This year marks what would be the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln...

Crystal clear pictures from Trenton...all done digitally.

And the Oscar goes to…

New Jersey can be proud of many things.  Cape May. Our  wineries. The Jersey Shore. Bruce Springsteen. And now, we can add the high  standards of our  bakeries to that list.
 
A few weeks ago a  Hunterdon County couple found themselves in a predicament: No bakery would  sell them a birthday cake for their three-year old’s birthday party. The  Campbells had tried in vain for the ShopRite in Greenwich to prepare what we  only know of as a standard birthday cake for their son, Adolf Hitler Campbell.  They wanted “Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler written on the cake in icing.  
 
You see, the Campbells are members – or at least subscribers to  the tenets – of Aryan Nation groups, which we can somewhat surmise by the name  of one of their daughters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. 

Hard to believe we have arrived at the last year of the first decade of the 21st century. Boy, seems like it was just yesterday that Bush was handed the presidency by the Supreme Court.

And what a year it was! For the folks in the New Jersey news in 2008, we have some parting gifts:

There are the conspiracy guys who claim that anyone and everyone from the Mafia, Fidel Castro, LBJ, the Soviets, or my Aunt Lilly had something to do with the JFK assassination. By the way, my Aunt Lilly was nowhere near Dallas on November 22nd.1963. She was probably at a beauty parlor in Brooklyn getting ready for my cousin Lenny's Bar Mitzvah the next day. There are those who believe that Neil Armstrong did not really walk on the moon and they the whole thing was shot in a movie studio or somewhere out in the Arizona desert. Or that green M & Ms are an aphrodisiac.
 
Now, New Jersey can be proud that we have our own tin-foil hat wearing guy with his own conspiratorial theories about President-Elect Barack Obama: Leo Donofrio, an East Brunswick attorney.
 
Donofrio claims that since Barack Obama was not a "natural born citizen" --- since Obama had dual nationality at birth -- his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject -- he cannot possibly be eligible to be president, under the U.S. Constitution.

The holiday season is upon us, and shoppers are out there looking for bargains. Also, business owners are looking to make some money in a very tough economy. And so, sister Susie from Sussex Mills in Sussex County may want to share in some holiday cash.

When I was eleven, way back in 1965, my family was invited for Thanksgiving to my cousins’ cousins, a Jewish-Italian family who lived in the southern part of Staten Island. This was the other side of the world to us if you lived in Brooklyn -- but, now, with the completion of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge just a year earlier, Staten Island was more accessible by car. And off we went in the family car, our white 1954 Buick Special.
 
My mother spent a good portion of the trip, while we sat in traffic on the Belt Parkway, explaining to us why the cousins, Anthony and Dominick Arcamone, of my cousins, Lenny and Robert Novick, were not our cousins, but only cousins to Lenny and Robert -- way on the other side their family. “The Arcamones are only cousins to Lenny and Robert, but not to you,” she told me.

Whenever I get the chance to visit my parents in Florida when working a comedy gig down there, it’s like living in a “Seinfeld” episode. They keep the condo thermostat at 74 degrees, and yell at me not to touch it “because you will break it.” My father even put a piece of scotch tape over the dial, so no one else would touch it. The same piece of tape has been there for twenty years. My parents typify the typical Floridians -- like Billy Crystal says, “They eat dinner at 4:30, lunch at 11:00, and breakfast the night before.”
 
And so, when my parents were worried about ‘identity theft’, [as if anyone in their right minds would want to be mistaken for them], they signed up for a senior citizen “A Dozen ID Theft Tips for Seniors.” My father took notes during the seminar to write down all the tips. “Don’t lend your driver’s license to anyone.” “Don't ever tell anyone other than the government your social security number.” “Shred all documents you no longer need.”
 
It was this last ‘tip’ that got my father all upset.
 
“We don’t have a shredder, and we need one. And we have old papers we need to shred,” he told my mother.

Well, the presidential campaign season is finally over, and now it's that time of the year when we have our very special feature -- the NJ Politics Unusual mailbag. This is where we get to answer questions generated from our scores and scores of regular readers, passionate fans, soulful admirers, aficionados, devotees, follower, groupies, detractors, critics, and anonymous stalkers. We get so many emails, IMs, text messages, and posts it's hard to keep up. But, we do the best we can to respond to the minions of loyal readers of every shape and size -- whether they are real or imaginary or praising or attacking. Either way, it's nice to know they find the readings interesting enough to surf to at their computer desk.
 
So here goes.