Much is being made about the brutal cold expected at the NFL playoffs game in Minneapolis on Sunday. The Minnesota Vikings versus the Seattle Seahawks at the University of Minnesota — with a forecast temperature at kickoff of 0 degrees Fahrenheit. That will make it one of the coldest games in NFL history, though the […]

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Well, OK. Make it a 9.8. That fifth snowflake didn’t bloom into a ring, early in the show. Mechanical malfunction of some sort. But otherwise, the Russians did well tonight with Opening Ceremonies for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Which came as a bit of a surprise, given the battering (see @Sochiproblems) Sochi 2014 had taken […]

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I look forward to two more-or-less regularly scheduled social events each year in Abu Dhabi. 1. The staff party on the anniversary of the founding of The National newspaper. 2. The birthday party of a spouse of one of the newspaper staff. The latter was held tonight, and as usual it brought together an agreeable […]

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Tell the truth, Baby Boomers. The first 40 years of your life you never once thought about living in the year 2014.

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Today was the final day of the World Championships in Athletics — or track and field, as it is known in North America. It was the first of several big events to be held in Russia in the next few years. The Winter Olympics in Sochi next February, the soccer World Cup in 2018. They […]

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Mike Lopresti is one of my favorite sports journalists, as well as one of the best sports journalists in the United States over the past 30-some years. We go way back. I met him no later than 1980, and I tried to hire him a few years later — just before he and I and […]

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The 31st Sun Baseball League draft commenced at 5:30 a.m. today, in the UAE, which left me at a competitive disadvantage. I am not sharp at that hour of the day. Not a morning person. But, then, in the first 30 years of the league I won the championship exactly twice. So it probably doesn’t […]

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As a Baby Boomer whose life was heavily influenced by the Cold War, I wanted to go to Moscow before the Soviets went out of business. But events conspired to keep it from happening. I was to have gone to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but then came the U.S.-led boycott over Afghanistan (them, again), and […]

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My recollection is this: I called Landon Donovan the day before the 2001 MLS Cup final and talked to him for 10 or 15 minutes. Yes. The day before. Called him on his cell, and he picked up, and I wrote a story based on what we talked about on the eve of the game. […]

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A couple of weeks ago my Dell laptop, which had served me so well since the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, up and died. Didn’t just seize up … quit. Expired. We finally were able to do some diagnostics on it, and the diagnosis was, “Your hard drive is dead.” Which in my world, anyway, […]

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