The Luna Park Gazette

I wonder what Klaatu would think of us now. I pulled up a beach chair in my local park Friday night and treated myself to a screening of the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still . I’d made certain earlier in the day that the folks at the Narrows Botanical Gardens were screening the 1951 original starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal and not the 2008 atrocity with Keanu Reeves. This was the last night of the summer movie festival and I was feeling kind of low. I hate winter with a passion and in my mind once we clear Labor Day, it’s a screaming hell-plunge into freezing days, 16-hour nights, and no outdoor anything. So, this seemed like a fine way to start the summer send-off: a beautiful night, a great film, and a five-minute walk home. Of course, you have to deal with traffic noise, winds ruffling the movie screen, and noisy kids running around and shrieking at each other, but the price was right, as my father used to say, meaning it was free. Based on...

Okay, I probably could’ve handled that a little better. Last week I got the bill for the double knee surgery I had back in December and since I had switched insurance companies in the interim, I figured I should touch base with the old outfit to see what was going on. The price tag is sizeable to say the least and I wanted to know what was going on before bill collecting commandos kicked my door its hinges. So, I called my old insurance company and what followed was a nearly hour-long waking nightmare that would’ve scared the screaming Jesus out of Rod Serling himself. The experience left me shaken, exhausted, barely able to speak, and perilously close to insanity. And I’m not exaggerating about the time: my cell phone clearly showed that 52 holy-shit-on-a-shingle minutes had burned up during the course of this telephonic fiasco. This was the same week I reconnected on Facebook with a novelty song from 1966 called “ They’re Coming to Take Me Away ,” which turned out to be th...

You think I would’ve learned my lesson with John Ford. Several years ago, I rented " How Green Was My Valley " from Netflix because I thought it was time I finally caught up with Ford’s 1941 classic about a family of Welsh miners in the early 20th Century. I had seen so much of Ford’s work that it seemed wrong to have this one slip by for so long. But I confess that I wasn’t feeling terribly excited. Yes, it was supposed to be a great movie, but I thought it might be stuffy and dated. And what the hell did I know from Welsh coal miners anyway? I was responding to this film with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the dentist. Well, when I finally sat down to watch the thing, I was sobbing so hard that I was nearly dehydrated by the time the credits rolled. The setting may have nothing to do with my life, but the characters and the emotions grabbed hold of me like few films ever have in my life. I strongly suspect this is the reason why it’s called a classic. Now I’ve...

Saturday night went so well even the R train cooperated. Residents of Bay Ridge and the surrounding areas know all too well the misery associated with the Broadway local that chugs through our fair neighborhood…whenever the hell it feels like it, apparently. In fact, the R train and its express associate, the N train, are often referred to as the Rarely and the Never ‘round the parts. But last night the little engine that wouldn’t came through big time to put the finishing touch on an awesome save as I abruptly flipped the bird to the comfort zone. Now my weekend started off nicely on Friday when I met two of my writing class buddies in Park Slope for an evening of food, drink, and yakking. We had talked about meeting up and, following the advice of sister and auntie, I took the lead in making the thing happen. Saturday’s weather report had initially called for rain most of the day, so I decided to skip making any serious plans to focus on a slew of household chores that I h...

And so it all ends with the click of a mouse. I’ve unfriended people on Facebook many times in the past. It usually happens when some twit I’ve never met in the real world says something monumentally stupid or incredibly rude and I ask myself “why in the four-alarm freaking hell am I keeping this asshole in my life?” Then I press the button and make them disappear. It can be a very satisfying experience. There are few things more fruitless than a Facebook pissing contest and, having weathered more than a few of these online fiascos, I am looking to find better things to do with my time. But my most recent unfriending was quite different from the usual routine. And much more painful. This person was a former best friend of mine who cut himself out of my life for reasons I still haven’t quite figured out. We met about 20 years ago at a job in Manhattan and we just hit it off. My friend--I’ll call him Phil--was a great guy with a fabulous sense of humor. We started hanging ou...

Mary Klinge didn’t waste any time. “I know your password,” she told me in recent email. “More to the point, I know your secret and I have evidence of this.” Ms.Klinge, which I suspect is a fake name, caught me flatfooted by mentioning one of my old passwords. I’ve been the victim of identity theft so this opening line was a bit disturbing. Things got even creepier as Mary went on to explain that she had setup “a malware on the adult video clips (porno) and you visited this web site to experience fun (you know what I mean).” No, I don’t know what you mean. I don’t go look at adult video clips (porno) so maybe Mary means somebody else. Then she said she had set a webcam in my computer and gathered all my contacts. Now that’s just mean. She wrote that she put in much more time than she should have investigating “into your life and created a two-screen video.” “The 1st part shows the video you had been viewing and 2nd part displays the recording from your cam (it’s you doin...

“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”—Groucho Marx Okay, so what the hell is happening on 93rd Street? Ever since I was liberated from my post-surgery leg braces, I’ve been walking about two miles nearly every day. In the last few weeks I’ve been slowly getting back to the gym with 30-minute cardio workouts and some basic weight training exercises, but the long walks around my neighborhood in Bay Ridge are still a major part of my recovery. On Saturdays I sometimes deviate from my usual route to cut over a few blocks to a local fruit and vegetable store to pick up my weekly supply of healthy stuff. Now for the last two weeks I’ve been walking up Oliver Street off Shore Road and heading up 93rd Street. And that’s where everything goes to hell—literally—because when I get to the block between Marine Avenue and Ridge Boulevard I keep running into black cats. I know the old bit about black cat’s crossing your path is a ridiculous supers...