We were just going to talk the usual city politics...

...now Johnny is halfway through this incredible longform piece of journalism on NJ.com on just how bad and poorly staffed the after-death market in New Jersey is:

An 18-month NJ Advance Media investigation for NJ.com found serious failures at nearly every level of New Jersey’s patchwork system of medical examiner offices, the obscure agencies charged with one of the most fundamental tasks: figuring out how somebody died and why.

This far it's an absolute eye-opener and Johnny's gonna go back and dig into the rest. See, this right here is how you win all the awards (or should). Well done S.P. Sullivan and Stephen Stirling!

We're going to start off today with a brilliant article in NJ.com

S.P. Sullivan has a fascinating article on Snake Hill in Secaucus and how it may not be done giving up it's secrets after a massive cemetery reinterment from 2002:

That was 2002. The Turnpike Authority was looking to build a new interchange in Secaucus — Exit 15X — to give motorists access to the Secaucus Junction train station. As the site was prepared for the work, human remains were discovered. What followed would end up being the largest disinterment of bodies in U.S. history. Thousands of remains were extracted from the Meadowlands during a 10-month period in 2003. All told, more than 4,000 people were reburied in Hackensack and memorialized at a ceremony in late October 2004.

A decade later, a question lingers: Are there more bodies, forgotten and without families, buried just beyond the New Jersey Turnpike’s shoulder?

Make time for this article. It's so well written and simply fascinating. The fact it's late October and some of this story is about bodies and cemeteries makes it all the more topical.

Experts: NJ is getting outright hosed on Super Bowl money

The NFL, without showing all work, uses a formula from a company calling itself Sport Management Research Institute to tell host cities they will get upwards of half a billion dollars from travelers and others coming for the game and festivities. People who don't do their homework on these numbers hear this and think fabulous what a great deal we're getting, some kind of factoring and science must have been used in these projections. Well the half a billion is being grossly overstated by as much as 75% and the science used so the NFL can use the $500 million number is based on "false science" say experts:


Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, told NJ.com in a recent Q&A that the study that produces that $500-600 million figure is based on "false science":

The studies that they do that I’ve seen—they don’t make all of them available—but the ones that I’ve seen use input-output analysis and produce reams of data that an uninformed observer would look at and say, ‘Well, this is science.’ The NFL certainly wants people to believe that it’s science.

S.P. Sullivan at NJ.com did a great breakdown of the true costs and benefits of Super Bowls and what New Jersey and to a lesser extent NYC can expect from this year's Super Bowl. Sullivan interviewed quite a few experts who said the NFL numbers just do not add up:

Matheson says the rosy economic figures being offered by the NFL and host committees are flawed in part because the parties funding them have an economic interest in reporting big numbers. They also focus on economic activity created by the game without factoring in economic activity prevented by the game, he says.

"The way that the studies go wrong is that they do a pretty good job estimating all the economic impact that does occur because of the Super Bowl, but they don't do a very good job of estimating the impact that doesn't occur," Matheson said.

There is so much more on this at the link above. It makes for a great read if you want to know the truth and not just what's being told to you.