Got to get this in before tipoff, which is about a half-hour away. Can we get a shout-out for the Butler Bulldogs? Doesn’t every right-thinking American have to be pulling for Butler? A mid-major in the NCAA basketball Final Four? OK, right-thinking Americans who live in East Lansing, Durham and Morgantown are exempt. But everyone […]

[Read more →]

This was cheesy. A sellout wrapped in a semi-clever package. But still a sellout. Yesterday, April 1 … the espn.com home page seemed to have a new feature. Streaming across the upper half of the home page was a ticker sort of concept. Moving news, right to left. Like the cable news stations use across […]

[Read more →]

Maundy Thursday. I had forgotten from where the word “Maundy” came. According to the minister at the local Anglican church, it comes from the Latin for “command” — mandatum. Which got anglicized into “maundy”… which should come as no surprise to those who know what the English have done with other foreign words they encountered. […]

[Read more →]

I will tell this anecdote again. I have used it on this blog at least once. Maybe twice. Thrice. It was the 2006 Olympics. At Torino. A gloomy, gray, soggy city trying to jumpstart its future after the Fiat plant closed up and left town. Actually, the media center was inside the old assembly line. […]

[Read more →]

This story is almost beyond comprehension, for those of us of a certain age.  Anyone, that is, old enough to remember the Evil Empire that was the Soviet Union. Now, not even 20 years after the Soviet Union fell, to the delight of the free world, a former agent of one of its more feared […]

[Read more →]

Ah, yes, the NCAA tournament bracket. I went with the “highest seed in every round” system … in the year that two No. 5 seeds and a No. 2 got to the Final Four. Nice timing. So, no, I will not be finishing atop the Abu Dhabi Ballers (sponsored by Tandoori Corner) standings. But I’m […]

[Read more →]

It kills me to look at the trash can here in the Teeny Apartment. On Earth Hour day. I see a section of my newspaper that I just finished reading. It is jammed in a spot right next to the plastic bottle that held a half-liter of grapefruit just. And just below it is the […]

[Read more →]

Remember when India conjured images in the western world of hundreds of millions of people starving in the streets? That concept is getting a little threadbare. And now we have more evidence of it: A group of Indian investors just paid $333 million for an expansion franchise in the Indian Premier League. That is, India’s […]

[Read more →]

One of the vanities of expatriates in the Electronic Age … is that we’re sure we know what’s going on back home. At least in the subjects we care about. Hey, we have wifi in the apartment! We know what’s going on! Sometimes, that isn’t quite true. Take, for example, Major League Baseball.

[Read more →]

This is a great thing about Abu Dhabi … at the same time that it’s a bit disturbing. A rule of thumb for expenses here: If it involves commodities, it will cost about the same as in First World countries. If it involves people … it will be cheaper. Often far cheaper. What does that […]

[Read more →]