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Vol. LXV, No. 44
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
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Subscribe to our newsletter |
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Vol. LXV, No. 44
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
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 (Photo by Frank Wojciechowski)
SNOW PACK: Members of the Princeton University women’s cross country team braved the elements last Saturday in the Ivy League Heptagonal championship meet held at the West Windsor Fields. The Tigers ended up third in the team standings, snapping a string of five straight Heps crowns. For more details on the race, see page 42.
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Add a recent letter to residents from the Princeton Township Policeman’s Benevolent Association (Local 387) to the voices opposing consolidation.
“As responsible members of the community we … feel that it is our duty to inform you about potential public safety concerns we have in regards to consolidation,” begins the statement. “While we respect the Consolidation Commission’s efforts to research this topic, we believe that the cost savings are minimal while the negative impact on services and public safety will be significant.”
The Princeton of Yina Moore’s youth was a close-knit community that helped shape her vision for its future. Descended from a family that has lived in the Borough for more than a century, she attended Princeton public schools and graduated from Princeton University. Her father ran a transportation business in town until the early 1990’s.
Jill Jachera majored in political science at Penn State University. But she never intended to go into politics.
“It was for the purpose of going to law school,” the Republican candidate for Princeton Borough mayor said in an interview last week. “I never had political aspirations. I have always been pretty turned off by the lack of focus on the issues, and the way things can degrade into pettiness. I’m pretty much of a no-nonsense person, and that wasn’t something that appealed to me.”
Compared to other parts of New Jersey, Princeton got off relatively easy in Saturday’s snowstorm. But the unseasonable precipitation did leave its mark on roads, homes, and businesses across the area, making it seem more like mid-winter than the days leading up to Halloween.
“Charter school reform is not really our raison d’être,” observed Julia Sass Rubin in a recent interview about the whys and wherefores of the Princeton area Save Our Schools (SOS) association.
With the campaign season winding down, the four candidates for two seats on Township Committee, Democratic incumbents Bernie Miller and Sue Nemeth, and Republican challengers Mark Scheibner and Geoff Aton, were asked to talk about the issues that have emerged as their top priorities.
Four candidates are vying for seats on Borough Council in the November 8 election. Democrat Barbara Trelstad is up for re-election. Fellow Democrat Heather Howard is running, as are Republicans Peter Marks and Dudley Sipprelle. Each shared some of their views about the issues they see as most important.
With Election Day less than two weeks away, Township Committee and Borough Council members met together last week for a final session on the question of consolidation.
In addition to the question of consolidation, the Borough mayoral race, and the races for Township Committee and Borough Council seats, Princeton voters should be aware of a district change that occurred last spring. The change, which places Princeton and South Brunswick in the 16th District, will impact candidates for the State legislature.
It was Bob Prier’s first game as head coach of the Princeton University men’s hockey team and he faced a daunting task as the Tigers took on No. 9 Yale, the defending ECAC Hockey champion.
After surviving a major scare from Notre Dame in the Mercer County Tournament semifinals, the Princeton High boys’ soccer team brought a heightened sense of urgency into its semifinal clash against Hopewell Valley last Wednesday.
Jenna Cody knew she was going to have to fly solo for the Princeton High girls’ cross country team as she competed in the Mercer County Championships last Friday.
Luciano Rossi and his daughter, Nina, took radically different paths in their Princeton High athletic careers.
For the Princeton Day School boys’ soccer team, the defense of its Mercer County Tournament crown didn’t go well.
The plan is for a trip to New York, dinner with friends, a Saturday night birthday treat at a special hotel, and a Sunday morning preview tour of the the Metropolitan Museum’s new Islamic galleries.
Then along comes a freak October snow storm, the storm without a name. The story’s all over the six o’clock news: New Jersey’s a mess, Christie’s declared a state of emergency, the power’s out in Princeton, and after a call to our neighbor, we’re told that huge limbs from the sweet gum tree have fallen across the driveway. We’re in a panic. If we turn around and go home, we lose the cost of the room and a night in the city, not to mention the delays on New Jersey Transit and the risk of driving home from the Junction at night with trees bringing down power lines. So, we stay at our nice hotel, take a cab driven through the gusty streets by a mad Russian exile raging all the way to 115th Street. He says he fought in Afghanistan, America stinks, everything but Russia stinks, and the long ride begins to feel like a scene in an old movie from the days when Russian exiles drove cabs in Paris.
Fifty years ago this November 11, Simon and Schuster published Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to wildly mixed reviews; sales were middling.
Sixty years ago in February of 1951, Scribners published James Jones’s From Here to Eternity to the sort of sales and reviews writers dream about.
The Catch
It makes some kind of senseless sense that when you put Catch-22 into the mix, things go a bit crazy. Yes, the publication date was November 11, but in Joseph Heller’s introduction to the 1994 edition of the novel, he says the New York Times reviews appeared two weeks after the publication date when in fact they actually appeared a month before, on October 22 and 23.The naming of the book has a quirky history all its own. Heller intended it to be Catch-18, and the first chapter appeared under that title in 1955 in the paperback anthology New World Writing. But in 1961, the similarity to a recent best-selling novel by Leon Uris (Mila 18) forced the author and his agent, Candida Donadio, to do a numerical version of musical chairs. Catch-11 was rejected because of the recent hit film, Oceans 11, and Catch-17 clashed with another high-profile film, Stalag 17. The ultimate and decisive advantage of Catch-22 was that snappy duplicate digit. In any case, the word would become, like Nabokov’s “nymphet,” a standard dictionary item, defined as “a situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions,” or “a situation or predicament characterized by absurdity or senselessness.”
Thought your family was dysfunctional? Phaedra Backwards, Irish playwright Marina Carr’s poetically crafted, stunningly designed new exploration of the tragic story of Phaedra, daughter of Minos and wife of Theseus, is guaranteed to make you thankful for even the most odious of your own relatives.
It’s a rich tale that provides Ms. Carr, previously represented at McCarter in productions of The Mai (1996) and Portia Coughlan (1999), with the inspiration to fill in the gaps, answer the unanswered questions, create the back story to this saga, embodied most prominently in plays by Euripides (Hippolytus, 428 B.C.), Seneca the Younger (first century A.D.) and Racine (1677).