Trenton, 5/30--A furious battle in the New Jersey congress ended last night with an agreement to make the "telephone pole" the state's official tree. There was much tension, the usual threat of filibuster, but finally a willingness among advocates of the "hickory" to concede defeat.

New Jersey thus becomes the first state in American History to officially accord the telephone pole such high status.

"The telephone pole has had its small cadre of admirers," said Congressman Jim Sharkey, Republican, of Scotch Plains. "But it took us a while to build-up the support [in the Congress] to make this happen."

Sharkey said the tree, originally indigenous to Western Canada before migrating south to California in the 1860's, is "a distant cousin of the redwood," and is remarkable for its uniform, unchanging size and dimensions.

"Add the fact that, miraculously, they grow contiguously in exact spacial intervals of several hundred feet, and you can see how they became suitable candidates on which to hang thousands of miles of electrical wire networking," Sharkey explained.

Many people "never perceive the telephone pole as a tree, let alone appreciate it," Sharkey said. "We take these magnificent arborial specimens for granted, perhaps because they're so omnipresent and maybe also because they've been coopted for technological use."

"In a sense, we psychically reject them as wonders of nature," Sharkey laughed, inappropriately.