Continuing on happier stuff, on Tuesday I had the chance to get together for dinner with 
woodlander and two people one of whom I think doesn't have a Livejournal and one whom I know doesn't, who's from Florida (which is unrelated to his not having a Livejournal), but who was driving up the eastern seaboard and happened to be coming near. So we met for the chance to see him.
Our plan was to gather at a 1950s nostalgia diner in Belmar, New Jersey, which was a good plan except that the diner no longer existed. Even if it had existed it wouldn't have been so easy to find. That side of the street lacked numbers and the opposite side went up only to 700 (we were looking for 801), so I did some circling around to guess that this was the only spot that even remotely resembled the Google Map illustration of the place. As it wasn't even there anyway, we waited a while for a person we weren't sure was going to show up to not appear, and then went on.
So we set out for the boardwalk, in the hopes of finding a place that was open and preferably indoors, where we discovered that the Florida guy hadn't seen the ocean in a year and change despite nearly living on it, that apparently they don't have beach tags in Florida (he was also surprised to learn there's full-service gas in New Jersey, and no, they don't make you pop your hood so they can look uncertainly over the oil and air filter and whatnot -- he was worried about people checking his transmission fluid or something like that), and that the Belmar boardwalk on an early-summer Tuesday evening doesn't have a lot of places that aren't pizza shops. There was at least one restaurant which looked promising, despite the fact that it looked like it was kind of leaning over towards the shore, kind of like an old apartment I used to have. On closer examination, though, it appeared to be closed.
Walking down the shore we ran across one bar that apparently was the happening spot of Belmar, based on the number of people outside who were talking and smoking, but on the way back the spot was empty, so either they opened or they lost their coolness. After making fun of the logical implications of the warnings about excessive noise or there not being a lifeguard on duty, we walked back to my car. If it seems to you that there's not a lot to make fun of in a sign about noise ordinances, maybe you had to be there. There was also some homeowner who set outside his house an inflatable Spider-Man, with a flat foot, perched on the corner as if to pounce, although he was holding an American Flag.
Trivia: Thomas Alva Edison's first run as a train newsboy was on a train leaving Port Huron, Michigan, at 7 am and arriving at Detroit three hours later. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stuart H Holbrook.
Currently Reading: The Evening News, Arthur Hailey. I suppose it shows how technology's permeated things in the 17 years since the book was published that the opening scene attempts to impress us by pointing out how the newsroom can call up even partially edited video hot off the videotapes.