Here’s an opportunity alert for the state lawmakers in Trenton who are always looking for new ways to protect us from ourselves here in The Nanny State.
It seems like every year they pass a bunch of new laws to prevent us from injuring ourselves by our own stupidity — like the statutes on carrying a pocket knife that are so vague you can’t even have a Swiss Army knife on your keychain unless you are prepared to spend time in jail.
(Note on tangentially related subject: I wrote about this several times last year, and even heard from some lawmakers who promised they’d get busy crafting new legislation to rectify this bizarre and unfair situation. But after the initial offer, there’s been nothing but dead air. I’m not going to identify the politician who made the most specific promise by name, because I don’t want to alienate him. But you know who you are, Heclan O’Fanlon. )
Now back to the matter at hand. Overshadowed in the stories last week about Halloween getting snowed out, were a couple of other intriguing sagas about people who clearly need protecting.
There was that family in Danvers, Mass., who took a trip through a local corn maze and got so lost they had to call 911. When the cops arrived, they found the bewildered clan 25 feet from the street. Thankfully for theWrongWay Corrigans, police did not release their names. The owner of the farm, described it as “challenging,” and explained that it was spread out over 7 acres, and designed as a “SalemVillage Headless Horseman.” He said several people got themselves lost last year, but only the panicked family called in the cavalry.
That’s interesting, and pretty funny. But it’s always funny until someone loses an eye. What, might I ask, would have happened if that family didn’t have a cell phone? What if they’d had to spend the night out there? What if they’d been stranded for a week? You can’t eat the kind of corn they grow in those mazes — so they might have had to eat each other. Are you listening, New Jersey Lawmakers? They might have had to eat each other!
Clearly, we need a law that makes it a crime to build a corn maze, and we need it right now.
And if that one isn’t enough to keep you hiding under the covers at night, there was another 911 call in Massachusetts late last month from another family lost in the wilderness. This time, however, they weren’t lost in a corn maze; they were lost in an apple orchard. According to local reports, Mark and Marsha Rosenthal of Boston traipsed off on an apple-picking jaunt at the Honey Pot Orchard in Stow, and as night began to fall, they couldn’t find their way back. When nobody answered the phone at the office of the orchard, they used the last of their strength to poke 911, and press send. The cops rushed out, found the owner of the orchard, and told him where the couple was waiting to be rescued. But again I query: What if they didn’t have a cell phone? They were about a halfmile from their car, and night was falling on a 200-acre kill zone. Don’t bears hang out in apple orchards? “Heck yes, they do, and I think I see one right over there!” How many apples could Mark have eaten before Marsha started looking like pot roast? I’m thinking about three.
And if the apple orchard wasn’t enough of a potential disaster, the owners of the orchard also had a hedge maze. The horror! The Humanity!
So far, the close calls only seem to be coming from that state to the north, but we all know how that stuff spreads. Now, we’ve got people nearly dying in Massachusetts, but by next week, they’ll be getting lost in Manalapan. How many “pick your own pumpkin” places do we have in this state? How many apple orchards? How many corn mazes?
See what I’m worried about, you New Jersey legislators? You’d better get on this before it’s your grandma lost out there. Our black bear population has gone through the roof.
Has it surprised anyone around here that former New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine apparently ran his new company, MF Global, so far into the ground that the company had to file for bankruptcy, and that federal investigators are trying to find out where more than $600 million in missing customer money wound up?
This is the company that Corzine fled to after this state’s voters got so sick of him that we tossed him out on his ear in 2009. For years, he’d dined out on his supposed financial genius, as evidenced by what he’d done as the head of Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, he was running our state’s finances into the biffy.
In 2010, with the hounds off his trail for the nonce, he joined a little investment firm in Manhattan, and set out to turn it into “a full-service investment bank.” By the very next year, $600 million in crappy investments was in the wind, the company was nose-diving like the Red Baron, and Corzine was who knows where. He said in a statement that he “felt great sadness for what transpired at MF Global,” and he later said he’d forgo the estimated $12 million in severance payments to which he might have been entitled by contract.
Is that man a saint, or what? And what a financial genius! He did all that in one year! We saw what he did to us in four years; think what he would have done in eight.
And if hindsight is always 20/20, what does this tell us about our good fortune in sending him packing, and denying him another term as New Jersey governor? It tells us we’ve discovered the cure for one form of cancer, that’s what.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].