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.)
Frozen pizza that doesn’t suck: Amy’s
Some evenings, after a hard day's work, one does not feel up to preparing Herb-Roasted Rack of Lamb with Flageolet Gratin, Roasted Radicchio, and Tapenade for dinner. One prefers instead to throw a frozen pizza into a 425° oven and eat it from paper plates about...
Faucet instructions from Peerless are funny
Amy and her boss were replacing a faucet yesterday. They began by dutifully reading the instructions. Pretty soon they were laughing out loud at lines like "Good luck to you, and may all your coupling nuts turn freely," and "Step 1G: Spit and drink a pop. See? We told...
‘Jesus Camp’ (2006 documentary film)
Jesus Camp is an Oscar-nominated documentary about an evangelical Christian camp for kids in Devil's Lake, North Dakota, and, more broadly, about the political militancy of America's religious right. It was directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. [includeme...
Upper Michigan travel guide: Hunts Guide to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
We just got back from a few days visiting Amy's sister in Pembine, Wisconsin, near Iron Mountain, Michigan. Before we went, I did some Googling and came across a fantastic little Web resource: Hunts' Guide to Michigan's Upper...
Summer 2007 update: Long time no post
Greetings from my air-conditioned bunker as summer 2007 clatters apart overhead like an unbalanced engine. Amy's at work, I'm on hiatus, and out in the backyard the heat and humidity are mounting over the soggy vegetation — a prelude to an afternoon forecast of...
‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ (2005, Tommy Lee Jones)
Maybe once every few years, if you're lucky, you can rent a completely unheralded movie which turns out to be so startlingly well-made and enjoyable that you watch it two or three times. So it is with The Three Burials of Melquiades...
The Atlantic: Magazines and coffee beans
One of the first realizations that hit me when the World Wide Web was emerging was that magazines were doomed. Suddenly, all the color and photos and graphics and layout possibilities of magazines could go through a wire along with the text, without waiting for...
Backyard gardening: Playing in the dirt
It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land. By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground. as you were taken from it. — Genesis 3:18-19, The New Jerusalem Bible We've been spending a lot of time on...
‘An Inconvenient Truth’: Al Gore’s global warming, climate change slide show
The day before Earth Day, the movie that created such a stir last year — An Inconvenient Truth — finally made it through our Netflix gauntlet and onto our TV. The film is a documentary about former Vice President Al Gore's "slide...
‘Bouchon’: Thomas Keller’s French bistro cookbook
A few weeks ago, while buying a book I needed, I added this one, which had been sitting on my wish list for a year or so. Thomas Keller's Bouchon, published in 2004, is pretty hefty for a cookbook. It's about a foot square, weighs almost six pounds, and features...
Twitter it away
There has been quite a lot of Internet buzz in the last month or three over Twitter. It's a Web 2.0 service that encourages you to publicly post (via Web, IM, or text message) very short descriptions of whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. [includeme...
Joseph Campbell: Hero’s Journey, Power of Myth
Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field...
‘In Spite of Ourselves,’ by John Prine and Iris DeMent
Here at the homestead, we've kinda considered this our theme song for about the last six years or so. The complete Sessions at West 54th Street show is on a VHS tape down in our basement somewhere, but I stumbled across this John Prine YouTube clip this morning, and...
The grace of Elizabeth Edwards
Back in October of 2004, my wife Amy was working at the Maidenform store in Pleasant Prairie's Prime Outlets shopping center. One morning — October 21st, to be exact — Amy phoned home to tell me that there was some unusual activity in...
Growing flowers from seed for hummingbirds and butterflies
Long story short: Since the experiment below back in 2007, we have decided that starting seedlings in windows is unwise. Because they bend toward the light, you have to constantly turn them, trying to keep them upright — and even then, they become too leggy and...
St. Patrick’s Day: Irish breakfast, Racine parade, Irish stew recipe
I'm not even a little bit Irish, but I love St. Patrick's Day. I love Irish history and literature and music — especially James Joyce and Van Morrison — and for me, St. Patrick's Day is the official threshold of spring. The peaty smell of the thawing soil and the drab...
Erik Mongrain: “AirTap!”
I just stumbled across this clip on YouTube while monkeying with stuff on my Google homepage. It's Erik Mongrain, from Montreal. I've never heard of him before, but I imagine we'll be seeing more of him from now on.
Keith Olbermann’s ‘Special Comment’ on Condoleezza Rice
I continue to enjoy Countdown with Keith Olbermann every weeknight. There are a few bugs in the show that I would fix — for example, there's way too much talk about American Idol — but overall, it's a very refreshing hour and an entertaining downshift from the...
Alton Brown’s shrimp gumbo recipe: Brown roux in oven
Here is the gumbo recipe from Alton Brown: Shrimp Gumbo.This is yet another example of why I think Good Eats is one of the best shows in the history of television: Not only does Alton Brown give us an entertaining half hour of viewing, but we also get some real life,...
‘Tsotsi’ (movie, 2005, Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto)
When we first meet him in his bleak Soweto slum, the young gangster nicknamed Tsotsi ("thug") is little more than a predatory animal. Like a panther, he dispassionately stalks and pounces upon his victims, taking their belongings and, if need be, their lives. He seems...
Hawaii dreaming on Wisconsin winter day
Saturday was when we really reached our limit. Sitting across the living room from each other, both flabby, both pasty, both exhausted by the worlds inside our laptops and the gloomy, windy, dead, and frozen terrain outside, we exchanged a glance that conceded the...
What my cousin did last summer
I last talked to her years ago at a wedding, about the work she had been doing then in Mozambique. I was thinking about her yesterday, so I did a quick Web search and found a story from the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that originally...
Blogging documentary: Chuck Olsen’s ‘Blogumentary’
Jennifer, whom I don't personally know but who sends me links fairly regularly, emailed me last Tuesday about an item at Google Video. Expecting to find a short clip only a minute or two in length, I was surprised to see instead that blogger Chuck Olsen has posted his...
NOAA Weather Radios: Midland WR-300
The freak tornadoes that swept across Central Florida one week ago, killing 20 people, have reminded me that I want to buy a weather radio — the kind that turns on automatically in the middle of the night when the National Weather Service issues a warning. Here in...
Super Bowl 2007 XLI: Indianapolis Colts vs. Chicago Bears
6:50 a.m. — It's ten minutes before seven on the granddaddy of American holidays, and I'm not going to be sleeping anymore, but it's still ten and a half hours before kickoff, so why not put my nervous energy into something cliché — like, say, live-blogging Super Bowl...
Regina Spektor
A little while back, I blogged about how hard it is for me to find new music and how I've been trying to use new technology like Last.fm and Pandora to seek out fresh songs and artists. Then, a couple of Sundays ago, I learned about a young songwriter from a source...
Bart D. Ehrman: ‘Misquoting Jesus: Who changed the Bible and why’
I first saw Bart D. Ehrman last March 14 when he was interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Prior to that, he guested on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The cover of Ehrman's book proclaims it a "New York Times Bestseller." There's even another book refuting his...
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (2005 movie)
Late in November of 2005, Oprah Winfrey was on my TV getting all effusive over Memoirs of a Geisha. To hear Oprah describe it, it was the most moving, most beautifully filmed cinematic masterpiece in the history of box offices. Having...
Blender videos for Blendtec Total Blender: ‘Will It Blend?’
Here's a kooky little item I saw on Pogue's Posts and decided to steal: Will It Blend? The site, created by Orem, Utah based heavy-duty blender maker Blendtec, advertises their impressive Total Blender via David Letterman-inspired viral video demonstrations of its...
‘North Country’ (2005 Charlize Theron movie)
Honored with two Academy Award nominations in 2006, North Country finally worked its way to the top of my Netflix queue recently. It was a pretty good rental. You've probably seen stories similar to this one a number of times. The...