Mini rant. I hate euphemisms for death/died. I particularly dislike it when newspapers attempt to evade using the D words.

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A particular vanity of the young is a notion that humanity has never been more attractive than it is, among the young … right this minute. Stands to reason, right? All one needs do is look at photos of Hollywood vamps from the 1920s, from winners of the Miss America contest circa 1950, at leading […]

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I had CNN International running on the one and only TV in the building’s exercise room, where I was alone, feebly exercising. It was a Saturday, because CNN, the U.S.-based news network, which uses a London office for its Europe/Middle East/Africa outlets, was running its “BackStory” feature, which appears on weekends and recaps what CNN […]

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“I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.” That is what I said when I was informed Harold Ramis died today. To me, it was perhaps the best of the dozens of funny lines from the 1984 move Ghostbusters. And it was spoken with perfect, deadpan clarity by the Ramis character, the stiff parapsychologist Egon […]

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With fairly regular access to the Sochi Games, on TV in the office, here in Abu Dhabi, or on the NBC website, at home … I find myself watching more than a little of this silliness. And watching it reminds me of the six Winter Olympics I covered, as a credentialed reporter. When you have […]

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When I was a child, Lincoln’s birthday was a legal holiday in the state of California, and it always made perfect sense to me. Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, the man who led the country through the Civil War, which ended slavery. One of only two guys in competition for “greatest U.S. […]

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Tell the truth, Baby Boomers. The first 40 years of your life you never once thought about living in the year 2014.

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When I was young, which of course is a long time ago, no television program would take to the airwaves without a theme song. At the least, some sort of music. (The whimsical theme for the Dick Van Dyke Show enters my head, with Van Dyke, a champion prat-faller in his prime, neatly eluding an […]

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Syria is a bloody mess. An evil regime, rebels who may now be more terrorists than reformists (let alone democrats), millions of refugees and more than 100,000 people dead, and some of them victims of chemical weapons. Here, in the Middle East, the U.S. is often reviled for what it does. Now it is being […]

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OK, so we have a royal baby. Who still doesn’t have a name more than 24 hours after being born. That would be (name here), Prince of Cambridge. So, what should this kid’s name be? Let’s think this through.

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