I watched “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” (1948) last night on Nolan’s Insomniac Theater. (Universal monster movies occasionally can help on nights like that.) It was a lot of fun.
Lou Costello really was a genius, with his madcap physical comedy; he reminds me of Robin Williams every time I see him. The blink-and-you-miss-it tablecloth bit toward the end is priceless.
Dark Horse Comics.
Blue is burning bright and deep
in the gardens of my sleep.
The ordered flowers of my dreaming
Mirror summer mid-day’s gleaming,
at attention, standing guard,
all about a child’s yard.
I am aging now. Does this
set the night to reminisce
and move my dreaming eye to roam
the backyard of my boyhood home?
There a firm azure replaces
all the old remembered faces.
There the bright battalion smolders —
upright rows of bluebell soldiers.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2022
Photo credit: By MichaelMaggs – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2704582
I never actually went to Action Park — the infamously dangerous 80’s-era amusement park in Vernon Township, New Jersey. But the name alone conjures childhood memories because it was a perennial source of rumors and urban legends for kids at the time. (And we all lived a few hours away in Eastern Long Island.) I remember the commercials too.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name mentioned since that time. (The park closed in 1996, in part because of the same recession that was giving my generation so much anxiety in our first post-college job searches.)
So I was surprised when a friend in Britain, of all places, sent me the first video below. Not only does Action Park’s infamy live on, it extends across the Atlantic.
Anyway, it turns out that the park was one dangerous place. There was even a 2020 documentary about it on HBO Max.
Wild.
Mute Records.
September 11, 2001.
Photo credit: By Journalist 1st Class Preston Keres – This image was released by the United States Navy with the ID 010914-N-3995K-026.
I tried to leave a building via some glass doors tonight, and saw ANOTHER goofy fat dude trying to enter at the same time. I backed off TWICE trying to let him come through before I exited — then I realized I was being polite to my own reflection.
People saw this happen.
NOW Comics.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 