I don't know, man, I thought it was pretty good last year out on Bader Field for Metallica's Orion Festival (+ More!). They didn't sell as many tickets as Phish, or Dave Matthews Band Caravan the year before, or, frankly, as many as they said at the time, or that they hoped. Chris Steffen of Rolling Stone described their view of Atlantic City as the immediately classic "suboptimal." not to be confused with the optimal subs available at the White House Sub Shop. 

The band is trying out the less suboptimal venue of Detroit this year. "I thought Atlantic City was going to be a lot better than it was," frontman James Hetfield told Rolling Stone at the festival grounds on Belle Isle. "There was some gouging going on in hotels, ripping people off, crap like that. But it's a gambling town, and it's got a reputation for that. We're trying to make this affordable for people, so that wasn't a great thing. Getting in and out of Detroit, I think, is a lot easier."

Gov. Christie announced Wednesday $31 million in grants to three cities and one county as part of his ongoing allocation of $1.8 billion in Sandy aid from the federal government. This is just over half of the total allotment of so-called "essential services" grants to municipalities and governments to cover losses due to essential services impacted by the Oct. 29 hurricane. The money is to cover extra police patrols, increased public works efforts and education services required due to dislocated students. Atlantic City received $7.5 million, Sea Bright $938,000, Ocean County, $7.28 million and Toms River, $15.5 million.

"Several municiaplities and local government agencies have experienced, and will continue to experience, difficulties in meeting the demands and costs for critical public services as a result of the impacts of Superstorm Sandy," said Richard E. Constable, III, Commissioner of the N.J. Department of Community Affairs, which is in charge of distributing the CDBG Disaster Recovery funds for the state. "Essential Services grants are really a vehicle to bridge funding for these Sandy-Impacted local governments as they work to get back on their feet."

Presumably, the money in Atlantic City will not go to this section of famoulsy destroyed Boardwalk, in the northeast inlet, which tourism officials have gone out of their way to point out is a NON-essential part of the Boardwalk. Though I hear there's a plan in the works to replace this section with a concrete promenade linking up with the Marina District. 

Volunteers — twice as many as last summer — from Philadelphia’s largest physical and cognitive rehabilitation center will be donating their time on Saturday, June 15, for an event in Wildwood Crest called “They Will Surf Again” that gets patients with spinal cord injuries into the ocean and riding the waves again.

Using special, adaptive surf boards, as many as 40 MossRehab therapists, on their own time, will share their professional expertise by hitting the beach at Rambler Road in Wildwood Crest between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. The public is invited to attend.

The group, which also includes other MossRehab staff and supporters, will aid participants with disabilities to get up and down the beach, get in and out of wetsuits, and will assist surfers as they ride the waves, said Chad DeSatnick, one of the organizers for the event.

(Photo courtesty of Dr. Tom Harrington of Stevens Institute of Technology, via NOAA website).

So, it's Rip Current Awareness Week in the United States of America and in New Jersey, that inevitably leads to talk of Hurricane Sandy. It seems that in addition to ripping up homes and boardwalks and flooding homes and businesses, the storm rearranged the ocean floor. Severely eroded beaches mean sandbars off shore, which mean rip currents. The built up sandbars are further off shore than normal, which, as the surfer dude students in Dr. Jon Miller's Stevens Institute Classes on beach erosion have informed him. is excellent news for surfers. Creates longer and more sustained waves to surf in, and because they are forming further off shore, keeps the newbies out of the water. So good for the surfers. However, the lifeguards will have their hands full, warns Miller. Sandy's handiwork means rip currents in unexpected places, which the lifeguards will have to scope out on a daily basis. "It will be challenging to keep swimmers safe," he said. "A lot of the beach erosion caused by Hurricane Sandy uncovered a lot of jetties and groins and will lead to rip currents. It's just going to be different, that's the key. It's going to be different for lifeguards and for people coming to the beach."

As always, the advice is the same: never swim alone, never swim in unguarded beaches. If caught in a rip tide, swim parallel to the beach to get out of the current, so it doesn't suck you out to sea. But don't take my word for it. Here's audio of a public service announcement by Olympic swimmer Ian Crocker.  

One the nation’s oldest and probably most iconic outdoor publications, Field & Stream, is teaming up with local volunteers this weekend in a post-Sandy event to plant dune grass and clean up storm debris at Island Beach State Park.

From 8:30 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturday, May 11, as part of the magazine’s Hero for a Day program, volunteers can be part of an effort to replace and improve wildlife habitat at the park, which was severely impacted by Sandy. Large sections of the dune system within the 3,000 acre park were heavily damaged.

Island Beach is located on a southern barrier island peninsula at the south end of Seaside Park Borough in Ocean County. As one of the few remaining undeveloped beaches along the north Atlantic coast, Island Beach is particularly beloved of New Jersey anglers because of its excellent surf fishing for striped bass and bluefish.

I first saw this thing called the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile driving around Ocean City in the early 1990s. You’d turn a corner, and there it would be, this big yellow vehicle with a hot dog atop it sitting at a light, or parked along a side street.

It was an odd sight, yet to me it sort of fit right in with Ocean City’s boardwalk and family-fun atmosphere. But the section that is supposed to be the bun – it looks like an older model yellow sedan – always reminded me of a big banana and got me thinking about what else they could turn those big old land yachts from the 1970s and 1980s into. A mobile banana split, perhaps?

But then I’d get an earworm of that old jingle “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener” … and whether it actually ever made me hungry for a hot dog, I really couldn’t tell you, though I did consume a hot dog as I wrote this. (In the interest of full disclosure, it was a Ball Park frank; I like the way they plump up when I cook them.)

On the six-month anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, which struck the New Jersey Shore on Oct. 29, 2012, with crippling force, creating an historic level of damage, the cool rainy weather and choppy seas on Monday served as a grim reminder of the infamous hurricane.

Sandy was the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history. It is also the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with winds that spanned 1,100 miles and killed 285 people across seven countries. In the U.S., damage spanned seven states. So vast and long-lived was the storm, officials had days beforehand to prepare. Tens of thousands of residents in the state’s four shore counties – Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth and Ocean – were evacuated to higher ground.

But even with days of notice about the approach, there was probably no way to adequately prepare for such a monster storm.

Six months post- Sandy, it's still tough to get a handle on the full extent of how Sandy has and will continue to change the Jersey shore as we know it. I stopped over at the Ventnor City Hall on some business this morning, and they are elbow-deep in preparing for the storm of money that will be flowing down from the feds, the state and the non-profits. The event was so unprecedented that it has taken a longer time than I think anyone really expected to even see a direct path to recovery in the future. Experiences are truly varied: some people seem to have made quick turnarounds and have figured out a way to get back quickly into damaged homes, others seem paralyzed by either insurance issues or indecision over how to rebuild. Once FEMA settles on its long term flood maps, the choices should be a lot clearer. Raise your home, don't raise your home. Pay higher insurance rates, or relocate. The fear is that people will start to walk away from damaged homes with no easy or affordable fix, and leave tax bases and populations _ and characters of these quirky barrier islands _ shadows of their former self. Towns like Brigantine and Ventnor have been thriving year round places for a long time and healthy summer destinations, and it seems hard to believe they will be anything but that in the near future, though in the not-so-near future, the debate will probably be pretty much moot as sea levels continue to rise.

In any cases: Gov. Christie, in addition to commemorating the six month anniversary on Morning Joe and announcing plans to distribute federal money through Community Development Block Grants, also issued a handy Sandy By the Numbers chart. Among the entries: $3.23 billion in insurance payouts; $718 million in Small Business Administration loans; $384 million in approved FEMA grants; 8 million cubic yards of debris removed from the streets; 130,000 people counseled through N.J. Hope and Healing; 38,000 e-mails or phone calls related to Sandy to Gov.'s constituent services; 28,000 donors to Mary Pat Christie's non-profit Sandy Relief Fund (with $34 million raised); 4,000 mold informational flyers or posters distributed (mold is bad; don't ignore it); 1,000 housing choice vouchers made available; 816 unemployed or National Guard members placed in temporary clean up jobs; 734 Sandy related tweets by @govchristie; 192 families being housed in FEMA trailers or at Fort Monmouth; 93 percent of total insurance claims considered closed (at least by FEMA).