The club just got swept by the Padres, who hadn’t won a game since August till the Boys in Blue showed up at Petco. The McCourts divorce case is grinding on, right? With the two cretins in a fight to the death over the franchise and the money they have bled out of it. The […]

[Read more →]

We just did two-plus months in a big apartment on the 14th floor of a tower. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a real kitchen. Nice. The kindly people who live there are coming back from a long summer vacation, so we dragged out all our stuff (and you always bring back more than you take) … […]

[Read more →]

To celebrate Eid Eve, the Day after Labor Day and the Jewish New Year — and I venture to say no other group of people on the planet had that combination of events in mind at the same event — we invited over five people for … Mexican food! They hardly do Mexican in the […]

[Read more →]

Almost every sports fan in the world is interested in his or her national soccer team. Certainly applies in the UAE, where the most casual of supporters can tell you where and when the UAE appeared in its first (and still only) World Cup. That would be Italy, 1990. The UAE went out in three […]

[Read more →]

Fasting from sunup to sundown, not an easy thing. I was chatting about this with our backup cabbie, Jesse, a Filipino grandfather who loves Country and Western music. And he had an interesting take on the rogue-cab-driver situation I referred to the other night. He has a suggestion for the horrific driving we’ve seen the […]

[Read more →]

Brazil is big on referring to athletes by just one name. Which I don’t have a problem with, generally, and especially not for athletes. Their given names,  Portuguese-based most of them, tend to be elaborate affairs. Pele, the most famous Brazilian of them all, was christened Edson Arantes de Nascimento, which is a lot of […]

[Read more →]

First, the good news: USC 49, Hawaii 36. And now the bad: Matt Leinart released by the Arizona Cardinals. How the great have fallen. First the on-probation Trojans. Now Matt. It’s almost as if that whole mid-decade USC team is having its history rewritten, and not in a flattering way. Reggie Bush cheated. Pete Carroll […]

[Read more →]

Today we link you to what I found to be two supremely interesting recordings of Sports People talking. I was thinking how the concept of the podcast and the videocast (is that the word?) are still fairly recent, in the larger scheme. Podcasts really gained traction only about a decade ago, and video of people […]

[Read more →]

Been dealing with cabbies since the night we arrived. Caught one in the middle of Najda Street an hour after touching down. Cabs become a part of your life here, unless you take on the risky/expensive proposition of driving yourself. What you ought to do is make an arrangement with a cabbie you like and […]

[Read more →]

Let’s play a little detective/sleuthing game. Examine this list of names: Doria Aura, Mitzi Laquanda, Damien Louis, Deon Cantrell, Janna Loise, Ami Despina, Nobuko Stephen, Towanda Bronwyn, Farah Drema. OK, what do they have in common? Or to put it another way, what do those names say to you?

[Read more →]