"Not too many people want to shoot Saddam Hussein anymore," said Patrick Wilson, the 20-year-old man you're actually shooting with paintballs. "Snooki gets hit the most. We have to repaint the faces a lot."
And with her arrest on disorderly conduct charges in Seaside yesterday, Snooki may become an even more popular target for paintball gunners.
While people throughout the state, the nation and probably even in remote Amazon tribes all weigh in on "Jersey Shore's" captivating stupidity and profess their hatred, Seaside Heights, MTV and a small legion of store and business owners in this blue-collar Ocean County resort are pumping their fists all the way to the bank.
"We really had no idea what it would become," said Seaside Heights Borough Administrator John Camera. "We never knew that this dumb little reality show would blow up the way it did."
The second season of the show premiered Thursday night on MTV.
Before "Jersey Shore," Seaside was most famous for MTV "Beach House" stints and a 1991 visit by Dick Cheney that drew more than 100,000 people.
It was always seen as a rough-and-tumble town, a beachside resort where families mingled with outlaw bikers and you could grab an ice-cream cone and a shot of whiskey on the boardwalk. In the winter, families on social services lived in hotels there; teens invaded in the spring after proms with caches of booze; and for at least the last decade, folks like "J-Woww" and "The Situation" have traveled there in the summer from North Jersey and New York.
In 2004, MTV's "True Life: I'm a Jersey Shore Girl" first chronicled the spectacle of spray-tanned, tough-talking "guidettes" who invaded Ocean and Monmouth counties' Shore towns each summer to bag a buff "guido" with gleaming spikes atop his head.
