modem outside of a school, it was never perfectly reliable, and feels like it has only gotten slower and less reliable over time. This feeling is of course aggravated by my experiences with far superior DSL service in both Japan and Taiwan, but the biggest insult was discovering that cable internet service provided by Optimum Online to my apartments in New Brunswick (I went to Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey), not even one hour away from home and in the same state, was dramatically superior in both speed and service quality.

On Saturday, following a period of off-and on flakiness, the connection from Comcast stopped working completely. All right, I thought, on Monday we (I and my father) are going up to his house in Capemy last several weeks in Japan (for this year anyway), in honor of my return to good old New Jersey, below are some choice quotes from a book of travel writing by the late humorist Irvin S. Cobb entitled Some United States (1926) purchased just this afternoon from the $1 shelves outside the famous Strand bookstore in The City. As the title of this post implies, today I bring you excerpts from the chapter on the great state of New Jersey.

CHAPTER XII

NEW JERSEY

Just Behind Those Billboards

After you cross by train through the tube under the North River, which is so-called because it is really the Hudson River and edges Manhattan Island on the west and bears no relation whatsoever to the northern boundaries of anything at all, and,