Newark!

Ah, Satan's Laundromat is photoblogging Newark. These are my kind of photographs, and I will be heading to Newark at the end of this week for the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Annual Health Law Teachers Conference. I'm not a health law teacher, but I was asked to speak on the subject of New Federalism and Health Law. I'm only speaking for 15 minutes, but I'm charged up at the moment to draft an article with the title "Experimenting With Drugs in the Laboratories of Democracy: Assisted Suicide, Medical Marijuana, and Federalism."

It will be interesting to see Newark, a city I lived quite near when I was a high school student. We lived in Wayne, New Jersey, in a community called Packanack Lake, that had an exclusionary scheme--you had to be accepted into the "country club" to be allowed to buy a house--that got enough press that they sang a song about it on "That Was The Week That Was," which was kind of The Daily Show of its time. Except weekly. And David Frost was on it. Newark was considered too uninteresting/ugly/dangerous to visit. If you wanted to be in the city, you'd go to New York. Another thing I always held against Newark is that it impinged on my original home town of Newark, Delaware. If you said you were from Newark (pronounced "New Ark") and didn't add Delaware, everyone not from New-Ark would try to make you say it in an unpleasant slurred New Jersey way. And now the dominating New Jersey city has even overwhelmed my own pronunciation. I have to stop and think to say the name of my own home town right.

So maybe I'll have some gritty Newark sights to photoblog like Satan's. Or maybe I'll take a side trip to Wayne and see what's happened to it in the 30+ years since I've laid eyes on it. But you can't be in northern New Jersey without longing to be in NYC, and I intend to ensconce myself in a nice hotel looking out on Central Park on Saturday and Sunday. I want walk around the City again, and see some museums, including these frogs. Maybe I'll go to the theater, but it's too early to see The Frogs.