Welcome to New Jersey, Tim Tebow!

Dear Timmy Timmy-Tim-Tim:

First and foremost, welcome to the next stage of your NFL career, where you'll be playing for the New York Jets. I personally look forward to watching you run 4-5 option plays a game as part of the Jets' new Wildcat formation. Over the next couple months you'll probably find that, because the Jets actually play their games on the left side of the Hudson River at MetLife Stadium, and because their training camp facilities are also in New Jersey, it probably makes the most sense to live in New Jersey while you play for the Jets.

Now, you and I are from the same home town (in God's country; St. John's County, Florida, in particular), and - as I've been living in New Jersey for 19 out of the last 21 years - I thought it might be helpful to explain a few tricks I've learned about living around here. Hopefully you'll refer to these in the event you fall into an awkward situation or three while living in New Jersey.

We should probably start with the whole religion thing, eh, Timmy Boy? I know you're into that shit. The good news, for you at least, is that New Jersey is a reasonably religious place (only 15% of the population self-identifies as atheist; compare this with other states such as Vermont, where over a third are atheists). The bad news is that only 8% of New Jersey residents are Baptists, and less than 0.5% consider themselves "evangelical" in any way, shape or form. We don't have many mega-churches here, it's considered impolite to put anything religious on your car, it's considered even more impolite to talk to someone you're not close with about religion, and - to be honest - you're probably better off just leaving the whole "Son of God" thing within the confines of your own home during your stay here.  (That genuflecting-like substance in the image to the right needs to go away, as well.)

Also, we need to have a quick chat regarding your conversational style. In an excellent article for Grantland.com, Chuck Klosterman opined that you are highly sensitive and have a strong emotional intelligence. Assuming he's right, and he probably is, you're going to need to modify that tone if you want to stick around New Jersey. Don't get me wrong - the whole "rude New Jerseyan" thing is totally overblown. We actually do look out for our neighbors here (assuming our neighbors earn the kindness). But what we aren't, really, is what people in other parts of the country mistakenly call "polite."

We're brutally honest people, we don't waste time on small talk, and if we're going to talk to you, it's going to be a lively conversation. I recently overheard two people converse inside a Publix (we both know what a Publix is, right, Timmy?) in North Florida for three minutes without saying anything important about people, places, or things. It was an incredible conversation to hear, because it wasn't a conversation at all - it was two complete strangers, each simply too polite to end a series of short ramblings about absolutely nothing. Neither conversant could bother saying something nice like "Y'all have a great day now!" while walking away. This will never ever happen in New Jersey. We simply won't engage you in conversation unless we have something to say to you.

All of this being said, you're probably wishing you were traded to Jacksonville, instead. Having spent considerable amounts of time in Jacksonville, I can't blame you. It's a beautiful city, the weather's warm, the girls are pretty and the Force is strong with Jeebus. I think most football fans in that city had Tim Tebow Jaguars jerseys custom-made before the 2010 NFL Draft. They were convinced they'd get you the first time around, and even more convinced they'd get you the second time around, once the Broncos signed Peyton Manning. You would have been, dare I say, deified as a football player in Jacksonville, given your standing there. (Right now, I don't think there are many NFL fans left in Jacksonville.  The team might move to Los Angeles, and that right soon.)

Conversely, I'm not sure that Jets fans are going to welcome you with open arms. I'm not personally a Jets fan, but I know many of them, and they don't exactly have a ton of patience. In fact, you being a Jet is going to be an awesome group psychology experiment - combine the most irrationally optimistic player in the NFL with perhaps the most irrationally pessimistic fan base in sports, and see what happens. Good luck and Godspeed, kid. Stay away from Rex Ryan when he's in an upset mood; I hear he doesn't mince words. Also stay away from him when he's feeling a little... frisky.

Oh, and one more thing about living in New Jersey. I hear your contract is "reasonable" by NFL standards. Combine that with New Jersey real estate prices and you'll probably end up renting an apartment down the street from me. (My wife will bring you a welcome basket, along with a few of her favorite Bible verses. There aren't many.) Anyway, combine that with the lack of state income tax in Florida and the $450,000 mansions for sale in Jacksonville and... yeah, you should have been traded to Jacksonville.

But hey, good luck in New Jersey! Now get the fuck outta here.

Flying is Scary and Annoying

There is an extremely small, but still very slightly greater than zero, mathematical probability that this will be my incredibly ironic epitaph, so I should try to get this right.

I know, I know. Today, thousands of domestic passenger aircraft took off and landed without any incident. The same thing happened yesterday. (But not the day before yesterday.) The statistical evidence also rings true: air travel, per mile traveled, is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude safer than travelling as a passenger in an automobile.

Even when a plane crashes, the passengers inside the aircraft are about 95% to survive the incident. To board a plane that crashes is highly unlikely, and to perish in an air crash makes a person extremely unlucky. Like, being stricken by a falling brick while walking down the street-level unlucky.

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There's a common type of sports journalism hackery that proceeds as follows: the journalist/hack begins the print article (it's almost always a print article) by making an argument toward some phenomenon that is, for all intents and purposes, objectively true. For instance, Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers of all time, or baseball teams that walk more frequently are more likely to be good baseball teams, or anything else you wish. Regardless of the person, team, or sport described, you can assume that there are literally reams of data supporting the argument, and that most intelligent fans of the sport agree them to be true.

Then, at around paragraph five or six, the journalist/hack completely deconstructs the valid argument presented earlier in the article by talking about what their eyes, or their "gut", or their godforsaken spleen, tells them must be true. Here, you can expect to read some language like "I'm fully aware that what I just wrote about is what the data tells us, or what science tells us, or what most fans believe to be true through taking time and research to explore the objective 'facts,' but there's glory and fantasy and wonder in sports that you must be a journalist to understand."

And then the article turns to complete shit, because glory, fantasy, and wonder are not the reasons why most intelligent adults watch (or care about) sports. The above are nothing but straw men; excuse words for idiots who don't take the time to back up their claims with facts (or are lazy or are rushed to make deadline).

When I read what I wrote above about air travel, and think about what I am about to write below, I think of sports journalism hackery, and I hope against all hope that I am not being a hack (though truthfully, I probably am).

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It seems, though I have no facts to back this up, that (until, strangely enough, about ten years ago) air travel was an extremely risky proposition. Perhaps it was the news cycle sensationalizing extremely rare incidents when they happened, or perhaps it was the uncommon frequency with which musicians decided to fly under poor weather conditions, in wintertime in the North, before sufficient air technology existed to handle the problems which later occurred. (Since 1990, I think Wisconsin has forbidden by law all live music concerts except in instances where the artists agreed to travel to the Cheese-state venue via Madden cruiser.)

Over the past ten years or so, though, I can't think of a major domestic aircraft that spontaneously combusted over the Atlantic Ocean (or worse). It seems - and again, I can't prove this - that flying in the United States has become demonstrably safer while the act of flying in the United States has become incredibly more annoying. This is probably intentional; when an air carrier's 747 spontaneously combusts over the Atlantic (or worse), the air carrier tends to file bankruptcy soon thereafter. Killing paying passengers is not an effective marketing campaign. People are significantly more willing to sit in 17" wide seats and pay $6 for cheese plates; safety is paramount to individual comfort.

The lack of comfort inherent in flying economy class these days, though, is one reason why I'm a nervous flier. I don't like feeling cramped, and I especially don't like feeling cramped while surrounded by 128 coughing strangers (many of whom also happen to be under three years old and are screaming).

The Gambler's Fallacy, which I alluded to above, is another reason. Just because the past ten years of domestic passenger air travel in the United States have been relatively error-free doesn't mean that the next ten will be equally as safe. I fly somewhat more than average (I expect to take 13 - shit - flights in the current year) and, over the course of my lifetime, at least one emergency landing is likely in the cards for me.

(NOTE: If/when I am ever involved in an emergency landing, I fully intend to overreact to approximately the nth degree. I will call everyone in my family to say goodbye to them while in flight, and it'll seem really weird when I live another 30-40 years after my plane lands without injury. I could see this definitely leading to family conflict in the future, with me adamant that I survived against long odds.)

But I have to say, the people flying the airplane make me less (vs. more) nervous about flying. Have you seen an airplane pilot lately? These people are badass; they have ice water in their veins. The Miracle on the Hudson was not a miracle; most pilots would have done the same thing. And if you're flying on anything better than Podunk Airlines, you can be reasonably certain that both of your pilots are at least 40 years old, have been flying for at least twenty of these years, and are constantly monitored for health issues. Further, they probably have high job satisfaction - for 80% of the time they're doing their job, they're out of contact with the outside world and just enjoy the flight.

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I'm less nervous as an airplane passenger than I used to be (I used to spend the entire flight on the verge of massive anxiety attack), but I'll never be calm while traveling in a passenger aircraft. I've been thinking lately about possibly taking flight lessons to counteract my anxiety; I'm the type of person who likes to know how things work, and having the experience of flying a small airplane might (to some extent) help me understand more about "typical" flight behavior (e.g., that uncomfortable feeling three-quarters of the way through the flight when the plane starts descending and it seems, for a brief second, like the engines might be stalling).

Plus, I might find that I actually enjoy the friendly skies. Who knows.

Restaurant Review: Harvest Moon, New Brunswick, NJ

In October 2010, in celebration of my birthday, some friends and I went to the microbrewery/restaurant Harvest Moon in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for dinner.  I'd called earlier that day to make a reservation for 7:30 - it was a Saturday and the Phillies were playing a NLCS playoff game, so I assumed the restaurant would be busy.  Most of us arrived there early for beers, but two of my friends were running a little late as it was difficult to find parking in New Brunswick that evening.  At 7:30, we were told we could sit (our table, for eight, was vacant at the time), but unfortunately only six of us were present.

In this case, as we were already drinking at the bar, most restaurants would let us sit and order more drinks and appetizers in anticipation of our party to become complete.  This was not Harvest Moon's seating policy, however; we were told that our friends had five minutes to arrive, or else our table would be given to the next waiting party.  We protested quite loudly about this, as it seemed to make no sense - after all, most of our party had arrived and we were planning to continue spending our money at the establishment.  (In fact, we even tried blackmail - a larger group of approximately 15-20 was planning to "pub crawl" back to Harvest Moon later that night.  This fell on the deaf ears of Harvest Moon's management.)

Long story made somewhat shorter, our friends were more than five minutes late, I became very upset at Harvest Moon and our group of six left in a huff.  (We eventually had a wonderful meal at the always-accommodating Old Bay, perhaps New Brunswick's best dollar-for-dollar restaurant, and yes, the "pub crawl" never made it to Harvest Moon later that night.)  In fact, I swore I'd never go back to the restaurant. 

But, time has a way of fading old grudges, and more or less the same group of friends ended up at Harvest Moon last night for dinner.  I now intend to review Harvest Moon - I tell the story above because I want to leave it aside completely for the rest of the review and focus on the recent past (in order to be fair).

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Harvest Moon has interesting ambiance - in a reasonably small space, it somehow combines a working microbrewery, bar, first-floor bistro, and second-floor dining room.  The building is very old, and vestiges of its residential past are clear to the discerning eye - there are stanchions separating two parts of the upstairs dining room, for instance, that clearly separate a living area from what may have been bedrooms, or sitting rooms, in the late 19th century. 

The restaurant occupies what was once a fairly unique niche in New Brunswick cuisine - it is on the low-priced end of casual American dining, on a nice (if relatively quiet and buttoned-up) block of George Street.  The restaurant attracts a mix of younger and older individuals, though on Saturday nights, particularly before shows begin at State Theater, the crowd definitely skews older.  (There are often DJs on party nights that begin spinning at 10 pm, Harvest Moon does attract a younger crowd at that point).

When our group arrived, we were told the wait would be sixty minutes, but with a hint that the wait may end up being significantly shorter than that.  This fortunately ended up being the case, as the manager (the same who argued with us in October 2010) found the head of our table twenty minutes later to let him know that our table would soon be ready.  As we were hungry and a little cranky, this was very welcome news.

The high point of any Harvest Moon experience is the up-close microbrewery experience.  As you enter the restaurant, you can look to the right to see a multi-platform brewing system.  On the top level (about eye level as you walk in) are the storage tanks, each seeming to hold (this is an approximation) about 200 gallons of fully fermented beer.  But any avid home brewer should kneel down and observe the live boiling of the wort on the basement level of the restaurant; on this night, there was an active boil happening in one of the four giant stainless steel tanks. Interestingly, you could even see the boiling effluent pour out into a steaming, 5-gallon fermenting bucket (the exact same kind of bucket that my friends and I use at home, to ferment our own beers).

And the beer at Harvest Moon almost never disappoints.  I started with the Double IPA, which had wonderful citrus hoppiness balanced perfectly with mildly sweet and floral aromas.  Later I had a Pale Ale to complement my Harvest Moon Burger, which was stronger than the name might suggest (6.4% ABV, I believe) and much more robust - it nearly matched the previous IPA in all aspects of the beer drinking experience (hops, malt, and finish).  They had a special Barley Wine on tap this weekend, which my friend purchased thinking she would not like, ended up really enjoying, and letting me have a sip in the process - it was not my cup of tea, as it was very thick and strong, but I agreed it was (at least in small doses) delicious. 

There were many other beers on tap, and a beer aficionado visiting Harvest Moon would be well-served to select the Beer Sampler; seven or eight 5-ounce tastes of each beer, provided in a wood harness that is labeled and presented alongside a tasting guide.

I haven't mentioned the food yet, and this is with reason.  There are few excellent dishes available at the restaurant, and it's never good news when the best dishes are the appetizers. The Moon Nachos, with grilled chicken added to the mix, are incredibly rich and possess just the correct amount of melted Mexican cheeses.  The buffalo wings are breaded (always how I prefer them) and served medium by default, with considerable spice balanced by the generous portion of sliced celery and blue cheese.  Both rank among the best I've ever had in their respective food category.

However, Harvest Moon recently seems to have reduced their portion sizes across the board, and does not handle special requests well.  Even my Moon Burger, requested medium rare, arrived almost well-done.  (By comparison, Tumulty's Pub, a few blocks south on George Street, not only cooks cheeseburgers rare, they basically recommend eating your cheeseburger rare in their menu.)

My dining companions had issues with virtually every main entree that we ordered.  The Pad Thai was overwhelmingly laden with peanuts.  The fish and chips were served without malt vinegar, and the request for the essential condiment of the fried dish was handled as if no one ever asked for malt vinegar before.  The shrimp salad was served with approximately 1.5 ounces of shrimp (they looked to be the factory-farmed, frozen kind you pick up at your local grocery store) and was not evenly dressed.

The service, too, did not meet our expectations.  Our waitress was clearly not enthused with her job; her service was brusque to the point of rudeness, and we often had to request items twice.  (To be fair, the bartenders downstairs were extremely helpful and polite - even going so far as pouring a draught Hard Cider for my non-beer-drinking wife, off the menu, when she asked.)  Our group of friends, whom I've never seen act stingily with gratuities, unanimously felt that the almost-insulting 15% tip was fair for the dining service that we received.

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Objectively speaking, I'm not sure there is a less pleasing dining experience in all of New Brunswick than Harvest Moon.  (In this calculus, I am excluding the shitty restaurants on Easton Avenue that predominantly cater to drunk Rutgers undergraduates.)  While the restaurant is pleasing in a superficial sense, it appears to be fundamentally mismanaged, from the seating policies, to server training, to the care put into crafting the food.  Beer is the strong point of the Harvest Moon experience, which would make the venue fantastic if it were only a bar.  Unfortunately, it is also a restaurant, and it is a restaurant that no longer stand apart in the American-fusion casual New Brunswick dining segment.

For your money, you're better off going to Tumulty's, Old Bay, or even Old Man Rafferty's.  Tumulty's is a wonderful restaurant with perhaps the coolest vibe (for under $30 a plate) in the city.  Old Bay's food is excellent and their service is so polite and friendly that you might actually think you were in the South.  And Old Man Rafferty's is seemingly more self-aware of its culinary weaknesses; when the desserts are first in the menu, you know that dessert is going to be the best part of the meal. 

Harvest Moon, unlike any of the above-mentioned restaurants, is at risk (in my opinion) of becoming irrelevant in New Brunswick.  There are now more choices than ever, and any restaurant that isn't improving in this environment is clearly fading away.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars (ratings take into account food quality, drink quality, service, ambience/atmosphere, and last but not least, value).

Best for: A delicious beer or two with friends, perhaps accompanied by an appetizer.

Average price: Beers are between $5 and $7; appetizers $8-12, entrees $8-$30.  My Moon Burger was on the low end ($9, not bad for a burger).  There's a late night menu as well, but I've never ordered from it.