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 […]

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Interesting story in The National this week. About how people living here in the UAE might be prone to suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) just like those living in regions where the sun rarely shines. Here is a link to the story. If you didn’t follow the link, you must be wondering how we […]

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Two events conspired so that I could see most of Super Bowl XLV live. I checked late Saturday night to see what stations were showing the game locally, and “ESPN” was one of them. Turns out, yes, it was the ESPN we now get in the apartment since we got a minimal TV package last […]

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Not enough of us hit the “reset” buttons on our lives. Or we wait too long. Suzie Ahn, a former colleague of mine in the good old days of the San Bernardino Sun sports department, hit the button, and she didn’t wait too long. Suzie did what some of us talk about doing, but never […]

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I saw the story on espn.com … taken from wire services … from the hefty Sports Illustrated piece in which a former football agent talks about making cash payments to college players during the 1990s. I should have thought of R.Jay Soward immediately. Instead, it was more of an “well, of course” moment, when I […]

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A former journalism colleague of mine, Michelle, certainly is not a lifelong Padres fan. She was born in Michigan but grew up in Florida, went to school there and worked at Florida newspapers for most of her life. She went to the University of Florida, as did one David Eckstein. When Michelle first got to […]

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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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We interrupt our Abu Dhabi travelogue to strap into the Wayback Machine and check in on Don Markham. For those of you looking for United Arab Emirates material, come back tomorrow. For generic observations about Southern California, same deal. Or maybe the day after. Today, for one day only, we go back to the Inland […]

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Sometimes it seems a lifetime ago, but there was a long stretch of time when a big chunk of my brain was devoted to a big but fairly specific topic: High school football in San Bernardino County. There was nothing bigger, in that part of the sports world. Everything else was somewhere down the line. […]

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One of our favorite former journalism co-workers, Jim Long, died in September at age 46. Far too young for far too good a guy. Here is the obit that we did here in September, but most of you have seen it. The news here is that his widow, Judith Pfeffer, has created a blog dedicated […]

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