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Re: Newport Centre Mall: GameStop store employees beaten, robbed of $27G, cops say
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Worker's comp laws are supposed to protect employers from worker injury suits, but if an employer clearly was negligent and kept sending employees out just to be robbed, then maybe a lawyer could file a separate negligence suit. If someone here knows the crime victim, one step might be to start a thread here asking for names of good Jersey City personal injury or worker's comp lawyers.
Posted on: 2007/12/30 4:39
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Re: Newport Centre Mall: GameStop store employees beaten, robbed of $27G, cops say
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Is it true that crime victims can get free medical care in Jersey City? If so, how does that work?
Posted on: 2007/12/29 21:43
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Re: Downtown Manhattan will remain hot real estate in 2008
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The Crain's publications are great, but it's hard to trust a positive local TV news story about local used car dealers or carpet stores, a positive USA Today story about auctions of government property, or a positive article about the local real estate market in a local business paper that's full of real estate ads.
It could be that the reporter here is unbiased and that the predictions will turn out to be accurate, but this is just the wrong place to look for that kind of analysis.
Posted on: 2007/12/28 19:22
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Re: City cuts business at 14 'problem' barbershops: shops became "substitute for social clubs"
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Well, I agree. Even if the real reason for shutting the barber shops down was drugs, why did they shut down the barber shops instead of the open air drug distribution points? If I had my druthers, I'd rather have drug-selling barber shops than open-air drug markets. Apparently, there was some huge coke distribution barber shop two blocks from my house, and I never even noticed it till the Jersey Journal covered a bust there.
Posted on: 2007/12/27 21:48
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Re: City cuts business at 14 'problem' barbershops: shops became "substitute for social clubs"
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This reminds me of the Dave Chappelle episode in which he gently explains to naive white folks like me that certain barber shops are places where people sell drugs.
Posted on: 2007/12/27 16:06
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Re: Cancellation of NO 16 and 99 BUS!
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I've tried to take Bus 16 sometimes when I've gone from downtown to Temple Beth El. The problem with that bus is that it seems to be so infrequent and/or so erratic, especially on weekends, that actually catching one of the buses is a huge pain. To be useful, I think, a city bus line really has to run at least every 10 minutes from about 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and at least every 20 minutes on evenings and weekends, and there has to be a sign at every bus stop explaining just what the schedule is. The ideal would be if the city could somehow arrange for some of the dollar vans to take over the Bus 16 routes. The Bus 16 riders would end up with more frequent service, and the riders on the Bergenline dollar van route would still have plenty of service.
Posted on: 2007/12/27 16:00
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Re: City plans to sell Downtown Newark Avenue building -- "The Jersey City Employment & Training off
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If they could somehow get an absolutely ironclad agreement to use the OTB revenue to help the Newark Avenue area street people and the St. Lucy's shelter residents, and also the various soup kitchen patrons, then I would feel OK about the OTB parlor. But, of course, even if the city agreed to an agreement like that, which it wouldn't, city officials would find some way to get around the agreement, and we'd still end up with a harmless, friendly old drunk guys sleeping on the sidewalk.
Posted on: 2007/12/27 15:37
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Re: Real Estate Market trend In Jersey City
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Thoughts:
- To me, the range of prices in the original post seems narrow. A rundown, ugly 1,00-square-foot house in the zone for a bad school is bound to sell for a lot less than a well-maintained, attractively decorated 1,000-square-foot house in a good school zone, even if both houses are the same size. - Of course, if prices are actually down a bunch here, AND they've stabilized, this is a good time to buy. Buy low, sell high. - My guess would be that whatever forces are pushing prices down this year will probably push down for 2 or 3 more years, so, all other things being equal, 2008 or 2009 might be a better year to buy a house. - It's not clear to me that bonuses will be that terrible this year. The people involved with mortgages may be in trouble, but stocks have done OK. Maybe the people who are involved with stocks will get decent bonuses. - My suspicion is that Wall Street bonuses affect certain types of people who buy homes in Newport, Paulus Hook and occasionally in other parts of Jersey City, but that, for most buyers, the state of the mortgage market is a bigger concern. All other things being equal, homes here that cost less than $400,000 will probably do better than homes for about $400,000 to, say, $800,000, because the market for jumbo mortgages is frozen while the market for small mortgages is OK. People who buy $1 million houses, might not sweat over a little ice in the mortgage market, but most people who buy $600,000 houses around here probably need a really good deal on a mortgage. - On the other hand: one thing that's bound to support the market here and in New York is that, because prices are so high, there are tons of gainfully employed people with decent credit who are living with roommates. If prices ever start to fall a whole bunch, roommates will break up and find their own places, and that will put a floor on how low prices can really fall. - I'm starting to think that all of the downtown grade schools are actually very good. I was just at an event at my daughter's school, which is not one of the ones that "the yuppies have discovered" in a big way, and all of the children, parents and teachers were lovely. The test scores are actually a lot better than in many of the suburban schools. If it's true that the downtown grade schools are good, and if New Jersey figures out some way to hold funding steady when it passes control back to the city, then the fact that the schools are good could start to lead to increases in prices, even if the overall New York-Newark market is weak. Along the same lines: my impression is that a lot of the Heights schools and many of the West Side schools are as good as the downtown schools. So, it could be that a lot of neighborhoods are going to benefit from the good school effect. Keep in mind that, for a parent with 2 school age children who wants to avoid using Catholic parochial schools, living in a good public school zone means that the parent may be able pay about $200,000 to $500,000 more than the parent could afford to pay for a similar house in a crummy school zone.
Posted on: 2007/12/18 23:54
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Re: ox restaurant
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I finally got time to eat at OX.
In case anyone cares: To me, it seems as if the entryway and typestyle in the menus seriously misrepresent the restaurant. They make it seem like an obnoxiously snooty place where you can't come in unless you're dressed really well, and where, if you come in a new liquidator store outfit, you'll probably leave some uncool stain on the white banquette. The restaurant just seems to shriek, "Stay away unless you're rich, you poor scum." But then, I went in and it was a perfectly nice, Brooklyn Carroll Gardens hangout kind of place. To me, the decor is kind of flinty, but the white banquette takes up only one wall, and there are sturdy, spill-proof granite-topped (??) tables on the other side. The food is perfect, as I expected, and the prices are a little high, but probably not that high for that kind of perfect food. I think I saw a review on Kannekt that suggested OX serves big portions. In my opinion, that's incorrect. But my guess is that OX is serving healthy, European-size portions, and I don't think it's fair to zing this sort of restaurant over that sort of thing.
Posted on: 2007/12/16 23:00
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Re: Armed robbery near Montgomery?
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Disclaimer: The following could be wrong. I'm going by what I think I saw someone post here awhile back. You should call 911 in an emergency, but, if you're using a cell phone, the 911 routing system (?) is not very good, and it's hard for the 911 people to get your call to the right people. So, if you have a cell phone, you should program the non-911 number for the local police into your speed dial system and call that in an emergency (if you're in the city you live in when you see a crime). Question for those who know more about this: If what I've written is true, and you have two people calling about a serious crime in progress, would it make sense to have one person call 911 and the other speed dial the local police number, then ask the authorities which call to drop? Or would that just confuse everyone?
Posted on: 2007/12/14 5:29
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Re: Healy rides the crest of Hudson County politics
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In the real world, it might not be easy for the size of the Jersey Journal to do much real investigating. But the JJ could just do a weekly article on what the city business administrator says he's doing, and maybe what the planning people say they're up to. Even if the articles are really puffy articles, at least they would help the reporters get to know the staff people. Chances are that, even if there is some corruption, the main reason the JJ doesn't cover these people is simply that the reporters don't ask, not because the city is trying to hid the city business administrator.
Posted on: 2007/12/13 5:47
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Re: Healy rides the crest of Hudson County politics
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I didn't write that 3,000+ city/county staff employees are dishonest. I wrote that I think a lot of any significant amount of corruption that exists in the county probably exists at the staff level. (And by staff, I meant the "staffers who make the various operating divisions of local government run," not the "assistants of the mayors and city council members.") If I'd been thinking more clearly, I guess I also would have written that there must be an awful lot of power wielded at the staff level in a completely legal way but almost entirely in the dark, just because the Jersey Journal and the Hudson Reporter ignore the people at the staff level. R Pinkowitz has had a lot more first-hand experience with all of this than I have, but it seems to me that, for all of their faults, mayors and members of the various city councils get some media attention and have to get re-elected every year. Even in this area, there are some (loose) limits on how corrupt they can get. But members of the operating staffs get virtually no attention. In all fairness, I started thinking about this because the Jersey City city council itself let a tape of a city council committee meeting appear on the Comcast public access channel, and I saw some top-level Jersey City staffers that I'd never heard of. Probably those of us here who work for the Jersey Journal are probably sputtering and will whip up new avatars so that they can post a long list of JJ references to people like William Matsikoudis, the corporation counsel, and Brian O'Reilly, the city business administrator. But I think these staffers get a lot less press attention than city managers, general counsels and chief planners in a lot of other communities get from their local papers, and, within Hudson County, they've gotten way less media attention than Katia Stack and Carla Katz. I see 69 JJ article and blog hits for Katz, for example, and only 12 for Matsikoudis. I only see 2 hits for Katia Stack, but that's just because the current archive only covers 2007, and the Katia story seems to have peaked a couple of years ago. In other communities I've lived in, the city manager, the chief planner all were mini celebrities, and the papers quoted them to the point that it was a little embarrassing.
Posted on: 2007/12/12 16:16
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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I don't think I've ever had a flu shot, purely because I'm lazy, not even all that cheap. But, if there ever was a 1918-like killer flu, that flu actually killed working age people much more than it killed older people. That might be because the older people had acquired immunity during an earlier epidemic, but it might be that older people did better because they were more likely to stay and home rest once they got the flu. Re: the original question The problem with mandatory vaccination campaigns in our kind of society is that it's tricky quantifying the risks and impossible quantifying the benefits in a way that can satisfy skeptics. JSalt could be right, and maybe, say, measles vaccines are continuing to keep measles at an acceptable level, but it could be that measles would stay at the same level, with less risk, if we ended measles vaccination requirements. It's hard to know for sure, because it's ethically impossible to test the hypothesis by keeping some randomly selected kids from getting measles shots. At some point, you just have to roll the dice or go with your gut. My gut says that I'd rather risk the small chance that my daughter might react badly to the vaccine than to expose her to getting measles or diphtheria, but those side effect sheets you get with the shots are pretty scary.
Posted on: 2007/12/12 6:38
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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Maybe one thing that's happening here is that you have a really informed, nuanced view about all of this (not "all vaccines -- bad!!!" but "we should be careful when mandating vaccines, and careful balancing the risks versus the hoped for benefits"). Probably you and JSalt would find that you're on the same page, or very close, if you were in the same conference room and had the same data and same trustworthy experts to talk to. I think the opposition to HPV and chickenpox requirements is pretty reasonable, for example. But a lot of us here view probably are thinking more about people we know who don't use any vaccinations. Even though I vaccinate, I'd probably send my kid to a "vaccines not required" school, if it were a good school, but I bet I'd freak worry a lot during a bad flu season.
Posted on: 2007/12/12 4:58
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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Under normal circumstances, obviously, you're right. If there really were a scary outbreak on the level of the SARS outbreak in Canada, maybe it would be possible to at least enforce the "stay home" rule well enough to control the epidemic. Even if the "stay home" rule weren't perfect, maybe that, coupled with some kind of financial aid program for the parents who stay home, could keep a scary outbreak from turning into a genuine epidemic. It seems to me that doctors should get together and figure out what kind of rules would apply to what outbreaks. Maybe there wouldn't be anything stay home program at all for a normal flu or strep outbreak, but, if the kind of flu that infects everyone and kills 10 percent of the people who get it appeared, maybe there would be some kind of hardcore kid quarantine program. If that kind of killer outbreak happened, public hysteria would help with kid quarantine enforcement, because people would be terrified. My understanding is that, if killer flu surface, we'd all live in a state of quarantine for months, and maybe that would help with the stay home effort (although it might not be so great for the economy, or for food distribution).
Posted on: 2007/12/11 18:52
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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I guess the question here is not so much whether vaccinations make sense as whether the government has a right to make you give your child a treatment appears to be good for the community but could be harmful to that specific child. I doubt mercury in vaccines causes autism or any other problems, but some children certainly react badly to vaccines, mercury or no mercury. In New Jersey, the compromise is that you can decide not to vaccinate your child, but (unless you have an acceptable excuse) you can't send that unvaccinated child to school. You have to homeschool. That compromise is good, because it protects immunized children who have failed to develop proper immunity (and children who can't be immunized for clear-cut medical reasons), but it's bad because it keeps nice, normal children out of school just because they aren't immunized. Maybe a way to improve that compromise would be to permit parents who oppose immunization to set up private schools specifically for families that oppose immunization. That way, parents who consciously oppose immunization (or specific vaccines) could send their children to school, but parents who support immunization or have no opinion about the topic could send their children to schools in which most children have had their shots.
Posted on: 2007/12/11 17:20
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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My boss is great and would let me work from home, but the FMLA doesn't apply to very small employers, it doesn't apply to short but severe illnesses, and, of course, even if it does somehow apply to the illegal aliens in Jersey City who are working off the books, illegal aliens are never going to use it. But illegal aliens' kids can get sick, too, and make other kids sick, so this is the sort of issue over which immigrant haters ought to declare a truce. Even if the immigrant haters do want the 3-year-old immigrants to die of the flu, they need to agree to public health measures to protect those children for the sake of all the children. Public health authorities have to make a serious quarantine involving children such an important, powerful thing that even employers who are employing illegal day laborer slaves in dank basements have to obey the school kid quarantine kid rules, no matter what, no matter whether the workers are legal or illegal. The public health people should really have a right to send an armed guard to the workplace to make sure the employer lets the parent return to work. And I'm not talking about a cold or even normal strep, but true killer epidemics, such as bad flu epidemics. Also, my argument to the Webmaster about why this is not thread-hijacking: provisions for unimmunized public school students, and immunized students who lack immunity, is critical to the debate about vaccine requirements. If parents were sneaking un-immunized kids into school during a 1918-level killer flu epidemic that, without quick intervention, could kill hundreds of Jersey City school children and thousands of adults (without and without children), then that would be a big problem.
Posted on: 2007/12/11 17:10
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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Precisely. Anyhow: another thing we really need is some kind of law that absolutely positively prohibits employers from firing or discriminating against parents who stay home with children suffering from serious infectious diseases. If a parent is staying home with a child who has measles, or flu during a year when the flu is really dangerous, and an employer so much as makes a cranky call to the parent, C. Everett Koop should fly out of the phone and spit in the employer's face.
Posted on: 2007/12/11 14:54
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Re: No one is safe from the JC Parking Authority
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I'd like to give Woftkowski a medal. If the officers know they had a right to park where they were parking fine, but they should have continued with their stakeout and then gone to court to get the ticket knocked down, not let a suspect get a way because they were harassing someone who was just trying to enforce the law.
Posted on: 2007/12/11 14:44
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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For the hepatitis B, HPV and chicken pox vaccines, that's probably reasonable. In most cases, children are either very unlikely to contract those disease or unlikely to be harmed, and most of us here survived without having those vaccines. For diseases such as flu, measles and polio (in other words: diseases that can kill or disable a fairly large percentage of the people who are infected) people ought to figure out a compromise. Example: under normal circumstances, parents with qualms about the vaccines shouldn't have to give them. But, if cases of one of these diseases actually crop up in a community, the public health authorities should have the authority to make unvaccinated children (and vaccinated children who haven't actually developed antibodies against the diseases) stay out of regular classes while the diseases are circulating around the community. Under normal circumstances, the risks of the vaccines probably do outweigh the benefits. But, if a disease such as measles already is causing infections in a community, then you figure the benefits of being vaccinated would probably increase quite a lot. Example: Even if parents are willing to accept the risk that their children will develop measles without suffering from serious after effects, the problem is that having a large number of unvaccinated children gathering in schools could let epidemics take root and increase risks for all children who lack good immunity to measles, not just the children whose parents choose not to vaccinate. One of the obstacles to letting public health authorities keep children out of school during epidemics is that single working parents and two-income working parents without relatives living nearby. A solution to that would be to set up special epidemic schools during epidemics. Those schools could have small classes, to reduce the odds that children will infect one another, and extra nurses circulating around looking for kids who are sick and need to go home.
Posted on: 2007/12/10 22:49
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Re: NJ School Kids Forced to Have FOUR New Immunizations
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- FAB: The vaccine makers try to predict which three strains will be a big problem, then include protection against those in the vaccine. It's possible that the vaccine makers could guess wrong, and it's also possible that, even the vaccine makers guess wrong, the vaccine could protect you well enough against the actual straight to keep you from getting pneumonia (or to keep you alive, even if you get pneumonia).
One problem with flu vaccines is that, using current technology, it takes a long time to make them, because you normally need huge supplies of chicken eggs, and you have to start making the vaccines during a season when a lot of eggs are available.There's also a newer, faster technology involving tissue cultures, but I think developing the cultures takes time. So, if you wait till it seems pretty likely that a serious epidemic is on the way to vaccinate everyone, it probably will be too late. - Vaccine requirements: It seems as if the HPV vaccine requirement is very expensive and very questionable, and I also have mixed feelings about the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine. It sounds to me as if maybe it's better for small children to get real chicken pox than to get the vaccine, and use the vaccine for children with extra health risks and big who somehow never got the chicken pox. The flu vaccine requirement is more complicated because kids apparently do spread flu to their parents and older people, and a terrible, extremely deadly flu epidemic hit in 1918. (That epidemic was especially hard on working-age people, and I think that something like half of the pregnant women who got sick enough with that flu to enter the hospital died.) - Causes of autism: The author of the book, Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills ((click here for a Wikipedia entry summarizing the book) says there's a whole collection of taste-enhancing substances, such as MSG, aspartame, soy lecithin, and processed yeast, that clearly hurt brain cells in petri dishes and might hurt them in people, too. If vaccines cause, say, 1 case of autism for every 10 lives that they save and every 20 cases of autism or other kinds of crippling disability that they prevent, maybe that would be a reasonable tradeoff. (Or, maybe not, but I'd be open to hearing both sides.) If processed yeast makes my kid's "organic" tofu chicken fingers taste great but saves no lives and might occasionally cause autism or Alzheimer's disease, then I wish that topic were getting more attention.
Posted on: 2007/12/10 17:14
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Re: A lot of Park Slopers are moving to the other side of Newark: Maplewood NJ.
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Not much unlike how they ruined Jersey City, "yuppies" ruined Maplewood as well. OK, I guess that was snark. In my opinion, though, "yuppies" (and I'm defining that as "people who went to college, or can fake it, and drink lattes or a similar coffee drink, or consume some other equivalent food or beverage," not as "high-income jerk who knocks people over while talking on a cell phone") are really just another ethnic group (well, demographic group, but the modern marketing equivalent of an ethnic group), with our strengths, weaknesses, language (e.g.,  and ROTFLMAO) and peculiarities.At my daughter's school, I realized that the teachers are dealing with us in the same friendly, open, somewhat puzzled way that they'd deal with families from Tibet or from Burma: we're just another weird, wacky addition to the Mulligan stew. We're changing Jersey City, but we're not really ruining it any more than any of the other groups have, and, someday, some group will come in and change everything we've done, and people will go around complaining about the Martians, or whoever, have ruined Jersey City's charming old yuppie atmosphere.
Posted on: 2007/12/9 17:03
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Re: Healy rides the crest of Hudson County politics
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I think the secret to Hudson County politics is that the real power and the real corruption are probably hidden away in the Jersey City and Hudson County staffs.
Someone I know was doing some business at City Hall. It was a sleepy little place with patronage hires trying not to look as if they were deadwood. Then he went to the city administration offices at 30 Montgomery, and there was still a lot of deadwood, but a lot going on, and a lot of people from there talking in hushed voices at the Au Bon Pain. I'm sure there's something equivalent going on at the county level. And I love the Jersey Journal police blotter, feature and general assignment reporters, but I think the political reporters, and, especially, the columnists, are pretty weak people who probably keep their jobs by using ridicule to squash their critics. But, if the political columnists and reporters at the Jersey Journal were any good, they would be telling us almost as much about the Jersey City administrator, the city planners, the county planners, etc. as about Healy. Instead, the city and county staffs let Healy, Stack, et al. entertain us with their antics, and maybe get jobs for their kids and their friends, then the administrative people go back to their offices and cut the real deals. My guess is that most of us except, say, the builders here don't even have the conceptual framework in our heads to understand what we should be worried about at that staff level.
Posted on: 2007/12/8 20:27
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Re: ox restaurant
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by justjoe on 2007/12/7 21:11:41 Thanks for that suggestion. I definitely do use IGTM and find it to be a really useful restaurant to have around. The menu isn't exactly what I want, and the price is a little high for what you get (which, I understand has to do with the high cost of doing business around here, not with any desire by the IGTM people to be expensive), and at least you can call up and get good, clean broiled chicken strips with french fries. To everyone else: I'm trying to sit on my hands and not reply to all of the responses to my post, because the Webmaster kindly pointed out that I was sending this thread off track. The bottom line is: - The people who started OX are wonderful, creative food artists who have created a nice restaurant and deserve community support. I hope everyone here who either has no children or has an evening babysitter available will go there and eat and drink a lot (with whatever money they have left over from supporting Madame Claude's, Basic, Marco & Pepe, etc.). - To the extent that I've talked to OX-connected people and been positive: I haven't been trying to be two-faced. I really want you to succeed. Really. If I in any posts here seemed to imply that I oppose you starting your restaurant, or aiming at whatever niche you want to aim at, that was due to bad writing, not to me seriously thinking that you have to run a particular kind of restaurant or run it in a particular way. - I do think there are still some obvious holes in the restaurant choices on the Newark, and I do selfishly wish that there was a restaurant that could better fit my need for a Basic-type dinner restaurant without me having to walk all the way to Basic when I'm tired. And I guess I subconsciously somehow write a lot of posts here trying to cause some restaurant to be like Basic (ideally, with a playroom, and maybe with a parental massage expert). But I do understand that there might be economic and bureaucratic reasons why running a restaurant like that here is not feasible. - I should go home and cook more. - I should go move to Montclair. (But do you really want someone like me moving around suburban New Jersey . . . behind the wheel of . . . A CAR? Be careful what you wish for.)
Posted on: 2007/12/8 20:13
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Re: A lot of Park Slopers are moving to the other side of Newark: Maplewood NJ.
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Maybe the suburban N.J. schools are better than a lot of the Brooklyn schools that aren't P.S. 321 (the famous yuppie school), but if, for example, you compare the third graders at Clinton in the South Orange-Maplewood district with third graders at Cordero, it looks as if Cordero gets significantly higher scores, even though the percentage of poor kids is twice as high at Cordero.
Before my daughter was in the public pre-K, I figured maybe the Jersey City schools were somehow teaching to the test too much, but I now think they really are doing a fairly good job of at least trying to teach higher-level thinking schools, not just getting the kids to memorize enough to pass the tests.
Posted on: 2007/12/8 0:20
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Re: St Bridget's School
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In my opinion:
- Garden Preschool, which uses the Bank Street method (a lot mellower method than Montessori) is really heaven, if you have the ability to handle the volunteering requirements. Having to volunteer might be a bit of a pain, but the great thing is that you know a parent is always in the classroom making sure things are going right. - Park Prep (in the Heights) is really similar to Garden Preschool and also uses Bank Street and doesn't require parents to volunteer. The very, very best thing about it is that it's new and therefore has openings. - The Montessoris -- I think the problem for really active kids or kids who are a little behind socially is that, in practice, people in the schools are hostile toward or ambivalent about the whole concept of punishment, so they end up letting behind behavior slide, or they confuse the child by pretending to offer "choices" that the child knows are not really choices, or they end up cracking down in ways that are sort of harsh, or they just give up. On the other hand, Hamilton Park Montessori and Waterfront Montessori offer a lot of great extras, along with owners and teachers who really care about the children. - The regular downtown public pre-K programs -- There's a lot of silly red tape, and not enough phys ed, but the academic program itself seems to be similar to the Garden School program, and the students are great. I might pick one of the private programs over the public pre-K because of concerns about phys ed, after school activities, scheduling, convenience, or access to a good grade school program, but I don't think there's any reason to worry about the academics of any of the public pre-K programs in the downtown schools.
Posted on: 2007/12/7 7:24
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Re: ox restaurant
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Home away from home
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Quote:
It's sad that a reasonably polite discussion about restaurants and the state of services in downtown Jersey City leads to intentional rudeness. I think that a real city should have residents of all types and ages, and, as much as possible, the businesses and other services needed to support people of different ages. Obviously, you're just reacting this way because you really like the OX people and got ticked off by what I wrote. If you were serious about your comment, I'd say that maybe parents who are committed enough to diversity and urban living to put their kids in the Jersey City public schools belong here, and that people scandalized by the mere thought of an eat-in playroom might belong in an active adult living community somewhere. Note that, even if people might have read my original post differently I never actually wrote that OX should go away. that it's in any way a bad restaurant, or that people who can afford to pay $30 or $40 for a meal on a regular basis should go away. I just wrote that I was frustrated because (as far as I knew when I wrote my post, before MCA explained that the appetizers and salads are big) I didn't think it met my needs. If the OX people read this thread at all: - Maybe they're really successful and have all the business they can handle, or will have once Grove Pointe fills up, in which case, yay. Good for them. - If they need more customers, maybe one thing they could do is figure out a subtle, classy way to indicate that their appetizers and salads are big enough to make a meal.
Posted on: 2007/12/6 9:50
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Re: ox restaurant
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Home away from home
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Quote:
I am lazy when it comes to cooking, but the effortless outside the home playdate concept is also really appealing.
Posted on: 2007/12/6 6:26
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Re: ox restaurant
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Home away from home
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I work full-time, and my spouse works semi-randomly rotating shifts. When the spouse is at home in the evening, cooking seems to be easy (aside from when stuff burns). When the spouse is working till 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. or whatever, cooking seems really hard, and having someone else stretch my time by cooking the food and washing the pots and pans seems very appealing.
Posted on: 2007/12/6 6:21
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Re: ox restaurant
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Home away from home
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You could be right, but my suspicion is that the market is just so small that, a lot of times, owners of restaurants have to have other jobs to support their restaurants. I've expressed skepticism about franchises in the past, but maybe something else that would work would be if we had some kind of mini Au Bon Pain or a mini version of Panera-like chain restaurant that could avoid dumping a week's worth of salt in every meal.
Posted on: 2007/12/5 19:21
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