No group can ever match the original Dream Team, right? That was the group that came to the Barcelona Games in 1992, the first time NBA players had been allowed in the Olympics. And they trashed people. Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley … I want to say John Stockton, Scotty Pippen, Patrick Ewing. Those guys. I […]

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Just filed a piece on Chaunte Howard for the Press Enterprise. She is a Riverside North alumnus and had a shot at a medal tonight in the high jump before going out at 6 feet, 7 inches and finishing sixth. That story is here. The day before, I did a couple of stories. One on […]

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I just wrote a piece for the L.A. Daily News about Allyson Felix winning her first Olympic gold, as part of the U.S. women’s 4×400 relay team. It seems as if Felix has been winning stuff for years, but she had never won Olympic gold until tonight. She had a pair of silvers in the […]

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I’m writing on my Dell laptop right now, and it again is powered by my Dell adapter. It required a long round-trip to the velodrome at Laoshan, on the western edge of Beijing. But it was there.

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I find many things linguistic interesting. And for what it’s worth, the rudimentary English spoken by thousands of Chinese volunteers here is … almost uniformly American-accented. That’s not the case for all of the world’s English-as-second-language speakers. A fair number have England-accented English. Particularly in France, and in England’s former colonies — including Hong Kong, […]

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I think everyone in the profession has variations of these. (Well, probably everyone has job-specific nightmares of this sort.) But this one is real. I lost my computer power cord/adapter.

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It’s interesting how the so-called extreme sports bleed back over into the Olympic movement. Thinking snowboarding, short-track speedskating, in the Winter. Triathlon, open-water swimming and, now, BMX, in Summer. BMX is short for “bicycle moto-cross” … the pedaling version of motorcycle motocross. Riding over rough terrain. Basically, we’ve got 16 men and 16 women out […]

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You oversleep by 20 minutes and still wake up jittery, from lack of sleep. I don’t think I’ve had five hours any of the last three nights. I’m too tired to sit and think about it. OK, I’ll try …

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Here are some quotes collected by the Olympic New Service from the members of the U.S. men’s prelim 4×100 team. The one that dropped the baton on the handoff from Darvis Patton to anchor man Tyson Gay. Rodney Martin and Travis Padgett ran the first two legs.

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It’s been an awful year for print journalism. Something like 8,000 journalists have lost their jobs this year, and it’s not even September yet. It’s a big number, but it’s hard to get your mind around. It reminds me of that Stalin quote, something about “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a […]

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