This blog commenced on March 10, 2008. Ten years ago today. It was four days after I had been fired by the Los Angeles News Group, and I wanted to let co-workers and other journalists know what had happened, with as many specifics as I could recall pertaining to the (then mostly novel) concept of […]

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Actually, I suppose the overnight air flight never really disappeared. It just seemed to, for those of us who do the majority of our flying inside the United States. (And it is called the red-eye because of how you look the morning after flying most of the night.) After what seemed years since I had […]

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This dawned on me the other day. Even before we made the drive up (and back) through California’s Central Valley. I have spent nearly the whole of my life breathing bad air. Polluted air. Sometimes thick enough to taste. Sometimes particulates so tiny they never come back out a person’s lungs. Didn’t plan it that […]

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The New York Times today posted a very interesting and very alarming long-form piece on the practice of selling social media accounts. The story suggests that 15 percent of Twitter accounts are actually “bots” — bogus accounts created to help ethically challenged entrepreneurs amass enormous lists of account holders which they can sell on to […]

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So says the camel expert at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, where we worked and lived for more than six years. Anna Zacharias, a journalist from Canada who has made the Arabian Peninsula her home, has her ear to the ground concerning the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, near Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. […]

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This is not an exercise in academic rigor. I did not have someone sitting with a note pad writing down literally the first 10 facts I could recall pertaining to sports in 2017. But … it is a fairly accurate recreation of a fairly quick trip through my brain to see what stuck from the […]

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It is an exhibition, not a tournament. Something just north of hitting on a practice court. No matter. Serena Williams‘s return to a tennis court with an elite opponent on the other side of the net, with paying fans in the stands and someone keeping score … may be the biggest sports story in UAE […]

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It was Abu Dhabi’s idea, and not a bad one. Take the tennis-free final weekend of the year and jam into it a three-day, six-player competition grandiosely titled “World Tennis Championship”. Target the highest-ranked players in the world by offering fat appearance fees for a few days of action in the Gulf sun, with another […]

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This is a guy thing, pretty much, isn’t it. Or maybe a slob thing. Wearing things forever. Until they break or split or go to pieces and fall off your body. Or, perhaps, until your significant other gets sick of looking at your rags and throws some of them out when you are not paying […]

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This was something celebrated on at least one Facebook account: Seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi today, a day before Everyone Back Home had a chance. Movies in France tend to open on Wednesday. In the States, an opening often is Friday, especially for big movies like this one. So, at least one of us […]

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