When they talk about the boardwalk in New Jersey they mean Seaside Heights:
That’s amazing. I’ve been there, we visited a few years ago. Here’s one tiny sliver of the boardwalk:
I have other photos, of course. They are on the one SD card I can’t seem to find at a moment. But nevertheless, terrible scene in New Jersey, among many places. The Yankee spent part of her summers on that boardwalk. And, like Gov. Chris Christie said, it’s all gone or in the ocean.
What awesome might the ocean can throw at the shoreline. No one talks like that, but we all think it as more and more of these stories come out.
I like this kind of story from the New Yorker:
By late Monday, the conditions were frightening. The lights were out. There was no water. The toilets didn’t flush. There were power failures in the emergency room and the transplant unit. Medical personnel had to bring more than two hundred patients down the stairs and get them to other hospitals all over the city and beyond. Earlier, Virginia Rossano had been going through a seizure—just as planned. But now was no time for that, and she was given Ativan, a drug that relaxes the brain and relieves seizures.
Medical personnel (including one med student) put Virginia on a kind of sled and began moving her out of the building. “Three young men carried Virginia down twelve flights of stairs, so slowly, so methodically,” Cathy Rossano said. “They were phenomenal.”
The delicate process, repeated with hundreds of patients, took nearly a half hour, and, when they got to the street, the Rossanos encountered a line of ambulances, many of them with volunteers who had driven hundreds, even thousands, of miles to help. “There were people from California, Texas, from everywhere,” Cathy Rossano said. “Our guys were from somewhere in Illinois.”
I think I can use that as a good example of an anecdotal lead for the next year or so. It starts with a medical procedure called a craniotomy, which is not something you’ll ever forget once you hear it. It has great detail of getting patients out of a non-working hospital and has that everyone-came-together-and-made-it-out happy ending. Definitely worth your reading time.
Speaking of Chris Christie, and we were, here’s something else I read about the governor and his unrequited love for Bruce Springsteen. I feel like it gets some things wrong, but it gets so much right:
He is flushed and beaming. The song ends, and he releases his commissioners, who seem happy to bask in their governor’s attention and also happy that he did not crack their windpipes. We’re all feeling elation—if the E Street Band at full throttle doesn’t fill you with joy, you’re probably dead—and it strikes me that this is the moment to ask the governor a trick question: “Do you think Mitt Romney could relate to this? To a Bruce Springsteen show?”
He looks at me like I’m from France. “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”
What about Newt?
“He’s been married three times!,” Christie answers. “He’d get this. You know what I mean?”
Not really, but I accept the point: something about longing and sin and betrayal and the possibility of redemption.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Christie is a fairly usable thumbnail on the governor, so it isn’t just the Newt joke. There are a few other good lines worth remembering, too.
(Update: Aww, look, Springsteen whom Christie says “feels guilty that he has so much money, and he thinks it’s all a zero-sum game” actually complimented his governor in a Halloween show at Rochester. Probably made the guy’s day.)
