The Station Inn is open Seven nights a week with a cover charge Monday - Saturday. Doors open at 7 p.m. each night with live music starting at 9 p.m., unless otherwise noted. You must be age 21 and older or be accompanied by a parent or guardian to enter. For high profile performances, please plan on arriving early.

Every Sunday the Station Inn there's a bluegrass jam session. It's the most real deal music left in all of Nashville, and it doesn't even have a cover charge! Last weekend, I attended this with timball. The number of players peeked around 13 at once, out of about 16 musicians who were there playing. Truly amazing. I lack the words to convey how good it sounded and how much I was enjoying myself. If you go to this and you do not enjoy it, you must not like music.

The Station Inn

The oldest distillery in America is Scobeyville, New Jersey's Laird & Co., a producer of applejack. Known as "Jersey Lightning", applejack's long history in New Jersey includes once being used as currency to pay road construction crews during the colonial period.

Curse you, foul demon!

I love it!

Applejack. Yes, it's New Jersey. Just say Thank You.

Two mayors and two state legislators are among 11 public officials arrested in New Jersey as part of a corruption investigation, the U.S. attorney's office in Trenton announced Thursday.

"The defendants allegedly demanded and accepted payments ranging from $1,500 to $17,500 at any one time," the release from the U.S. attorney's office alleges. "In most cases, the defendants sought to establish and perpetuate a corrupt relationship with the cooperating witnesses to continue receiving bribes."

Corrupt public officials in Jersey? Say it ain't so!! Heh..

This is really great to see. Maybe there is some hope of making the NJ state government effective in the next century or so..

Mayors, legislators arrested in New Jersey corruption probe - CNN.com

Welcome to the Jersey Shore! Have a great time, but please don't dig too deeply in the sand in Surf City (you could get blown up), feed the seagulls in Ocean City (you could catch a disease), or draw dirty pictures in the sand in Belmar (it's rude).

If you have tummy trouble, don't even think of going to Sea Bright, and if you come to Spring Lake, leave your spear gun at home. Other beaches won't let you eat, pick flowers, fly a kite, gamble or ride a camel.

Many of the beach towns on Long Beach Island, one of New Jersey's most popular summer vacation spots, have laws prohibiting people from digging deeper than 12 inches in the sand. They stem from an accident several years ago in which a teenager died when a deep hole he was digging collapsed, burying him.

This year, the prohibition is for a different reason: More than 1,000 pieces of unexploded World War I-era military munitions were unwittingly pumped ashore during a winter beach replenishment project decades after being dumped at sea. Authorities say they've removed everything they could, but can't guarantee more munitions don't remain hidden.

"How can you tell a kid not to dig in the sand?" asked Faith O'Dell, who lives near the beach in Surf City, where most of the fuses were found. "It's their nature, it's what kids do. And when your kid says, `Why, Mommy, why can't I dig in the sand?' what do you tell them, that they could blow themselves up?"

N.J. beach rules target seagulls, camels, dirty pictures - CNN.com

A raging forest fire, started by what authorities suspect was an errant flare from a military aircraft, burned more than 12,000 acres of Pine Barrens, forced more than 1,000 southern Ocean County residents from their homes Tuesday night, and closed parts of several highways including the Garden State Parkway.

That flare, released by a plane flying over the Warren Grove Gunnery Range, ignited a blaze that, fed by dry weather and whipped by a 30-mph southwest wind, burned close to 20 square miles of forest land and damaged about 50 homes in Barnegat's Brighton at Barnegat, an age-restricted development of prefabricated, modular homes in perhaps Barnegat's most rural neighborhood.

By 10 p.m., the fire had consumed about 19 square miles, according to Bert Plante, a division fire warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

"As of 10 p.m., we have 15 percent of the fire contained," Plante said. "We're hoping that goes up rapidly overnight. We're not going to get a very good damage estimate until daylight hours. It's a crapshoot if we can keep damage under 15,000 acres. The fire is still very active because of the wind."

Gabliks said hundreds of state forest fire workers were called in, along with 150 pieces of equipment with crews from fire companies in Ocean, Monmouth, Atlantic, Burlington and Camden counties.

"It was a usual mission, when aircraft roll in to drop practice bombs and strafe targets on the range," Garcia explained.

As part of the simulated combat, pilots "pop off" flares from ejector tubes in the tails of the aircraft. The extremely hot flares are designed as decoys to attract enemy heat-seeking missiles that otherwise would home in on the aircraft engine exhaust, he said.

The range control crew dispatched its own firefighting equipment when spotters in the range tower detected the blaze, but it got out of control in winds gusting to 27 knots, he said.

Garcia acknowledged the fire could pose problems for the Air Guard, which has faced local community complaints about the range over the years. In fall 2004, another F-16 pilot accidentally discharged his jet's 20 mm gun during a night approach to the range target. Several non-explosive bullets pelted a school on the other side of the parkway in Little Egg Harbor as janitors worked inside. No one was injured then.

This is my home town. This kinda thing actually happens often.

The wail of sirens seemed to come from all directions while planes and helicopters circled constantly overhead, but many residents in Ocean Acres seemed unfazed by the commotion unfolding before them.

Susan and Rick Campanile, who have lived on Mermaid Drive for 30 years, said the frequency of forest fires, especially those in Warren Grove, have almost numbed them to the possibilities of what could happen.

"It always makes you nervous, but you can't do anything," Susan Campanile said.

One year they entertained guests at a cookout as cinders fell from the sky while a fire burned along Route 72. Other times the threat grew so real they hosed down their home as a precaution.

Yesterday, though, the Campaniles merely joined the rest of their neighbors out in the street to watch the smoke plume grow.

Asbury Park Press | 12,000 Acres of Jersey Burn

New Jersey again has the highest household income of any state and one of the lowest poverty rates, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, but two of its biggest cities are among the poorest in the nation.

Camden ranks as the poorest place in the country with a population over 65,000 and Newark is among the poorest cities with more than 250,000 people, according to the figures released Tuesday based on data for 2005.

The numbers illustrate that New Jersey, with its middle-class and wealthy suburbs nestled up against struggling, old industrial cities, continues to be a place of stark economic contrasts.

New Jersey is richest state, but has some of the poorest cities (phillyBurbs.com) | New Jersey News

Dagmar has posted a well thought out argument about the Patrick Aaron Lee situation over at LiveJournal.

Tragically, Patrick Lee died last Saturday after having taken a bunch of drugs and winding up in an altercation with the police. Unfortunately the family and a few friends are acting "a-fool" and apparently trying to claim this is a case of police brutality, regardless that the responding officers demonstrated remarkable restraint in their attempts to restrain a guy who was basically running around a parking lot naked.

I've gotten more than a little irritated about this, since under normal circumstances a Taser is a really safe thing to be using (as opposed to batons and bullets), and taking them off the streets is just going to get more people hurt that could probably have been brought under control with a taser. Therefore I have summarized events and countered some of the deliberate misinformation in hopes that this information is going to make it's way into the proper hands and hopefully put some minds to rest.

Regardless of whether he was relatively irresponsible, he will be missed.

I'm of the opinion that more research needs to be done on Taser usage before any reasonable conclusions can be drawn.

Update: Dagmar's post has really been making the rounds.

The death of Patrick Lee was an accident

Could a new plant, designed and built to current standards, be licensed on the same site today? With the growth of Ocean County, which continues today, it is not certain that a nuclear plant would be permitted there today.

The design of Oyster Creek's reactor has been prohibited for nearly four decades. Does that reactor conform to today's standards? Would Oyster Creek receive a license today with that reactor?

In light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would Oyster Creek's storage system, which is located close to Route 9, be acceptable today?

Is the evacuation plan realistic in today's Ocean County?

Every few months something about Oyster Creek comes up. I've blogged my thoughts about this several times. This plant is known for its accidents and union disputes with workers who blow whistles about the plant's many problems.

I am of the opinion that they should update the plant rather than shut it down. Remove the current reactor, encase it in solid concrete on the western part of the site, and install something new and modern. They already have a very significant amount of waste storage on site, might as well go for broke. It is Jersey after all, home of the Toxic Avenger. The plant would not be a problem if it was safe and efficient. Currently, it is neither.

Joseph Scarpelli, Mayor of Brick Township, NJ, Petitions against Oyster Creek Nuclear Powerplant (Cryptome)

Cryptome eyeballs the nuclear power plant yours truly grew up within a mere two miles of. I like to think of it as "my nuclear power plant". Over the years, I've truly enjoyed following its various accidents and dribbling safety record. My childhood is dotted by its infrequent drills and more frequent fish-kills. I revel in every dead link to its emergency plans as if they were the failed papers of my children hanging on the kitchen refrigerator.

Noted for being the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, it has claimed a number of firsts over its lifetime. I believe it even held first place on Greenpeace's "accidents waiting to happen" list, bumped only because its actually had accidents happen. While no radiation leak has ever (publicly) occurred which has extended beyond the site's inner boundary, local residents keep our iodine tables handy and in a cool preserving environment.

Oyster Creek, first run by the same company that brought us such hits as Three Mile Island, is now run by the company that brought us the spring blockbuster known as The Great East Coast Blackout, and remains a major local attraction. The energy museum on the north end of the site burnt down several years ago when a forrest fire blazed right up to the edge of the plant site, but any given day you will find a dozen or so local residents fishing off the Route 9 (locally known as Thunder Road, due to the Springstein song) bridge on the southern side of the plant. The plant's exit stream is known as one of the best local fishing spots due to the slightly (sometimes radically) warmer waters present. In the evening you can watch the sun set over the plant, and in the morning experience the eerie fog present on the south side of the plant.

Also visible in this image is the past path of the defunct rail line running along Route 9 that government plans cite as the route for transporting its growing nuclear waste stockpile. You may notice how it suddenly ends at the roads on either side of the plant. A few years ago the local waste site was augmented to hold even more waste, as the plant continues to have its license extended again and again, pushing far beyond the plant's designed lifetime. Oyster Creek, rusted drywell and all, continues to pound away, never at full capacity, and likely will for years to come until this lovely chunk of Ocean County is evacuated and turned into a wildlife preserve.

Eyeballing the Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Station

] University police found assault rifles and more than one
] ounce of marijuana during a traffic stop early Monday
] morning.

] Officer Jason Myatt stopped a Ford Expedition around
] 1 a.m. Feb. 7 after it made an illegal u-turn on MTSU
] Boulevard, according to the police report.

] The weapons included a Model 26 Glock semiautomatic
] handgun, a Stag Arms AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a
] Russian-made AK-47. Police also found $1,250 cash.

That is some pretty serious hardware to have on campus. Sounds like they were dealing as well.

I like this quote about assault weapon carrying potheads:

] Glenn said that MTSU is an extremely safe campus, but
] that in his experience, but that people who carry assault
] weapons are on different plane.
]
] "They don't see the world like you and I do," Glenn said.
] "It's not a response to a threat on their part; it's a whole
] different way of looking at the world."

Two arrested with marijuana, guns - The Sidelines - News