A wheelie good time at the park

Sometimes when you take a lot of pictures, a really good one can get away. This image from my walk last week at Onondaga Lake Park was among my 100. It shows a woman and children enjoying a wheeled ride on a pleasant afternoon on the fitness trail, front, center and behind. I do believe…

Angie’s back, with a promise to stop fiddling with the password

Friday I told you all about how Angie from Kentucky had given up on her excellent blog because she couldn’t log into WordPress anymore. She’d tried to change her password for security’s sake, it turns out, and that was it for that blog. But instead of giving up, this retired woman with MS gathered her…

Congratulations to a hard-working George III

George Venditti III put on the cap and gown in Oneonta and went up there with a whole bunch of other young people to mark the occasion of receiving that coveted academic degree. As a bunch of proud parents sat around a table at the Retreat in Liverpool, N.Y., during a celebration dinner, my marvelous…

the speed of the boss is the speed of the team – lee iacocca

Today I present guest blogger Beth, esteemed Ann Arbor author of I Didn’t Have My Glasses On. Beth and I engaged in the baseball bloggers death match, Syracuse Chiefs vs. Toledo Mud Hens style, the past two weeks. Take it away, Beth: and in the end, the mud hens tried to cross the road to…

Guitar strings and more, wonderfully arranged by Mark Doyle

I had a vivid dream last night, in color and stereo. I was in a 200-seat theater filled with people thrilled to be there on a Friday night, smack dab in the proud little upstate New York city of Auburn. The air was charged by wonderful music set forth by the guitar and mind of…

Starring in ‘Adult World,’ Emma Roberts, John Cusack, the city of Syracuse …

Of course I walked into the Palace Theatre last night wanting to like the movie ‘Adult World.’ Director Scott Coffey took writer Andy Cochran’s poet-graduates-college-and-then-gets-an-education story and set it in Syracuse. There was a fair amount of huzzah around these city streets while the Hollywood production was being shot here in 22 days in February…

Angie says she won’t be blogging anymore

The email from Angie two days ago did not make me happy. My blogging friend from Kentucky again was having trouble with her WordPress account. That’s putting it mildly. “WordPress hates me,” she wrote. “I’ve had to reset my password two times in the last two hours and none of them are working just like…

The baseball bloggers wager is down to this

One game does a bet make. Syracuse Chiefs at the Toledo Mud Hens, Fifth Third Bank Field, Toledo, Ohio, tonight, for all the marbles. If the Chiefs win, to take the eight-game series 5-3, it shall be on the pages of markbialczak.com: If the Mud Hens win in front of Beth of I Didn’t Have…

What the future holds for Batman and Emma Stone

Gotcha with that headline? Maybe lady Emma will cross superhero lines now that her Spider-Man liaison (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” yet and don’t want to break down in tears right here and now) ended so swiftly and cruelly with death this spring. That’s not in movie news this week,…

Dinner with Daryl and Tony Graziano, too

With my dear wife Karen’s son Daryl quite content working the overnight-and-weekend shift at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino in Verona, N.Y., our dinner get-togethers come on Wednesday or Thursday nights. His late-winter move some 25 miles from Syracuse and closer to the job has further complicated schedules. Last night we celebrated his birthday…