Talking about weather is boring. I probably have written that exact sentence on this blog before. Weather. Boring. Sort of the definition of banality. As a writing device, it indicates “dull guy” … or “nothing to say.” Character walks into a scene and says, “Hot enough for ya?” … We know the speaker is meant […]

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The day after The Decision, that contemporary monument to bad ideas (New Coke, anyone?), I offered to write a commentary/analysis on LeBron James’s decision to commit to Miami and abandon Cleveland. I ended up trashing LeBron and The Decision … in a column I linked to a few days ago.  But before I realized I […]

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Watching a soccer match while you put out a newspaper is a bit tricky. Especially when the big-screen is over your right shoulder and around a pillar. But I saw more than enough of Spain-Holland to be hit by this thought at about the 75th minute: If I had never seen a soccer game before, […]

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Let’s see … Where were we … before ants and LeBron James took over our lives. Germany had just bombed Argentina out of the quarter-finals, Uruguay won that bizarre handball match over Ghana, Brazil went out to the Netherlands, and Spain took down Paraguay. Which were the two days when what had been shaping up […]

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I couldn’t help myself. I was going to approach this as a commentary, a think piece. I spent an hour researching other three-player groupings of stars in NBA history … making charts and compiling stax … my explanatory-journalism approach to LeBron James and the Miami Heat fiasco … and then I just went off, instead. […]

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We in Abu Dhabi, on the other side of the world, have been following the Saga of LeBron James. Riveting stuff, right? Where will the world’s greatest player never to have won a championship play next year? And does he have space left anywhere on his body (that isn’t his face) for a tattoo perhaps […]

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Of all the comments I have made since we arrived in Abu Dhabi nine months ago, perhaps the most laughably wrong went into this blog in November or early December. I suggested Abu Dhabi didn’t seem to have many insects. Ha. And double ha. I have spent months now fighting invasions of gnats, followed by […]

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Get outside your home country for a bit, and you realize that just about no one cares about the “national day” your compatriots back home are celebrating. Religious holidays cross borders. May Day crosses borders, especially in Europe. The Summer Solstice has some second-tier traction, here or there. National holidays … not nearly as much. […]

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In the run-up to the World Cup, I wrote — early and often — about the coaching disaster that was Diego Maradona. He somehow had Argentina in peril of not qualifying for the World Cup by dint of bizarre lineups, erratic behavior and bad results against some of South America’s lesser sides. I became convinced […]

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The Big Show shut down for two days, and it gave us a taste of what our summer will be like only 10 days hence. Ack. For three full weeks we could watch at least two World Cup matches every day. Twenty-one consecutive days. If we had a couple of TVs, we could watch two […]

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