Perfect Evening, Perfect Game

The Somerset Patriots lost last night’s game with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs by a score of 5-3, but the loss did not taint the enjoyment of the game one bit. No matter what anyone else may claim, I think that baseball, not football, basketball or any other sport is America’s favorite live spectator sport.

The national professional sport teams have made it so expensive to get beyond the gate and are located so far from home, that it’s hard to compare the entertainment they provide to the homespun enjoyment of watching baseball in person at a nearby sports facility such as the one at TD Bank Ballpark on our own turf in Bridgewater, where the Somerset Patriots play.

If you’ve watched the Patriots in action, you could not help but to see all of the families there with their kids thoroughly having a good time and being entertained not only by the game itself, but by all of the other fun-filled sidebar events put on for the fans, mainly children, by the special events staff.

The bonus at last night’s game is that the weather was absolutely ideal – made in Heaven. The fans seem to have responded accordingly, as attendance set a season high of 8,065.

And the best part of all was enjoying it in with my son Dave, granddaughter Monique, and my lifelong confidant, Priscille.

Sensationalized Headline Does Star-Ledger Reporters no Favors

In today’s print edition, The Star-Ledger’s front-page headline read, “Jersey’s $400M screw-up” and, just below it, “Application error costs the state Race to the Top funds.” Well, that’s true, but only partially. And it’s not what Jeanette Rundquist and Jessica Calefati, the two reporters who wrote the story said.

I know of Jeanette Rundquist’s work from when I sat on the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education in the early 1990’s. That was a time when newspapers could still afford to cover board of education meetings in person, and Jeanette was The Star-Ledger’s key reporter covering those meetings.

She was then, as she is now, an excellent reporter who did her best to dig into the background of board events and of its members to provide the community with accurate and full coverage of those meetings. Although I have no knowledge of Jessica Calefati, both she and Rundquist did a good job on today’s piece.

But what The Star-Ledger headline screams out is not what Rundquist and Calefati reported: What those two women wrote is:

“New Jersey fell three points short of receiving ‘Race to the Top’ funding in part because of an error by the Christie administration in the state’s application.” There is a big difference between “in part” and the headline's implied 'in whole'.

A table accompanying this story also qualifies New Jersey’s loss:  “A mistake in New Jersey’s application for the competitive Race to the Top grant program may have cost the state up to $400 million in federal education reform dollars.” For those of us who like accurate reporting, this is very different from the headline writer’s attention-grabbing words.

Look: It’s true that if the error had not been made, New Jersey would not have been penalized a precious 4.8 points. There is no getting around that.

But it is just as true that there was a total of 500 points for us to win or lose, and that New Jersey lost another 34.6 decisive points in two other vital categories over which school districts and the teachers’ association had a direct influence:

In the categories for State Success Factors (125 points) and Great Teachers and Leaders (138 points), the Round Two Scorecard in the sidebar to the story shows how New Jersey lost 34.6 points in part (my words) “for not securing enough school district and teacher union support for its proposals,” and that “More points were lost due to N. J. not using student performance to make decisions on teachers’ pay or job security.”

So there you have it. You shouldn’t have to read a post from a blogger like me to get the facts straight.

Out of the Pool and Back to School

A farewell message on the outside window of the
aquatics director's office. (by Dick Bergeron)

On Monday, August 23, the indoor pool at the Jewish Community Center off Talamini Road in Bridgewater will have a different configuration of users: The kids are all leaving and getting ready to hit the books once again.

That means the nature of the swimming programs will be altered to reflect the change in seasons and, for a brief period, the pool will be a lot quieter and more lanes will be open for lap swimming.

Despite the higher utilization of the indoor pool during the summer months, the Aquatics Director, Stephanie Johnson, does an excellent job of maintaining a weekly lane schedule by type of swimming activity. It’s the key for lap swimmers like me to know when to show up.

The schedule is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet color coded to show lane availability by type of usage (lap swim, swim lessons, swim team, private lessons, water therapy, etc.). It’s converted into a PDF file and posted on the JCC’s web site.

The JCC (officially the Shimon and Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center) is a valuable asset to Bridgewater and its surrounding communities. While it clearly honors and represents the ages-old Jewish tradition, it is truly a non-sectarian agency that serves the New Jersey counties of Somerset, Hunterdon and Warren in what I consider to be a very effective ecumenical manner.

The entrance to the JCC onTalamini Road in Bridgewater.
(by Dick Bergeron)

I don’t know if the founders and organizers of the JCC think of it that way, but this Catholic boy sure does. The JCC effectively embodies the American character of retaining the memory of one’s own tradition while respecting and accommodating all of the others.

The Gulf or The Cape?

First Lady Michelle Obama recently came home from an expensive vacation in Spain. Today, President Barack Obama and his family are beginning a 10-day vacation on secluded Blue Heron Farm, a 28-acre waterfront property in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where they stayed last year.

I write this post with feelings that are only somewhat mixed: Any president of the United States is entitled to a break away from the pressure of what may be the world’s toughest job. But why this exclusive island resort in the northeast? Why now?

There is not only symbolism, but a good deal of substance behind every action that the President of the United States decides to take.

Both Mr. Obama and the First Lady have spent only a few days ‘vacationing’ in the Gulf to show their support for the region’s tourist businesses. But the latest was a mere one-day presidential photo-op in the Florida panhandle, and it was back to Washington.

No president ever gets away completely from his duties. Especially not in this super-connected electronic world. His/ (maybe someday her) responsibilities are simply too great. So any presidential vacation is really a working one peppered by hobnobbing with favored guests, and time alone to ponder his responsibilities in a quiet setting.

But why Martha’s Vineyard? Why not one or two locations along the Gulf Coast, where the hobnobbing can be with common people and where the president, quite frankly, has just blown a major opportunity to help reinvigorate the tourist, fishing, and petroleum industries of as many as five Gulf Coast states.

The New England tourist industry would not suffer one iota from his absence in the region this summer. But the same cannot be said for the businesses along the Gulf Coast which are flat on their backs.

The President has the right, but is it a wise choice? Somehow, for me, Obama’s decision is the wrong priority.

Just a thought. Stay cool. Thanks for reading. Stay engaged.

Throwing the Gulf States under the Bus

The main thing that I like about columnist Paul Mulshine is not only that he writes exactly what he thinks, but that he thinks before he writes. His research is not too shabby either. That makes his columns very interesting, even if I don’t always agree with his views.

Today, he wrote about a subject dear to my heart: The media and White House abandonment (read: Barack Obama) of the states along the Gulf of Mexico, as soon as a temporary fix was found to plug the out-of-control underwater oil spill.

We all know that BP took short cuts that it should never have taken, and that the spill was most likely a direct result of BP’s failure to employ conservative drilling techniques.

But we also know that day-in and day-out, no one could turn on a TV news station without seeing those infernal underwater cameras showing oil gushing out into the Gulf, as hundreds of people who were given little credit worked 24/7 to fix the problem.

When the well was eventually capped, albeit temporarily, news crews were called off assignment, and coverage came to a near dead halt. Staff from fickle media outlets quickly packed their bags and shifted their attention to other matters. Should it be any wonder then, that Americans don’t trust many of the media outlets to report accurately and consistently any longer?

Today, the swimming beaches are largely clean, and nature is doing its job in restoring Gulf waters to their pre-spill condition. BP is still sending out planes over the Gulf in search of large oil formations which it can no longer find: Media outlets are not reporting on that. Yet shrimp boats have returned to the waters and fisheries are being restored.

Nevertheless, scores of large and small businesses along the Gulf States are still bearing the economic brunt of previous negative media reporting that permeated the air waves and of the quick exodus of journalists from the scene once the well was capped.

Meanwhile, there are few reports of the current situation from the media or the White House, just a weekend visit from the president where, according to Mulshine, “instead of visiting the beaches,” Obama “posed for a picture in a cove in a back bay behind a luxury Marriott hotel.”

A Review: Eat, Pray, Love

Whenever our family goes on vacation, we always brings a ton of books with us. In addition, we also browse through book stores and even buy a few more, especially if they are on sale. This summer, when ten of us came together on the shores of “The Great Lake" up north, the pattern repeated itself.

One day, while some of us were reading, the fancifully creative cover of the paperback edition of Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, caught my attention.  I asked my daughter, Denise, if she wouldn’t mind writing a review for this blog. Turns out she already had one posted on goodread.com. Her critique follows below:

I had a preconceived notion that this book might involve whining but I was happily wrong. The author sets off on an extended trip to Italy, India and Indonesia after a nasty divorce, looking to find peace of mind.

She first visits Italy to pamper herself; that's the "eat" part. Then it's off to India to "pray," and find an experience of the divine in an ashram. In Bali, her last stop, she looks for "love" in the form of striking a balance in her life.

You can see where one might get impatient with her for being a little self-absorbed, just by considering this synopsis. But Elizabeth Gilbert turns out to be someone you could easily be friends with.

She is actually self-effacing in her own way, has a great sense of humor, and keeps her troubles in perspective. She is amazing in the way she makes friends from all walks of life. I found her thoughts on religion and spirituality thought-provoking. I'll be interested to see the movie. 

The movie version of the book, starring Julia Roberts, is being released today. According to the Sony web site, it will be playing at the Clearview’s Bernardsville Cinema 3, Clearview’s Chester Cinema 6, Clearview’s Madison Cinema 4, and the Manville 12 Plex.

Note:  In my photo, the printed letter 'E' of 'eat' has been creatively overlayed by Priscille with tiny shells collected by our granddaughter Monique from 'The Great Lake'

The View from the Top

It was a perfect day for a climb up one of the New Hampshire’s scenic peaks – cool and dry. Five of us took advantage of the situation to drive over the bridge from Black Cat Island to nearby Holderness to get some exercise and to drink in the views from a higher elevation.

There are plenty of sights around here by merely sauntering around on the back roads, but none compare to standing on a mountain’s granite outcrop following a brisk hike through the forest canopy and emerging into the full sunlight to behold the spectacular scenery.

As peaks around these parts go, Rattlesnake Mountain, at 1600 feet, is not a particularly challenging one. (There are seven others in N.H. by the same name.) Nonetheless, it will get your blood circulating faster and your muscles and joints moving – no doubt about that. It’s a favorite of families because of the relatively easy climb and the panoramic lake views that it affords.

If you ever do something like this, though, do yourselves a favor and don’t be like some of the people we encountered who went up with no water and equipped without adequate footwear. We saw a few with only flip-flops on their feet – dumb, really dumb. Not Granite-Staters. That’s for sure. Up here, I think they are referred to as flatlanders.

It’s always a good thing to never underestimate nature. Seasoned mountain climbers who have taken on the more serious of New Hampshire’s peaks in inclement weather and without leaving a climbing itinerary with someone below have found that out the hard way.

Thanks for checking in and for reading. Stay engaged and enjoy the remaining weeks of summer. 

Photos:  In the first photo by Denise Bergeron Schleckser, your blogger rests on a shoulder of Holderness, New Hampshire's Rattlesnake Mountain, while in the second photo shot by your blogger, a similar view depicting Squam Lake unfolds (think Jane and Henry Fonda in the flick, On Golden Pond).

Better than Fiction

Its title, “The Quants,” does not immediately conjure up the image of a page-turning thriller novel. But that’s what it is. Except that none of it is fiction. If you’d enjoy a narrative which reads like the financial and economic version of a Tom Clancy page-turner, this is the book.

Unlike a Clancy novel such as “The Hunt for Red October,” though, the eventual outcome of Scott Patterson’s account of the 2008 financial crash is not nearly as clear:

“The Quants” is the story about a systemic failure of Wall Street, the banking system and of U.S. government oversight – one which never should have been permitted to happen. It’s the tale of how the worldwide financial trading and banking system came within a hair of imploding upon itself, nearly taking down entire national economies.

Patterson places the culpability for this meltdown which reared its ugly head in the early weeks of August, 2007, squarely on the shoulders of “a new breed of math whizzes who conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it.”

They did it by transforming Wall Street into a casino-like operation wrapped in hedge funds powered by computer models driven by complex quantitative analysis techniques whose underlying structure proved to be a witch’s brew of false assumptions.

The ‘quants’ and hedge fund managers who drove these high-frequency trading models were responsible for buying and selling billions of dollars worth of highly leveraged, complex financial instruments which were light-years away from the underlying collateral from which their value was presumably derived.

Some of that collateral consisted of nothing more than exceedingly bad mortgages which had been packaged and re-packaged into securities, the value of which was no longer measurable. But no one seemed to care, because the money kept rolling in by the ton.

However, when the demanding reality of the world caught up with the fantasy built into these complex trading models, the hedging walls collapsed. And the U. S. economy narrowly missed a fatal bullet.

Photo:  by Dick Bergeron

It's Best in Summer

This is the best time of the year to enjoy a well-churned ice cream cone, especially if it’s from a local roadside ice cream stand. Somerset County, New Jersey doesn’t have too many of those, but a first-rate, long-established one can be found just a few miles past Bridgewater on Route 22 West – Polar Cub Ice Cream.

The place was so unexpectedly crowded on a recent, muggy-hot early July evening that, when we drove up to it, the parking lot was as full as a generously hand-packed quart of ice cream. An overflow of autos was lined up in the breakdown lane of Route 22.

It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen it that backed up but, as we all know, this continues to be an extraordinarily hot summer. It’s also the first time that Priscille and I turned back on account of that tie-up! If you haven’t yet been there, it’s worth your gas money to try it out.

When I was a kid up in the Bay State of New England, I can remember at least four high-volume roadside ice cream emporiums within home driving distance which made their own blends of that summer delight. Not wanting to miss out on any of those frozen specialties, we visited each one of them over the course of the season!

Don’t you wish that we could preserve some of this heat for winter use? Thanks for reading; stay cool; be engaged.

Photo:  Ice cream lovers line up at the Polar Cub Ice Cream stand on Route 22, a few miles west of the Bridgewater line

A Bit of a Break

It’s far from the famous beaches of the New Jersey Shore and not well-known to people south of New England: Lake Winnipesaukee is about 100 miles north of Boston in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire where the classic cinematic masterpiece “On Golden Pond” was filmed.

This massive island-studded glacial lake covers 69 square miles and is encircled by low-lying ranges south of the White Mountains which, in turn, lie about an hour or so ‘up north,’ as Granite State natives are fond of saying.

On the way up we spied license plates from states like Maryland and Virginia, but none from New Jersey. Nonetheless, the region is well-known in the New England states and in eastern Canada for its great vacation and recreational facilities. Despite the condition of the down-trodden economy nationally, recreational facilities of all types in this area seem to be doing well.

Last night at Canoe’s, a highly popular restaurant in Center Harbor, we made the mistake of pulling into the parking lot without a reservation: 45 minutes to wait for seating. Too hungry for that, we scooted down to the Town Docks in Meredith where all the outdoor tables were in use, but only a 15-minute wait.  If you like lobster at a reasonable price, this is one of the places to patronize.

A New England favorite is the ubiquitous lobster roll. No chintzy servings of that tasty crustacean are allowed – not if you want to stay in business, that is. Served in a plain hot dog roll which disappears under a mound of large, lightly seasoned lobster chunks, you get a treat that goes well with your favorite cold beverage.

Thanks for reading, and have a good rest-of-the summer. If you don’t hear from me as regularly in the next week or so, it’s because I’ll be chilling out.

Photo:  An early morning view from Black Cat Island into the wide-open expanse of Lake Winnipesaukee which stretches 21 miles long (by Dick Bergeron).