Seattle Seahawks 41, New Orleans Saints 36. Like anyone else who didn’t see the game live (or doesn’t live in Seattle), there was a shock factor when I saw that score. But once the jolt of “what the …?” subsided, my next thought was one word: “Pete!”

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Landon Donovan is the 2010 U.S. National Team Player of the Year. At least according to the Futbol de Primera organization, which annually canvasses 200-plus journalists, including me, who vote for their top three players on the national team during the previous year. So of course Landon won it. He deserved it. Those two goals […]

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North America is the only major continent that doesn’t have a really fun continental soccer championship. Probably because the U.S. and Mexico dominate things so thoroughly … well, of course that’s it. Where’s the fun in that? Mexico or the U.S. have won nine of the last 10 championships, with Canada slipping in there in […]

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Actually, I have a batch of resolutions for the new year, but I’m going to mention only the one I might have a chance of achieving: Reading one book per week in 2011. Fifty-two books by the end of the year. Already have one down, and I’m only three days into the year.

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Going to try something here I’ve never done before — slap in a gmail “chat” I had with a fan of the Seattle Seahawks late tonight, his time. Seattle defeated the St. Louis Rams 16-6 to win the NFC West with a 7-9 record. It is the first time in NFL history in a non-strike […]

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I said the other day I miss watching college football bowl games. And I do. But some weird stuff, some disturbing stuff, is going on over there. Changes I was not completely up to speed on because the disconnect between U.S. college football and the Middle East is just about total. To wit:

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A surge of social activity marked the end of the year. Yeah. What got into me? On Thursday night, we went to one of the 2-3 really nice French restaurants in the city, named Bord Eau, located in a big (too big, really) room in the Shangri La Hotel, and then we welcomed (as opposed […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists? Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists […]

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(With fixed link!) When you work at a newspaper, you don’t need to hear what your readers say. I mean, it could be healthy and informative, but most of the time all of us know what we did or didn’t do that made the newspaper not as good as it could have been. We know […]

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I know the world is clamoring for this. Pictures of the living area of where we now live, in Abu Dhabi, with the new Ikea couch/chair/ottoman in the place. Find that Facebook link … here.

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