KA-BOOM Thar She Blows!!!

Angie of Kentucky is living out of a Hampton Inn because her next-door neighbor blew up the apartment cooking after midnight. You can’t make this stuff up. Check out her dry style of dealing with yet another roadblock on top of her daily battle with MS.

Can ‘Galaxy’ make a star from the cutting room floor?

I am ever more impressed by the ways fans can tune in to “Guardians of the Galaxy.” The old songs brought the soundtrack to No. 1, and the box office success continued. Now writer/director James Gunn’s continued posting on his social media is including pictures and details about deleted scenes. A picture of a blue-faced…

At Festa Italiana, folks eat it up

Even the name sounds delicious. Festa Italiana. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Well, sure, downtown Syracuse has its share of festivals that declare their devotion to the culinary. The Crawfish Festival is named after the bright red mud bug dug so much down New Orleans way, and in May, Clinton Square welcomed folks…

OK, I guess these are my teams

Maryland and Syracuse both played at noon Saturday, games televised on networks available to me, and I was ready with m flatscreen for the Orange vs. Central Michigan on ESPN News and my iPad for the Terps vs. West Virginia on the Big Ten Network. The Syracuse game kicked off first. And I stared hard…

‘The Drop’ takes us to a Brooklyn dark and tense

Read much of the work of Dennis Lehane? Seen “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” or “Shutter Island” perhaps? Well, the novels or movies from the mind of this Massachusetts crime-drama master are not requisite for enjoying “The Drop,” I don’t think, but being primed for his sort of tension surely helped me keep my wits…

A patio party with a firepit warms our weekend

We’ve heard word of this big patio, my dear wife Karen and I, from the planning stages to the digging and pouring to the inevitable haggling about finishing touches with contractors. I was not pleased when damage was done to the steps that DJ had put in previously. Make it right, dude … When somebody…

Entering a new e world, and it’s not about dating

I’m trying to attract attention with a new online profile. I showed it to my dear wife Karen, and she gave it the green light. This first week after my temp agency informed me the 40-hour-per company had decided to end my assignment two months in has included enough soul searching to remind me that…

Thirteen years ago, we were invaded forever

Thirteen years ago to the minute, I was watching in horror as the television screens in the newsroom of the Syracuse Newspapers were all turned to some version of that horrible vision above. Oh, how the 9 o’clock hour on this day sends shivers down my spine every year. It forever will. The fact that…

Godzilla apparently lost the fight for screen time

When you remake a classic like “Godzilla,” you’re going to give the scaly beast plenty of star power, right? That’s what I thought, even though the monster mash didn’t make my review list this summer. Then I caught the Cinema Blend story by Mike Bracken writing of the Honest Trailers clip that picks on the…