I fell off the wagon, a few nights ago. For months, years, my entire computer-gaming indulgence consisted of some laptop solitaire (which, no, is not to be confused with onanism), and solitaire isn’t exactly habit-forming. Generally. Then the devil snuck into my brain and whispered, “Minesweeper!” Who else could it have been, except for Satan? […]

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I remember attempting, in my early 40s, to run a mile in eight minutes. Which doesn’t sound special until you actually try to do it … without a runner’s bodytype or lifestyle, diet or ability to withstand pain. My younger daughter was at soccer practice nearby, and for 10 or 11 weeks that fall I […]

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Dallas eliminated the Anaheim Ducks from the NHL playoffs tonight, which is vaguely newsworthy because the Ducks were the defending champion. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have noticed at all. We barely did, anyway. The NHL is as irrelevant to Southern California as snow tires. We’re just not all that interested. And don’t have to be. It […]

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I’m back to living in Long Beach. It’s where I grew up and lived for 22 years, until getting a job in San Bernardino. I survived the culture and climate shock of the move to Berdoo (People buy groceries while wearing slippers? It’s 100 degrees for four consecutive months?!?) and lived in the Inland Empire […]

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Read today’s press release, below. One funny thing about this … when the release shifts to “about Roski” … and the first item mentioned is that he was named “one of the 10 most intriguing sports figures” by the L.A. Daily News … I was the one who wrote that, for L.A. News Group, last […]

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Have to give the guy credit for a vivid imagination.Ed Roski, the force behind the attempt to build an NFL-worthy stadium on a Carson landfill, a few years back (that point in time when the NFL blew off L.A. and awarded an expansion franchise to Houston), is still at it. He held a press conference […]

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Yes, absolutely, it’s a gaffe for the ages. Dean Singleton asking Barack Obama about the threat posed by “Obama” bin Laden. Read about it here; … or see it here. That’s a whopper, you bet, from your MediaNews CEO. But the real news out of the E&P story (the first link, above)? What really caught […]

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I wish I had thought of this first, because the more I think about it the more I’m convinced the author has the right idea: The “modern” Olympic games should be ended. This op-ed piece, by Buzz Bissinger, appeared in the New York Times on Sunday. He makes a compelling case that the Olympics we […]

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A designer for the San Jose Mercury News, one of the struggling newspapers in Dean Singleton’s Northern California pod … has put together a moving photo gallery of images from the Merc newsroom. Martin Gee’s photos are mostly about what is NOT there … which makes them haunting. Well, sad, too. To go to the […]

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I’ve decided to do a series of mini-bios on people with whom I worked during my 31-plus years at the San Bernardino Sun. Me and that newspaper … it’s about the past, not the present or future, and we had some fun (or at least memorable) times, and I worked with some interesting, even bizarre […]

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