For Lent, I gave up Snickers candy bars. That may not seem like a very significant, nor a serious, Lenten sacrifice … and it is not, cosmically. But it is, for me. I consider Snickers the best candy bar ever invented. Whatever is second is a distant second. Maybe the Baby Ruth. As a candy, […]

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Searching my memory, but I am not sure I had really grasped, pre-UAE, that the main event of the Dubai World Cup offered the biggest cash prize of any horse race/meet. The race is worth $10 million, with $6 million going to the winner. That’s a lot of oats and alfalfa. The Dubai World Cup […]

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The 31st Sun Baseball League draft commenced at 5:30 a.m. today, in the UAE, which left me at a competitive disadvantage. I am not sharp at that hour of the day. Not a morning person. But, then, in the first 30 years of the league I won the championship exactly twice. So it probably doesn’t […]

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Rene Douglas wasn’t the best jockey around. He was not Eddie Arcaro, or Bill Shoemaker or Chris McCarron or Gary Stevens. But he was good. Quite good. Good enough to have won more than 3,500 races, including the 1998 Belmont Stakes and the Juvenile Fillies race at the 2006 Breeders’ Cup. Then came a horrific […]

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The Miami Heat’s winning streak ended at 27 tonight, in a loss at Chicago, and I like to think the surviving members of the 1971-72 Lakers are celebrating somewhere with a bottle of champagne. Just as the players of the NFL’s unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins allegedly do when the latest team to get close to […]

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Two uplifting developments for U.S. soccer today, and after that, some video from some uplifting moments from the 2010 World Cup.

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I spent some time in yesterday’s post considering what is sure to be a chasm on the two-car Red Bull Racing team, now that Sebastian Vettel passed Mark Webber late in the Malaysian Grand Prix — against team orders — to win the race. People will be talking about this for months. For years. Nascar? […]

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Maybe we should have seen this coming. A guy doesn’t win the Formula One drivers championship three consecutive years by being a milquetoast. But that didn’t keep those of us who follow F1 — which is most of world aside from North America — from having a general idea of Sebastian Vettel, the German driver […]

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  The U.S. national soccer team won a key World Cup qualifying match over Costa Rica last night in conditions that were, oh, unusual for a game played in the Concacaf “hexagonal” — made up mostly of teams from Central America and the Caribbean. A heavy snowstorm. Don’t see that in Kingston. The Yanks defeated […]

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I appreciate classical music as much as your average First World old guy, and perhaps more. However, not much of it is played live in Abu Dhabi, or the UAE. For obvious reasons. The Western classical canon is not prominent here and the Dead White Males of orchestral prominence are not guys the Gulf Arabs […]

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