Blue skies, red shells fill downtown for first fest of season

Life was good for thousands of reasons Saturday afternoon as the crowds spilled into Syracuse’s Clinton Square. The sun was shining, and the temperature one the AXA/Equitable Tower peeking through the nearer buildings read an oh-so-pleasant 64º F. Crawfish Festival pulsed with people of all sizes and ages and colors, this first of a series…

Free Advice — How do you avoid the big ruts and little potholes?

Free Advice is a periodic feature in which I answer anonymous letters sent to markbialczak.com. Today I entertain a question that comes from somewhere throughout BloggyVille. Dear Mark, You put the pedal to the metal when it comes to social media. What keeps it fresh for you? Especially, what keeps blogging a great (mostly) adventure?…

Student reporter’s paradise

“What happens when you fly over Los Angeles?” the stewardess asked me. Yeah, me, I thought, attempting to come up with a winning reply. “You land, I hope,” I said, lamely, not being quite that slick yet and never to see her smiling face again as I was getting ready in 1978 to begin another…

California, there we came

In May 2005, I jumped on a plane in Syracuse, got off in San Diego, and jumped into a powder blue Ford Mustang convertible. My dear wife Karen knows how to plan a vacation. We’d been together in our Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood for less than a year, she was…

Throwback: Fake cover for imaginary album by faux band. Really!

Back in the late 1970s, our two bedroom, one-bath apartment in Adelphi, Md., was always rocking. Yes, Twenty, Aggo and I were eyebrows deep into two years of hard university time within those walls in the cockroach-inhabitated complex we used to lovingly call Residential Plaza, dropping their officious P from the first name because that…

Cherry tree picking

A cherry tree will be going into the backyard of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. My dear wife Karen and I took the trip to Chuck Hafner’s Garden Center in North Syracuse this past weekend, walking the aisles under the sun out back and inside the greenhouses, too. We spied…

As Baltimore considers the now, we remember the then and ponder the when

I watched the evening news with clips and recaps from Baltimore and flinched. Fires and riots and looting. We are in trouble, I thought. Why would we do this. Oh, I’d heard the back story of how our police force had done things that had led to the death of one of our citizens. A…

Chocolate, candles, coasters and cups of tea from across the big pond

Rachel and Steve outdid themselves. When my dear wife Karen stepped the door of the Little Bitty last night, she spotted the package on the kitchen table immediately. I announced that the BloggyVille mystery gift from across the pond, the prize I’d won because Rachel, Lundy Girl from the blog Could Do Worse: Adventures in…

The Blog of Funny Names goes to the movies

It’s my monthly turn on the wheel of writers with sharp oberservational eyes over at The Blog of Funny Names. I’m speaking of King Dave, and Arto, and Kerbey, and Fannie, and Liz, and Mark. Not myself. Over there, I’m the Other Mark, the Markie come lately, the newest scribe on the block. Here’s how…

The mystery prize from the other side of the big pond

Just this morning I received an email from my dear BloggyVille friend Rachel, putting me on alert that she’d put the prize from her Could Do Worse: Adventures in London anniversary sweepstakes in the post. A bit back Rachel had noted how she’d been publishing her words and photographs here for several years, and would…