New Jersey is Awesome

The missus will occasionally make the above declaration when she seeks a chuckle from her audience. And rightly so, because New Jersey is a comedy location. If a character in a movie comes from New Jersey, expect him or her to be a comedic buffoon. If a punch line is "New Jersey," it's much more likely to get a laugh than, say, Connecticut. There's nothing funny about Connecticut.

Yes, it's fair to say that we New Yorkers tend to look down our noses at the Garden State (that's New Jersey, for those who haven't seen the Zach Braff movie). Even The New Yorker (that's the magazine) once featured a cartoon that included a caption that was something along the lines of, "It was disappointing to learn that the light at the end of the tunnel was New Jersey."

And yet New Jersey provides much of New York City's power from over the Hudson River. So we're picking on the people that give us light. Yeah, we're real bastards here in New York.

Anyway, I thought it high time that I give a special shout out to New Jersey. Today, upon Governor Corzine's signature, New Jersey repealed the death penalty, the first state to do so since 1976, when the Supreme Court botched their decision allowing the states to start killing people again.

Way to go, New Jersey. Civil unions, and now abolition of the death penalty: Yes, I think it's fair to say that you truly are awesome.

No irony.