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Mayor In N.J. Sorry About Blog Offending Tourists

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The Associated Press

Published: July 20, 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 muscle-bound, tanned-as-coconut-shell visitors he referred to as "guidos," a term widely considered an ethnic slur, 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.

The 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 has each summer.

But they struck a nerve far beyond what was intended, offending Italian-American groups, New Yorkers, and yes, blondes. And, following an exchange of insults, they even earned the mayor an invitation from a Staten Island tourism group to visit and find out what it's really like.

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.

Asked if he would apologize, he said, "I'll be doing several of those."
Pringle started the blog last summer as a way of communicating with renters about what is and isn't allowed in Belmar.

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