Toledo has a mascot named Jim Flealand

Beth of I Didn’t Have My Glasses On has gone all mascot on us, Syracuse. She’s taken her first shot in the great Syracuse Chiefs vs. Toledo Mud Hens blog vs. blog wager. I will admit, so very grudgingly, that I do like the idea of a baseball character who goes by the name of…

A small business can still swing for the fences

A small business conference was my dear wife Karen’s assignment Thursday afternoon for the Syracuse Media Group, the company that was born from the big daily. As I was sharpening comments right here, Karen called. She suggested I drive downtown to the Oncenter and take a walk through the aisles. There were plenty of folks…

Chiefs vs. Mud Hens, and there’s going to be some sort of sign

They may fall slightly off the national radar, these eight games coming up between the Syracuse Chiefs and the Toledo Mud Hens. But for this blogger and Beth, the author behind I Didn’t Have My Glasses On, the eight games in May are the equivalent of the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Final Four,…

Did anybody ever see Bob Hoskins and Phil Collins in the same room?

My Thursday blog task for the Syracuse New Times site for a few weeks now is to find news in the film world and Mark-snark about it. Yes, I can do that. But Tuesday, Bob Hoskins passed away at the age of 71. It was a little odd that the British native got his start…

Morrisville soccer ruled, and Papa Jobe was royalty

There was a time when soccer was king in Morrisville, N.Y. … A rush of emotions hit me last month when I saw the news that Peter McAvoy, the young man who was captain for the Herikimer County Community College soccer team in upstate New York, collapsed and died. So tragic, so sad, so heart-breaking…

At this huge nursery, it’s easy to welcome spring

Last Saturday my dear wife Karen and I walked the aisles of Chuck Hafner’s Garden Center in North Syracuse for more than an hour, and I was a lot closer to getting bushed than I was to getting bored. Every year we take the drive from our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood to North Syracuse…

A bright buffet: Now you can see Althea and her parents

During Syracuse dining week in February, I wrote about the fine dining meal that my dear wife Karen and I shared our friends David, Theresa and Althea at 317 at Montgomery. I was bummed because the lighting was too dim for any of the pictures I took of our dining partners to be usable for…

Back when I was a cover boy

In my day, the SUNY Morrisville journalism classes were spread through many different campus buildings. Charlton Hall. The Library. Lab-Class. The Little Theatre in the Student Activity Center, even, with those fold-over mini-desks in the very spot where the Friars put on their most excellent drama productions. No wonder I still get hit with that…

‘The Other Woman’ makes a perfect payback funny indeed

By the end of “The Other Woman,” everybody in the theater cheers the way things shake down. Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton sure make a good team against the cad who decided he wanted them all at the same time. Mann is the star of this show, using the physical comedy skills that…

Our porch Christmas spruce is in the ground

We knew when we purchased the potted blue spruce in December and proclaimed it our side porch Christmas tree that we wanted to put the baby in the ground after the ornaments were packed away and spring thaw arrived here in our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Here’s the pre-Christmas post where I shared the…