The New York Times has an interesting piece about three smart-alecks who cooperated on a newspaper hoax in 1941, convincing several newspapers (including The Times) to run the weekly scores of a make-believe college football team and its make-believe opponents. What the hoaxers did was simple: They called in the made-up score to the sports […]

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An American Christmas. We had not done one of those since 2007. A semi-surprising stat, in retrospect, given that I had not been outside Southern California on December 25 for a very long time … and maybe never, through 2007. Then came Hong Kong in 2008 and Abu Dhabi from 2009 through 2014. And I’m […]

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After six years and two months in Abu Dhabi, we leave the UAE for the final time today, headed for Los Angeles on flight EY171, Etihad’s 16-hour-plus nonstop to LAX. It was a fast six years, filled with challenges unimagined during previous incarnations as California journalists. Each of us added a significant stretch to our […]

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The thing about the internet is … it lasts forever. Or it must seem that way for those who wish people would stop dredging up some social-media faux pas of theirs from four or five years ago. The reality, says a key official at Google, is that we may be entering a new Dark Age, […]

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Three years ago, I wrote about this: How big a day December 7 was, for much of my life, as Americans remembered Pearl Harbor — the surprise attack in Hawaii that took the U.S. into World War II. And, mostly, I haven’t changed my outlook … how time and current events conspire to push notable […]

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We were at the Immigration Office in Abu Dhabi today to handle an administrative chore pertaining to passports. Eventually, pretty much everyone here spends hours at the Immigration Office. The office is in several buildings on 19th Street, near the church district. It may be one of the busiest government offices in the city, behind […]

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It was 10 months ago that terrorists entered the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 people, most of them journalists, including the editor in chief. A 12th person was killed nearby. It was a few days ago that I realized the offices of Charlie Hebdo were in the Paris arrondissement […]

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We like where we live. Quite a bit. Particularly given where we lived the first three years in Abu Dhabi. “Functional” would be the biggest compliment we could pay those two apartments. Where we are now is a tower of about 20 stories. Maybe four years old. With a gym, a swimming pool and several […]

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A colleague let me know about this piece in The Guardian, the English newspaper: An oral history of USA at Italia ’90: the World Cup that changed US soccer. This felt very personal, from the first few paragraphs. I know/knew those guys. I was at Port of Spain, Trinidad, for the Shot Heard Round the […]

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Late last year, I went off on the sloppy usage of “icon” and “iconic”. It was in regard to Vin Scully and a media release (not written by Vinny) about his plan to return to the Dodgers broadcast booth in 2014. And the intellectually bankrupt Dodgers PR crew used both icon and iconic within the […]

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