ok, so I won't dress it up - the soprano's thing was a non-event. I spent the evening reading a book at home. The restaurant was restricted to friend's of the owner. Furthermore, Ms. V spent the evening waiting tables upstairs and so doesn't have any scintillating stories. However, there was an enormous man in the kitchen with an entourage of fawning bus boys. "Hey there, wadj-ya-doin?" said the indigenous giant, "Ai'm fine," she said and tootled past looking for her boss.

However earlier in the day, I was chaffuered to the true heartland of NJ - the near endless stripmall on some kind of main road (maybe an 'I-something'). I've seen strip malls before and they don't hold me in soulless fear quite like they used to, in no small part because of the UK's enthusiastic adoption of US car culture and the migratory patterns of its out-of-town shopping victims. However, the interesting thing is not the malls but that the NJ road system was designed by a committee of non-drivers with symptoms of any number of peculiar and elaborate psychoses.

The favoured site for these mendacious town planners is the junction - where else can such havoc be wreaked so economically than by introducing two or three streams of traffic unexpectedly to each other? Specifically having junctions which form an surprising lattic formation as filters off interstates where one lane of traffic is building speed to get onto the interstate and another travelling fast and trying to leave the road without obstructing the flow. All you have to do is to cross these two streams ('don't cross the streams...') and, garnish with abundant foliage so that no driver could possibly judge the best course of action, nor even see the other cars - without premonition - and you have a cracking road/life expectancy event.