Even on the other side of the world we know about the U.S. federal government shutdown. The cable news stations love that story, and have for weeks — especially on days when no global natural disaster has presented itself for our delectation. The potential default of the U.S. national debt also has been talked about, […]

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A huge day in 2014 World Cup qualifying. Four years ago, I would have been up all night watching games to update the Countdown to South Africa blog. (Perhaps the best World Cup blog seen by … almost no one!) In this case, I woke early enough, in Abu Dhabi, to see the late games […]

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Air travel has become crude and brutish over the past few decades. It has gotten worse in nearly every regard. But not on every front. Planes are safer. They seem to go more places. And the big one: The multi-media platforms most of the big and/or new planes have. Most of the movies I watch […]

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Most of us, in Southern California, grew up in a horizontal environment. Maybe a second floor. Maybe. But, generally, we lived in the ‘burbs, in one-story homes, and to fling ourselves from the highest point of the building involved somehow climbing on the roof, and a leap was more an act of daring or stupid […]

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If you have watched the TV sitcom Seinfeld, you remember the Bubble Boy episode. That was George Constanza’s description for the kid with immunity issues, who spent his days inside a plastic bubble. Over the past year-plus, the UAE has had its own “boy” — the inevitably named “Fear-of-Flying Boy”. And local media, including The […]

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We were riding in the Land Cruiser over the broad and grassy uplands of the Masai Mara, looking for a leopard, when we saw a tent-like structure on the horizon. What could that be, out in the middle of the game conservancy? A watering station for some truly exotic creatures who would be traversing the […]

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Six days that flashed past … but seemed jammed with enough events and experiences to last for weeks. A first visit to Africa, and to Kenya. A day in Nairobi, one week after the terror attack at Westgate Mall. Then four days in the astonishing Masai Mara Conservancy, we woke to hippos bellowing in the […]

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  People ride around in Land Cruisers, with guides, here in the Masai Mara, sharing the same upland plains with all manner of creatures, great and small, harmless and lethal, and it doesn’t take long to think you’re in a sort of zoo, where the chances of you being harmed are remarkably low — unless […]

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It was a compulsion that seemed to suffuse the afternoon safari fleet, here in Kenya’s Masai Mara conservancy. “Let’s find a leopard.” It made sense, at least for the six of us riding, again, with our guides, Ashford and Wilson, because the day before we had seen four of the Big Five. The missing fifth? […]

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The idea of safari resorts, like this one in the Masai Mara, in Kenya, is Land Cruisers out on the savanna, a half-dozen tourists with cameras, binoculars and bush hats, a guide/driver … and the big animals of Africa. Even if we concede that Kenya’s tourist industry is geared to assure we see as many […]

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