Back in December, I confessed to my deep and only semi-rational need to see Adrian Peterson fall short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season NFL rushing record. (And he did, in part because I willed it; that’s how fans think.) Here’s one I probably care about more: The Lakers’ NBA record of 33 consecutive victories.

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This happened in the past few days. Two women I know, mother and daughter, were discussing a lizard who had gotten into a washing machine and showed no interest in getting out. Throughout the description of the problem — which included the reptile hanging on through a spin cycle and also survived the water draining […]

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For a period of about 20 years, from 1989 until 2009, I saw nearly every match the U.S. national soccer team played. Many of them in person. Most of the rest via television. I knew those teams, especially those from the World Cup teams of 1990 through 2002, as well as I have ever known […]

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I wrote about this the other day — the London Times‘s fictional “exclusive” about a huge, world-changing club soccer tournament, the Dream Football League, to be held in Qatar in the height of summer every two years, beginning in 2015. A week later, the former British paper of record, issued what journalists in England call […]

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Sometimes, the UAE can seem like a fairly regular place. For days at a time. People have jobs, they go to work, they encounter traffic along the way, they watch sports on TV, they plan vacations … And then we get a story in The National that reminds us that we live among a very […]

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This is a fairly big deal, over here in the Old World. Well, at least in the parts of the Old World that care about rugby, and that would include the British Isles and (go figure) France and Italy. Each winter, they stage a Six Nations competition in which six “national” teams play each other, […]

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I have suggested on this blog that college sports are hard to follow, overseas. They are. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the notion of “sports” affiliated with “college” does not seem ridiculous. Thus, once you leave the U.S., you are confronted with confusion and disinterest, as pertains to […]

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Moby Dick was one of the handful of items that came with my Kindle when it was purchased. (Along with the King James Bible, and Huckleberry Finn and maybe Sherlock Holmes.) Or I’m pretty sure it was. I have been avoiding the great white whale the whole of my life, and I can’t imagine I […]

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The London Times once had the same reputation in Britain that the New York Times has in the States. The emphasis here being “once” … as in “bygone days”. Britons were clearly proud of it. And still are, almost instinctively. They refer to it still as “The Times” … as if there is only one […]

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When Canadians assemble in any numbers, these seem to be among their most important considerations: 1) organizing a Terry Fox Run, 2) displaying some maple leaf flags (so people don’t mistake them for Americans) 3) agitating for the imminent arrival of a Tim Hortons and 4) setting up a hockey league. Far as I can […]

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