You would think I would have written this post three years ago. And parts of it I could have, and probably did. Other concepts dawn on a person slowly. Especially the absence of something. Here is a short list with items, I have mentioned before, and at least one I have not.

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I nominate this as a parlor game of my own inventing. Pick a year … and see if you can accurately place one historical event in that year, and then see how many years you can go, from there, into the past before you are stumped. Whoever goes back the farthest wins the game. How […]

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The final round of Concacaf qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil began tonight, and the most interesting score was this one: Honduras 2, United States 1. Never before had the U.S. lost its opening match in the “hexagonal” (six-team) format for choosing World Cup teams — which was instituted ahead of the 1998 […]

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These days, just about all of us go first to the internet for information on … any topic. All the winners of Super Bowls. The world’s cities of more than 1 million population. The capital of Burkina Faso. A very handy tool, even if we stipulate that wikipedia, the go-to source for many searches, is […]

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The latest news of match fixing in soccer washed around the globe today, and it was the usual depressing stuff about this game and that game and about 680 other games played from 2008 through 2011 that were deemed “suspicious” by the authorities and may have been fixed, by gamblers. And then there was the […]

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So, you live in Abu Dhabi and want to see the Super Bowl? Have to be prepared to go all night long. With a couple of Americans new to town living just one floor away, at the new digs, we invited them over and watched the game (or I did, anyway) — which ran from […]

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Yes, you’re officially old but vaguely hip (or were) if you recognize that headline as coming from a song from 25 years ago: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” One of those “let’s get a bunch of celebrity singers together for a big, star-powered song to raise money for starving people somewhere” recordings. Can’t say I […]

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I generally have loathed the San Francisco Giants, but I have rarely felt the same way about the San Francisco 49ers. It probably has to do with the 49ers generally being bad when I was young and a fan of the Los Angeles Rams. The Niners did me no harm. If I think about it […]

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