Text size:

NJ mayor sez 'Fuhgeddaboudit!' to blog

The Associated Press

3:30 PM EDT, July 18, 2008

BELMAR, N.J. - To the Staten Island Girls who may have been taught to fight dirty in Brownies, Ken Pringle is sorry.

To the Guidos, those muscle-bound, tanned-as-coconut-shell visitors who are as welcome at the shore as Canada geese, the mayor of Belmar offers his apologies.

And to blondes everywhere, whether they know how to take out the trash or not, the blog-writing mayor is really remorseful.

Those comments in his blog for summer renters in this legendary party town on the Jersey shore were meant, Pringle says, as tongue-in-cheek jabs at visitors behaving badly -- which Belmar surely has each summer.

But they struck a nerve far beyond what was intended, offending Italian-American groups, New Yorkers, and yes, blondes.

So Pringle is shutting down the blog, the Belmar Summer Rental News, with an apology and a bit of regret that the furor his comments created has overshadowed very real concerns about tourists and their effect on the quality of life here.

"People had such a visceral reaction to what they thought I said that it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about what I actually said," Pringle said in an interview Friday as he struggled to finish the final newsletter amid constantly ringing phones, mostly calls from reporters. "It was meant to communicate with our tenants in a fun way."

Asked if he would apologize, he said, "I'll be doing several of those."

Pringle started the blog -- which he also printed up and distributed to the 300 or so group rentals in this beach town about 10 minutes south of Asbury Park -- last summer as a way of communicating with renters about what is and isn't allowed in Belmar.

It included schedules for recycling and trash pickups, noise ordinances and general how-to-get-along advice.

But he also sprinkled it liberally with jabs -- intended to be humorous -- at some of the more hapless renters, like the group who left their marijuana-smoking water pipe out on the table while police responded to a noise complaint at their address.

Pringle's good-natured back and forth with a summer resident and blogger who calls himself Belmar Benny about party-shack life in Belmar drew thousands of Web hits.

But it was in the July 4, 2008, edition of the newsletter that Pringle may have crossed the line between satire and offense. One article recounted a bar fight between two female tourists, one of whom was from Staten Island, N.Y., that ended with the New Yorker hitting her opponent's face while still clutching a drink.

"Journalistically speaking, 'SI woman punches other woman' is right up there with 'Dog bites man,' " Pringle wrote. "But here's the twist: As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl's face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in. Now, we're not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray, or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse."

The same issue mentioned "Guidos," citing a Web site NJGuido.com on which one writer boasted that he's the one who always screams and wakes the neighbors up on the way home from a Belmar bar each weekend.

"The call of the Guido is bellowing, and frequently slurred, invariably starting with the sound, 'Yo,' followed all too often by some creative variation on an expletive beginning with the letter 'F,' " Pringle wrote.

On the next page, he poked fun at a group of girls who told code enforcement officers that no one had ever told them how to take out the trash, titling the article, "Let us guess . . . they're blonde."

His comments have angered Italian-American groups, and a Staten Island tourism group invited him to come there to see what it's really like.

Pringle would not go into detail about what form his apologies would take, but said the final issue of the rental newsletter would probably not be posted until sometime Friday night.

"This will be the last one," he said. "It's always been a significant commitment of time to do it."