Sandler and Barrymore let us know all is well

Adam Sandler can play a goofball, all right, 10 times over. I mean, I still laugh when I see him rolling around on the ground fighting Bob Barker in “Happy Gilmore.” Sometimes, though, for my fellow Brooklyn native and I, it’s a swing and a miss. I need only go back to last summer’s “Grown…

Never underestimate an imported pickle

My dear wife Karen appropriated the card of the smiling, baseball-holding pickle to the Bialczak refrigerator door hall of fame. Quite the Syracuse honor for the Dill from Toledo via Ann Arbor. Beth of I Didn’t Have My Glasses On sent over a glittering package of congratulations after our bonafide big baseball bloggers wager based…

Mulch to remember on Memorial Day Weekend

My dear wife Karen wielded her mighty little hand shovel to place the two Gerber daisies we’d purchased Friday night — the only color she’d found at the apparently picked-over big box — into the hourglass shaped front garden. I pulled out the bags of red mulch and poured liberally. Karen placed and patted, lovingly,…

The best day to tie the knot

The fall day had dawned gray when we jumped in the car and drove west from Syracuse. I wore my new suit pants but carefully arranged the jacket on a hanger in the back. She changed into her beautiful dress in the bathroom of a Kentucky Fried Chicken down the block from City Hall, earning…

What is ‘Jeopardy’s’ lost decades?

‘Jeopardy’ has sucked me back in lately. Once every 10 years or so, it seems, my clicker finger stumbles upon America’s great answer-and-question half-hour, and my mind lets it hover … linger … put the remote down … get hooked again. I have to find out if I’m still any good at shouting out correct…

Put on the all-weather radials

Reader Paul Curran had to pitch in his favorite golf shot to my increasing collection of greenside photographs. Yes, this is good man Paul and his golfing mates during a round at the Manderley on the Green Golf Club in Ottawa, Canada. The identity of the rest of his foursome will remain Paul’s to know…

MJ dances, Paul Walker drives and Elmore Leonard delivers plot

First-class entertainment these days indeed goes on past the graveyard. And so I weave the images of Michael Jackson’s hologram dancing, Elmore Leonard’s novel scripting and Paul Walker’s canned footage being added upon in this week’s installment of my movie news interpretations for my Syracuse New Times blog. If you’d like to read my post…

The Polish in me

I look at my father’s face in this photo and I’m struck with two lightning bolts of memory. Frank is happy. Frank is happy because he’s once again brought his family to the tiny Polish resort in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I’m fairly certain I’m the one taking the photo. I think…

Downtown living continues to bounce back

The resurgence of residential urban living has been on the minds of planners and developers for so long in Syracuse now that the annual Downtown Living Tour recently held its eighth edition. Builders are taking the old, forgotten, historic buildings and pumping new life into them with apartments and condos. The spots that used to…