But chilly, chilly is the evening time

[austin_dern]

Although we couldn't go onto the Casino Pier, bunny_hugger and I could ride the Floyd Moreland Carousel --- and we did, happily, and if I'm not mistaken even finding the mounts that share our middle names, the way we di the first time we rode it --- we could walk up and down the boardwalk and see the weird normalcy of the post-Sandy summer. The oddest normal thing was a new ice cream parlor, connected in some way with a Hershey's that isn't the Hershey's Chocolate Company, in a building topped with fiberglass ice cream scoops that just look perfect, down to those sprinkles of frost that form on a big enough scoop of ice cream. Opposite the new-laid boardwalk from that are the twisted poles of the downed sky ride. (Also visible from this end are Pirates Hideaway roller coaster and the displaced-but-presumably-returning Hot Tamales kiddie coaster.)

Back towards the FunTown Pier end, well, many of the shops and arcades were in business. We visited a jewelry shop where bunny_hugger's found attractive beach-type things in the past, and she did again. She also noticed they had ornaments carved from salvaged boardwalk wood, showing scenes like FunTown Pier from before its destruction, or the Star Jet roller coaster after it had dropped in the water. (We're not sure if this is just poor taste or a bad decision to keep staring at the wound instead of letting it heal.) I bought one showing FunTown Pier.

We'd wondered too if the Berkeley Sweet Shop would be open: it was near the pier and was of course in Seaside Heights, but bunny_hugger's father hoped we could get some salt water taffy from ``that good place''. I worried when, from the jewelry shop, I could see the taffy machine not running, but maybe Sundays are just a slow production day. The shop was open and in good working order, it seemed, and we got a box of taffy for her father (he'd wanted about half liquorice and half other things, or as he put it, ``a cup of liquorice, a cup of something else, another cup of liquorice, a cup of something else, etc'') and a tub for ourselves that we'd be nibbling on till well after we got back to Lansing.

Trivia: Containerized cargo vessels entering service in 1978 could handle up to 3,500 twenty-foot containers, more than had entered all United States ports combined during an average week in 1968. Source: The Box: How The Shipping Container Made The World Smaller And The world Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Detroit City Is The Place To Be: The Afterlife Of An American Metopolis, Mark Binelli.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

We still have about half a dozen pieces of taffy left in that tub.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm glad we've been able to keep some of it to linger.

[moxie_man]

Hershey's Ice Cream expanded up into Maine about 25 years ago. They're based in PA and yes, it's surprising that they aren't related to the chocolate people. Personally, I've had better and I've had worse ice cream. Of course, it's hard to compete up here in Maine against Gifford's.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, I've seen the Hershey's Ice Cream logo for years but had always assumed it was a spinoff of the chocolate company. Now that I'm attuned to it, I think I remember some mentions of it in books about the chocolate Hershey (who left a couple of companies in his wake, including a confectioner's on which he made his original fortune, before diving into milk chocolate).

I haven't yet had ice cream from the Michigan State University dairies; apparently it's highly spoken of, but we just don't get so very much ice cream as you might imagine for whatever reason. Probably because if we got more ice cream we'd eat more ice cream, is the thing.

[moxie_man]

Understandable about the Ice Cream. So, we "yankees" in New England make up for it. I read one stat from about 10 years ago, that the six New England states combined consume more ice cream than the rest of the country. Makes one wonder if that's still the case.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm curious. Someone's got to lead consumption, after all, and it can't always be California and Texas.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking that The Box would be a good thing for me to read, because I don't know very much about its subject, and logistics seems to be important.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I picked it up because it looked like an interesting book on a subject I knew nothing about, and it proved so: Levinson puts together an interesting narrative that made me feel like I was seeing things that were all around me (I was in Singapore at the time, and it's got plenty of containerized cargo, and home for me was New Jersey where the first, for appropriate values of the term, containerized cargo ship originally sailed from) for the first time.

Because there's some kind of rule about these things, at about the same time as Levinson's book came out Brian J Cudahy also published one, Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, and that's worth going to as a second book because of the dangers of reading only one book about something. Cudahy takes much more of a trainspotter approach to ... well, everything, really, so that if you for some reason needed to make sure a scene set in the containerized cargo world as it existed in 1974 was accurate I'd probably rely on Cudahy more than Levinson, but if you wanted to understand the history of the things I'd try Levinson's.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Apparently you've somehow missed the Hershey's ice cream stand(s) on the Parkway or Turnpike that've been there for at least a dozen years. I *think* Molly Pitcher has one, and I recall seeing one other.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've seen the signs for them, but I'd just assumed it was connected to the Hershey Corporation because ... well, who wouldn't? I'm surprised there's not serious trademark issues since the difference between candy and ice cream seems pretty slight to me.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

There has been some immense trademark battling between the two, and every time they try a brand line extension, it seems to flare up again.