A plaque at one of the places we have stayed during our vacation in California summed it up pretty well: “If you are lucky enough to live by the water … you are lucky enough.” Certainly, a large body of water generally tempers climatic extremes. But life can get even better. You can be more […]

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I wish I had known the inventor of the hammock because I would like to shake that gentleman’s hand. And I’m fairly sure it was a “him” and not a “her,” because women have never sat around much, at any time, in any society. Men, however, have been hanging around since the dawn of time, […]

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People who grew up mostly in one house each have their own version of this in their personal histories: The business strip/street/mall where they bought groceries, picked up a newspaper, saw a movie, shopped for clothes, filled the tank. For me, it was Second Street in Belmont Shore, and I spent the night back in […]

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  Second-to-last stop on our tour of California. From cozy Balboa Island to my hometown, Long Beach. And if this trip has been almost entirely about seeing how close we can get to the ocean, we have come to the right place. The windows of the condo we are renting afford a wide view out […]

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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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This must seem a bit over the top by now. Well, it does for me, too, and I have the benefit of knowing how it happened. Three visits to Paris in 13 months and change. To recap:

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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 […]

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Another rough year for the economy. The world economy, the national, the state … People losing jobs. Unemployment of, what, 12.5 percent in California? Something like 10 percent in the nation? Even higher, when you include people who have stopped looking for work and the scads of people not fully employed. U.S. print journalism is […]

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Hard to imagine an auto race could be the biggest global event in the history of Abu Dhabi, but there you are. For our first two weeks here, working at The National, there was really only one story (OK, aside from the plane crash in the emirate of Sharjah, up the coast), and it was […]

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I did a story this week on Danica Patrick, the perky little race driver. Her contract with Andretti Green, an Indy Racing League team, is up this year, and speculation is rife that she will jump to NASCAR, which is far more popular than the IRL … on the order of 10 to 50 times […]

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