I was a history major in college before I opened the door to the offices of the student newspaper, in my fourth year of school, and that was that.
Had I not gone into journalism (and it is hard to imagine I wasn’t going to end up there), I would have tried to make history a […]

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I have written tennis. I covered the entirety of Wimbledon in 1985 and 1986. The first year, some German kid named Boris Becker won. The second year, he won again.
Tennis is fairly far down the list of sports I know best … and sports I like. But when the staffing situation at the paper is […]

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The guy who laid me off 3.5 years ago had his own moment with the sharp end of the “consolidation” side of print journalism last week. That is to say, he’s out of newspapers and apparently is unemployed.
Here is the typically code-riddled e-mail to the people who worked for him:

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It’s a planet with 7 billion people on it whose agenda is “it’s all about me.” Or, OK, maybe 6.9 billion people living with that myopic world view (many of whom would like to deny it), and maybe 100 million people who are saints or grandmothers or both.
So, it was with profound self-focus that the […]

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T-Day in the UAE, our second.
I can sum this up quickly: It didn’t really happen.
Both of us worked on Thursday. Same as last year. Same as the year before, in Hong Kong. (Three consecutive Novembers outside the U.S.)

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That’s what I’m calling it. A slump. Just a string of unfortunate results. Accidents, even.
I don’t actually look like that.
A little down period on the mugshot front. It began the other day. 2005, I think it was.

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No matter how the midterm elections go, back in the U.S. today, we can’t complain about the outcome.
We did not vote.
We have explanations … but not excuses.

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Today marks the one-year anniversary of the day in 2009, October 15, a Thursday, when we got on a plane to leave the United States.
We have not been back since.

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Rather a lost day. Well, apart from the scenery, which was rolling and green and a constant pleasure to scan. But if the idea was to find a place in Languedoc we could invest in … Have to concede we really didn’t make any progress.
I suppose those things happen, when house-hunting. I’ve heard people in […]

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I was thinking about the Beijing Olympics, and realized that the U.S. men’s basketball team had zero Clippers on it. But then, neither did the Vancouver Olympics. Have any Clippers on the U.S. team.
Though clipper ships presumably sailed to Vancouver, but not Beijing, it being too far from the ocean. Hong Kong? Sure. But not […]

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