IN a perfect world, the Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers would be a proper carnival you could take your kids to, with cold lemonade at the Parkway Rest Stop, sword swallowing by Mister Snitch!, dunk-the-blogger booth at Mary's Lame Attempt at Fame, house of horrors at the Bad Hair Blog and the rest.
But then who in New Jersey contemplates a perfect world? So, absent perfection, for another glimpse of New Jersey Ascendant, check out the weekly assemblage of all things Jersey that has taken on a life of its own on the Internet.
For those with too much time on their hands, a blog carnival is a collection of Web log entries, usually on a shared topic - politics, food, poker, etc. The most famous of which is the Carnival of the Vanities, which has become the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey of blog carnivals.
Earlier this year the anonymous proprietors of Enlighten-New Jersey, whose bloggers seem to believe Senator Jon S. Corzine is the antichrist, decided to start a New Jersey carnival to provide exposure for New Jersey bloggers and foster community in the New Jersey blogosphere.
In the first one, on May 22, Sluggo of Sluggo Needs a Nap dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination for governor and threw his support to Bret D. Schundler. Jim Flynn at Parkway Rest Stop included a link to a video of Norwegian soldiers in Kosovo doing a takeoff on the Beach Boys' "Kokomo." And Coffee Grounds offered logos for New Jersey cities. The seven subsequent ones have included more assaults on Mr. Corzine and reports on New Jersey minor league baseball and the heroic preparations undertaken by concertgoers contemplating a possible shortage of toilet paper in the women's restrooms during a Bob Dylan concert at Montclair State University.
A lot of it's typical blogging fare - unsolicited and unneeded opinions and pictures of people's children that only their grandparents really want to see. But after eight carnivals, you can see why New Jersey looms so large in the blogosphere. No one in Manhattan really cares about what's happening in Elmira, N.Y. It would be hard to see the point of a Carnival of the Connecticut Bloggers. (On the other hand, the world breathlessly awaits a Carnival of the Long Island Bloggers.)
But New Jersey was made for the blogosphere, right down to the Asbury Park Tillie icon on the carnival logo.
The state is small enough that whether you live in Bergen or Hunterdon you still have an opinion on the best pizza or sausage and pepper sandwich at the Jersey Shore, drive on the same turnpike, and both contribute to the Jersey Joke syndrome and bristle at it. The politics are so obviously dysfunctional everyone shares everyone else's pain. Everyone has an attitude. And over the past decades, almost without people realizing it, the pop culture New Jersey of Springsteen/"The Sopranos"/"Garden State," etc., has changed the way people think about their state.
"I grew up thinking Abe Beame was the mayor of Union City," said Maureen Berzok, whose recent Jersey Writers blog included a particularly Jersey-centric review of "War of the Worlds." ("I only went to see 'The War of the Worlds' because of the star: New Jersey ... Sorry, Tom, but Jack Nicholson was right: You can't handle the truth. You're just not a Jersey guy, especially one from Bayonne.")
She continued: "Now we're aware of our own peculiarities whether it's Janet Evanovich on Trenton or the Weird New Jersey books. I have a relative who just came back from Cambodia. I would never go to Cambodia. I'd rather go someplace I haven't been in New Jersey."
LAST Sunday's Installment No. 8, edited by the blogger and soup maven Cripes, Suzette!, featured 26 entries including a valiant attempt to finish all of "Ulysses" on Fausti's Book Quest, Mister Snitch's thoughtful and learned post on Hoboken and Newark politics, assorted very, very dark musings on Poor Impulse Control, and the Barista of Bloomfield Ave. on the Nutley pizza wars.
At first, the New Jersey carnival pioneers figured theirs was the only statewide carnival but it turns out there is at least one other one, Montana's Rascal Fair, where bloggers include Giddy Up, Grizzlies Rock and Fat Girl on a Bicycle.
From a distance it looks like a Bizarro version of the New Jersey Carnival - west not east, big not small, empty not crowded, red not blue - but Mr. Flynn at Parkway Rest Stop sees similarities.
"My friend, Craig, there says Montana's a small town with long streets," he said. "Jersey's a small town."