SfanGoch

Age is a state of mind. These two guys are still in their teens. Cool. Rock on, man!! Elderly men escape nursing home to go to Wacken metal festival

Pete, Wyborova vodka and spirytus bottle caps were great for making heavy duty skelzie caps, too. Thanks to the marynarzy who always came to The Point to visit friends and relatives when their ships were in port, there was always a large supply of them to be found. My dad was a master blender for Lane Limited and I always asked him to bring home metal cigar tubes which were used for the company's Medal of Honor brand of cigars. Being an evil genius kind of kid, I also used to make the saltpeter and sugar mixtures. I'd pour the wet mix into the cigar tubes and stick a pencil in the middle and set it aside to dry. When dried, I'd pull the pencil out, leaving a hollow cavity in the center. Then, I'd punch a hole in the center of the screw-on cap, stick a fuse taken from firecrackers into the hole and seal it with melted crayon or wax. Ta-da, instant rocket engine!! My friends and I would get long cardboard tubes from the plastic factory across the street and use them as launchers. Pretty primitive; but, those suckers would fly a pretty good distance when launched off the docks and over the East River.

Yeah, I noticed that. He's eligible for AARP membership now. How time flies, man.

I wanted to to meet John Zacherle, "The Cool Ghoul" one more time. I met and shot the bull with him a couple of times back in the mid and late '70s when he was a DJ at WPLJ-FM. I wish I still had the negative from when my friends and I took pics with him using a lame Kodak 110 camera. I loved watching him when he hosted cartoons and Chiller Theatre on WPIX Channel 11 and Disc-O-Teen on Channel 47 before it went all Spanish language programming.

Nah, just kidding. Good thing he didn't. Teens charged after manual transmission thwarts Nashville carjacking

Point taken, Mike. The B- and lower List celebrities charge for their autographs to make some extra money. There's a fan event which is held annually in NJ called "Chiller Theatre Toy, Model and Film Expo". Here's a guest list for this year. Pretty good bunch of celebs there. If you look at the upper right of the page, organizers added a disclaimer about guests charging for autographs. If a guest tells you that the expo is making them chrge for an autograph, let a staff member know and they will confront that person.

Bro, it's my thread and I haven't a problem if someone does digress. That's the way people talk. There's no such thing as going off-topic in the "Off-Topic" section. Saying otherwise would be oxymoronic and contrary to the spirit of the section. If there is, I'll quit this site immediately.

The thread in question was nowhere near to turning uncivil. It was about bad box art and everyone seemed to have fun commenting on the subject. It would have naturally run its course in due time, just as other topics have done without any assistance. This particular thread will face the same fate. My comment might be the last on the topic; or, there could be more. I might not necessarily agree with your, or others' sentiments; but, I respect your right to express them. That's what debate and discussion is about. Besides, I doubt that discussing something as quirky as bad model box art would erupt int verbal warfare since everyone is pretty much in agreement as to what bad box art is. If there were to be an additional 150 comments about it, great. Conversely, if nobody else replied, that's great too. The members would have made a decision either way without killing each other in the process. It doesn't require a mod to make a judgment call on something as mundane as this. Dig into the site and you'll find many more far less interesting or entertaining threads which live on and can be resurrected at any time by someone who does find, for whatever reason, the topic is still of interest to them. We know there are members who do pull up old discussions which others have lost interest in and brought them back to life by adding their new thoughts and insights. It doesn't mean that the topic was worth bring back; but, that one person felt it did. Why should this one be any different? It's one thing to exercise one's judgment; but, the threshold for determining when a thread should be locked has been lowered too far. A healthy debate that isn't turning nasty shouldn't be shut down based on the presumption that it might head in that direction. If the criteria used is that narrow and blanketly applied, then, just about every thread is liable to be preemptively locked. If it hasn't devolved to the point of personal attacks or impolite comments, don't blindly assume that it will. If it does, contact a mod to look into it.

LET THERE BE NEON! has been in business for over forty years in Tribeca. I'd always window shop whenever I passed by the place on White St. They have the most talented neon artists in the city.

This one: There are a lot of others which were locked for the same reasons. Seriously, is such heavy-handed monitoring really necessary? If somebody doesn't find a thread interesting, he wouldn't bother posting in it.Why should somebody else make that decision for that person, and others, based on his personal feelings?

Classic, man!

A quirky, new take on the classic helicopter parenting.

There are still a bunch of custom neon shops here in NYC. They do a lot of restoration work on vintage signs and also sell nice work to the public. I need to snag Ballantine Ale and Rheingold bar signs.

Obviously, we aren't smart, nor capable enough, to make that decision on our own.

Nice, a Johnny Thunders reference. Always able to see him playing somewhere in the Village at any given time.

And, those are the only ones that matter.

I get it when a thread is on the verge of becoming a cyber-knife fight and gets locked to prevent any further escalation of tempers. But , JeezusMaryJoseph, why should a thread get shut down because a mod is tired of it? That's like taking the ball home because you don't feel like playing anymore even if it wasn't your ball to begin with. Everybody else was having a good time with it; so, what's the point of locking it? As long as it doesn't devolve into personal attacks aimed at forum members, what's the harm in letting any thread run its course on its own? When, and if, people get tired of the topic, it'll fade into the back pages by itself. It's the same deal when a mod decides that a thread is going off-topic. If The original poster doesn't have a problem with the direction a thread is heading at any given moment, why should a mod make that decision for that person? Not for nothing, normal conversations within a group of people usually stay on topic for a while; but, somewhere along the line, it will digress into other things not relevant to the original subject. This is temporary and the conversation is righted on its own. Why should it be any different on a forum? People are discussing things in relative real time and things like digressing from a topic will occur. This type of excessive hall monitoring puts a damper on enjoying this forum.

Well. it wouldn't seem that way if they didn't waste their parents' money on a degree in Fine Arts so they could end up as cashiers afterwards.

One thing a lot of celebs do to foil potential autograph sellers is to only sign personalized messages including the person's name, which essentially makes the item practically worthless to anyone except that particular individual.

Way too late in the game if a store is required to teach a cashier basic math. I look at the positive aspects of this rampant and pervasive stupidity. It will be a breeze for me to pull off a Negan after society goes to hell in a handbasket. Nothing beats having a mindless throng of ignorant zombies at your beck and call.

That's a list Z-List celebrities, the memories of whom will last a lunchtime.

Pretty cool. Kids are the same everywhere. Kids from the city are pretty good at exporting our particular culture when they move elsewhere. Did the kid from Da Bronx show you guys how to play skelzies? This was a popular street game. No equipment, except a piece of chalk and bottle caps, were needed. Growing up in a post-industrial wasteland (but, it was OUR post-industrial wasteland ), everybody's family was blue collar lower middle class. We didn't have much; but, we made do with what we had and were resourceful enough to invent activities to keep ourselves occupied.

95 bucks will make you the lucky owner of a gen-oo-wine autographed baseball signed by Eddie Haskell

I remember when a ballplayer would sign his autograph for free. Former Mets catcher Jerry Grote is the exception. After a game at Shea in July'74, my friends and I saw him walking out to the players' parking lot. We went over and asked him to sign some balls we brought. He spat at us and told us to get effing lost. No big deal. He sucked as a hitter anyway.

Funny that you should mention that film. A couple of my old neighborhood pals and I were discussing this movie after it was released. We were wondering where the writers got the idea for "the lot" and "Beast" from. Too much of a coincidence for us. The story could've been about us in Brooklyn instead of Cali. We thought it was weird how the storyline also took place in the '60s and pretty much paralleled everything we used to do to a tee. Even the kid who became a pro ballplayer in the movie was a carbon copy of my friend, Jose Rivera. Jose was a star player in the Greenpoint Little League, playing for La Plata, and at Lincoln High School, the same school which produced Sandy Koufax and other great athletes. Only, Jose didn't make it to the majors. He was called for a tryout by the Mets in 1980 and was told he didn't have the right stuff. He was so pissed off, he switched allegiance to the Yanks. 38 years later, Jose is the Managing Director of JMR Wealth Management Group at UBS Financial Services and is a regular guest financial expert on CNBC. He hasn't forgotten where he came from. He donates large sums of money and equipment to the Little League teams here and organizes a Dupont/Eagle Old Timers' Reunion party at Dupont St. Park every year. There were over a thousand people at the last one. He still hates the Mets. There were two dogs on the block that all the kids were afraid of. One was Bosco, an Alsatian Shepherd and Ralph, a monstrous black Great Pyrenees. Turned out Bosco was a punk. His owner came by the house and asked my parents to keep our six cats indoors. They used to gang up on Bosco whenever he was in the backyard and they would shred him up. Ralph was another story. He was a homicidal maniac and had no qualms about chasing one of the kids down, chomping down on his butt and tearing the seat of his jeans right off whenever he got loose. If you look at the photo of "The LOT", he lived in the rear house on the left. See the wooden fence along the side? Ralph broke through it numerous times.