Why did I hate the 4th Transformers? Let’s start with …

As I walked to my seat in the Destiny USA Syracuse theater for the “Transformers: Age of Extinction” Friday matinee, I noticed a whole lot of parents with young kids sitting on both sides of them. I couldn’t help but keep noticing as I settled in for the four, five, six, seven trailers. The little…

Gopher gone, we have a lovesick dog

As we settle into the second day full day of the separation of Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle and the backyard gopher, the sniffing and scratching continues. And my beloved 3 1/2-year-old rescue mutt looks up at me with puppy dog eyes again and seems to say: Where did my furry friend go? On Saturday,…

Bye gopher, don’t come back now, ya’ hear

Broccoli, cantaloupe and watermelon. The Syracuse-based animal control guy knew his gopher bait. Within three hours of our phone conversation today, our backyard nemesis wandered into our humane trap, and the June nightmare, the battle of wits, the terrorization of Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle, was over. The furry was stuck inside the bars and…

We gotta get rid of this gopher now

All those cute and funny names you offered for the backyard gopher my dear wife Karen have been attempting to lure into our humane trap so I can drive it away to a better life? I refuse to call it by a single one of them. I’m in no mood for cute, nor funny. X%$&@?!%^#…

The Writer’s Life — Blog Tour

That photo at right is not a working typewriter. It’s still pretty neat, though, my little remembrance of how I used to take the words from my mind, send them through my fingers, onto paper and onward to the world of readers. First, teachers. Later, readers of newspapers. Later, keyboards linked to computer or laptop…

An old favorite, with plenty of oaks

Sometimes weeks of summer slip by with too much on our plates for KP and I to get that golf game in. I was worried we’d miss the whole month of June, what with that trip to Cape Cod and college graduations and life. We snuck in Olde Oak yesterday. Tater went fishing instead. See…

Let’s be thankful Eli Wallach, quite a character

Eli Wallach died Tuesday, and the actor was 98 years old. He got to work alongside the greats of many generations, in movies that your grandparents and parents and you, yourself, may indeed have loved. Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen and Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Magnificent…