When did I last watch ice hockey? Might have been the gold-medal game of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Canada versus the U.S., with the Canucks in the living room of a big Abu Dhabi apartment nervous as hell and the Yanks amused to see it. Hockey is Canada; Canada is hockey. Forget all that stuff […]

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We live in a silly world. We shrug as the list of countries with nuclear weapons grows but we have printed warnings that coffee may be hot, plastic bags should not be placed over your head and, now, we have instructions for getting toothpaste out of a tube. I noticed the other day, on a […]

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Most of us who have lost most of our hair … we’re pretty much the last to know. Or the last to accept it. “I’ve got plenty of hair over here. I can just stretch it across …” No, really, you cannot. And when you reach the point where you are desperately trying to make […]

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I don’t understand competitive eating. Seems like a good way to suffer immediate “death by food” — as opposed to death by food over a span of decades, which probably will kill most of us in the First World. And, eating something nasty, such as hotdogs (and hotdogs are certainly nasty after two) … seems […]

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I don’t know if this is common, semi-common or weird. I can count while I’m thinking of something else. But only to 100. And as long as I do not think of some other arithmetical concept.

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Maybe Magic Johnson as club president is worth the price of tickets. Brandon Ingram, the second-year forward, could move the needle, too. But most observers seem to think it is Lonzo Ball who is the key to the Lakers selling a lot more season tickets than they did a year ago. And now they are […]

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I am not a rugby fan. Most Americans are not. We have our own collision/territorial sport known globally as American football, which makes redundant a need to see some other incarnation of large men running into each other. I have, really, only one position, when it comes to world rugby, and it is this: I […]

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The jumbo Sunday crosswords that appear under the imprimatur of the New York Times … had been kicking my butt. Seventeen straight that I failed to complete without a mistake. Making me wonder if the canary had stopped singing in the coal mine of my brain. I completed one on February 20 but, through May […]

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The first week of June brings to mind two history-changing military actions in World War II involving the United States. Arguably the country’s finest hours, when it comes to warfare. –D-Day, June 6, 1944, which was 73 years ago today. –The Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942, Most Americans with a passing knowledge of U.S. […]

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Until a few years ago, this is what I knew of Gustav Mahler. He was a famous composer whose work I had never heard. He was the favorite composer of the eternally snooty television brothers Frasier and Niles Crane, of the long-running show Frasier. (Whenever the two went out for a night, odds were it […]

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