Since arriving here almost all our free time has been given over to the vexing problem of housing. Where to live, for four months. What can be afforded? Just how many utterly wretched $1,500-to-$1,800-a-month, already furnished, two-bedroom, short-term-lease apartments are there, on this island? We might have thought maybe 50, or a hundred. Instead it […]

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Back at the Beijing Olympics I rued my inability to speak Mandarin. You show up at a big event, you’re there for three weeks, you feel as if you ought to be able to throw a few local words at the hometown folks. “Bonsoir, Fifi!” “Guten Abend, Heike!” But I got to Beijing and Mandarin […]

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Go ahead and sing that to the famous tune from “The Wizard of Oz.” Good times. The Boston Red Sox aren’t winning anything. Specifically, Boston’s insufferable fans aren’t going to win anything, not this fall, and that’s wonderful. The Red Sox Nation can go back to whining and suffering and all that self-absorbed crap that […]

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I imagine I will grow accustomed to this. Eventually. Walking down the street, in Hong Kong … along one of the narrow sidewalks (and they all are) … and splat, a big fat drop of water lands in my hair. My first reaction always is, “This can’t be good.”

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Climbed out of bed … and it does require climbing, because the mattress is on the floor. That seems to be fairly common here in Hong Kong. When, really, every bed here should be an extra 12 inches off the floor so you can have one of those storage-under-the-bed things, because nobody has closets or […]

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I’ve celebrated a lot of birthdays. A lot. If you gave me a candle for every lap I’ve completed around the sun … you’d probably burn down a building before I could blow out all of them. It’s not really possible that I’m as old as, apparently, I am. Anyway, I decided today that this […]

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Another blow to the San Bernardino Sun, and specifically to its sports section: John Murphy is leaving the paper to join its arch-rival, the Riverside-based Press-Enterprise. And there just went one of the last reasons to buy The Sun instead of the PE.

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Can’t be too upset about this. These Dodgers never were very good. They had a hot two weeks in September to finish a modest 84-78, only the 15th-best record in baseball, but that was enough to win an awful division. Then they ran into a Cubs team that chose that weekend to go into a […]

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I’m watching the Dodgers go down, and out … on ESPN’s international network. Which is being voiced-over by a Cantonese-speaking announcer. It led to this amusing bit, a moment ago.

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You almost cannot under-dress, in Hong Kong. Jeans and T-shirts are standard men’s wear. Unless it’s particularly hot. Then anyone out and about (but not going to work) is wearing T-shirts and shorts — especially if he is under 30. I like this. I arrived with a batch of polo shirts, a pair of cargo […]

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