New Jersey

[Originally written in 2009.  Updated in 2021.]

Prior to graduating from college in 1990, I had no experience with New Jersey.  We had been to New York City a few times, Long Island a few times, and upstate New York a few times, but New Jersey was simply a transit area between the Washington DC area and New York.  When my friend Ken moved to New Jersey to study for his masters in psychology at Montclair State University, living in Bloomfield (Exit 148 from the Garden State Parkway), I visited him several times.  This gave me most of my experience in New Jersey.

From 2009 to 2018 I was going up to New Jersey fairly regularly, to Fort Lee, which is on the NJ side of the George Washington Bridge.  These adventures put me in Edgewater fairly often, Hackensack (county seat for Bergen County), and Paramus with its Garden State Plaza.  Fort Lee is also next to Palisades Park, where my buddy Ken, Dave, and I saw Blue Oyster Cult in 1992 at the Soap Factory, a club that isn't there anymore.  

I started by driving up the Turnpike, then started taking Chinatown buses, private buses which left DC near Bethesda and dropped off across from Madison Square Garden, with the 158 bus from Port Authority taking me through Edgewater to Fort Lee.  Then towards the end of that chapter, I was driving again, this time avoiding tolls by driving due north from Baltimore up to York, PA, then over northeast to Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, then on I-78 over into NJ, 287 north, then I-80 east to 95 and 46, a five hour drive from Northern Virginia to Fort Lee.    

 

Bloomfield.  Bloomfield is fairly run down, with old houses, and no less than 3 strip clubs.  It’s fairly close to New York City and Newark. Close by are Newark, Lyndhurst, and Giants Stadium (in East Rutherford).  Newark has a high population of Brazilians.

 NYC.  Forget driving in Manhattan – that’s for fools and masochists.  What we did was drive to Hoboken (where the Hindenburg crew lived in the 30’s, as the Nazis didn’t trust non-Germans to service the zeppelin) and park there, taking the PATH train into the city, specifically Greenwich Village.  Near Fort Lee there is a shuttle which takes you into Manhattan at 175^th Street.  For much of northern Jersey, the NYC skyline is visible, especially the Empire State Building (now that that World Trade Center is gone).

 Mid-Jersey.  This part includes Trenton, Princeton, and Hillsborough.  On the more recent trips to visit Ken, I visited him here.  The voyage from my area completely avoided the New Jersey Turnpike, instead driving up 95 past Philadelphia and crossing over into New Jersey somewhere close to Trenton, and driving through Princeton.  My friend Jim was married in Princeton (his wife was from there, though she went to Cornell) in 1995.  Since northern New Jersey is pretty much a suburb of New York City, and southern New Jersey is very much a suburb of Philadelphia (particularly Camden and Cherry Hill), central Jersey is really the only part of Jersey that is more or less an independent suburban area in its own right.  Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, could be considered in this area.  I ended up visiting its main campus in New Brunswick fairly often for a four year period, though not as a student.  

 “Mentertainment.”  New Jersey has an impressive array of strip clubs.  The law says that if the venue serves its own alcohol, the girls have to wear bikinis; one specific club, Frank’s Chicken House, had no alcohol on the premises – just soda and greasy chicken – and completely nude dancers, many of whom were porn stars.  The state has a guide to the clubs, called the “Mentertainment Guide”, which I joked was the “New Jersey Tourism Guide”.  I suggested to Ken (over 10 years ago) that we hit every strip club in the state, to which he reacted in horror: in his county, Essex (when he lived in Bloomfield) alone there must have been 10-15 clubs, and 3 in Bloomfield alone.  As mentioned in my magazines blog, NJ’s convenience stores can be trusted to offer a wide array of porn mags in plain view.  Definitely convenient!

 Jersey Shore.  This starts at Sandy Hook in the far northeast, and runs down the coast to Wildwood.  Asbury Park and the boardwalk are included in this area.  My experience with this is very limited (Sandy Hook and Atlantic City), but to me beaches are pretty much the same everywhere except the south of France or Rio de Janeiro. 

 Atlantic City.  Along the boardwalk and shore, on the southern end.  Remarkably, there is no direct connection between the Atlantic City Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike: you have to drive through Camden (or is it Runnymeade?) to get to the Expressway.  AC is very much like Las Vegas, but with a beach & boardwalk and nasty weather in the winter.  To my experience, though, the only thing to do in Atlantic City is gamble, whereas Vegas is far more versatile.  On the other hand, if you’re in my area (DC/Baltimore), AC is only 2-3 hours by car, compared to a plane trip for Vegas.  The Viets love to gamble, and love Atlantic City.  And of course, Monopoly was originally designed here: is there an Atlantic City variant of Monopoly?  Go figure.

 Roads.  Aside from the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, the roads in Jersey are… unique.  There are a confusing array of state, local, and municipal roads, and the exits are poorly marked: typically they’re posted 5 feet ahead of the exit itself, so that by the time you see it, you’ve already passed it.  Then you have to turn around at a jughandle – because of the concrete barriers running across the median – and go back again.  It really seems that the roads are set up for the benefit of people who live there, at the expense of anyone else: if you can’t figure it out, tough shit, that’s your problem. 

 New Jersey Turnpike.  This opened in the 1950s and serves as a high-speed conduit for traffic coming from Delaware over the Memorial Bridge, all the way to New York City (Final Exit 18 & the George Washington Bridge).  Oddly, it does not hook up with the New York State Thruway.  Most of the traffic on the Turnpike seems to be out-of-state.  There are various service areas which – until recently – had Roy Rogers restaurants, at a time when McDonald’s had bought out and closed most of the ones down here.  There are 18 exits, but they are not evenly spaced apart: the southernmost exits are far apart and then they get closer and closer in as you get closer to Newark and NYC.  The Turnpike also divides into cars-only lanes and truck lanes, changes from being surrounded by forests down south to surrounded by chemical plants further north.

 Garden State Parkway.  This serves as the primary conduit of traffic within the state itself, and most cars on the GSP seem to have NJ tags.  There seems to be a toll plaza every 10 exits or so.  NJ natives tend to orient themselves by GSP exit numbers, though I recall when visiting Hillsborough that the GSP was rarely part of our travel plans – in that part of the state it runs far to the east, near the shore.

The two cross in upper-middle New Jersey, exit 11 on the Turnpike, exit 129 on the Garden State Parkway.  South of the interchange, the Turnpike winds through the middle of nowhere, and the GSP goes east over to the Jersey Shore.  North of the interchange, the GSP goes up in the middle of highly populated areas, and the Turnpike goes up parallel to the river, with exits for the Outerbridge Crossing and Goethals Bridge (to Staten Island), the Holland Tunnel (to downtown Manhattan), the Lincoln Tunnel (to midtown Manhattan), and finally ends at the GW Bridge.  

 Celebrities.  Bon Jovi are not only from New Jersey, they named an album after the state.  Bruce Springsteen makes much of his Asbury Park origins.  Danny DeVito grew up there; and Joe Piscopo was very much in-your-face about his home state.  Frank Sinatra is from Hoboken.  Kevin Smith is from Red Bank, and sets most of his movies there.  Zakk Wylde (Ozzy’s guitarist), the Misfits (who we saw at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park) and Glenn Danzig are from Jersey.  The Seton Hall University radio station, WSOU (89.5) played an impressive array of metal and obscure rock (e.g. “Sabbra Cadabra” and “Megalomania” by Black Sabbath).  What all these celebrities seem to share is a consensus that “New Jersey is f**ked up, but it’s our home and we’re proud of it.” 

Vs. NYC.  My father's side of the family is from Brooklyn, and many of my relatives have that distinctive accent - though for some reason my father didn't.  It seems New Yorkers look down on those from New Jersey, bragging that "we're better than them,"  as if everyone from New Jersey - at least the northern half - is trying to bask in the glow, glory and notoriety properly the exclusive domain of true New Yorkers.   But once you leave that area, the rest of the country makes little or no distinction between Jersey and NYC.  To everyone else, everyone from that area has an attitude problem.  

Magazines

As anyone who knows me well knows, I read a lot of books.  But I also read magazines – of various types.

 Cars.  Since I’m into cars, I’m obviously into car magazines.

 High Performance Pontiac (HPP)(subscription).  By far my favorite.  There is a snobbery in the Pontiac community against ’82 and later Firebirds, because they came from the factory with small block Chevy V8s, instead of the Pontiac V8s the 1955-1981 models had.  HPP does not share this – they will discuss TPI (tuned-port injected) Formulas, LT1 Trans Ams, Bonneville SSEIs, or ’04-’06 GTOs, in addition to the articles on tuning the Quadrajet in your older Firebird, Trans Am or GTO.  A given issue might have features on a ’66 GTO, a ’74 Trans Am, an ‘88 Formula 350, and a ’02 Trans Am all in the same month.

            Another funny thing: unlike Hot Rod and Car Craft, which are based in L.A., and have a “sunny, surfer” attitude, HPP is based in the NY/NJ area, so they have this “forgettaboutit” Sopranos style – and can relate to cars rusting and snow in the winter. 

 GM High Tech Performance.  This focuses on late model EFI (electronic fuel injection) cars – ’82- later Camaros and Firebirds, the occasional Buick Grand National, ’94-96 Impala SS, Bonneville SSEI and newer Grand Prixs, and Corvettes.  Many of the articles are on tuning with laptops, replacing injectors, passing emissions, fixing trouble codes, which us late model guys have to deal with instead of pesky Holleys and Quadrajets.  It seems to be written by many of the same guys who do HPP, so often times there is an overlap.

 Hot Rod.  This is the premier high performance magazine, and I used to subscribe, but after a point it became tiresome.  Much of the features were on fancy, overdone ’69 Camaros with interior work which cost more than some entire new cars, shaved door handles, no A/C, etc.  The tech articles usually featured grotesquely expensive crate engines no one short of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or Ross Perot could afford.  And with any performance upgrade, the modifications were simple and easy to install, and did exactly what the aftermarket company promised – completely at odds with the reality as us car crafters know it from real life.  The magazine is essentially targeted at gearheads with unlimited budgets – or those hoping to be someday.  ZZZ.

Car Craft (subscription).  Car Craft used to be almost identical to Hot Rod, to the point where I couldn’t remember whether an article I’d read came from one or the other.  Then some time in the late 90s, David Freiburger took over, and completely changed the slant.  Instead of $15,000 crate engine reviews, it was now “how to get 400 HP from a junkyard 350” and a fantastic article on how they got a ’68 Plymouth Satellite they’d bought for $200 to drop 6 seconds in the quarter mile without spending any money at all – ok, they fudged a little, spending $10 at the hardware store for dryer duct (!!!) to make a crude, home-made cool air system.  In other words, Car Craft had turned into a magazine for the REST OF US.  Since then, it’s reverted back to something in between.  Every now and then they’ll do a piece on third generation F-bodies (’82-92 Firebirds and Camaros), which keeps me happy.  In fact, they’d feature so many Camaros that some readers accused the magazine of being “Camaro Craft”.  I actually had two items published: one a tech question on carbs vs. fuel injection in a 1998 issue, and the other was a humorous “bite”: “Pontiac DID invent everything!” 

 News.  I tend to get my news by osmosis: off the radio, TV, newspaper, the Internet, etc. passively without any conscious effort at seeking it out.

 The Economist.  I like this English news magazine, published weekly.   I even used to subscribe to it, but I found that it was too much information; I couldn’t consistently read each issue before the next one arrived, so I’d accumulate a stack of them.  Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report have a very narrow view: if the US isn’t bombing the country, it’s nonexistent as far as those three are concerned.  The Economist brings us news about Brazil, Cambodia, and lots of other countries which are off the US news radar for whatever reason.  The writing is very good, and even the captions for photos are clever and tongue-in-cheek.  I’d classify the politics as centrist, with a very slight pro-capitalist bend.

            As for Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report, I’ll buy them when they have a particular cover story I’m interested in, but that’s fairly rare.  If anyone had the idea that Americans are insular and provincial, these magazines would be potent support for that view.

 Music.  Of course I’m heavily into music, so of course I’ll read music magazines.

 Classic Rock.  This is by far my favorite.  It’s an English magazine.  They’ve heard of bands like Hawkwind and Opeth, and aren’t afraid to cover them, though for some reason they’re fixated on Axl Rose and Guns N’Roses – to the point where someone complained it should be called “Velvet Guns Monthly”.  They have a “Buyer’s Guide”, reviews of new albums and reissues, and tons of great stuff each time.  It’s reached the point where every issue induces me to make 3-4 purchases, the majority of which I’m highly satisfied with.  I’d subscribe, but the subscriptions are horrendously expensive: $100-124 for a year.

 Kerrang!  This used to be the premier heavy metal magazine, but they used all sorts of horrible typefaces and offset colors.  Moreover, the writers were REALLY full of themselves.  One, Mark Putterford, spent several paragraphs of a piece on Zeno Roth (Uli Roth’s brother) going on about how he had this huge responsibility, which he took extremely seriously, to be generous to new rock stars otherwise the readers would turn off on a bad review by yours truly and the poor would-be rock star would then be condemned to oblivion.  On the other hand, they turned me on to Faith No More back in 1989.

 I really don’t like Rolling Stone.  Occasionally I’ll buy an issue if they have a cover story on AC/DC or Metallica, but my experience and impression has been that like MTV, Rolling Stone considers itself not merely a magazine about rock music but more of an overall arbiter of all things cool: what we should wear, listen to, read, watch, and even think.  It doesn’t help that when it comes to bands I like the most, Rolling Stone either at best ignores them or at worst tends to bust on them.  Whoever runs it really is not someone I’d hang out with.

 Cream was a bit the same, but I haven’t seen them around recently.  I used to pick this one up at the Stars & Stripes (PX bookstore).  Like Rolling Stone, they’d tend to bust on the bands I liked the most.  One writer referred to “the two black-haired goons who used to flank Ozzy in Black Sabbath” [Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler] not even knowing their names.  What a load of crap.

 Hit Parader and Circus I was never into that much.  Both seemed a bit too enthralled with mainstream metal and hair metal – as if they were written FOR and BY metal Neanderthals only mere IQ points above Beavis & Butt-head.  Revolver seems like a more recent version of these.  I couldn’t get into Alternative Press.

 Guitar World.  I used to subscribe to this.  It had tablature and usually focused on metal guitarists.  Most of the columns are by thrash metal guitarists – Dimebag Darrell once had a column, as did Zakk Wylde. I still buy it periodically when there’s a cover story or a song I’m interested in.  Sheet music is not specifically designed for guitars and does not translate directly to guitar, you have to be able to “read it”, which is fairly esoteric and far less practical than tablature.  Tablature is far more direct and straightforward: it has 6 lines, corresponding to the 6 strings, and fret positions for notes and chords.    

Guitar (For the Practicing Musician).  This doesn’t seem to be around anymore, but we used to buy it when it was.  This was the first magazine that had tablature in it, and I still have dozens of issues. They also had a few special editions and a few acoustic editions.  Its format and typeface were more conservative and less metal-oriented than Guitar World.

 Guitar (just plain “Guitar”).  This was the most conservative, oldest, and least interesting, mainly because it had no tablature.

 Politics.

Reason.  This is essentially the Libertarian opinion magazine.  I never read New Republic (slightly liberal) or National Review (slightly conservative) – and because they are both “N.R.” I get them confused anyway.  If I had to pick one where I find myself saying, “amen, hallelujah” (preaching to the choir) it’s this one.  Peter Bagge used to do cartoons for them, too bad he’s not active anymore, now that I finally have a subscription.

While not as flippant and casual as the Economist is sometimes, it’s certainly readable without seemingly like a textbook or manual – enjoyable to read.  Then again, that may be because I tend to agree with it 95% of the time.

 The Nation.  On the leftist side, here’s the voice of socialism.  Christopher Hitchens used to write for The Nation, until the Iraq War came by and he refused to apologize for Saddam Hussein simply to oppose the war.  My friend gets this as a gift subscription from an old friend of hers, whether she likes it or not, as do her daughters from the same benefactor – and none of these three ladies have any use for it.  I read it occasionally to see the other side’s arguments, but it’s difficult to digest, not only because I tend to disagree with it 95% of the time, but also the writing is terribly dense and affected.  Even the “social” parts (arts, books, movies, and music) are horrendously pretentious and verbose.  No one who writes for The Nation seems to have a sense of humor, and they all share the annoying intellectual snobbery that socialists (including Hitchens) seem to have.

 Men’s Magazines.   I’m a guy, so I like to see naked women – in various different contexts.   Back in the old days (which for me means, the 1970s), many of the lower end stores, like Dart Drug, used to have ALL of these out on racks in the middle of the store.  Not behind the counter, not in plastic wrap or brown wrappers, nothing.  Talk about a trip!  Now we have to go to New Jersey, where it seems every convenience store has an astonishing selection of the nastiest, skankiest magazines you could possibly imagine ever existed.  In my neck of the woods, even in liberal Maryland, this is unheard of.  Anyhow.

 Playboy.  Supposedly the classiest, but we still get full frontal nudity.  I can’t recall the last article or interview I read.  The cartoons are a hoot, though.  The women can be counted on to be stunning but often classy as well.  I suppose you could consider it upscale, respectable porn, even if it is a bit dull sometimes. If a mainstream celebrity (e.g. Victoria Principal or Kim Kardashian) wanted to pose nude, she’d do so “tastefully” in Playboy.  Each issue would have an initial pictorial (usually the celebrity one), then the famous centerfold – 80% white, 20% black or Asian – and finally a second pictorial, which was frequently one of these “Girls of the [College Division]” things.  The second pictorial could be counted on for some full frontal nudity.  Unfortunately there would be a “guide to sex in films” which I found less satisfying as a pictorial, per se, but sometimes informative as to certain of the more racier films – these were artsy R rated films and not run-of-the-mill porn.

There was also a so-called Playboy Advisor, to which various dolts and idiots addressed their concerns.  They would alternate from sexual questions to “how do I set up my hi-fi” or “what Porsche model should I buy?”  I found the former to be more pertinent, and the latter would be better served had they been addressed to the magazines which specialize in those areas, NOT Playboy.

 Penthouse.  Ramping up the raunch yet still pretentious in terms of “articles”.  The women are somewhat hotter than Playboy and pose in far more provocative ways, definitely designed to appeal to prurient interests with a minimum pretention of class.  The women look like porn stars or strippers who work on the high end – pretentious porn movies or expensive strip clubs.  It’s debatable whether PH managed to reconcile the two.  PH would have 4 pictorials, and one would frequently be lesbian or guy & girl sex, considerably raunchier than Playboy but still with excellent photography for some pretense of artsiness and “class”.  The Forum featured various erotic stories of dubious plausibility – well written and very imaginative and entertaining, to be sure, but not representative of the social life of anyone we knew personally or even remotely. 

 Hustler.  Ok, this magazine has no illusions of class whatsoever.  The cartoons are gross.  The models are attractive but skanky, and it’s hard to enjoy it without feeling nasty.  The models look like low-grade porn stars. I never liked it.

 Mayfair.  This is more like it.  The girls here are natural, busty, and almost (but not quite) “girl next door”, if by next door you mean some town in England.  They struck me as “approachable” (unlike the perfect goddesses in Playboy or L.A./Las Vegas porn stars of Penthouse or Hustler) and normal, but very attractive and very friendly.

The Vladimir Ilyich Code

Recently I caught “The Da Vinci Code” on DVD at last, followed up immediately by seeing “Angels & Demons” in the movie theater.  Having seen “National Treasure” (both of them) earlier, the similarities were striking.  I suppose you could call “The Da Vinci Code” the Catholic version of “National Treasure”, or “National Treasure” the American version of “The Da Vinci Code”.

 Maybe expand the franchise to include a communist version, the “Vladimir Ilyich Code”.  Putin has been murdered, and to solve the crime, the Moscow Militia calls in veteran Kremlinologist – but non-communist – Richard London.  If anyone can get to the bottom of this crime, it’s him!  No one knows more obscure communist mythology, trivia, and minutiae than this man – even veteran Politburo members can’t remember half the stuff this man has forgotten!  Plied with vintage Stolichnaya and some rare Lenin pamphlets, he agrees to take the case.

 He starts in Moscow, but wait – he has to borrow Lenin’s embalmed body to find a crucial clue…

 Which leads him to St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, where some Rasputin-oriented clue leads him to….

 Sverdlovsk, formerly Ekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered by Ermakov and his henchmen, which leads him to…

 London!  To Karl Marx’s grave, and the tombstone provides the obscure and counterintuitive hint to another clue in…

 Beijing!  It turns out something to do with Chairman Mao – oops, can we borrow his embalmed corpse for a bit? – will lead us closer to the answer, in…

 Hanoi! Something Ho Chi Minh wrote way back when, before he died in 1969, will tell us to go to…

 Paris!  Where he helped form the French Communist Party in 1920, but wait, his clue leads us back to….

 Moscow!  And the killer is….

Flying Tigers vs. Baa Baa Black Sheep

Browsing through Barnes & Nobles one day, I came across this book: Flying Tigers, by Daniel Ford.  It’s an in-depth analysis of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), better known by their famous nickname, the Flying Tigers. 

            They were recruited in the US by Claire Chennault, in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.  These were mainly flight instructors and other pilots who were otherwise unoccupied though in the military, who jumped at the option of some real combat, for $600 a month ($12,000 a month in today’s dollars), plus a $500 bonus for each Japanese plane shot down ($10,000 in today’s money).  They had to resign from the military to serve in the unit, which was technically a civilian outfit (some of the AVG members later started the CIA’s Air America outfit) working for CAMCO, a private firm – making them essentially mercenary pilots.  Due to the time necessary to get all the planes and infrastructure set up at their bases, they didn’t really see much combat until after the US went into the war.  Originally they were expected to fight Japanese forces in China, but most of their combat took place in Burma, Thailand, and north Vietnam.  Their rearward base was at Kunming, in Yunnan Province.  They had three squadrons: Adam & Eves (First Pursuit), Panda Bears, and the Hell’s Angels.

            Most of the planes were Curtiss P40 Warhawks, with 1100 HP V12 liquid cooled engines.  The P40 had a reputation that it was uncatchable in a dive, which proved true in the Pacific theater.  However, as Boyington described below, a South African pilot in North Africa learned that the Messerschmidt Me109E could match it – which he discovered when the German pilot matching his dive opened his canopy and flashed the “V” sign at him with a smile.

            They were up against the Japanese Army Air Force (JAAF) meaning that none of the Jap planes they faced were Zeros, which were Navy planes.  The book identifies the specific Japanese squadrons (Sentais) and pilots in each encounter, so you see both sides.  In many cases, “kills” on both sides were overstated: often two pilots claimed credit for shooting down the same plane, which somehow actually managed to make it back home anyway.  For their part, the Japs claimed to have shot down a force several times larger than the AVG at its peak.

            Originally volunteers, and definitely chafing at having any military authority imposed on them (despite the fact that most of the pilots were ex-military anyway) the group resisted the US Army’s efforts to absorb them into the military, but not for long.  Most of the combat operations took place after Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war, so this was not like the Lafayette Escadrille (US pilots flying for France in WWI prior to US entry) or the US pilots who flew for the RAF in the Battle of Britain.  The major accomplishment of the AVG was to strike back at Japan at a time when the Japanese were mostly successful, overrunning Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and almost reaching Australia.  Here was one theater where the Allies were fighting back – successfully – against Japanese aggression. 

 Madame Chiang Kia-Shek, aka Soong May-Ling.  As an aside, and without feeling compelled to devote an entire blog to this otherwise remarkable woman, I thought it useful to talk about her.  She was born in Shanghai in 1898, and died in New York City in 2003 at the age of 105.  Whether it be Claire Chennault or General Joe Stilwell, anyone who came into contact with Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife generally agreed that Madame Chiang, as she was often referred to, was very much the brains of the couple.  She spoke fluent English, even with a Georgia accent, having been educated at Wesleyan College. 

 The Flying Tigers.  This is the 1942 WWII vintage movie with John Wayne as Jim Gordon – unclear whether he’s supposed to be Chennault or Pappy Boyington.  They’ve pretty much made it yet another garden variety war movie set in China in WWII shortly before the US entered the war.  The Flying Tigers, of course, fly P-40s with the tigers painted on the planes, and are usually outnumbered in their battles against Japanese planes.  We have to have a story, and that involves yet ANOTHER arrogant, selfish asshole who only cares about money (bonus) and glory, UNTIL he wants to impress the cute white nurse and get into her panties, so THEN he decides to impress the Chinese children at the orphanage.  Of course he screws up, somehow, and of course he redeems himself, at the cost of his own life.

 Baa Baa Black Sheep.  Reading through Flying Tigers, I was intrigued to find that among the pilots of the AVG was Greg “Pappy” Boyington, who I knew was associated with the Black Sheep Squadron, and popularized in the 70s TV show “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, played by Robert Conrad.  I only bothered to watch Season 1, Disc 1, which includes the lengthy pilot.  The pilot gives us the backstory of Boyington (Conrad) washing out of the Flying Tigers, which portrays Chennault as an arrogant bastard stiffing all the AVG pilots.  Boyington manages to weasel his way to be Major, and steals the 214 squadron from Major Buell (Charles Napier), while being crucified for myriad rule book violations by his immediate superior, Colonel Lard, who hates his guts – and the feeling is mutual. The next one up, General Moore, though, is looking out for him.  The Corsairs look authentic and cool, as do the Japanese planes.  For their part, the Japanese aren’t so much “bad guys” (morally challenged or evil) so much as merely “opposing forces”. 

            Eventually, though, it gets fairly cartoonish: Boyington’s only 3 ways of solving a problem are (A) getting wasted on whiskey, (B) getting in a fight (there’s a fight every 10 minutes in this damn show), or (C) bullshitting his way somehow.  The pilots have 70s hairstyles, like “M*A*S*H” and the production and theme song give it an “A-Team” appearance – even down to Boyington’s constant scrapes with Lard, similar to that Colonel Decker who has it out for the A-Team. John Larroquette has a minor role as one of the pilots (he rarely has any lines); Rene Auburjonois, the shapeshifting senior partner from “Boston Legal/Deep Space Nine” has a one-episode role as Hooper, an Aussie who wants to stay alive on an island infested with Japs. 

            Far better than the TV show were Boyington’s memoirs, Baa Baa Black Sheep.  Much of the early part thereof indeed describes his adventures in the AVG, which backs up and complements the Flying Tigers book.  He also has some very unflattering remarks concerning Madame Chiang. 

            His Black Sheep squadron was an ad hoc squadron of various pilots pulled together to operate in the Solomon Islands slot, a line of islands in the South Pacific running from Guadalcanal in the southeast up to Bougainville in the northwest.  His pilots wanted to call it “Boyington’s Bastards”, but he knew the press would never print that name, and didn’t want his name to be part of it anyway.  He simply recalled the children’s nursery rhyme, and used that for the squadron.

            They often attacked the Japanese airstrip at Kahili, doing strafing runs.  The Japanese air controller on the island spoke fluent English without even any accent, trying to trick them into revealing their altitude and strength, but Boyington could tell he was a Jap because the English was TOO good, without any of the jargon, slang and banter the American pilots used amongst themselves.  Finally Boyington taunted the Jap, “come on you yellow bastards, come up here and fight!” to which the Jap responded, “if you are so brave, Major Boyington, come down here and fight us!”

            The Black Sheep Squadron used F4U Corsairs, with their distinctive gull wings, equipped with 6 .50 cal machine guns and a 2000 HP Pratt & Whitney radial engine, up against the Japanese Navy pilots, who were often flying Mitsubishi Zeros.  Boyington referred to the Japanese markings as the “angry red meatball.”

            Boyington describes something which harks back to my Religion blog.  He says he got along well with the chaplains, and the Catholic chaplain explained something very extraordinary.  According to him, the Vatican realized the war was on its way, long before it actually happened.  So the Vatican managed to get the German priests off these Pacific Islands, in a way which avoided tipping them off: they were all promoted and brought back to Rome.

            He liked to drink, of course, but also play cards: but he made it a point not to play with pilots in his own squadron, “for I didn’t like the idea of people firing guns behind me when they owed me money.  I gambled with people I didn’t have to fly with.”

            Boyington was shot down and captured by the Japanese, and went through the whole “Bridge on the River Kwai”/”Papillion” prisoner-of-war deal.  A heavy drinker by his own admission, the ordeal acted as a de facto type of rehab; in some ways his health improved after he recovered from the wounds he received when he was shot down.  He started at Rabaul, went to Saipan, then to Iwo Jima, and finally to mainland Japan, in a special camp outside Yokohama, in Ofuna, which is the Japanese equivalent of Hollywood.  There he met some Japanese guards who were Christian, spoke excellent English, and refused to beat the Allied prisoners – and were beaten instead as a result.  Ironically, he was worried the Japanese would learn of his service in the Flying Tigers and shoot him out of hand.  During his time in captivity the Japanese classified him as a “special captive” and not a prisoner of war, so the Red Cross were never alerted to his captivity and to US forces he remained “missing in action” – and assumed dead - until finally liberated.

            He eventually learned to speak Japanese through this whole ordeal.  Hell, even I learned some Japanese!  “Domai” = “no dice, that’s bad”; “Nunda?” = “what’s going on here?”; “Ah so ka” = “I understand”; “ohio” = “good morning”; “obason” = “Auntie”; “Baykoko” = “United States”; “Yamai” = “stop”; “haitison” = “guards”; “toxon” = “a lot, much”; “baka” or “kanero” = fool.  Perhaps it was the Stockholm Syndrome, but eventually he learned to like the Japanese and get along with most of his captors.  He observed that many of the Japanese officers treated him well, and Japanese civilians, even those in bombed Yokohama, bore him no malice or discrimination.  Boyington even struck up an unlikely friendship with an old woman working in the kitchen at the camp, and she helped him steal food from the guards.  Of course, he also learned much about Japanese, and many of the Jap officers candidly admitted to him that the war had gone in the toilet.

            When Boyington returned to the US, he was treated as a hero, given the Congressional Medal of Honor by Truman himself, and sent on a confusing whirlwind bond raising tour (similar to “Flags of Our Fathers”).  He took up drinking again, and got a fair amount of bad publicity as a result.  Oddly, he found it difficult to find jobs, and finally ended up working selling beer for a brewery and as a referee for professional wrestling.

            Looking back on this, it seems that his tenure with the Black Sheep Squadron is one of the least interesting parts of the whole story, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that the actual veterans of the group were NOT big fans of the 70s TV show.   He was a remarkable man, flawed as he was – but it seems that anyone who met him personally held him in high regard. 

Saturday Night Live

A few years ago, I asked my secretary at the time, Carolyn (Vietnamese name Phuong), if she’d seen SNL the weekend before.  Huh?  Blank stare.  Apparently she didn’t know what Saturday Night Live was.  Since I don’t recall many Asian – much less Vietnamese – cast members on SNL, I suppose this makes sense.  But she was one of those Viets who doesn’t watch ANY American TV. 

 Beginnings.  It began in October 1975, started by Lorne Michaels, who had much more hair back then.  He’s still prominent on screen.

 70s. This is considered the “classic” era, though to me the sketches are not that much funnier than 80s and 90s era SNL, to the point where these should be considered special.  The highlights, of course, are Ackroyd & Curtin’s “Coneheads” and their bickering back and forth on Weekend Update, plus the various “samurai” sketches with John Belushi as shouting “MAMA SAN!” and attacking something with a samurai sword.  Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Lorraine Newman, Garrett Morris (token black!), Steve Martin (common guest) are the classic cast members.

 80s.  This era includes Jim Belushi, Rich Hall, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus & Brad Hall, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Billy Crystal, and Martin Short.  This era gets forgotten, but it’s no worse than the 70s or 90s era which get more attention.  Most of the alumni of this era went on to bigger and better things, most notably Eddie Murphy (who was great as “Velvet Jones” and “Buckwheat”) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, better known as “Elaine” from “Seinfeld”.  Harry Shearer is a regular voice on “The Simpsons”, and teams up with Guest and McKean for Spinal Tap and various Guest movies.  I liked the “Run, Jump, and Throw Like A Girl Olympics”, Martin Short’s Ed Grimley sketches (brought over almost verbatim from SCTV), and Billy Crystal’s “Fernando’s Hideaway” (“you look MAH-velous!”).  Piscopo did a great Frank Sinatra impression.  

 90s.  This era’s better cast members were Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, Dennis Miller, Phil Hartman, Kevin Nealon, Chris Rock, Tim Meadows.  Oddly, this is now considered quasi-classic, thanks to “Wayne’s World”, which was not only well done as sketches, but successfully translated into a full-length movie.  Dana Carvey’s “Church Chat” was quality, the obvious “Wayne’s World” sketches (Wayne: “No way!” Joe Perry: “Way!”), Dennis Miller’s Weekend Update, and Hartman’s great impressions of Reagan and Clinton – and Sinatra (to Jan Hooks, as Sinead O’Connor: “what’s with the bald chick?”).  I was disappointed that they cut the Reagan Iran-Contra sketch short on the Best of Phil Hartman compilation.

 00s.  Darrell Hammond (actually been on since 1995), Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, Jimmy Fallon, and Tracy Morgan are the best known cast members of this era.  Here I felt the quality began slipping considerably – particularly Ferrell’s inane recurring cheerleader sketches with Cheri Oteri.  Too many sketches had me wondering, “is THAT the punch line?” with only the opening sketch, ending in “live from New York, it’s SATURDAY NIGHT!” being any good.  One of the better ingredients of latter-day SNL is the TV Funhouse, with the “Ex-Presidents” and “Ambiguously Gay Duo”. 

 Musical Guests.  I really can’t stand 95% of these, as they’re usually some mainstream pop band who don’t offend anyone.  My favorite was Faith No More, who played in December 1990.

 Style.  It wasn’t slapstick; it wasn’t dry; it wasn’t nearly as oddball as Monty Python; it wasn’t risqué.  Really, SNL humor is middle of the road, marginally controversial, standard issue American humor.  It’s nowhere near as clever as “The Simpsons”; nowhere near as controversial as “South Park” or “The Family Guy”; and only sometimes, not consistently, laugh out loud funny.  Because it’s on network TV it has to go by the NBC censors, so even live the language wasn’t particularly obnoxious.  One element I found was consistently the funniest was the political humor, and the fake commercials.  

 Recurring characters.  As mentioned earlier, Belushi’s Samurai; Bill Murray’s lounge singer (who I hated); Billy Crystal’s Fernando; Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat – and foul-mouthed Gumby; the Coneheads (top quality); Wayne & Garth; the Church Lady; Chris Rock’s Nat X (zzz); Julia Sweeney’s androgynous Pat; Rob Schneider’s Richmeister “making COPIES”; Martin Short’s Ed Grimley (“…you know!”).  The list goes on…

 Unscheduled cameos.  This was probably the best: when the person being parodied would suddenly arrive on set.  Janet Reno showed up during Will Ferrell’s “Janet Reno’s Party Machine”; Steve Martin crashed David Spade’s Hollywood Minute (which dismissed him as a “has-been”); John McLaughlin crashed Dana Carvey’s Halloween version of The McLaughlin Group (“WRONG!”); Bob Dole challenged Norm McDonald that “Bob Dole does NOT speak in the third person!”  Also quality were Paul Simon (singer) and Paul Simon (senator) showing up at the same time.

 Great Political Parody. Darrell Hammond nailed not only Bill Clinton, but also Al Gore.  Phil Hartman did a good Clinton, but his Reagan was stunning.  I never cared for Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, as there was zero resemblance.  Dan Ackroyd was great as Jimmy Carter (“you’ve got the brown acid.  Do you have any Allman Brothers?”) and Bob Dole (“PIERRE DuPont!”).  Dana Carvey killed as Ross Perot and George Bush Sr.  Ferrell, of course, nailed George W. Bush.  More recently, Fred Armison (sic) does a passable Barack Obama, and Amy Poehler captures Hillary Clinton’s acid cynicism (though she’s better as Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas).  Debates are always well done, and even quasi-political characters are nailed down (Darrell Hammond as Tim Russert, asking McCain if he’ll run in 2004 if Bush “forgets to run”).

 SNL is best condensed into “Best of” the top actors, but unfortunately there is no “Best of Darrell Hammond”, which is a shame, as he’s competitive with Will Ferrell and others who do have their own.      

Religion

Time for more abstract and philosophical analysis, possibly blasphemous but certainly something to consider.

 Same summit, different approaches.  The image which came to me was of a top summit, like Mount Everest.  Viewed from the top, a mountain peak has 360 degrees of approach around it, which could either be described in terms of degrees, or more easy-to-grasp, clock positions from 12, 1, 2, 3, etc. all the way back to 12 – and compass points as well, 12 being North, 3 being East, 6 being South, and 9 being West.

     Figure all of us monotheists – as opposed to atheists or polytheists – are attempting, in some way, shape or form, at our own paces, to climb that summit and reach the top.  Catholics take the North approach, non-Catholic Christians take the East approach, Jews take the South approach, Muslims take the West approach, and so forth.  Then figure there are Sunnis vs. Shi’ites, Orthodox vs. Conservative vs. Reform Jews, all sorts of Protestant religions and the Eastern Orthodox churches.  Each is trying to reach the summit from a different direction and each claims that the others’ way is wrong.  But we all know and accept that the summit – the God – is the same, but we argue that the means by which we try to reach Him, is itself so important as to trump everything else.  As if, upon reaching God at the top, God turns to us and asks, “well, thank you very much for coming up here.  By the way, how did you get here?” “Uh, I came up from the South.” And God goes nuts and says, “INFIDEL!!!  You blasphemer!  Didn’t I send Mohammed down there to tell you to come up the West way?  What is wrong with you??  Begone!” 

     This is why I find religious intolerance among fellow monotheists to be so idiotic – especially when it reaches the point of KILLING others simply because their particular form of monotheism is different.  Again, back to my example: you get to the top and say HI to God, and tell him, “Oh, by the way, there were some Jews coming up by the South approach, we killed them.  Pretty good, huh?”  And God will say, “Way to go, Abdullah!  Here are your virgins!”  Granted, back in the Middle Ages (a long, long time ago) the Christian Crusaders decided that the Muslim way was so wrong that it merited termination.  And we have no shortage of anti-Semitism to observe, perpetrated both by Christians and Muslims, although this form of discrimination appears to be racially motivated rather than due to any religious differences.  To me it’s all stupid.  Who cares how we get up the mountain?  And are we so sure that God cares, that we’re going to kill anyone going up the mountain the wrong way?

 Jesus rises.  Awhile back I analyzed the New Testament between Easter Sunday and Asension, and realized that after Jesus rose from the dead, He made no public appearances.  All His appearances were in private, solely to the Apostles, who were predisposed to believe in Him.  Why didn’t He meet Pontius Pilate, or Caiaphas?  Raising from the dead would have been front page news: to everyone.  Surely a public appearance by this guy who everyone - Jews, Apostles, Romans, etc. - saw crucified would be a killer recruitment for Christianity, and since Jesus sent out the Apostles to spread the word, we knew He wanted this to be a mass movement, not some secret society only a few select people were invited to, like Amway.  What comes to mind is that He returned from the dead not in the literal sense of being flesh and blood, but in the spiritual sense of retaining consciousness and some identity after death – that we have a soul which survives death, as His did.  So He came back to show his Apostles that, for believers at least, there would be life after death, just not on this Earth, in this form as we knew it.  This also explains why He returned at Ascension, instead of staying here indefinitely.  But that leads me to wonder: where did Jesus live when He was alive?

 You can’t make me.  I also noted that through the Bible, God can never make anyone do anything.  The most He can do is send an angel or a dream to persuade someone of the “right” course of action ("by the way, you might want to do this").  Here are some examples:

1.  Jonah and the whale.  God asked Jonah to go to Nineveh and tell the people there to shape up.  Jonah thought to himself…. “nah….”.  And so he ended up in the whale.  And then he thought, “this sucks, maybe I should go to Nineveh after all.”  And he did.  The whale was just God’s way of being persuasive – and it worked.

2.  Joseph & Mary.  Joseph was due to be Mary’s husband, but found she was already pregnant.  Not good – he was inclined to call it off.  But the angel came and backed up Mary’s “conceived by God” story (of which I’m sure Joseph had probably been somewhat skeptical), so he decided to go along with it.  This was not an angel with a shotgun.

3.  Three Wise Men.  Herod wanted them to come back after seeing Jesus and fill him on the Manger location – so he could have Jesus killed.  The angels sent the Wise Men a dream and advised them to take an alternate route home.  Once again, very persuasive angels – the Three Wise Men took another route, Herod was not able to have baby Jesus terminated before Mary and Joseph escaped to Egypt.

 Why is this important?  People see all the hatred, the violence, the cruelty, the torture, the evil in the world and ask, “how can God allow this to happen?”  The answer is: God can’t stop it.  God couldn’t make the gas chambers fail, the machine guns jam, the swords and machetes too dull to cut anyone, or make rapists impotent.  And He can’t control our behavior.  We control our behavior, for better or worse – all too often, for worse.  You may as well scream at your best friend for not having stopped the rain. 

 Homily.  I go to mass, at the local cathedral (Catholic) almost every Sunday.  One thing about Catholic mass is that no matter where you go, around the world, you know the mass will have the same format: intro stuff, two readings (someone from the audience), a gospel (by the priest), a homily (the priest’s sermon), the collection,  and then stock material until the Our Father, the peace be with you “shake the hands stuff” (half the people only lamely shaking hands with anyone outside his or her own immediate family), communion, then the end where we get announcements and the blessing, and then we charge out.

     I tend to zone out during the homily.  There are really only so many different ways the priest can basically say, “Jesus died for you, be good, m’kay?”  Too many are off in the stratosphere of abstract discussion.  Occasionally the priest gets cute; one time the first two rows were Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, so the priest said that Jesus’ 40 days in the desert was like a “camping trip”.  It’s a rare priest who can reconcile the abstract with the concrete and keep my attention.  Then of course, one of the priests is Father Shakedown, who monotonously recites all the huge bills the church has (“that air conditioning in this huge place isn’t free, people!  Cough it up!”).  

 After Mass.  In Paris, we went to St. Joseph’s, an English-speaking Catholic church down Ave. Hoche from the Etoile.  After mass we’d go someplace special.  Originally we went to a McDonald’s, in a part of town I don’t recall.  This was a 70’s vintage McDonald’s, with horribly greasy food: even the French fries were green.  Blah.  But then we went to an arcade next door.  This was before even Space Invaders or Pac-Man, so God only knows what horrendously primitive games we could have played.  Later on, Burger King arrived on the Champs Elysees, far cleaner and nicer than the skanky Evil Clown in that other part of town.  And again we went to an arcade – this one had Rolling Thunder, which I really liked. 

 Churches.  Part of the charm of Catholic churches is their antiquity and elegance (I have no reason to visit Protestant churches and have no experience therein).  There seem to be two types of church.  The first is the fancy old style, in the shape of a cross, with stained glass windows, statues, old style pews, all the medieval stuff we’re familiar with.  St Peter's in Rome is obviously the biggest and most impressive, but there are many others: Notre Dame in Paris, various cathedrals around the world, even the Madeleine in Paris, which is set up like the Parthenon in Greece.  What they all share is a faithful adherence to some form of classical, or even Gothic, style.

     Then there are the IKEA churches:  someone studied the schematics of Merriweather Post Pavilion or the Nissan Pavilion, because the seating is ampitheater style, in a large fan radiating out from the altar.  The imagery, to the extent there is any, has a sparse, abstract feel to it, like Pablo Picasso designed it.  I suppose this was some movement in the 60s or 70s to modernize the Church and distance it from the archaic medieval feel it once had.  These are churches for the automobile, Internet, cell phone age, as if to say that religion isn't some irrelevant anachronism from medieval times, but still relevant and meaningful to us even today.  Both styles have their supporters and virtues. 

     I've even seen churches which were converted from movie theaters, either as temporary expedients or permanent arrangements, but in that case we're really stretching the envelope of what we can consider a "church".  Maybe it was officially blessed or consecrated by the appropriate bishop, but it certainly doesn't feel like a church.

     Having been to Egypt, I’ve been to mosques.  After being used to churches filled with pews, mosques are kind of bizarre: no seats, just tons of carpets to kneel down and pray on.  Needless to say, I was a visitor and not praying to Allah myself.

     When I visited the USSR in 1983, part of the tour – Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad – was countless Russian Orthodox churches and monestaries.  ZZZZ.  They’re all the same: chock full of Cyrillic lettering and icons.  There’s a Romanian Orthodox Church across the street from me, which has a similar deal, though the lettering is Roman, and the language is Romanian.  But style-wise it’s almost identical.  And the service is in Romanian, which I don’t speak, except “va rog” and “multumesc”, and some naughty words like “pizda” and “pula” (unlikely to be heard in a mass, anyway).  But of all the Romance languages, Romanian is by far the closest to the source language, Latin.

 Latin Mass.  It’s difficult to find a High Mass (in Latin) these days.  The vernacular (local language) has been more popular since the 60s; I recall my dad bitching about how the Church went liberal in the 60s to sell out and attract people back into the pews, and ditching the Latin Mass was the biggest factor.  But even a Latin mass was not all in Latin: only the standard, boilerplate stock language which is the same every Sunday, is in Latin.  The readings, the homily, and most everything else is in the vernacular anyway. 

America the Beautiful?

A belated July 4^th blog entry, on a fairly esoteric topic. I’ve noticed some competing theories on what America and Americans are all about. 

 Slacker.  In the movie “Stripes”, the platoon has to pull an all-nighter to pass parade inspection, and the cramming isn’t going too well.  Winger (Bill Murray) finally whips the team into shape with an inspiring speech invoking “Old Yeller”, and claiming that Americans are basically slackers who represent the worst of every nation, rejected, ostracized and cast out by everyone else, and combined to form our own country of rebellious losers.  The rejuvenated and inspired platoon succeeds in impressing the general and gets assigned to the EM-50 project.  Woohoo!

            This “theory” finds itself repeated over and over again, countless times in countless movies, in American cinema, with the good guys starting out as hopeless losers who somehow manage to get their act together at the 11^th hour and pull off a dramatic victory – in such varied contexts as “Miracle on Ice” (the story of the 1980 US hockey team in Lake Placid), “The Dirty Dozen”, and “The Bad News Bears”.  “Stripes” was merely the film which finally distilled this theory, which was implicit in all those other stories, into an articulated theory and shoved it down our throats. 

 Elite.  The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein would beg to differ.  His view was that the immigrants who came to the US from Europe – with the obvious exception of the slaves – were the cream of the crop, the ambitious go-getters with the balls and courage to take the risks of settling in a new world which had no guarantees but plenty of opportunity.  The losers are the lazy idiots who stayed back in the mother country.  It’s certainly a more appealing view than the slacker view. 

 Southern.  (vs. Northern, aka Yankee).  I recently read The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, another one of these “the South was right!” deals.  To hear this talk, every male from south of the Mason-Dixon line is a chivalrous gentleman, and every male north of that line is an arrogant, deceitful slimebag.  What an interesting theory: the South has a monopoly on virtue, the North on vice.  Complete and utter bullshit.  While New Jersey may have no shortage of northern assholes, your average tractor pull or Klan rally will attract an equal amount of white trash.  Neither side of the Mason-Dixon line has a monopoly on anything. 

  The other funny thing is how often Southerners appear to describe themselves as true Americans.  It's as if, having been denied the CSA, they then decided that, "well, if I'm stuck with these damn Yankees, I'll at least claim that I'm a better American than they are."  The truth is...well, in the next paragraph.

 Eclectic.  Probably the most appropriate.  We’ve got blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Midwesterners, rednecks (from all parts of the country, not just the South), guidos, effete wine-loving yuppies, “What Would Wellstone Do?” liberals, Flying Monkeys, slackers, hard chargers, bums, crack addicts, crooks, saints, Ned Flanders, etc.  And the CSA types too - who are no more, but no less, American than anyone else.  Anyone who looks at the entire picture has to come away from the whole thing realizing that the #1 element which defines “America” is diversity and heterogeneity.  We’re all different.  We are mutts (as Murray indicated) but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily slackers.  Gordon Gekko is no more – or less – American than Zonker Harris, Andrew Dice Clay, George Washington, or Pauly Shore.