All politics aside, I have always been fascinated by the concept of the coup d’etat. This must go back to the 1960s, a particularly busy decade for overthrowing governments — which I would have followed, once the news finally came in. The coup is about as old as government itself. The oldest on record, recorded […]

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The mind reels. Two semi-trailers loaded with beer were stolen from the Atlanta craft-beer-maker SweetWater Brewing Company last month. That works out to about 3,300 cases of beer, or 78,528 bottles, according to SweetWater. It also represents about one week of sales by the brewery. The thieves were brazen. They pulled up with two tractors […]

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When I was married, several decades ago, I remember my parents producing a lengthy list of their friends and associates who they thought ought to be invited to the ceremony and reception. I also remember thinking, “Hey, this is for the people getting married and our friends and relatives. … and why do we have […]

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I spent six years in a newsroom that included a lot of Canadians, and if I ever doubted Canada’s preoccupation with ice hockey, those six years straightened me out on that. Which makes the current sad state of the National Hockey League’s seven teams based in the Great White North of particular interest. If the […]

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I have been fascinated/haunted by the death last week of an Englishman named Henry Worsley, who succumbed to an infection the day after he was air-lifted by a rescue team after giving up his attempt — 30 miles from success — to cross Antarctica alone. He had begun his quest back on November 14, dragging […]

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This entry has nothing to do with sports, journalism or sports journalism. Not that it has been, daily, since 2008. It’s just plain astonishment at the natural world, and sharks in particular, and a piece of video that perhaps you have not yet seen. A shark eating a shark.

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Whenever helium gets in a fix, whenever neon is at risk, whenever argon and krypton and xenon and radon are ganged up on by the other 110 chemical elements … and we know they are pretty much inert … “Nobleman” is ready to shed his civilian dress and come to the rescue. Those six elements […]

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An added attraction at the San Clemente home where we have been staying is a collection of at least a dozen paperback books containing cartoons from The Far Side. I can page through those for 20, 25 minutes at a pop, smiling at many of the (typically) single-panel cartoons that so often tweak science and […]

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We remember how this goes: Your team is so good, so much better than everyone else, that the idea of them losing is hard to imagine. Or remember. In 1971-72, it was the Los Angeles Lakers, who won a record 33 consecutive games, over a span of 64 days. This season, it is the Golden […]

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So, back on Friday, we hosted an American-style Thanksgiving dinner. Six people, but food for about 12 and leftovers on an epic scale. (You never want to run out of food when hosting, and especially not when hosting Thanksgiving.) And, being, usually, Old School proponents of not wasting perfectly good comestibles — this, in a […]

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