy and his cohorts apparently spend much of their time sitting around and scheming about how to raise more revenue for the city. Instead of trying to rake in more money, why not cut non-essential government services? Does a clerk really need a salary of $60,000 or so?

Now he’s threatening to raise the tourism and development tax. What is that, you say? Well it’s a tax added to the sales tax for certain businesses, such as restaurants and other businesses which are not supposed to charge it, but charge it anyway, although they don’t send it to the city. For reference, see my article on “Anglesea Auto Repair,” which, by-the-way, is not located in Anglesea. We Anglesea people are rather touchy about that. My point is, if a guy doesn’t even know where his business is located, what else does he not know?

Anyway, they told me that this extra tax would go primarily to the Convention Center, although the guy who was in charge during the time I talked to him seemed to know very little about it, or who should charge it. Here are some hints, taken directly from the ordinance: Hotel, motel, and boarding house lodging; Food and drink sold by restaurants, taverns, and other similar establishments for consumption on or off premises, or by caterers, (but not including vending machine sales), and, admission charges to any place of amusement, including charges for admission to amusement rides, sporting events and exhibitions, dramatic or musical arts performances, motion picture theaters, and cover charges in nightclubs and cabarets. Auto repair shops are noticeably absent.

One problem, though. Should not the Convention Center be self-sustaining, being that it charges admission to events throughout the year? I guess I just don’t think like a politician. The Wildwood mayor, however, never met a tax he didn’t want to impose, or that he could scheme up.

Anyway, the ordinance says that the 2% tax shall be piggybacked on the 7% sales tax, probably so visitors won’t question it or take their money elsewhere. It just shows up as a 9% sales tax.

Strangely enough, both North Wildwood and Wildwood Crest adopted this silly legislation, but if you visit the North Wildwood municipal site and look up the City Code, you’ll be hard pressed to find it anywhere, but most establishments charge it. The funny thing is that it’s optional for a business of any type to charge it, but they get a break on filing other taxes if they do. That makes it easy to see how much they think of their patrons.

The city employees in North Wildwood also make a ton of money; way more than they could pull in out there in the private sector, but the taxes are much lower than Wildwood’s and the streets are in pretty good shape and are being upgraded every year. What is Wildwood doing with its taxpayers’ dollars? Oh, that’s right; they’re going to put in more silly sidewalks along the southern part of Pacific Avenue, so the mobs rushing to Silen’s Shoes will have smooth sailing.

I haven’t been in Silen’s in decades, and wonder if they still have wooden floors? Murphy’s and Newberry’s 5&10 stores had wooden floors, as did our elementary school. Not the smooth, solid, polished type found in homes, but the dull, creaky type that squeaked when you walked on them. This made it virtually impossible for a teacher to sneak up on you at your desk, but I recall hearing floor noises all during my days at school.

Woolworth’s had terrazzo floors, and now the place is piled up with junk from a guy who likes having mannequins made in his likeness. Downtown Wildwood will never be right until those two buildings are put to proper use, not that it would be a cure-all. I could see maybe a Dollar Tree in the Murphy’s building, but what do I know? The governing body would probably opt for a huge store that sold beach balls and fake palm trees.

Some psychologist/researchers in New Zealand say they have taught pigeons how to count. This couldn’t come at a better time because some teachers in the Neshaminy school district in Pennsylvania went on strike. Perhaps pigeons can be brought in to teach the classes at a much lower cost to the school district.

Okay, I don’t know whether to write first about the pigeons or the teachers’ strike, so I’ll write about why someone would name a place Neshaminy. Nah, I think I’ll start with the strike. I find it reprehensible that school teachers would go on strike at the expense of the children (and some adults) in school. Have they no shame? They say they have no contract, and that’s somebody else’s fault how? I suspect they have no contract because the union didn’t like the terms of the contract. Like, how bad could it be, when they only have to work about nine months out of the year? Really closer to eight when you figure in all the holidays. They have no business thinking only of themselves and going on strike, and it’s totally irresponsible.

When I attended school, teachers never went on strike, so we never got any bonus time off. We would have loved for our teachers to go on strike, preferably for the whole year. Instead they actually taught us the three R’s, of which only one begins with an R. The thing is, we knew that only one of them started with an R, but these days I’m not sure some of the teachers are aware of this discrepancy.

I have to add a disclaimer concerning my friend, Rocco, who is a teacher and is not currently on strike. I don’t know if he’s a good or bad teacher, but I know he is pretty smart, despite having done probably even more stupid things than I have done over my lifetime, and that’s saying a lot. There’s no contest involved, and we both used to do stupid things, but it’s just that I think it’s stupid to jump out of airplanes, although he retired from that activity a number of years ago. He seems much more calm these days.

Anyway, the strange thing is that back in the day, teachers had to know the subjects they were teaching, but that seems to not always be the case now. I have known a number of teachers who had rather poor grammar. Elementary school teachers used to teach the full gamut, at least through fifth grade, and all knew how to play the piano. They also all used round pitch pipes which made me hungry for a Mello Mint, which is now extinct.

I’m swerving off track again. Apparently these striking teachers care little about whether the students have to go to school longer in the year to cover the time off from the strike. Public servants who perform essential services should not be permitted to strike, and that includes police officers, firefighters, and trash collectors, to name a few.

But now we have to look into this pigeon thing, which the researchers call “remarkable.” When asked how long it took to teach the pigeons to count, using touch screens, one researcher said it took one hour per day, seven days per week, for a year. Using that same time line one could probably teach certain high school students how to count, and possibly how to add and subtract. The question is whether or not non-striking pigeons could be trained to teach people?

Personally, I think dogs are smarter than pigeons, but neither can talk, so perhaps we should defer to training parrots. African grays are the best talkers and some could probably even teach singing. The problem is that they, like the pigeons, have bird brains, which are considerably smaller than even the stupidest teachers’ brains. I’m pretty sure that’s true.

These researchers may be ostriches, because they stated that only primates had been taught to count previously. Well, I have seen both dogs and horses who nailed counting tests, and many dogs can sniff out drugs, explosives, and cadavers. I don’t want to know how they train them to sniff for dead bodies.

My point is that these psychologists are gushing over the fact that they taught pigeons to count in just a year’s time. I doubt that it would take a dog that long, or a horse, for that matter. And after you teach a pigeon to count, what do you do with him? Teach him how to be a CPA or a bank teller? And do they really know how to count? I doubt it. They get rewards for picking the right images, which they practice for a year. In other words, they know which images to pick, in ascending order, that will get them some chow. That’s not really counting.

It’s like the chicken I saw once in a box with glass windows at an amusement park. This hen’s specialty was pecking a ping-pong ball from a cushion of air and making it go through a little basket with a lever on it. When the ball flipped the lever, a bit of corn was released into a chute. The chicken never missed, but one time the ball, instead of coming back to the stream of air, bounced into the part with the chicken. This confused her, and she kept looking in the cup for the corn. Of course she was not only befuddled, but was also incapable of picking up the ping-pong ball. My point this time is why aren’t those balls called, “table tennis” balls? Just wondering. . .

Today we’re going to talk about fishing, a relaxing and leisurely pastime. Anyone can go fishing, especially in salt waters, because they don’t have to bother with obtaining a license. Okay, my research assistant just informed me that I need to update my information, because fishing requires at least registration, and it can be done online in New Jersey. Then you can print out your little registration card that you must keep with you at all times, lest you be required to pay a fine.

Well, now that we have that out of the way, the rest is simple. You need a rod and a reel, although the rod and reel are both optional, so you don’t really need them. You can use a hand line, but I don’t recommend it. One person who was rather adept at using a hand line was a young guy who used to visit our rooming house with his mother, who was also pretty good at using a hand line. Their last name was Trout, and I am not making this up. So, if your last name isn’t Bass, or Striper, or Wahoo, or some other fishy-sounding name, I would recommend buying a rod and reel.

What type of rod and reel should you buy? Well, that depends on where you’re going to be fishing and how far you’re likely to have to cast. A boat rod doesn’t mean you need a boat, but it won’t do well in the surf, where you’ll have to cast farther.

The reel is another decision. I’ll do better by telling you what types to not buy. Don’t buy a fly-fishing reel, or a bait cast reel, or a spin cast reel, and don’t ask me why. Going after bigger game fish such as marlin requires a huge, expensive reel and lots of line, probably a mile or more, although I’ve never done any real sport fishing. Ask your reel salesman about the type and amount of line to spool on your reel. In the old days I just bought some fishing line and wound it on the reel myself, but now it’s more sophisticated and they do it for you with a machine.

If you buy a spinning reel, lots of luck! Many fisherman use these contraptions these days, but I don’t fully understand them. They usually hold the rod with the reel on the bottom and many turn the crank with their left hand, something I don’t understand. I prefer a regular casting reel, backlashes and all, but that’s just a preference.

The next thing you have to obtain is the right tackle. Football requires both a left and right tackle, but for some reason fishing only requires the right one. And, of course, you’ll have to get a tackle box. This also relates to football, but I’m not sure how. I just hear announcers say that the quarterback can only throw away a pass if he’s outside the tackle box. This seems strange to me, because it would have to be a very HUGE tackle box for the quarterback to be inside it, and from there, I don’t know how he could throw a pass anyway.

We could go into how other nautical terms related to football, such as block and tackle and punting, but for purposes of this informative article we’ll stick to fishing.

So, what’s the best type of right tackle to buy? Most people go for hooks and sinkers as their primary items, and the hooks should be attached to leaders. Once you’ve figured out the basic concept you can get all fancy with spoons and buck-tails, and whatever else you see in the fishing tackle store. If you don’t know what a buck-tail is you probably don’t need one.

Sinkers come in many sizes and the environment-polluting lead type are the weights of choice. This is because if you get bored while fishing, you can write on the bulkhead with them. Ha ha! Only kidding. The fish don’t worry about whether a sinker is made of steel or lead, because they don’t eat sinkers on a regular basis. If you catch a fish that has eaten a lead sinker it should be taken in for chelation treatment before it is eaten, just to be on the safe side. If the fish is big enough you might be able to squeeze out enough mercury to make a thermometer or two.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because I forgot about telling you what to use for bait. Well, that’s up to you, but it depends on what type of fish you expect to catch. I don’t worry that much about it and like to be surprised, so I just use some surf clam. Some people like using minnows, and the good thing about them is that if you don’t catch any fish and have enough of them left over, you can eat them, although they’re very difficult to clean.

My late uncle often used shedder crab as bait, but that was both too complicated and expensive for me during my youth. Other bait choices include shrimp, green crab, and bloodworms.

Bait has gotten a bit fancier these days, though. Some people seem to have success with Gulp, an artificial bait. It’s available in many forms that resemble actual species.

I was going to talk about jigging and chunking, but this is getting way more complicated than I thought it would. Let’s get down to actually catching a fish.

Not all fish behave in the same manner, so if you’re fishing for flounder it’s important to let the fish take the bait. Flounder rarely strike like other fish, although it sometimes happens. Flounder come in both the summer and winter variety and it’s illegal to catch and keep one that’s not in season. A winter flounder is a left-eye fish and a summer flounder or fluke is a right-eye fish. If you don’t know what that means you’re not stupid – you’re just uninformed. Okay, so I’m uninformed!

Once you get a fish on board or to the dock or whatever, it’s important to identify the type of fish so you can figure out if it’s big enough to legally keep and whether or not it’s in season. The easiest way to identify a fish is to shout to someone nearby, if possible, “Hey, do you know what this is?” If the person says it’s an oyster cracker, you should then ask the individual to take the fish off the hook for you. Just trust me on this.

Another good way to identify a fish is to whip out your smart phone and snap a photo of it. Then you can post the photo on Facebook or Twitter and get a bunch of different answers from hundreds of fishing “experts.” Or, you could just pull up the NJ fish identification chart on line.

This is getting way too complicated and I’m going to have to stop. My point is that I thought fishing was still as simple and relaxing as it used to be, but I may have been wrong. In fact, I may not even advise it as a valuable pastime now that I have had more time to think about it. If you attempt it, just make sure you’re outside the tackle box, whatever that means.

I sometimes wonder what happened to some of the things we had or used way back in grade school (and I’m talking the 1950s here) that I don’t see around anymore. One thing most of us have forgotten about is that white paste that came in big glass jars. We used it to paste cut-outs on backgrounds, etc. Back then we had no tissues hanging around, so whatever was left over would eventually dry on the fingers. After a while, most kids just rolled it off when it hardened.

Apparently they don’t make it anymore, but the internet lists formulas for making your own. I guess it was called, “library paste,” but I just thought of it as the stuff that looked like a jar of marshmallow fluff.

Another paper glue we used back then, but mostly at home rather than at school, was mucilage. It was amber-colored, thick stuff that came in a little jar with a rubber applicator top. The top sported a slit on an angled surface, so the idea was to push down and swipe it across the paper. More often than not, this first required scraping the hardened stuff off first, and clearing the slit.

Yes, these were exciting times with exciting products, and what could have been more exciting than Mercurochrome? For all you sissies out there, this was the answer to iodine and other antiseptics that burned or stung. It was the weapon of choice in our house against those dastardly germs! So where is it now? Well, the FDA won’t allow it to cross state lines, so if you live in Iowa you can brag about more than the Boise State football team, because a manufacturer there still cranks out the stuff. The FDA is a bit of a mercuryphobic organization and its members aren’t quite sure yet whether dabbing a bit of Mercurochrome on a wound could lead to near-lethal doses of mercury in the body. My guess would be no, but I’m neither a scientist nor a doctor. The stuff did leave a much brighter orange on your skin than even iodine.

No word yet as to whether or not the FDA will continue allowing Ford to sell its Mercury line of vehicles across state lines, or whether it will allow Brunswick to sell its Mercury outboards across state lines, but not much in this day and age is really far-fetched.

What’s that, you say? Why aren’t mercury thermometers banned? Well, they pretty much have been. Back in grade school our science teacher made a barometer with a glass tube that sat in a small bowl of mercury. Little did we know that we were being poisoned and would die within a few years. Oh, wait! That never happened! They now have instructions for disposing of a mercury thermometer, which is to put it inside a capped soda bottle and transport it to a disposal site. The EPA says mercury makes it into the atmosphere in two ways: by broken thermometers and emissions from power plants.

Again, I could go into detail about how little mercury is emitted from power plants with all the safeguards now in place, but thermometers? Really? Anyway, the claim is that if a broken mercury thermometer is disposed of in a landfill, for example, microorganisms can convert it into a highly toxic form called methylmercury. Horrors! How many broken thermometers would it take to pollute the atmosphere? I’m guessing somewhere around 700 billion or so, but it’s just a guess. Sort of like how many deodorant sprays would it take to deplete the ozone layer, notwithstanding the emissions put out by large jet airliners, etc. But we’re safe from dangerous propellants these days, thanks to the tree huggers, who know so much more about everything than we mere mortals.

So, while we’re sitting around fretting and chewing our nails, worried about whether or not the planet and civilization as we know it, will be destroyed by broken mercury thermometers, our elected officials, in their infinite wisdom, once again, force us to use CFLs, or compact fluorescent light bulbs! Oh, that’s right, those CFLs contain mercury. Hmm. . . let’s see. . . if we’re going to worry about mercury then why are we forced to use it in one instance and banned from using it in another? It all has to do with money. Of course, the proponents of CFLs say that the mercury from one thermometer can be used in 125 CFLs. Fine and dandy, if that’s really true, but I’d be willing to bet that the number of CFLs in use outnumber the thermometers in use by at least 1,000 to 1, based on the fact that I don’t know anyone who still uses a mercury thermometer, and the ones who do generally own a grand total of one thermometer. Count the number of lightbulbs in your home. With digital thermometers, why would one even need a mercury thermometer? Oh, that’s right – I almost forgot – we conservatives like to pollute the environment.

I saw many a fluorescent tube broken, especially while working rides on the boardwalk, and we never quite needed a HAZMAT team to clean up the debris. A broom and a dustpan took care of it rather nicely. Now they want us to call FEMA if we break a CFL!

So once again I got sidetracked by liberal silliness. We had no markers or highlighters in grade school, but they supplied us, at least in the early years, with many crayons, however, they were a bit waxy and never seemed to work as well as Crayola crayons, so most kids brought their own. I usually only had the basic set, but some kids had the mega package that, before they changed the name a number of years ago, contained the color, “flesh.”

I don’t necessarily miss everything from that era, but have wondered about many of them. I don’t want to go back to the three-channel antenna programming on TV, especially when we had to also tune in a booster, radio style, to conform with whatever channel we were watching. Even after the Philly stations boosted their power and we no longer needed a booster, sometimes the picture was snowy, or decided to flip up and down. Or it might just decide to go all diagonal from time to time,usually during a crucial TV moment. We had no remotes in those days, so during times of turmoil it paid to sit as near the set as possible. My brother, Larry, and I remember many a Friday night when our father sat in front of the TV, with the lights turned out, squinting and blinking while watching fights on Gillette’s Calvacade of Sports.

Many of the things no longer available to us won’t be missed, but here at the Jersey Shore, as I’ve mentioned before, we’ll always miss subs from J&H Cold Cuts, cheesesteaks from Luigi’s, pizza steaks from Grasso’s Four G’s, and toasted hoagies from Russo’s Gingham Club, but I want to keep my high-def LCD TV with scores of worthless channels.

Usually, when a college football team wins a game, two or more of the players on the sidelines sneak around carrying a tub of Gatorade, complete with ice, and attempt to dump the contents on the coach’s back. Ha ha! Or something. . .

The part I don’t understand is why someone should be punished for winning a game? If it’s important to get the coach all wet, cold, and sticky, shouldn’t it be the losing coach, rather than the one who won the game?

For some reason, it seems that good things must be punished, at least briefly, although I’ve never understood the motive. In the Navy, when an enlisted man makes it to petty officer, the chevron has a symbol of the person’s rate, and a silhouette of an eagle, which is commonly called a “crow.” Well, the crow has to be “tacked on,” so anyone seeing this individual gets to pound him on the arm. On the boats in Vietnam, he was also treated to being thrown into the water.

Back in grade school I hated going to school wearing new shoes, because any kid who noticed and hollered, “Stamps!” got to stomp on the shoes. A new haircut resulted in “Swats!” and anyone shouting this was permitted to rub his knuckles up the back of the neck. Go figure. . .

It’s probably not hard to figure out why people want to punish others for good things, because that’s exactly what the government does on all levels. If one works hard and makes a lot of money, the federal and many state governments take a larger percentage of your earnings in taxes. Earn less and pay less, sometimes nothing at all.

And what about property taxes? Does the city and state reward property owners who invest in their properties and keep them looking nice? Nope. They tax you more. Let your place go to seed and they reduce your assessment, so you pay less.

The northeastern states, probably more than most other states, punish drivers for using certain roads by charging tolls. My work took me to the Southeast, especially Georgia, and very few roads in the south charge tolls, yet they’re better maintained than those in the Northeast. I remember when I first moved back north and was living in Maryland it cost about fifteen dollars round trip to visit my relatives in New Jersey, just for the tolls!

I remember when the Garden State Parkway opened back in the fifties, and the deal was that the toll booths would be removed after the road was paid for. Hello! It’s 2011 and they just hiked the tolls by fifty percent. All my working days I never got a pay increase of fifty percent for the same job.

Back in the fifties they put up a ten-cent toll near Bargaintown and took it down after the exit was paid for. That was the last one I remembered being taken away.

Well, let’s move on to other things. The Wildwood mayor was rather ecstatic about a few people paying fifty bucks to ride horses on the beach. He said, “We have this vast tract of property here and it needed to be used.” Where has this guy been during the summer? The good thing about the off season is the serenity on the boardwalk and beach.

Three women who own Okey Doke Ranch in Clarksboro were the first to practice horsewomenship on the beach. One of them who said the horses were as excited as they were, stated, “I didn’t even let him go full force because I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop him, he was so excited.” I suppose he saw the roller coasters and wondered if he would get to ride them, otherwise it’s pretty much ho-hum for a horse to walk on the beach. However, I think they should make potential riders demonstrate that they know how to stop their horses before letting them ride. If you can’t figure out how to stop a horse on a two-mile long beach, you probably should take up some other sport.

The mayor and two commissioners made their way down to water’s edge and were permitted to ride the horses. One of them said, “It was awesome.” He doesn’t get out much.

The mayor envisions a corral being built near the back of the beach (wherever that may be) and making money for the city renting horses and ponies. I’m not sure how that would fit in with allowing no more than twenty horses on the beach at a time. No word on beach polo, however, or on building a grandstand for a racetrack.

Yes, autos have emissions, but you can’t really see them, as is the case with horses. Horses emit even when they’re running, leaving a nice trail. I guess horses on the beach would be a good idea for someone planning on raising a garden in beach sand, but I think this whole horse thing may affect the building of sandcastles. Thank God for flip-flops!

Yes, the mayor and commissioners are excited, not that it takes much to excite this bunch. One of them is bubbling because some company that sells horse figurines has contacted the city about holding a convention here because the city allows horses on the beach. Ho hum. . .