It’s official. That tryout with Bayern Munich has turned into, at least, a temporary job in Europe for Landon Donovan. I wish him well. This is a fairly critical point in his career. Not because it will determine whether he makes a nice living out of soccer (he already has). Nor because his status as […]

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Supermarkets? Not in this town. You have tiny markets. And tinier markets. Selling small portions of stuff. And smaller. For anyone used to the basic SoCal mega-market (never mind the massive portions of a Costco) … shopping in Hong Kong is to feel like Godzilla going to the store in Tokyo. Everything is bitsy. I […]

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My first month commuting, in Hong Kong, I just rode the subway and walked. Simple. But that was when I was staying a few steps or a few blocks from the MTR/metro/subway. Now that I am in Mid-Levels … getting to the office in North Point is a longer and trickier proposition. Because getting to […]

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I’ve been in a lot of high-rise buildings, here in Hong Kong. Twenty, at the least. Thirty, more likely. And I have yet to see a floor numbered 4. Or, for that matter, a floor numbered 14, 24 or 34. Not a single floor with the number four attached to it. This, apparently, is because […]

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This will haunt me for a while. But it’s not about me. It’s about the pathetic people I have seen the last week or two. Last night, in particular.

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I started this about a week ago, talking about/thinking about a couple of kids I knew from Redlands, during my time at the San Bernardino Sun … Landon Donovan and Ronnie Fouch. The item got so lengthy, though, that I stopped — after musing about Fouch — and promised to come back for Landon. So, […]

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I feel badly for all of you. Outsiders talk about earthquakes and ask people in Southern California how they can live with the threat … and someday (tomorrow? next year? 50 years from now?), when that 8-point-something quake pops on the San Andreas Fault, it will, in fact, be a disaster of biblical proportions. But […]

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We live in a weird world, kids. And, I suppose, this tame blog is part of it. All blogs are. Random stuff, almost impossible to verify, that should be taken with a boulder of salt whenever “real issues” are being preached. A few lives ago, when I was still sports editor of the San Bernardino […]

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This is my first fall away from professional sports journalism since 1975. And even in 1975, I was covering sports at Long Beach State. That is, I was doing sports for 33 consecutive fall seasons. And the really weird thing is … I don’t much miss it.

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Anyone who travels knows that dealing with money in another country is a tricky business. Trying to figure out what is a good price and what is bad, by U.S. standards, doing conversion rates in your head. That’s challenge enough. Then there’s the physical reality of someone else’s money. Size, shape, weight … dealing with […]

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