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Entries from November 2017

Thank Goodness for Toothpaste Tube Instructions!

November 30th, 2017 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized

We live in a silly world. We shrug as the list of countries with nuclear weapons grows but we have printed warnings that coffee may be hot, plastic bags should not be placed over your head and, now, we have instructions for getting toothpaste out of a tube. I noticed the other day, on a […]

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Eli Manning and His Career in This Blog

November 29th, 2017 · No Comments · Football, France, Lists, NFL, Sports Journalism

Eli Manning will not start for the New York Giants on Sunday, ending a streak of 210 consecutive starts at quarterback for the Giants, going back to 2004. However, the Giants are 2-9 and their playoffs hopes were buried weeks ago, and Eli will be 37 in five weeks and is not having a very […]

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The Clippers and Their Sure Return to Incompetence

November 28th, 2017 · No Comments · Basketball, Clippers, Lakers, NBA

As a native of Southern California, I knew all about the Los Angeles Clippers. They were bad, except when they were horrid. They didn’t have fans, per se; their games were attended by bargain-hunters who could not afford to see the Lakers or were supporters of whatever NBA team the Clippers happened to be playing. […]

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Goff Prompts Re-Evaluations by NFL Cognoscenti — and Me, Too

November 27th, 2017 · No Comments · Football, NFL, Rams

Let’s make this formal. I apologize for suggesting that Jared Goff was a bust. (This is Day 2 of the Empathy Tour; pretty sure I will get over it.) I never directly wrote, on this blog, these words: “Goff is a bust.” But I did suggest here and here and here that he could be, […]

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The Casual Cruelty of the Sports Term ‘Bust’

November 26th, 2017 · 1 Comment · Sports Journalism

It was a paragraph of the sort every sports journalist has written once, twice, a thousand times in describing athletes who turn out to be not as successful as others believed they would be. It went like this, on the New York Times website: The Minnesota Twins picked first at the 1999 Rule 5 draft […]

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College Football Playoffs: Never Enough

November 25th, 2017 · No Comments · College football, Football

You would think the NCAA knew better. That the sturm und drang that accompanies the 68-team college basketball playoffs would have prompted them to leave football alone — ending the season with bowl games and letting collections of journalists and/or coaches and/or cranks with a trophy to figure out who ranked where. But then some […]

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An Act of Random Kindness and a Saved Trip

November 24th, 2017 · No Comments · Travel

I saw this just the past day or two, on some website. “Describe an act of random kindness that you encountered.” I think the point of this is … the act ought to be dramatic, unexpected and from someone you do not know. That is what the “random” is getting at. I probably am forgetting […]

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Mbah a Moute: Big Plus for Rockets

November 23rd, 2017 · 1 Comment · NBA, UCLA

Luc Richard Mbah a Moute‘s final season at UCLA, 2007-08, was also my last as a journalist in Southern California. I remember Mbah a Moute fairly well. He was a junior, a starter at power forward for a UCLA program that was riding high, and a regular contributor the previous two seasons. But he also […]

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RIP, ‘Pocket Hercules’

November 22nd, 2017 · 1 Comment · Olympics

The first paragraphs went like this: “He stands five feet tall. “He weighs 132 pounds. “He can lift 418 pounds over his head. “His name is Naim Suleymanoglu, from Turkey, and pound for pound he is the strongest man in the history of the world.” That was the opening of my story on the featherweight […]

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Newspaper Wrinklers and Crumplers

November 21st, 2017 · No Comments · Journalism, Newspapers

Pretty much everyone who has worked in print journalism nurses a grudge toward people who crumple a newspaper while paging through it. Today’s paper, especially.

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