It has to be noticed that the show is actually recorded in Seaside Heights, it takes about an hour of driving to get to Atlantic City. So sure, both are on the Jersey Shore, but that is only technically speaking, in reality there is no continuous shore between Seaside Heights and Atlantic City. It is Islands and a big river mouth between them.
If you said you had never heard of a rectangle would it be right of me to say “What, you’ve never heard of square?”
One could certainly reply “Oh, I know what a square is, but what’s a rectangle?”
It’s possible to know individual parts of something (Atlantic City, The Boardwalk, Allentown) without know the name of the whole thing (Jersey Shore).
Most people have heard of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, not everyone knows that where they meet is The Four Corners.
Wisconsin Dells. HUGE tourist attraction, TONS of local history, has the largest water park in the US Noah’s Ark) and a lot more, but how many people outside of the midwest have heard of it. I’d be willing to bet if a reality show took place for a few years in the Dells and then Lake Delton drained it would have been a bigger deal.
A square listens to Lawrence Welk. A rectangle listens to barbershop quartets.
Wait a minute. Since when is Allentown PA (which is in inland Pennsylvania) part of the Jersey Shore? 
o/ "Oh, our fathers fought the Second World War, spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore..." o/
There’s also a Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, FWIW.
This is very true. I grew up in Ohio and for the first 13 years of my life there was a Wisconsin Dells bumper sticker on our family car, so I had heard the name, but until reading this post, I didn’t have a clear idea of what it was other than some attraction in Wisconsin.
Yeah, but nobody ever says “we spent the weekend on the Jersey Shore” to mean that. “We spent the weekend in Jersey Shore”, yeah.
All true.
Well, DUH! Susan Sarandon washes her boobs in a classic, “May I help you with that, Miss?” scene. Otherwise, I’ve played Monopoly and I know Trump has a casino there, but Atlantic City stopped being relevant to the rest of the US around…um…I guess it was never all that relevant.
This.
Sorry, folks from the New York media market. The rest of us care as little about Atlantic City as we do any other news story about a place we’ve never been and thought closed down sixty years ago. Hell, I live within sight of the Chicago skyline and I ignore Chicago news unless I have a job that takes me there.
But everyone knows House on the Rock, right?
(Which is not in the Dells, but nearby - in Midwest terms where nearby can be down the block or 45 miles away).
It’s impressive that you are so proud of your parochial provincialism. And you’re also missing the point.
No-one is saying that, in the normal run of events, you have to take an inordinate interest in Atlantic City or the Jersey Shore. For very good reasons, most of us tend to focus most of our attention on the things that affect us most directly. But that wasn’t the question asked by the OP.
The OP asked why the boardwalk fire is such a big story and, to be honest, i think any 15-year-old with more than about three minutes experience of the modern media landscape could answer that question without raising a sweat. The combination of a large media market in the New York area, the recent storyline of Hurricane Sandy, and the dramatic visuals provided by the fire itself all combine to make it a big media story.
Also, to be honest, if a fire of this size and scale happened at Wisconsin Dells, i’ll bet anything you like that it would make national news. When disaster strikes, we often end up learning about places we’d never thought of before.
I had never spent a moment thinking about Prescott, AZ, until 19 firefighters died in a wildfire there. I had never heard of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, until a train exploded there a couple of months back. Weeks can go by without me exercising my brain thinking about Boulder, or Oklahoma City, or Waco, but when those places experience flash floods, or tornadoes, or fertilizer plant explosions, i don’t start scratching my head like a moron and asking, “Why is this in the news?”
As Little Nemo said in a numbered list that I made a point of publicly agreeing with.
Neither do I. I know what’s going on in the world, and I feel bad for the people who suffered and died. I just get tired of New-fucking-York this and that. I joke about how I ignore Chicago, but Chicago is a Glogal City, a notch down from NYC but a notch up from LA and Moscow, and when we had enormous floods last April you’d hardly notice from the news coverage it got. And the flood in Calgary got short shrift, too, though it shut down the city center for a week. But there was a big fire in what is essentially a strip mall in a run-down tourist trap! “Laws a-mighty, we and every other station must put a team on it right away! This deserves several days of coverage!” Please. :rolleyes:
And excuse my skepticism, but in a few years the only reason anybody remembers Prescott is as a name in a misremembered Eagles song. And the weeks that go by “without (you) exercising (your) brain thinking about Boulder, or Oklahoma City, or Waco,” are already weeks; those events were only a couple months ago and it won’t be long before the thoughts are years apart. And the explosion was in West, not Waco. Waco is more famous for the Branch Davidians. That was in Elk, not Waco, but at least it was closer to Waco than West. If you want your outrage to seem non-recreational you need to keep your geography straight.
::cough::
And yet that’s precisely what the OP did: he basically scratched his head and asked why this was news. Do you remember the OP, or is your inferiority complex about Chicago messing with your short-term memory?
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Mooooooooommmmmy! New York gets all the girls, and no-one ever pays attention to us!
You understand, i assume, that New Jersey is not New York? That they are separate places, separate states? That this fire didn’t happen in New York, and that the news stories about it are not about New York?
Which is precisely my point, dropkick. I don’t spend time thinking about those places, but when they made the news, it was for perfectly understandable reasons. Just like the fire in New Jersey.
You apparently don’t know what the term “recreational outrage” means. I have nothing of the sort. Hell, if anything, a person starting a thread complaining about news coverage of a large fire is closer to RO than i am.
So is a person whining about how Chicago doesn’t get as much attention as New York. On second thought, that’s not RO either; it’s just stupid.
For the record, the first person to bring up New York in this thread was you. You claimed that anyone who watched shows set in the New York area would likely have heard of the Jersey Shore.
I should mention that on HIMYM they do go to Atlantic City a few times, but I had no idea that was part of the Jersey Shore, and why would I?
To be honest, before this thread, I wasn’t sure whether Atlantic City was considered part of “The Shore” or not. I mean, I knew it was the very southern end of the general area known as the Jersey Shore, but I kind of thought it was its own distinct location.
Anyhow, before I visited it in 2006 or so, I just thought the Jersey Shore was a generic term for beaches in New Jersey (and I guess it is to an extent.) I hadn’t a clue that it had a carnival-like atmosphere/culture to it. When somebody talked about vacationing at the Shore, I just assumed it was like having a house out on the Dunes in Indiana or Michigan or something. The cultural aspect was completely lost on me. It’s kind of like the Adirodnacks and Catskills to me–I know it exists, but I’m not exactly sure what it is.
Because it’s in New Jersey and it’s on the…shore?
Just so no one will be confused in the future, here’s a map of the Jersey Shore with some of the major beaches highlighted:
Why would I know that the Jersey Shore is the name for the entire shore of Jersey and not just one section of it? Where I live if someone says they’re going to “The Lakefront” it’s a very specific area that stretches about 3 miles or so in Milwaukee (as opposed to the entire area where Lake Michigan meets the land) Furthermore, why would I know that Atlantic City is on the shore? Sorry, I don’t know where all the cities in New Jersey are. Can you tell me where Wisconsin Dells is without looking at a map? They had a pretty big disaster there a few years back. You may recall seeing some of these images on the news, which I believe went national when it happened.
Until this thread came up I had no idea (or if I did, I didn’t remember) that Atlantic City was part of The Jersey Shore…and why would I? The layout of New Jersey just doesn’t have that much bearing on my life just like I wouldn’t expect anyone not from my area to know how long it takes to drive from Spring Green to The Dells.