The place isn’t quite like I envisioned it. It is far more economically advanced that I imagined. The infrastructure here in Beijing, anyway, puts the U.S. to shame. The airport, the roads, the hotels, most of the big buildings …most of them are modern. Our cities are falling apart, in many cases, but in China, […]

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It’s been clear to me since Day 1 that China would prefer the U.S. Olympic team fail as often as possible. The Chinese saw the Americans as the only team capable of keeping them from winning the gold-medal count, and every American failure was good news to them. It was just sort of in the […]

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I’m going to have to file this after the Closing Ceremonies, because organizers appear to have shut down internet accessability. Afraid we’ll somehow send out images of the ceremonies, I guess. They said they would do the same for opening, but a lot of people filed, no problem. Tonight, however, no. It’s almost as hot […]

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When I win a major sports competition …. you know, an Olympics medal, Wimbledon, anything with a trophy or a medal – I am not going to do what everyone else does.

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No group can ever match the original Dream Team, right? That was the group that came to the Barcelona Games in 1992, the first time NBA players had been allowed in the Olympics. And they trashed people. Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley … I want to say John Stockton, Scotty Pippen, Patrick Ewing. Those guys. I […]

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Just filed a piece on Chaunte Howard for the Press Enterprise. She is a Riverside North alumnus and had a shot at a medal tonight in the high jump before going out at 6 feet, 7 inches and finishing sixth. That story is here. The day before, I did a couple of stories. One on […]

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I just wrote a piece for the L.A. Daily News about Allyson Felix winning her first Olympic gold, as part of the U.S. women’s 4×400 relay team. It seems as if Felix has been winning stuff for years, but she had never won Olympic gold until tonight. She had a pair of silvers in the […]

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I’m writing on my Dell laptop right now, and it again is powered by my Dell adapter. It required a long round-trip to the velodrome at Laoshan, on the western edge of Beijing. But it was there.

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I find many things linguistic interesting. And for what it’s worth, the rudimentary English spoken by thousands of Chinese volunteers here is … almost uniformly American-accented. That’s not the case for all of the world’s English-as-second-language speakers. A fair number have England-accented English. Particularly in France, and in England’s former colonies — including Hong Kong, […]

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I think everyone in the profession has variations of these. (Well, probably everyone has job-specific nightmares of this sort.) But this one is real. I lost my computer power cord/adapter.

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