"A Keg tapped at both ends." Well, it's time to tap back.

So, there you have it:

Cheese Steak vs. Hot Dog. South Bronx vs. South Philly. The Hudson vs. The Delaware. The City That Never Sleeps vs. The City of Brotherly Love. The Statue of Liberty vs. The Liberty Bell. Philadelphia Daily News vs. The New York Daily News.

Where WC Fields once said, “I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday. ” And Jay Leno once said, “The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up. ”

And just where is New Jersey with all of this? Just as Ben Franklin said, “A keg tapped at both ends”.

Well, it’s time to tap back.

What state will NY Yankees fans and Phillies fans have to pass through? Us. What roads will they have to travel on to get to their respective stadiums between now and next weekend? Ours. Which bathrooms will they be using if they drink too beer much at a game? Which gas stations will they use to fill up their tanks? Ours, that’s whose. Forget ‘Pay to Play’:

New Rule: “Pay to Pass Through.”

Set up EZPass to detect the Phillies ‘P’ and the Yankees ‘NY’ and quadruple the tolls. Charge them to use the bathrooms. If a Yankees and/or Phillies fans stops here for gas, charge’em a ‘pump your own gas’ surcharge. If they stop to eat in a NJ restaurant, add a World Series travel fee.

We have state debt in New Jersey, and now’s our shot to have help from Yankees and/or Phillies fans pay it down.

So, raise your beer to Ben Franklin: He had the right idea. He was just a century or two too early. And just had no way to pay for it.

(In the interest of complete disclosure, Ben would have most likely been a Phillies fan, where as I am a life-long Yankees fan. Prediction: Yanks in six.)

Why always New Jersey?

Neil Cohen, once the liberal champion for all liberal causes in NJ, has resigned. The guy who every year wanted to set the beaches free from the requirement of a beach pass resigned this morning, effective immediately. When there are allegations of child porn on your office computer, I guess 'resignation' is the next step.

It’s a slow news summer, so, unfortunately, this news will play around the country’s local news outlets on the same page with sidebars re-covering NJ’s gay governor as well the Corzine/Katz email incident. I am sure that stand-up comedians over the next few weeks will use this information as grist for their comedy mills.

So, why is it always New Jersey? I don’t know. I am from New York, and I chose to live in the ‘burbs of Hunterdon County just about twenty years ago. I did not choose Flemington, as much it chose me. But the whole New Jersey jokes thing may have begun when Ben Franklin said, "New Jersey is like a beer barrel, tapped at both ends, with all the live beer running into Philadelphia and New York." Not funny now, but back in 1776 that line killed.

Sometimes Franklin would tour taverns around the colonies with Jefferson on the violin. He even made fat jokes about John Adams.

This is an actual line from the Federalist Papers, but rejected at the 1789 convention: : "The Adams from Massachusetts is so fat [then the Congress would yell out 'how fat is he?']....that he should have his own constitution!" Bada bing!

So, Ben, thanks for electricity, the pot bellied stove, the Farmers Almanac, and ----initiating the jokes about New Jersey.

Where are my free speech rights? I think I left them around here somewhere.

An old joke:

This guy is walking around and around a lamp post at night. This cop passes by and demands an explanation. "I lost my keys”, slurs the guy.

Cop: "Oh, so you lost them under the lamp post?"
Guy: "Naw, lost 'em two blocks down there. Under my car."
Cop (angrilly): "So why look for them under the lamp post?"
Guy: "Cause the light's so much better here!"

Unfortunately, the light’s not that good anymore in private planned urban communities in New Jersey like Twin Rivers. You’ll have to look elsewhere for your free speech rights –---maybe where the light is better.

Here in New Jersey, our Supreme Court says it’s OK to sign away your free speech rights if you want to live in a private community. When someone buys in to Twin Rivers, they sign an agreement that signs away a portion of their free speech rights. And the court said, in this case, that that is okay as long as the restrictions are not “unreasonable”. One may think that the act of signing away your constitutional rights in and of itself is an "unreasonable" requirement.

“This is America! How can they sign away their constitutional rights so easily?” you may inquire. I think as others do, that you need to be very careful about which rights you sign away. Some day you may discover that you need it bad: “Aha! Where is my freedom of speech? I think I put it here someplace….”

The trend in corporate America is to develop more and more large privatized areas –where the First Amendment must be given up at the door. Restrictions to freedom of speech in shopping malls in NJ were first challenged some years ago. Now the arena it's private condo communities. This is not a trend that bodes well for civil liberties. What could be next?

On the side of COMMITTEE FOR A BETTER TWIN RIVERS was the A-Team --- Prof. Frank Askin and the ACLU [Ed Barocas, the Legal Director of the ACLU explains why he thinks his team scored a ‘victory, anyway].

On the other side was the TWIN RIVERS HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATION and their great attorney, ----my good friend, Barry Goodman. Barry and his team are the key reasons for the Twin Rivers 7-0 victory. Go ahead, Barry –do your victory lap. You deserve it.

The Twin Rivers-type communities of America may be wonderfully looking private neighborhoods with perfectly landscaped sloping lawns. The homes have doors and window fixtures all the same contractually-agreed-to-color. But, it is a slippery slope off of those lawns in to a privatized/corporatized America where people are willing to give up constitutional rights to achieve a little security ---and aesthetic beauty.

Maybe the folks who’ve bought into the private planned urban communities don’t even know they have waived their free speech rights to begin with. I don’t know.

But, remember what Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety [and in this case, some aesthetic beauty] , deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Wonder if Ben would have moved in to Twin Rivers?

Flemington: MyTown in Central Jersey

While most of New Jersey struggles with the dichotomy of being either South Jersey or North Jersey, MyTown of Flemington sits in the center of Central New Jersey, at the heart of heavenly Hunterdon County. We sit pretty much in the center---we’re one hour north of Philadelphia and one hour west of NYC. People here work and travel to both cities everyday. Well, not the same people---that would be silly. But many people do choose to live here because of its proximity to NYC and Philly. One spouse/domestic partner/civil-unionist can work in one city, while the other works in the other. Proudly, we are the center of Central New Jersey. The center of what Ben Franklin called "A keg tapped at both ends".

Fellow comedian Dom Irrera tells a joke about nicknames: “In the old neighborhood, everyone had a nickname. There was Big Petey. There was Little Petey. There was even Medium Petey."

Sometimes, but not always, I feel like we live in the equivalent of ‘Medium Petey’. Not quite northern NJ and not quite southern, either. To my buds in Bergen County, we’re part of South Jersey, and all Philly fans. To my peeps in Gloucester County, we’re strict northerners and all Yankee fans. And at the center of it all is Flemington, MyTown in Central Jersey.

And I can say ‘MyTown’ because while I am not a native NJer [born and raised in NYC, thank you very much---Brooklyn, to be exact, thanks again] I spent twelve years on the Flemington Borough Council dealing with the problems and challenges that any Central Jersey town faces these days. Property taxes. Sprawl. Property taxes. Traffic. Downtown business leaving, coming back, leaving again. And property taxes, of course. So, I can now claim my piece of NJ as MyTown.

Flemington [aside from being MyTown] is really Anytown, USA. We have our Main Street [really called “Main Street”, ---and we even have a North Main and a South Main, too]. We have our history ---the Lindbergh Baby Trial took place here in 1935. And, no, it was not the Lindbergh Baby who was on trial [like we’ve never heard that joke before]—(and yup, I made that joke myself once, when I was living here for about five minutes) ----it was the first “Trial of the Century” and the trial-ee was Bruno Hauptman. We even have a re-enactment of the Trial each year in the actual courthouse where the original trial took place. Some older folks around here (including the current Mayor) still believe that Hauptman was guilty and got what he deserved. Really.

While MyTown has not grown much in years and years and years [pop. according to City-Data.com is “Males: 2,038 (48.5%)Females: 2,162 (51.5%)”, [Check that out, fellas!---that’s 1.06 girls for every boy!]
We’re still just about 4200, on the nose------MyTown is surrounded on all four sides by the ever-growing, ever-changing, ever-pulsating, housing development-building, school-constructing, mall-installing, ‘open space’ buying, super-growing Raritan Township [21,834 residents, increased a staggering 138.9 percent since 1980!] -----RTville, the town without a center.

RTville used to call MyTown ‘the whole in the doughnut’. I prefer [since MyTown is the town-center of RTville] to call MyTown the ‘nucleus of the cell’. After all, this is where everything in Hunterdon happens---all roads in Hunterdon County [well, two roads, actually---31 and 2-oh-2] lead to MyTown. My term has not caught on yet with the local residents, but it is more catchy than ‘the whole in the doughnut’, and it has panache. And EveryTown in NJ needs some panache to distinguish itself from NYC, Philly and [sometimes] the rest of Jersey.

So, I kind’ve grown to like MyTown very much. It’s home and it is getting more panache-ey everyday.