I love the iron work on the balcony, truly, I love it!

Clearly the folks above were overdosing on Phoquittal (copyright) when they landscaped their lawn. And who can blame them? The Oxygen Cycle be damned!! This guy came here to fish, not push a mower!!

There is simply no explaining the paradox that is the Jersey shore. It manifests in the most amazing displays of, well, I guess it's a kind of gratitude for one's environment you see rarely expressed in the burbs. Here is the true expression of the artist in each of us, the non plus ultra statement with which many homeowners feel the need to punctuate their property. Above are a few examples.

The local library is wonderful. Although they were taken aback when I asked if they had a cache of grownup jigsaw puzzles to loan. "We have some for children". Well, that doesn't do me much good, does it, lady? I explained that on the island I lived on in Maine, jigsaw puzzles were a hot item at the Libe. This is clearly not a puzzling community (how can they manage without such pleasurable meditation?); not even the dollar store, usually a reliable source of decent 500 piece puzzles in Maine, has them. I explained to the woman how puzzles were an excellent source of meditation; she just stared at me.

But what they DO have at the library here are DVDs of the entire first and second seasons of Dallas! And T and I are knee deep into season one, waiting for the cliffhanger ending. I remind my skeptical daughter (who is now so enthralled she put the Dallas theme ringtone on her phone yesterday) that when she was just a tot, and I had to do dinners Friday nights at my cafe, I would clean up as fast as possible, rush home, and beg my then husband to tell me what happened on Dallas tonight?! This was before the advent of VCRs, or at least I didn't have one. I believe T was skeptical that anything from the early 80s could capture her imagination, but she is hooked! We watch a few episodes a night, and revel in the shenanigans of JR Ewing, his astonishingly dumb, prone to self immolation female costars, his despicable dad, Jock (I call him "Jerk") and Miss Ellie, who is the poorest excuse for a mother anyone can imagine. She is the Enabler Supreme! Cliff Barnes with his tortoise mouth perpetually agape; cute as a bug and lame as a one legged toad Ray Krebs, an amazing character who has his way with that minxy Lucy one minute and is the model of paternity with her the next. These people are seriously twisted, providing the stellar model of behaviorial self destruction that we came to know as the eighties, Raygunomics, and the me generation. And yet, the show has it redeeming moments: these amazing pro choice arguments folks today would do well to heed, little insights about the have and have nots. It's like the writers and producers weren't really sure if these folks were good guys or bad guys (the essence of the American psyche). They definitely plugged into the zeitgeist, that's for sure.

For example, T insists that I once bought Principal Secret (a moment of Sunday morning infomercial tv madness) because it was Pamela Ewing who was selling it and so I believed what she said about her product! Well, whatever... but the proof is in the pudding, in this case my pudding riddled face.

So now I'll have to reactivate my Netflix to get seasons 3 and onward. Libe only has these two seasons. I guess I might as well watch the final season of MI5 as well on Netflix. Now there's a riveting show for you! If you're not into MI5, the BBC spy show, Netflix has 7, count em, seven seasons for your viewing pleasure, and the first few are instant viewing. It's an intelligent, riveting show, well done, as the Brits say. And the fellas are not hard to look at, ladies.

So Sarah Palin's running for Prez, eh? T's response: "NICE!" And I concur. Clearly Sarah's caught wind of the women's movement in the Rwandan Parliament, figuring it was time she capitalized on that, bein white and all, she'll have somethin they wanna hear, dontcha know. Maybe she can see their black faces from her house!

"The cardinal rule of politics -- never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman"

JR Ewing

Whoever said Elvis was the king was seriously misinformed.