SfanGoch

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.

"Yeah" is unacceptable. Please refrain from further use of this word.

You must've had places that all the kids would go to besides a park to have fun and cause trouble. Lawnguylant ain't that much more different than the city when it comes to that kind of stuff.

HAH, good one Doug. I'll tell you, one grew up fast in my neighborhood back in the '50s - early '90s. There were a number of gangs spanning that time period and you had to pay attention to your surroundings. You could count on gang wars as soon as summer started. We had major gang-fueled riots in the summers of '69 and '72 which made the headlines around the country. During the one in June '72, a white demarcation line was painted just south of Green Street on the main drag, Manhattan Avenue, which ran from the second story of a building on the north side of the street to the second floor of the one on the opposite side. Anyone from the opposing side who was caught on the wrong side was dead meat. Heck, they were tossing refrigerators of the roofs of five story apartment buildings. This took place from june 30 to July 2, when NYPD brought in ESU and cops in full riot gear. Ah, those were the days........

Thanks, Tom. I think of those says whenever I'm walking around the neighborhood. Kids just don't play outside anymore. No two sewer touch football, no stickball or punchball, no kick the can,playing skelzies, crack the top, Ace-King-Queen, boxball....nothing. They hole up in their houses and play video games or waste time texting each other and behaving like little effing sneaks. Playing outside was how we developed social skills and learned how to interact with others. Kids today are treated like they're human veal by their helicopter parents. They can't do anything that could cause even the slightest bruise or injury. Pretty sad not letting kids be kids.

If you don't get what it's about, I ain't gonna try to explain. Being street rats, this is how kids played in the city and my recollections of the old neighborhood.

Every neighborhood in The Garden Spot Of The Universe had it special places kids used for fun and getting into trouble. Our place on Dupont Street was a magical and legendary portal into mindless adventure, known as "The LOT". When we got older, it was where we'd hang out and drink beers or Wild Turkey. But, in our younger days, it was where we'd do dumb stuff like setting up targets on the ancient oak which was once located next to the back fence and have archery competitions or our own Olympic games, including bare knuckle boxing and tackle football without equipment. We were a tough bunch back then and didn't worry about a little bit of bruisin'. What didn't kill you made you a better person. "The LOT" was also our gateway into every backyard on Dupont and Eagle Streets, from Franklin Street to the fence adjoining P.S. 31's schoolyard, two doors down from my old house at 76. We would play team tag, Army and Hot Peas 'n Butter throughout the block without having to worry about dodging cars driving down the street. Having a play area as big as this was great. It beat going to the park up the block because there weren't any grouchy adults screaming, "Hey, you punks! Go find someplace else to make a racket!" That's where "The LOT" came in. We were the masters of our universe and nobody could tell us otherwise or stop us from having fun. None of the people whose yards we played in ever complained or put a crimp in our funtime. None, that is, except for one man. This embodiment of pure, diabolical evil was known to all as "BEAST". "BEAST" was a fat, balding 35+ year old slob who still lived with his mother on the second floor of 85 Eagle Street. His kitchen window gave him the perfect vantage point from where he could observe the goings-on in "The LOT" and most of the backyards. Whenever we went to play in "The LOT", "BEAST"'s corpulent presence would completely fill the kitchen window as he surveilled our activities. See, "BEAST" wasn't the average fat, balding slob who always tried to put a damper on things. No siree. He was an ingenious fat, balding slob. He ran barbed wire through the shrubbery near the fence separating his yard from the one next door. We got wise to him and kept an old area rug hidden in "The LOT" which we would drape over the fence. He also installed barbed tanglewire disguised as tomato plants in his yard. Being that we all watched WWII movies on TV, we were prepared for this contingency. We went into his yard at night and, using wire snips, cleared the obstacles and left him a FU note. But, above all, he was also a sniper level shot. Whenever we would go through the yards, "BEAST" would shoot at us with his pump action BB rifle. He didn't just shoot us while we were in the yards. He would target us inside "The LOT", too. Waldo Gromek, "The Hero For All Ages" from the "Battle of the Waldos" story, once got popped twice in the schozz. His ability to lead and adjust his fire and hit moving targets was nothing short of amazing. We all were impressed with his skill, to say the least. "BEAST"'s reign of terror lasted about four years. He finally threw in the towel after we tossed an M80 at his window and blew it out of its frame. Fat Boy never called the cops because he knew we'd rat him out for shooting at us.

Stay tuned for the action-packed tale about "The Lot".

It was more like a poor man's version of "West Side Story" without the soundtrack and choreography. And the good looking chicks.

Beers are on me. Tom's covering the tab.