I don’t know Mat Latos. Pretty sure I’ve never been in the same room with him. Maybe not even in the same stadium, since he got to the bigs just as I was leaving California.
But he seems to be the sort of guy who gets under the skin of people around him, and Dodgers fans would like to think the club looked into that before (apparently) trading for him today.
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Gasoline price hikes always come as something of a shock in the Gulf, where many countries are pretty much floating on oil and consumers expect to pay very little at the pump.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading producer of oil and gas prices there have always been cheap — about 59 cents a gallon, according to the globalpetrolprices.com site. It is 79 cents a gallon in Kuwait, $1.01 in Qatar.
At the moment, UAE prices are $1.77 a gallon, which some consumers here already thought was high.
Prices are going higher, the energy minister said today, up 44 cents a gallon to $2.21 a gallon on August 1 — a 24.9 percent increase.
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It isn’t clear how long it will take cycling to escape the long shadow cast by Lance Armstrong‘s six doping-tainted Tour de France victories.
It hasn’t happened yet, as Chris Froome found out while winning the 2015 Tour yesterday.
He was a little too convincing as the winner of a tough mountain stage on Bastille Day, July 14, when he seized control of the race, and that was all it took for the questions to begin, with the clear subtext that Froome must be cheating, too.
Over the final 12 days of the race, Froome was spat at by fans, and one of them apparently tossed a bag of urine on the Englishman.
Clearly, riders should not be assaulted by fans, but it is hard to condemn those who limit their suspicions to tough questions about a rider’s superiority. If we have learned anything about cycling over the past 20 years, we know that “suspicion” is a good default setting when evaluating any great performance in the demanding sport.
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I much prefer people from some professions to be older than I am. Presidents. Ministers. Doctors.
The ones I deal with, anyway.
I have always assumed that someone is certainly going to be wiser than me if he or she is older. I don’t think that’s an unusual preference; as you get older I believe you become more aware of the Things You Don’t Know and Never Will — and you like extra years in key professions.
This is becoming increasingly difficult, of course, as I move up the actuarial table. Some large percentage of my elders are retired. The current president is the first to be younger than me, and I don’t like it. And it’s been a while now since a doctor was older than I am.
Until my recent — and wonderful — visit to one in Long Beach.
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What I wrote then?
Jurgen Klinsmann needs to be fired as soon as possible if the U.S. national soccer team is going to make any real improvement ahead of the 2018 World Cup.
The latest?
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For most of my life, airline food was mocked and derided.
“Cold” … “rubbery” … “tasteless” … “inedible”.
We ate airline food because it came with the ride. It was distributed, free. No, really.
(And I realize some Millennials have never seen anything more tasty than peanuts given away/sold. Or, worse, a bag of mini-pretzels.)
For years, the airlines provided meals as a form of crowd control. During meal-delivery, which generally clogged the aisle(s) for an hour, we all stayed in our seats, waiting for our freebies. Which usually came to us in three segments: 1) drinks cart; 2) food plate; 3) followup drinks cart or coffee/tea.
It also helped pass the time. And, 40-50 years ago, led to jokes about how bad airplane food was, mostly because it had to be reheated at altitude. Then came price-conscious cost cuts, and the disappearance of meals on most short flights.
Perceptions of airline food haven’t changed much, but the result has. Airline meals are no longer an issue of “how desperate for food are you?”
Meals are provided with less frequency, but my sense is, that when they are provided, they are better than they have ever been.
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Watching the match, or hearing the score, is enough to make a U.S. soccer fan wince.
Jamaica 2, United States 1. In the semifinals of the Gold Cup. Played on American soil.
But consider it Step 1 of what cannot help but be an unpleasant stretch for the U.S. national team — if things are to improve later on.
The team has to fail, and more than once, for Sunil Gulati to summon the courage to get rid of coach Jurgen Klinsmann, the German who is so openly and destructively contemptuous of American players and the American game.
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When we left the country for Abu Dhabi, in 2009, the whole of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ season could be seen on TV by consumers who had even lower-end cable packages.
This month, we came home during ball season … and I was able, for the first time, to experience the ridiculous situation — now in its second year — that leaves the Dodgers unwatchable on most cable TV packages.
I have marveled over this during our stay, and it struck me again tonight — as I was watching the Angels.
Most all of you living in SoCal already know what is going on, but to recap:
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Most major movies made in Hollywood make their way to the UAE, sometimes opening on the same day as they do in the U.S.
But certain movies …
Well, you can’t really plan on seeing them in Abu Dhabi. Which is why we spent two of the past three evenings in Southern California theaters.
The sort of thing you will want to see stateside?
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Turned on the delayed final round of the British Open in time today to see the part that really mattered — the three-man, four-hole playoff, which ended in Zach Johnson‘s tears of joy and relief after winning the oldest trophy in the game.
It was a reminder of how psychologically demanding the game of golf is.
What can be more demanding of the psyche than keeping your emotions under control, and your nerve, to perform with physical precision for something like five hours — with the oldest trophy in golf at stake?
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