A search of this blog would seem to indicate I never have broached my appearance on the game show Jeopardy! In 1988. Just the other day, but still fairly fresh in my mind. I can still reconstruct where things went wrong. I had not thought of it for a while, maybe even a year, but […]

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Leonard Nimoy died yesterday. He was 83. He was an actor best known for a three-year role as the half-Vulcan/half-human Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame. His was just one character of a television series that lasted only three seasons, from September 8, 1966, through June 3, 1969, before coming back to life as a […]

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The things you learn by living in a place. Eventually. Until today, I had not noticed that “praying for rain” is a Muslim thing. But why wouldn’t it be?

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I drove a go-kart once. When I was 10. On the usually empty road that ran in front of my cousins’ house in farm country near Hanford. I remember two things: How close I was to the ground and how fun it was to drive a real motor vehicle, and not just some putt-putt machine […]

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Like most of you, I have a mental filter than enables me to ignore most advertising pitches. TV, radio, online. Whatever. I don’t notice them. To penetrate the filter the commercial spot needs to be funny or loud or clever … or, in this case, beautiful.

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In a corner of my mind, that semi-hopeful, semi-bitter cry was particularly associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Who for a long time were bad, and then for most of a decade were quite good but couldn’t get that elusive first World Series championship. “Next year” finally came in 1955, when the Dodgers beat the Yankees […]

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The National’s correspondent in Erbil, Hugh Naylor, recently did a piece about Arab refugees and Kurdish forces trying to figure out how they can recapture the city of Mosul, sometimes described as the second-biggest in Iraq, with a population perhaps as high as 1.8 million … from the Islamic State fighters who overran it in […]

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When my children were in the 15-20 age range, I more than once told them something along these lines: “Don’t be part of that 1 percent.” That was the shorthand I used for teenagers who die, well, stupidly. By making bad choices. Driving too fast, driving drunk, riding with someone driving drunk, being in bad […]

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Ever tested your memory … because you could? Some odd collection of something, to see what you recall? Like the starting defense of the 1979 Los Angeles Rams? Not looking it up: Jack Youngblood and Fred Dryer, ends; Larry Brooks and Mike Fanning (?) at tackle; Jack Reynolds, Bob Brudzinski and Jim Youngblood at linebacker; […]

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What a bunch of geezers. Talk about the ancien regime. These days, the last thing I expect at an action-hero movie is a bunch of guys on screen who make me feel young. But that is what I got watching The Expendables 3, the third installment of Sylvester Stallone’s latest franchise, at a Gaumont theater […]

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