Hamptons Police Blotter: Tick Battles, Bad Movies, McGumbus Hovercraft
Time Warp Time
Numerous police departments throughout the area received flustered phone calls from residents in recent days. It appears that these callers all suffered from the same delusion—that they had been transported back in time. Police felt obliged to investigate, and they soon realized that each caller had driven by a local movie theater and had seen that the theater was screening Endless Love, About Last Night and Robocop. These callers had naturally concluded that the only possible explanation for this was that they had been transported back to the 1980s. To counteract this misconception, police issued a statement saying that what appeared to be a time warp was just a terrible absence of talent and fresh ideas in our popular culture.
Still Ticked Off
The proposed local deer cull now appears to be on hold, but meanwhile it’s open season between feuding interest groups and activists who mobilized in opposition to the cull. After last week’s storming of their offices by the faction Friends of Borrelia (FOB), a splinter group that seeks to “further the interests of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease,” the pro-tick group Ticks in Crisis (TIC) fought back. On a web-based “ticktivist” message board, the group leaked what they claimed were minutes of an FOB planning session, during which members discussed ways to prevent the development of Borrelia vaccines. TIC reported that it has infiltrated the ranks of FOB with a mole, although it’s not clear if they meant a spy or an actual mole. Police have refused to intervene until they are certain whether they’re dealing with a human being or a small, furry, subterranean mammal.
Rude Awakening
Residents of Shelter Island, Noyac, North Haven, Sag Harbor and as far away as Riverhead, were awakened at 2 a.m. last Saturday as Old Man McGumbus, 104 year-old WWII veteran and all-terrain transport engineer, inaugurated his After Hours Hovercraft Service. Noting that the existing ferry services to and from Shelter Island shut down at night, McGumbus took matters into his own hands, acquiring and refurbishing a Russian-made military hovercraft, a gift from his friend Kim Jong-un—the North Korean dictator. The Zubr class hovercraft, propelled by five Kuznetsov 12-MV gas turbines producing over 11,800 horsepower apiece, produced a sound equivalent to 10 jet aircraft taking off. Traveling at sustained speeds of 55 knots, the hovercraft made the trip from Shelter Island to North Haven in approximately five seconds. Police were in the process of shutting McGumbus down when the hovercraft, which consumes 167 gallons of jet fuel per minute, abruptly stalled.