Curious country, the United Arab Emirates. Expatriates … foreigners, that is … have far outnumbered Emiratis here for a while now, but the ratio continues to climb. Only a handful of countries in the world have more expatriates than citizens, and the UAE and Qatar seem to lead the way. According to numbers provided by […]

[Read more →]

For a week, the issue of safety in Dodger Stadium, and lack of same, was mostly a local or state topic, albeit an intense one. Some baseball fans outside Southern California and the Bay Area may have tumbled to the fact that a Giants fan remains in intensive care with brain injuries suffered during an […]

[Read more →]

My daughter sent me a link containing a slide show with photos from around the world of employees sitting behind their desks. If you have a desk job, and most of us do, you might find it interesting to compare the setting around your office work and those all over the planet, from Bolivia to […]

[Read more →]

I get some scary comments on the blog. Not talking about insulting comments. Get those all the time. That comes with the territory. It’s the ones in which somebody writes, and I discover  how completely, frighteningly wrong they are about a really basic issue … those are the ones that alarm me. Like this putative […]

[Read more →]

Less than a week after shrugging off the Opening Day attack on a Giants fan that left a paramedic from Santa Cruz in a medically induced coma and with possible brain damage, Frank McCourt apparently had one of his handlers explain to him the dire safety issues inside and outside his stadium. This is the […]

[Read more →]

Back in the IE, it was not unusual for me to have three bylines in one edition. It was fairly common, actually. Column, gamer, notebook. It also wasn’t rare to add a sidebar to that. If time availed and I was alone at an event we cared about. Here at The National, as in SoCal, […]

[Read more →]

Violence in Dodger Stadium, and commenting on it, certainly has caused a stir. If you want to see what sort of stir, look at the item from this blog and the 15 comments (and counting) I have been able to post. (Rather than edit those with obscenities, I don’t run them.) A few Dodgers fans […]

[Read more →]

You will be pleased to know that the Dodgers stand foursquare against fans nearly being beaten to death at Dodger Stadium. It’s a bold and brave move, but Frank McCourt’s team is the one to take it. Yes, that was sarcasm. Can’t help it when the subject is the owner of the Dodgers and the […]

[Read more →]

This was an issue before I fled the country. Actually, it has been an issue for about 10 years now. Going to a game at Dodger Stadium can be just … plain … dangerous. It appears that two men dressed in Dodgers apparel attacked a Giants fan after the game on Opening Day and beat […]

[Read more →]

Former colleague Michelle Gardner sent me a link to the latest from our favorite ballplayer, David Eckstein. Eck, you may recall, was the little guy who made the most from a baseball career with the fewest natural gifts. Undersized, not very fast, almost no power as a hitter, a guy with a strange throwing motion […]

[Read more →]