Mark's blog
Sporadic blog posts on a wide variety of topics, by Racine, Wisconsin web designer Mark Czerniec.(Also check out my weekly entries in Another Week.)
James Joyce: ‘Ulysses’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’
Bloomsday is coming up again this Tuesday, June 16, and so you might be hearing more about Ulysses and Irish writer James Joyce these days than you normally do. Overnight, I caught Thursday's episode of The Strand on the BBC World Service. During the program, host...
‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough brews up Jon Stewart feud over Starbucks
Former Florida congressman Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, may be the electronic media's most tolerable conservative Republican. He may even have a new book, out just yesterday, urging his party back from radical recklessness to a more moderate...
Original Culver’s restaurant location: Sauk City, Wisconsin
Since we were near Sauk City, Wisconsin the Saturday before last, I thought it might be fun to look for the original Culver's Frozen Custard & ButterBurgers Restaurant opened by George Culver and his family in 1984. It wasn't difficult to find the site (it's at 716...
Flip Ultra HD video camera: Our first camcorder
Meet the very first camcorder we have ever owned. It's the Flip Ultra HD, which arrived on the market at the end of April. It also comes in white. I had been lusting after something like this since reading Andy Ihnatko's Flip Mino HD...
Frogmore Stew shrimp recipe (Lowcountry boil)
In late June and early July of 2003, we vacationed in the South Carolina Lowcountry, staying in Beaufort and visiting Charleston, as well as Savannah, Georgia. One of the meals we ate on the trip and have made many times since is a...
Waterboarding is torture: Mancow lasts 6 seconds
Last night on MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann showed a video: The waterboarding of Erich "Mancow" Muller in Chicago for Mancow's radio show: "Absolutely torture," he says. "That's drowning," he says. If he were being interrogated...
GQ magazine: Bible verses on Rumsfeld-era Pentagon documents
Today on the magazine's website, GQ has posted a sildeshow of never-before-seen Iraq war documents from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon bearing Bible verses. It is titled "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets — like...
Gary Vaynerchuck talks Twitter on CNN’s ‘Your $$$$$’
Embedded video from CNN Video I just saw this via FriendFeed, courtesy of Orli Yakuel. It's Gary Vaynerchuck of VaynerMedia, the guy from Wine Library TV, in a video clip from CNN's Your $$$$$. I can only take him in small doses because of his hyperactivity, but he...
‘A Dustland Fairytale’: The Killers on Letterman with orchestra
In case you missed it this past Monday (May 11), here are The Killers performing "A Dustland Fairytale," with orchestra, on the Late Show With David Letterman. We know nothing about The Killers, but apparently they're from Las Vegas. At any rate, it's certainly a...
‘Neil Young: Heart of Gold’ (movie, 2006)
Neil Young: Heart of Gold is not Jonathan Demme's first concert documentary. He made the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Swimming to Cambodia, which captured a monologue by Spalding Gray, in 1987. As in those two previous films, Demme again imposes a...
Taylor Juniper bushes: Backyard evergreen hedge
Pictured above is our neighbor's fence at the edge of our backyard. It's six feet tall. When we bought our house, there were old and gnarly shrubs hiding the fence — a mundane and invasive honeysuckle, a feeble forsythia, a wild weigela. While the weigela did attract...
Chicken kebabs on the grill: A quick, low-meat dinner
For more quick and easy healthy meal ideas, see our list: Easy, healthy recipes With warmer weather comes our desire to grill — but the notion of grilling usually conjures up images of fatty pork, heavy beef or troublesome chicken. We would like to cook outdoors, but...
May the 4th be with you: Happy Star Wars Day!
To celebrate Star Wars Day, please enjoy the hilarious Late Night with Conan O'Brien segment featuring Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog at the premiere of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones in New York City. You can see more classic Triumph and Conan segments...
Pancake Day / Lakefront Artist Fair in Racine, Wisconsin
Update: Since this post was written — in advance of Pancake Day 2009 — the Kiwanis Club of Greater Racine has established a Facebook page with information about Pancake Day, which wiil be held on Saturday, May 2, 2015 (it's always on the first Saturday in May). For a...
‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ (movie, 2007)
We are all doomed, all facing annihilation at an hour approaching more rapidly than we would like to admit. In the meantime, we seek to communicate our experiences to our fellow living beings. We want others to know what life feels like from our perspective, perhaps...
Topeak bike pump: Inflate tires with great bicycle pump
Now and then there's something you buy which, every time you use it, gives you a little thrill because it's well-designed and does exactly what you want it to. Usually these products are a little more expensive, yet you never regret the purchase because you just love...
Wisconsin has statewide tornado drills today
That's Michke in the video. He's up in St. Paul, and you can hear him streaming live this afternoon from 2-4 p.m. Prior to that, as part of "2009 Tornado and Severe Weather Awareness Week" here in Wisconsin, we'll observe a mock tornado watch beginning at 1:00 this...
Bay View neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The weather was finally nice the day before yesterday, so, with no plans except to simply get outdoors, we ended up taking Wisconsin Highway 32 north from Racine to Bay View, an interesting little Milwaukee neighborhood that we have passed through a number of times....
Cadillac, Big Boy, Hamburglar, Farmall tractor in Cudahy WI yard
For my last birthday, our wonderful friend Tracey gave me an engrossing book called Weird Wisconsin which catalogs all sorts of legends, ghost stories, local loonies, roadside oddities, peculiar collections, large fiberglass objects, and unusually positioned...
ABC’s ‘World News Now’ (or is it ‘America This Morning’?)
It has come to my attention that, as of June 12, all TV in the U.S will make the transition to digital. Because of this, I will probably lose a show I have been enjoying for the past year or so. Often, while Amy sleeps, I am already conscious and worrying about the...
House plants: Will fragrant Hoya obscura fill home with scent?
These are our hoyas — Hoya obscura on the left, and Hoya obscura Major on the right. We have had them a little over ten months. Based on their comparative sizes, I'm going to venture that "Major" indicates "bigger." I am a fan of plants that serve some sort of extra...
‘Searching for Debra Winger’ (movie, 2002)
Searching for Debra Winger is a documentary made by Rosanna Arquette which, according to the Netflix envelope, originally aired on Showtime. The film explores the dilemmas of movie actresses over an unspecified age, but perhaps older than 35. One issue is the...
Billy Bob Thornton’s bizarre interview on CBC Radio’s Q / Qtv
Billy Bob Thronton and his band The Boxmasters were interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio's Q yesterday. Their latest album is a 2-CD set called Modbilly. Here is last night's AP story: Joaquin Phoenix II? Billy Bob gives odd...
Mars Cheese Castle, Tim & Tom’s move; Bobby Nelson’s Cheese Shop stays put
There's a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story today by Karen Herzog about a trio of Wisconsin cheese stores in Kenosha County, and how they will be affected by the I-94 widening project about to begin: Gouda-bye: Freeway alters cheese interchange. Update: Contrary to the...
Easter traditions, like the movie ‘King of Kings’ (1961)
It is funny how a few random details, repeated together over time, can solidify into a ritual which becomes essential to your psychological comfort. This is one of mine — the 1961 movie King of Kings and its main theme music, written by Miklós Rózsa. I grew up...
Lorraine Motel in Memphis: Martin Luther King’s last days
As I have written here previously, we visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis back in 1999. The museum is housed within the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down 41 years ago tomorrow evening. This morning, I heard on the...
The power of now: Eckhart Tolle and a Bike Ride on 35W
A baffling practice on public television here in the USA is the way the program schedule gets swapped out whenever fundraising time rolls around. While public radio stations typically interrupt abbreviated versions of their regular shows to ask for money, public TV...
Rainn Wilson’s SoulPancake.com: Fashioning art, spirituality
By now, most of us are familiar with Rainn Wilson from The Office, where he plays Dwight Schrute, the megalomaniacal nerd paper salesman from a German beet-farming family with semi-Amish values. Wilson is also a huge celebrity in the Twitter world where, as...
Deli Station: Racine’s new Jewish-European delicatessen
Update: Deli Station is closed Deli Station closed in late January, 2010. See the Journal Times story and the LTHForum.com discussion for more information. You can now get a delicious Peppered Beef sandwich in Racine, Wisconsin. The Corned Beef is just as good,...
Rick Santelli, CNBC in hot water on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’
God bless Jon Stewart and the Daily Show researchers and editors for putting CNBC's accuracy record under the microscope following Rick Santelli's anti-bailout rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.. I am so sick of...