The Luna Park Gazette

Well, my computer has crapped out on me once again. I made the mistake of listening to this disembodied voice from Dell Tech Support and now instead of a computer that shuts off unexpectedly, I have a pile of junk that doesn't come on in the first place. This has forced me to blog from an undisclosed location, kind of like Dick Cheney. I can't believe this nightmare is still going on. Now Dell is going to send yet another technician over to my house to replace yet another part. What the hell is left to replace? I've been screaming at them to give me a new computer for months, but apparently they think the Doctor Frankenstein approach is better. I thought the whole point of having a computer was to make your life easier, you know, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Trek , all that crap. My life has become anything but easier. The damn computer is on my mind all day. At this point, I'd take Hal, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey . Sure he was a homicidal maniac, but at...

"Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations." --President Barack Obama So the day has finally arrived: Barack Obama is now the President of the United States. President Barack Obama. I like the sound of that. President Obama. This was a work day for me, but you could tell things were different around the city, around the country, around the world. I walked by Wall Street on my lunch hour and saw a crowd of people standing before a giant TV screen mounted by the New York Stock Exchange watching Barack Obama being sworn in. Trinity Church, just a block away, had speakers set up outside so people could hear the Inauguration, and there was a TV inside for those who had time to wa...

"First of all, I don't see America having problems." --George W. Bush, interview with Bob Costas at the 2008 Olympics, Beijing, China, Aug. 10, 2008 I saw a poster for the horror movie My Bloody Valentine 3D in my local subway station the other day that warned of "graphic, brutal, horror violence and grisly images throughout." I don't know about the movie, but when I saw those words, I thought to myself, God, what a perfect description of the Bush Administration. Graphic, brutal horror violence? Four years in Iraq covers that and as far as the grisly images, we've got Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, the Katrina fiasco, and Dick Cheney's sneering mug for starters. Maybe we should think of Bush as Jason or Freddy Krueger. So, yes, the Bush presidency qualifies as an eight-year-long slasher movie, which, thank God, is now coming to end. It always amazed me that two people I know in two different areas of my life both called George Bush by the exact same nic...

And now the Prisoner is finally free. Patrick McGoohan, who starred in The Prisoner , my favorite television show, died yesterday in California. He was 80 years old. McGoohan, who was born in Astoria, was a veteran of stage, screen and TV, winning two Emmys for his work on Columbo . This guy was beyond cool, he was solid ice. I remember him first from Secret Agent , a spy show that, at McGoohan's insistence, went against the Bond formula of guns, women, and mindless explosions. His John Drake character was gritty and didn't hesitate to employ such less-than-sporting tactics as blackmail to put his opponents out of commission. I also remember seeing him in The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh , where he played a priest, Dr. Syn (oy...) in an 18th Century English farming community, who fights the king's harsh taxes in the guise of the Scarecrow, a kind of British version of Zorro. My mother never forgave him for his behavior in The Three Lives of Thomasina , a kid's movie about ...

Wikipedia tells me that an epiphany is "the sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something." It's a great concept, it really is, but I'm not going to wait around for one to show up any time soon. I've done that for too long. Today marks the second anniversary of my father's death. It feels so distant and not just by time; I feel emotionally detached from my dad's passing. In some ways that distance is good. I am losing some of the anger I had toward him. What's the use of holding on to it? And, as the economy continues to spiral into oblivion, I think more and more of the stories he told us about growing up during the Great Depression. Perhaps we should call it the First Great Depression, given the nightmare scenario being played out of the world's financial markets. I've been interviewing financial analysts for an story I'm working on and the news is pretty scary. "The difference between the Depression and ...

"New Year's Day is every man's birthday." --Charles Lamb. So now we begin a new year. It’s freezing cold in New York on this first day of 2009 and it was absolutely sub-arctic last night as I rode home on the train. But I didn't sit home on my rear end and watch TV, which is a good start for the new year. No excuses. I went to a great party with great people and some very nice cats and I happily survived the ride home on the subway. The F train was jammed and one guy next to me was reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich —one of the earliest self-help books--and making all sorts of notations, while another guy across from me was reading Consolation of Philosophy . It was a pretty literate crowd, until a bunch of drunken high schoolers got on and uttered ever sentence at the top of their voices. They were apparently looking for someone named Emma, because at every stop one young lady stuck her head out the door and screamed ...