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Articles by Jeff Murray
How PFAS Regulations May Affect Landfills and Industry
March 13, 2025 Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, regulations continue to evolve after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized long-awaited drinking water standards for six common PFAS, and two targets for upcoming regulations could be landfill leachate and industrial wastewater. Both significantly contribute PFAS to municipal wastewater facilities, which are not typically designed and operated to remove these compounds effectively.
Kiss of the Cat Whisker
Jeff Murray Just add airwaves. Illustration by Jeff Murray Your smartphone is the great-great grandchild of a “crystal set,” the earliest consumer wireless device. Given a local AM station, once connected to an antenna and telephone earpiece, a crystal radio was live and crooning. A variety of common metallic crystals will do the job, chiseled by any kid from the right rock face.
Where The Water Bends
Jeff Murray There be quicksand there. When kids ran feral, we ran to the brook. Who didn’t who could? Always a brook, a creek, a river, like most others, we newfound neighborhood Boomer pals smelled flowing water and thereabouts room to move.
Nuns, Bazooka Guys and Stone Cool Ruins
Jeff Murray Anchor blocks are real stone, cultured from the stuff of beaches and golf ball traps, quartz sand. I grew up in a family possessed of a ruin in progress, an antique set of Anker-Steinbaukasten, the classic German toy building blocks. Never sequestered as precious heirlooms, roughly rubble-piled in a rude, unoriginal corrugated cardboard carton, the stone blocks were at least old as my grandmother and impossible to imagine new on a toy shop shelf as granny teething a binky.
Nineteen Fifty-Sick
Jeff Murray Of Comics, Crayons and Quarantines. Fifties kids routinely contracted measles, mumps, chicken pox, and scarlet fever. Between 1956 and 1957, I was dealt my share of delirium, spots, royal rashes and putty-faced puffery and skated with that, thank goodness. Serious business no doubt, enough to warrant a public health officer nailing a scarlet-lettered QUARANTINE sign to our Jersey apartment door. Unsure if that happened for all those bugs, but I’m positive at least one.
Auntie Mine
Jeff Murray She’s like Absolute Zero, Daddy-o. No matter how close your parents, there’s no cigar like a cool aunt or uncle. They lack that parent bone. Yeah, that one. That Put Your Eye Out bone. That Eating Frozen Pizza Will Give You Weevils bone. On a good day they might buy you a kite and your first real cheroot.
Whiter Shade of Pink
Jeff Murray I was a pre-teen Russian asset. Almost six decades before Hillary Clinton alluded to Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard in so many words as Moscow’s marionette, thousands of Cold War American kids tuned into powerful shortwave broadcasts from the Soviet Bloc. Blowtorch among these was Radio Moscow, its North American Service beaming megawatts of propaganda to earnest thrill-seekers like myself.
Swanky Say Deluxe
Jeff Murray Running with the cufflink candidate. Who could have anticipated a ruby-eyed skull cufflink big as your head running for president of the United States, never mind one quite this quick on his toggle? Yes, Swanky… with his shock of awesome hair and his own personal beauty pageant. Swanky in your face, making his outraged Jonathan Jo mouth like an O. For some time now it’s been Swanky this and Swanky that, but Swanky just won’t go away.
JuJu For JoJo
Jeff Murray Biden’s secret bling. Joe Biden says the most Dadaist things. New Hampshire? He calls it Vermont. Which is a mistake, or conversely, a wry commentary on bourgeois life any of us could make. It may or may not be art, but for sure, who among us hasn’t referred to the Green Mountain state as my boss? All right, that’s a bridge so far.
My Dinner With Auchincloss
Jeff Murray An editor’s son tells primary tales. My father was editor of the Nashua Telegraph during the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary. One odd memory was the night he brought home a guest to share our family’s Tuna Wiggle and Birdseye frozen peas, a young man appearing to be in his 20s, who claimed his name was Auchincloss, yes, of those Auchinclosses, albeit at some unclear familial distance from Jacqueline Bouvier—Kennedy’s half-sister.
I Took a Swing at the Son of Rin Tin Tin
Jeff Murray Life in the days of 25 words or less. Before all contestants received trophies and dumb sweepstakes luck ruled without reason, certain gifted individuals won stuff. My clever 1950s New Jersey mom won a mink stole for 25 words or less. Our cheerful bakery delivery man won a washing machine on Beat The Clock, a network TV Goodson-Todman game show, for his ability to run relay races balancing precarious stacks of stage dishes.
The Queen of All Good Eggs’ Short Wave Vanity Plates
Jeff Murray How they never happened. The royalty I reference is my mom. She squired me throughout my awkward age—too young to drive, too old to be seen being driven by one’s mother. Call it My First Catch-22. These days, it might not apply. All I know is, in 1963 this was a window of vulnerability akin to living in mom’s basement, except on four wheels. Not below grade, but far worse in plain sight, on the streets where I might be forced to live by my fists.
Swanky’s Big Buffet
Been so much Swanky over the dam since 2016, so much President Ruby-Eyed Skull Cufflink Big as Your Head, time almost forgot the mofo of all startling revelations. Not us though. We didn’t forget that Eustace Tilley, New Yorker magazine’s mascot boulevardier bugged out of his cozy gig, lock, stock and rent-controlled walk-up above a midtown Duane Reade, to become Swanky’s 1700 Pennsylvania doorman. Didn’t buy our leak? Don’t believe your lying eyes? Look again.
A Yocky Way of Knowledge
If I had a one-floor elevator ride to explain what I saw in old time animated cartoons, that’s your takeaway and I’m sticking to it. The 1950s TV drip-drip-drip replay of old cartoons programmed me at the very deepest Cartesian level. When anarchist mice placed spherical fused bombs beneath fat black cats, I was at once the mouse, the cat and the bomb. I exploded to smithereens. My head went north, my tail went south and I jitterbugged for joy.
Arrest All Teenagers!
In 1987, approaching 40, I got it in my head that teenage spinal fluid would keep us Boomers forever young. And as a bonus, it would taste like a blueberry margarita. Hold the phone. I’m no Nostradamus. I could very well have "My Sweet Lord"-ed this scenario from the flotsam and jetsam of dopey dystopias floating in my kid science fiction addict’s brain. But then, my point has nothing to do with prescience or George Harrison-style sampling.
Ruminations of a Retiree
Nothing nightmarish, or at least metaphysically so, but rather, have you pictured the neighborhood you’ll spend the later years of your life? Will there be funny cast concrete lions with glass eyes at the end of a driveway you pass walking to the grocery store? I have those. And I pass, but have yet to walk, Elm St. A morbid, Charles Addams fanboy kid, I got some jollies imagining my dotage.
My Presidenteisenhower
All this hot “not my president” talk lately got me wondering about mine. At roughly six years old, I decided I liked Ike, though all the adults I knew favored Stevenson. Yeah, you likely need liver spots to know who I’m talking about, but hang in if you don’t. Dwight David Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States when I hit first grade. I knew that because I was already a news hound, the biggest fan of the original Today Show starring horn-rimmed host Dave Garroway and house chimp J.
Get Swanky! | www.splicetoday.com
That ruby-eyed skull cufflink president big as your head has gone full-tilt Top of the World Ma from the chandelier of the toughest room in his life. Vegas oddsmakers put him out of office any day in a hail of zingers like Jimmy Cagney at a Friars’ Club roast. Since November, Swanky hecklers’ withering wintry mix of smart remarks, low blows, cheap shots and toxic scorn have him trapped like a Saturday night rat at a third-tier Jersey Shore comedy club.
The Gerber Baby Wore Baracuta
Jeff Murray What one freshman never forgot. During my first giddy days of Boomer college, a particular freshman was rumored to be the Gerber Baby. I don’t know how it started, and by the 21st century, I’m not sure the Gerber Baby is any more familiar to SpliceToday readers than the Dionne Quintuplets. But back then, everybody knew the Gerber Baby as well as he or she knew Snap, Crackle and Pop. FYI, those are cartoon mascots for a vintage breakfast cereal known as Kellogg’s Rice Krispies.
Call Me Mr. Bahama
I laughed when I saw Tommy Bahama resort wear on sale back in what, the 1990s? I didn’t know it yet, but Tommy Bahama struck the same funny bone as Carlos Danger would many years later. Nothing to do with the duds. Just that Krameresque, goofily evocative name. All I could picture was Al Bundy arguing with the Dive Shack guy over snorkels and flippers.
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