The Luna Park Gazette

Groucho Marx has been trying to tell me something for the last 50 years and last week I finally got the message. I’m referring to a scene late in the Marx Brothers’ classic Duck Soup where Groucho, portraying Rufus T. Firefly, president of the fictional country Freedonia, must apologize to a diplomat from a neighboring nation whom he’s insulted to stop the nations from going to war. For a moment it looks like Groucho is going to do just that—take the high road, make amends, and avoid catastrophe. He starts to give this inspiring speech about offering the offended ambassador “the right hand of good fellowship,” confident this man “will accept the gesture in the spirit of which is offered.” Then it goes all to hell. Groucho does a sudden and complete emotional about-face when he thinks he might be snubbed. “But suppose he doesn't,” Firefly says abruptly as he struts back and forth. “A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept… Think of it - I ho...

I saw this British cop show on TV years ago where the hero, a 19th Century detective, was investigating a series of bombings. But rather than saying the word “bomb,” the detective used the archaic expression “infernal devices” when referring to the things causing all the havoc. I recall staring at my TV in disbelief. Did people really say “infernal devices” back then? And even if they did, the expression sounds so clunky that the show’s writers could probably be forgiven if they decided to update the dialog a little bit. However, after a series of irritating machine-related experiences over the last few days, I’m starting to think “infernal devices” is an excellent expression—and it’s a certainly an improvement over the expletives I’ve been spewing since Friday morning. It started with my smart phone, which decided it didn’t want to be charged anymore. I plugged in the power cord and saw the little green battery icon in the corner, but the energy level kept draining until it w...

Every morning I set sail for adventure. Actually, I’m just taking a ferry from my neighborhood in Bay Ridge to Wall Street, but it sure feels like an adventure compared with the other ways of getting around this town. I recently started a full-time freelance gig at TheStreet.com, where I worked a decade ago. After two years of working from home, I have to get reacquainted with the daily commute. Now I love the X27, the express bus that stops just around the corner from my house and gets me to Manhattan in the kind of comfort and speed that can never be found on the subways. The only problem is that at $6.75 a trip, the express bus can be extremely expensive. I don’t want to hike 15 minutes to the nearest train station and subject myself to the infuriating R train experience, so what’s a thrifty commuter to do? We’ve had the ferry service in Bay Ridge for a few years now and I’ve taken it to downtown Brooklyn several times during the summer to enjoy this funky area. But take ...

And, finally, I called for help. Friday is usually my favorite night of the week. Work is done and I’m free to do go out on the town or go home and sit on my ass. The choice is completely up to me and I love it. Most Fridays I'll go for the latter, especially during the winter, and this is what I did the other night. I had a DVD from Netflix, several programs waiting for me on the DVR, and a chicken burrito the size of a tree stump. I was all set for some serious relaxation, but my TV’s remote control had different ideas. This thing has been giving me trouble for the last few weeks, especially when I try to record a program or play something I’ve recorded. I would repeatedly press the OK/SEL button but nothing would happen. Everything else—volume control, channel selection—worked just fine. But the one button I needed the most was non compos mentis. I usually got the thing to work after a great deal of cursing and fuming, but on Friday OK/SEL went straight to hell. ...

I sat in the crumbling Times Square theater and prayed I would live to see the credits roll. This was in 1975. I was an 18-year-old freshman at Hunter College, and a fellow student in my theater class had suggested we take in an afternoon screening of Steven Spielberg’s shark-infested epic Jaws before attending a play that evening. Jaws , described as the first official summer blockbuster, was frightening as hell, but the most terrifying thing in the theater that day wasn’t the rampaging shark onscreen, but the lunatics in the audience. You must remember that this was New York of the Seventies, when the Crossroads of the World looked a lot more like the Highway to Hell. There were no Disney stores in Time Square back then, just prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and three card monte hustlers. I was just in Times Square last night, taking in a production of Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena with my sister, and, except for nonstop noise and lights, the place we walked through on Sat...