The Luna Park Gazette

I keep looking for the clock. For years I’ve been checking the time by the digital clock on the cable box that sat on my TV stand. It was there to let me know when to go to bed, when to go to work and how much goddamn TV I was watching. That thing was the main timepiece in my home, but I had to give it up now that I’ve finally severed nearly all ties with Spectrum and gone the streaming route like the nearly 5 million households that dumped cable last year. I say “nearly” because I retained the landline phone service since I don’t want to rely only the cell phone and, as a child of the Sixties, I’m reluctant to cut that particular cord just yet. This event has been years in the making, or, more accurately, years in the talking, as I have threatened to cut the cable for several years without taking any action. But it took a rent increase and my spiraling grocery bill to make me finally realize that my cable bill was too damn high—like $232 a month high. Spectrum w...

In 1959. Alfred C. Fuller, founder of the Fuller Brush Co., published his autobiography, A Foot in the Door . The title described the salesman’s technique for prolonging a conversation with a potential customer in hopes of turning the encounter into a sale. In today’s America, however, a foot in the door is liable to result in a bullet to the head. The Great American Shootout continued last week with a young woman being shot to death after she and three others accidentally turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend’s house in rural upstate New York. Then there was the teenager who was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell in Missouri; the two Texas cheerleaders who were shot after approaching the wrong parked car; and the six-year-old girl who was shot—along with her parents—by a neighbor after a basketball rolled into his yard. Today Fuller’s book would probably be called Death of a Salesman—and Anybody Else Who Knocked on the Wrong Door . I think of all the...

The term “Maggie’s drawers” is U.S. Army slang for a red flag that is waved when a soldier’s shot completely misses the target. The expression’s origin is uncertain. Some people believe it came from the character Maggie in the comic strip Bringing Up Father , which was created in 1913, while others think the term came from an old folk song called “Those Little Red Drawers that my Maggie Wore.” I first heard it from my father, who was a pistol and rifle instructor during World War II. The term “Maggie’s Drawers” came to mind last week when I was trying (struggling) to remember the name of a certain actor. I could see his face, and hear his voice, but I couldn’t nail down his name. I knew that he had been in a movie in the Eighties that I really liked…but I couldn’t remember the title. But hold on. The same dude was in a TV show I really enjoyed a few years back, which was called…? I tried but I could not recall the actor’s name, the film, or the TV program. In other word...

Whenever I’m feeling worried or confused, I look for answers from the world’s great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Rumi…Babe Ruth. Wait, what? What’s the Bambino doing here? Let me explain. As I’ve mentioned many times, I am no kind of a sports fan. I’m aware that baseball season is underway, but only because I hear this information on the news. However, I must admit there is a great deal of drama in sports--from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat, as the old TV show used to say. As Robert DeNiro’s Al Capone said about America’s pastime in 1987’s The Untouchables , “a man stands alone at the plate. This is time for what? For individual achievement.” Of course, he beats a guy to death with a baseball bat a few moments later, but let’s not dwell on the negative. Babe Ruth is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in America culture and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time. My interest in him stems from my cable station’s...

The tradition of flying the flag at half-staff supposedly began in the 17th Century, when the crew of the Heart’s Ease lowered the ship’s flag to honor their captain, who had been killed during an expedition searching for the Northwest Passage through Canada. There’s also a superstition that says the flag is lowered to make room for the invisible flag of death. Either way, the tradition caught on. I was walking by P.S. 185 on Ridge Boulevard Thursday morning when I noticed the flag outside was at half-staff. This was doubtless in response to the latest American mass shooting, where an armed psychotic blasted her way in The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. and gunned down three nine-year-old children and three adults before being killed by police. The security footage of the school’s glass doors being shoot to pieces is horrifying to watch and it only gets worse as we see the killer stalking the hallways. Investigators said the shooter, Audrey Hale, may have been ...