The Luna Park Gazette

And, so, another local landmark is gone. My sister and I passed by O’Sullivan’s Bar & Grill in Bay Ridge last night during our after-dinner walk and saw nothing but darkness. There were no lights shining from this old Irish saloon that the O’Sullivan family took over in 1934. There were no customers outside taking a cigarette break on Third Avenue; no voices, music or laughter emenating from the corner business on 89th Street. A dark bar on a Saturday night only means one thing, but I didn’t want to accept the grim reality. I had to walk up to the front door, grab hold of the handle and pull back. But the place was locked up tight. This morning I jumped on the Internet in hopes of learning that the owners were on vacation, or that they were renovating the place and would be reopening in grand style any day now. But the bar’s Yelp page was branded with two grisly words at the top: “Permanently Closed.” I’ve been searching around local message boards for any ind...

My father once gave me a great piece of advice when I was facing a difficult task. “Better behind you than in front of you,” he said. That little saying has been so helpful to me over the years and I will always grateful to my father for passing it along. So, it seemed appropriate that on this Father’s Day weekend, I should take on a chore I've had in front of me for an honest-to-God decade. I decided that I was going to clean out…the Box . The Box is this cardboard monstrosity brimming with all sorts of random stuff—books, paper, and a lot of extension cords, for some reason--that has been festering in a corner of my computer room ever since I moved here 10 years ago. The thing was supposed to be a temporary fix, just a way of transporting a lot of loose items out of my old address. My plan was to quickly review and properly sort all of the Box’s contents as soon as I got settled in my new digs. That was in 2011. Every weekend I would tell myself, this is it,...

“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” ― Arthur C. Clarke I had a senior moment at the gym the other day. Of course, every moment at the gym could be considered a senior one for me, given all the wheezing, whining and swearing I do as I try to keep in some kind of shape. But I’m trying to be more positive, so let’s skip over that particular misery for a moment and focus on an incident that occurred while I was in the locker room. There were a couple of students from a local high school standing behind me. I wasn’t paying any attention to them until one guy mentioned a certain faculty member. “Oh, yeah,” his friend replied. “He’s my robotics teacher.” I froze. Wait a minute. Robotics…as in robots? That’s an actual course of study in high school? That’s impossible. Robotics is something from Star Trek , or The Terminator , or Flash Gordon or a million other science fiction stories. And if it’s real, then it can only be happening in a super-...

At one point in Raideers of the Lost Ark , the villain, Belloq, holds up his watch to our hero, Indiana Jones. “Look at this,” he says. “It’s worthless…but I take it and bury it in the sand for a thousand years,it becomes priceless.” I’ve always thought that was a great line and it came bouncing back to me last week during my most wonderful writing class. Our fabulous teacher Rosemary always starts things off with a writing prompt to get things flowing. On this evening she asked us to list articles of clothing we owned before we turned 20 years old. As usual I stared at the screen and thought, “what the hell is this woman talking about?” And then, as usual, I started writing and soon came up with a list of items, including an atrocious short-sleeve paisley dress shirt that I owned when I was a teenager. At the time I actually thought that thing looked cool, but now the very thought of it makes me shudder. Wherever you are, paisley shirt… stay there . After making ou...