First, Yanks may be interested to know that “vitamin” is pronounced “VITTA-min” by the Brits. True story. Thinking about it, though, I have to concede (and this rarely happens) that their pronunciation makes more sense than ours. Why should that be a long “i” sound? Another British pronunciation: “conTROVErsy” for controversy. Honest to goodness. But […]

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It’s vaguely disconcerting to think you might be boarding an airline that will be out of existence in the near future. Because if the company is in financial peril, doesn’t it begin cutting corners on maintenance? This thought came to me in the shower the other day: How many airlines have I flown that no […]

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I’m pleased to see that my hometown continues to be goofy. The 5th Annual Long Beach Zombie Walk is coming! That certainly registers as goofy.

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Among the melancholy — yet not actually dire — events that can befall a person, as the decades pass: 1. Your high school closes. Or, in my case, all but disappears. Los Angeles Lutheran first moved from the edge of Inglewood to Burbank, and then to Sylmar, where it nearly disappeared and now apparently has […]

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This is the wackiest notion I’ve come across in quite some time. In this story posted by the little newspaper/website named the Long Beach Post, a recent candidate for student body president at Long Beach State has called for the school to dump its Prospector Pete mascot and also change the nickname for the school’s […]

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This is a very big development for the tourist board in my hometown — Long Beach, California. The New York Times, easily the most relevant newspaper in the country … and possibly the most significant in the world … has included Long Beach in its “36 Hours” travel series, in a story posted this past […]

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Casper Ware, the star point guard at Long Beach State, the kid who scored a career-high 28 points in the 86-76 spanking of 10th-ranked Pitt on the Panthers’ home floor … … is getting a shout-out from a significant website.

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It has been a rough, oh, coupla-three decades for Long Beach State alumni who care about the major sports. The football program was killed, and the basketball program, which was one of the nation’s best for a half-dozen seasons straddling 1970, generally wasn’t very good. So, as a 49ers alumnus, I was quite pleased to […]

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During our peregrinations through California, we have spent 10 nights in the homes of relatives or friends. For which we are quite grateful. That’s a huge savings to the tourist. Our sleeping quarters have ranged from plush “nearly always unused guest bedroom” to an old-fashioned case of “one of the kid’s rooms while the little […]

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a televised baseball game from start to finish. Sometime in 2009, I guess it would be. I’ve seen stretches of playoff games, while in Abu Dhabi, but the time differences are so weird that I inevitably miss the start of a game or its finish. So I […]

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