Like, Like it or Not

Prevalence of "like" — What's to like?

Like, what’s with like? Is it like a new form of like punctuation, or a mutant form of like stuttering? Like sometimes, deep in a likemire, my head is like spinning. Like comprehension is like impossible. I am like certain that it’s all like an attempt to be like cool, but I fear there may be like lasting damage to the like English like language. Like you know? It is like difficult to like sometimes stifle like, a laugh, when I overhear, like-minded people rattling on, always like at like warp speed. It’s a like epidemic in like some places. Young, like otherwise literate women, seem not like to have developed a like immunity from likespeak. Guys like seem infected less like often. I’m not sure if I’m like following all the rules of …

•  1 Comment
• Photos (1)

The Unfortunate History of the Klan in Ocean County

Hate group publicly burned crosses, openly paraded in 1920s — and some buildings remain as converted township property

Editor's note: Journalist Don Bennett conducted the following research as part of a recent county event, "What Would Martin Say?," Ocean County Human Relation Commission's forum, explaining the local journey toward civil rights past and present and the unfortunate hurdles that stood in the way. The windows were broken, the building in disrepair, but Dover Township officials were determined to restore it so it could be a recreation building in the center of the new Riverwood Park in Pleasant Plains in 1968. Things had not always been pleasant on the plains. For one thing, the building about to get a facelift was built about 40 years earlier as a meeting hall for the Ku Klux Klan. In New Jersey? In Ocean County? Right here in River City? Yes…

•  29 Comments
• Photos (4)

Local Focus

Driscoll Expressway ended up the Road to Nowhere

A look back at plans to connect Ocean County to South Brunswick via a Parkway Spur

Few issues have shattered the political tranquility of Ocean County and Toms River the way the controversial plan to build a new $315 million toll road from South Brunswick to the Garden State Parkway did in the early 1970s. Plans for the Driscoll Expressway, named for the former governor and father of the New Jersey Turnpike, seemed like a runaway train that could not be stopped. But stopped it was. The so called Parkway Spur was authorized by New Jersey lawmakers in 1965, but the New Jersey Highway Authority, which operated the Garden State Parkway, did not have the money to build it. Neither did the state Department of Transportation. The new road would have gobbled up three quarters of all the funds approved for highway construction in…

•  2 Comments
• Photos (1)

Scott Derek

2:28 pm on Saturday, January 22, 2011

A great website that documented that Expressway is http://www.nycroads.com/roads/ae-driscoll/   more ›