OK, let’s talk Mad Men finale

If it hadn’t had been for that real-life Coke commercial of peace and love, I might have gone home angry. Oh, wait, I already was in my recliner of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood, my dear wife Karen on the couch, both us somewhat exhausted after finally wrapping up our…

Blythe Danner turns a little film into a Dream project

Hollywood indeed works in funny ways, proving so delightfully again this summer of 2015 that truth can can sometimes be a strange bedfellow of fiction. Blythe Danner delivers the performance of her life in I’ll See You in My Dreams. The blue-eyed actress embraces the role of Carol Peterson, co-written and directed so warmly by…

Somebody needed a haircut in the worst way

Ten inches of rain in June. More on July 1. A whole bunch of writing and working on my busy schedule. I could practically hear the grass growing in the backyard of our Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Into every life a little rain must fall … yeah, right. The Lush…

Happy Fourth of July from our colorful garden

My dear wife Karen says she always wanted to have a combination of red, white and blue in a garden for the Fourth. She was sort of surprised when I pointed out that this year in our backyard butterfly garden of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood, mission accomplished. The blue…

If you light them up, please be careful

With three days to set things off, somebody somewhere is going to hurt themself. Or, worse yet, send a bottle rocket or another home firework off into the good night and have it land and turn somebody else’s holiday weekend into a nightmare. For my July Fourth Weekend edition of my Mark It Up community…

Free Advice — Damn copycat or thanks for the flattery!

Free Advice is a periodic feature in which I answer letters sent to me at markbialczak@gmail.com. This question comes directly from BloggyVille, and it has the blog’s name attached. In fact, the question hits close to home because it’s about somebody stealing swiping borrowing copying recently starting a format that greatly resonates with a fellow…

You want my left arm, too, Mickey D?

So I thought I’d be a little healthier than usual that morning last week, on a dead run trying to squeeze some sort of breakfast in between blogging and my vanity appointment and viewing a matinée showing of Ted 2 and blogging some more. I pulled the Chevy Cruze into the inside lane of the…

Wet, those six innings were

We enjoyed the five hours we spent at Citi Field in Flushing, N.Y. this past Saturday, my dear wife Karen and I with our New York Mets-loving friend Steve Vicik Jr. and his lovely wife Kristen. But it was wet. How rainy was it as our Mets and the Cincinnati Reds played to that 1-1…