When the going gets tough, the not-so-tough stand up their husbands and retreat to bed with an electric space heater. At least that’s what I did (sorry, honey) after waiting in the frigid cold waiting 20 minutes last night waiting for the DeCamp 33 into Manhattan. We were supposed to hear Andrea Marcovicci at the Algonquin, but I was dressed only in a wool coat – no scarf, no hat – and apparently no patience. By the time I gave up on the bus, I was an icicle, and nothing but a sauna-equipped limo would have convinced me to go into town.
But it could have been avoided. I went on IhateDeCamp.com today to see if there was any explanation, and found this picture along with this post:

During the Monday evening rush, a DeCamp dispatcher or bus handler or whatever you call them uses a pay phone to – I’m not kidding here – locate a missing bus. Choice quote: “What do you mean he’s somewhere on Grove Street? The guy who left 10 minutes after he did is here already.”

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The shaggy-haired governor of Illinois has been taking his case to the people the past few days, with appearances on just about every show in New York. So we’re calling it as a local story. We were most fascinated by some comparisons Blagojevich made during his interview today with the AP. (You can hear the radio version of the interview here.) “Blagojevich apologized for comparing himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” reported our favorite AP correspondent, “in an interview in which he compared himself to Daniel in the lion’s den, Lincoln, Elvis Presley and the newly unemployed.” Well, the nerve! We think this demands an immediate vote.

As every mother knows, there are two basic food groups in the world of the young child: peanut butter, and everything else. So when news broke recently that salmonella-tainted peanut butter was actually sickening and even killing people, that was big news in Mom World. My own family stared at me with initial disbelief when I told them about it right after Mista Barista brought home Scrunch Peanut Butter Crunchy cereal from Shoprite. At first they thought I was kidding. That’s why I always have access to Google from the kitchen table.
Well, enter Kristen Kemp, founder and editor of Montclair Kids and a self-proclaimed suburban helicopter mom, who posted this morning about her obsessive quest for the safest peanut butter in Baristaville. Of course, that had to involve a trip to Whole Foods, where Kemp encountered “Poor young woman at the customer service counter,” henceforth known as PYW.

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Jyoti Chrystal, Montclair’s first lady of yoga, wants Baristanet readers to know that Starseed Yoga is offering free classes for cancer survivors every Thursday at 2 pm. She also announced last Friday on her personal blog that Starseed, the oldest and for many years the only yoga studio in Montclair, is up for sale.
Jyoti, who has Stage 4 non-smokers lung cancer, has been battling her disease since being diagnosed last spring. The cancer has spread to her spine and the meninges, the tissue that covers the brain. “In July, it looked like I wasn’t going to survive this at all,” she said. In August, she began to thrive. “My doctors were calling me the miracle woman.” Then, around the beginning of December, Jyoti started to experience debilitating spells – two to five minutes in length – which cause overwhelming pain in her skull, a loss of balance and occasional fainting. She began to experience on one the phone with me today. It was haunting.

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I sure am glad I schlepped out to the Marshalls on Rt. 46 last week to pick up the very last pair of Uggs wannabes. (Thanks for the tip, Annette!) I thought perhaps my symbolic gesture would actually bring on the spring, but it appears I will get a chance to stomp around in my new Borns after all.
Yes another wintry mix is on the way. From the National Weather Service:

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Jeff Jarvis – visionary, pundit, blogger – has a new book that just officially hit bookstores today, and already it’s in its second printing. We think that “What Would Google Do?” will be as successful and provocative as just about anything in the Malcolm Gladwell oeuvre. It’s not so much a book about the inside workings of Google but about the business philosophy that propels it. This is not what they used to teach at Master of the Universe school. It counsels sharing, cooperation and openness.

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The victim of a pedestrian fatality reported this morning was a 64-year-old Montclair man. From the Star Ledger…

Joseph Lunetta, 64, was crossing Bloomfield Avenue at Sunset Avenue when he was struck by a van driven by 30-year-old Verona resident Christian Despecci-Verdejo, Verona police Chief Doug Huber said.
Lunetta was pronounce dead at the scene, Huber said. He said Lunetta was returning to his home on the Montclair-Verona border with cups of coffee he had just purchased.
Police are still investigating the accident, but it appears the traffic light at the intersection was green for traffic on Bloomfield Avenue, the chief said.

With its steady film diet of arthouse flicks, Montclair’s Clairidge Cinema has cemented its reputation as the Angelika of Essex County. Now, like the Angelika, it even has a cafe for pre and post movie indulging.
The high end cabinetry store and the neighboring high end kitchen accessories stores are long gone (remember those $300 colander days of yore?). Now there’s a more recession-proof splurge — namely coffee, hot chocolate and cookies. Gimmee Jimmy’s took over a space facing Church Street that opens directly into the Hinck building lobby (where the pricey cabinets were) and created a lounge where you can hang out before the show or after, or just people watch (a note says wi-fi will be available soon). Cookie lovers can either order in the main store and bring their goodies over, or place an order tableside (there appears to be a tunnel-like connection between the two spaces that staff uses).

We received a flurry of emails over the weekend from readers alerting us to this well, somewhat flattering portayal of New Jersey as cultural epicenter in the Wall Street Journal…

Of course, think “New Jersey” and cultural epicenter doesn’t immediately spring to mind. Instead, the name summons up unsparing caricature: grime, gangsters, pollution, ugly highways, Byzantine shopping malls, Saharan parking lots and a level of culture somewhere between troglodyte and troll.
New Jersey’s small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state’s deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning.

Really — it’s very flattering, in sort of a backhanded compliment, “no, I really do like your new haircut” kind of way. Err, thanks WSJ, we’ve known we were cool for a while now, but it’s good that you are now singing our praises (just don’t tell anyone about the taxes). Talk about Jersey or anything else — it’s your open thread.