It looks like suburban America. Single-family housing, block after block. Free national health care. Good schools. A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. That is what much of modern Germany looks like, to a visiting American. Pretty much everyone living the good life. The German Dream, which seems to have eclipsed […]

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It is not unusual for Americans to look at a global map and say, “Gee, Europe isn’t all that big, considering how often we talk about it.” By U.S. standards, Europe is semi-dinky, especially if you don’t include the European half of Russia in the Euro lineup. The U.S. is a bit shy of 10 […]

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Baseball is on the way back, we were told this week. “Spring” training camps will open on July 1, a 60-game mini-regular-season will begin play on or about July 24, and the World Series will finish no later than October 28. The NBA’s plan for a return-to-play “bubble” in Orlando was made public on June […]

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A guilty pleasure of mine, back before Covid-19 changed just about everything … was eating at Souplantation, And now it is gone. It was a buffet restaurant with a twist. It was largely vegetarian, with a wide selection of raw vegetables, and lettuce types, at least three kinds of soup and — this is crucial […]

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The NBA returning to action this season? For a while there, it seemed unlikely. Everyone’s attention was focused on the killer Covid-19 virus, as it should have been, and during the harrowing height of the pandemic it was easy to forget this salient basketball fact: Los Angeles’s two teams would have lost a chance to […]

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First printed in the San Bernardino Sun, November 3, 2002. Twice in my life I have gone to a hospital emergency room as a patient. On both occasions it was after suffering a head injury on a kickoff at a high-school football game. And you thought freeway driving was dangerous. From where we sit, it’s […]

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