corrado's

Not a restaurant, but worth a review anyway: roozle and I stopped here on our way from Baltimore back to Boston (via Somerville NJ and Paterson; the US-206 route works surprisingly well combined with crossing the Hudson at the GW Bridge instead of the Tappan Zee). It's four stores, but the one that we visited is the grocery store. It started life as an Italian grocery and then added sections for each new wave of immigrants. There's a pasta aisle, and a rice aisle, and an oil aisle, and a vinegar aisle. There's a vegetable section the size of a good produce section (I got some red jalapenos for about a nickel apiece), and a separate fruit section that large again (where I regret passing up the white cherries), and then there's the specialty produce section (where I bought a couple of pepinos). The whole thing is enormous; they have a display of quince (!) that's as big as most supermarkets' displays of, say, oranges. They have everything that Bread and Circus carries, but for half to a third the price. Chinese, Southeast Asian, Spanish, and several different types of Latin American foods are well represented. Indian food is oddly underrepresented, meaning it's only as good as you'd find in an ordinary supermarket. Smatterings of other European cuisines, particularly in the cheese shop.

There is also a wholesale grocer, a garden center, and a brewer's and vintner's supply shop in the complex, and they seem to have a presence in the farmer's market not too far away.

Corrado's Family Affair
1578 Main Avenue (off I-80 exit 58A)
Clifton, NJ 07011
+1.800.232.6758
+1.973.340.0628

M-W 0500-2100
R-F 0500-2200
Sat 0500-2100
Sun 0500-2000

transit of venus

Sounds like a cross between a cynical classicism and an Anais Nin title, doesn't it?

This coming Tuesday morning (for those of you in EDT), Venus will transit the sun. The ingress and most of the transit itself will happen before sunrise here, but the egress will be visible. Contact III is at 7:05 AM and Contact IV is at 7:25, and the half-hour starting around 7 is the most interesting visible part of the transit. Starting shortly before Contact III, expect to see some amazing phenomena: first, the Black Drop effect, which is due to the fact that the human eye can't see the Sun's edge brightness gradation because it's past saturation, and later, a halo effect observed by Lomonosov in 1761 (the last-but-one such transit) which is due to refraction in Venus' dense atmosphere.

There's a fun map showing where the transit will be visible. Notice the grey areas in Nunavut and off the coast of Antarctica; those are where night and day (respectively) will occur entirely within the duration of the transit.