I have never liked the Manchester City club of the English Premier League.

This is not a lifelong thing. No, this is about events and behavior and performances observed during my great Premier League awakening, while working in Abu Dhabi at the start of this decade.

That is when I decided that for better or (mostly) worse, I was an Arsenal fan.

And when I decided the English team I most loathed was … Manchester City, a team bought by a sheikh who has spent extravagantly nonstop since his 2008 acquisition. Welding nouveau-riche behavior on Manchester’s “other” team and turning them into the Bullies of the Prem.

A club once described by Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson as the “noisy neighbors”,  City has gone far beyond noise-making status and has become one of the strongest clubs in the league for a decade, with two league championships (in 2012 and 2014) and a third only a few weeks away.

And, in the meantime, doing significant damage to the Premier League this year by overwhelming it.

As we saw again tonight, as City left defending champions Chelsea begging for mercy in the latter’s craven capitulation to the well-heeled champions in waiting.

[Read more →]

Actually, I suppose the overnight air flight never really disappeared. It just seemed to, for those of us who do the majority of our flying inside the United States.

(And it is called the red-eye because of how you look the morning after flying most of the night.)

After what seemed years since I had taken a domestic red-eye, I was updated on the reality of the situation at Los Angeles International this weekend.

You can fly right through the night to a myriad of destinations — many of them on the other side of the world.

[Read more →]

Take a look at this headline, from the Los Angeles Dodgers media release today. See what you think.

DODGERS TO CELEBRATE 2017 PENNANT-WINNING TEAM WITH NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP RING CEREMONY ON MARCH 31

My reaction?

[Read more →]

I knew this was coming. I read the stories in which the spineless commissioner Adam Silver said it was on the way … and shook my head.

And now it is here, and most of Season 1 of The New Thing is done … and I hate the advertisements that appear on the left shoulder of NBA players.

A league swimming in cash (average club value: $1.36 billion), in which exactly zero teams are losing money and the average player salary is just shy of $6 million … felt some weird, stupid urge to add ads to its teams’ jerseys.

Making the NBA the first to sell space on player jerseys in the country’s four big leagues.

At the moment, the ad is 2.5 square inches, so it is almost possible not to notice it is there.

But rest assured of this: Ads on jerseys never get smaller. They just get bigger and bolder and more obnoxious.

Want to know what NBA jerseys will look like in 10 years?

[Read more →]

We are in Southern California, where the weather has been a bit raw. It snowed a bit in the mountains. Yikes!

But nothing like it has been back in the south of France.

Where we live has been getting inches (inches!) of snow.

This does not happen there. Certainly not to the extent we have been hearing about from residents back in our French town.

And, really, we do not feel too badly about it. Even when seemingly every kid in the village has built a snowman.

[Read more →]

I suppose I have always believed that some people were sleepwalkers.

Enough sleepwalkers talked about it, certainly, and I seem to recall episodes where I witnessed a family member moving around the house without being awake. Perhaps even being able to answer a question without being awake.

But I had never gone sleepwalking myself — till the other night, when I took a short walk that led to everyone in the house being wakened.

[Read more →]

Here’s guessing that most American fans of the Winter Olympics watched pretty much anything that was put in front of them. Aside from curling.

What is curling, anyway?

Does it have lots of thrills and spills built in, like sledding or jumping or shooting? It is a high-aerobics sport where only the elite can survive, like speed skating or cross-country skiing? Is it a refined and delicate event like figure skating?

Well, no.

Curling is pretty much made of up of more than a few doughy people who do not look like Olympic athletes. Who happen to have an odd skill for sliding a rock over a frozen lane. Who typically receive very little attention unless they are about to win a medal.

Which is why most of us checked out on men’s curling in the first week of the Pyeongchang Games. John Shuster‘s American team was doing what it does, which is pretty much melt during the Olympics. “Nothing to see, move along.”

Until the plump former bartender from Minnesota who led the U.S. team caught fire, leading to what might be the greatest clutch shot in curling history — and to a gold medal.

[Read more →]

What a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles!

A great piece of piano music, arranged for orchestra by another classical-music great, played by modern virtuosos led by an inspired director in the finest venue in the western half of the United States.

It was so powerful it almost knocked me over. So grand, it nearly made me weep.

Modest Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition, arranged for orchestra by Maurice Ravel, directed by James Conlon and played by the well-regarded L.A. Philharmonic at the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concern Hall with all its acoustic brilliance.

“Pictures” made up about a third of the music played, but it was the star of the show, and when it was over an appreciative crowd of mostly older (OK, geriatric) folks stood and applauded louder than younger people might have thought possible, five minutes, at the least — or until the director pointed out every soloist in the orchestra.

First, some links.

[Read more →]

The Los Angeles Times has done a fun story on Farhan Zaidi, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ general manager, who apparently is a fantasy football whiz.

To the point that he has won the past three championships of the club’s fantasy league — which also perfectly reflects the length of time Zaidi has been in a league run by the club’s players, including Clayton Kershaw and Justin Turner.

The players are becoming agitated at Zaidi’s dominance, given that the Pakistani-Canadian executive has little or no background in American football.

They are trying to figure out how he keeps sweeping through the league and have changed at least one rule after Zaidi declined to draft a kicker or a defense — “as any self-respecting fantasy football owner would do, until rules dictate otherwise”, he said.

(Note to self: Hmm.)

Now Zaidi has to take at least one of each on draft night — and then immediately dumps them.

That is all well and good, the data guy blitzing the players.

But Dodgers fans certainly would prefer if Zaidi had seen to it that the baseball club was as brilliantly run in 2017 as his football club.

To wit:

[Read more →]

This is a topic addressed by the Ringer website, and millions of American families can relate to it.

Which family board game is the most harmful to domestic tranquility?

The Ringer comes up with a dozen or so suggestions, from The Game of Life to Risk to Parcheesi.

I have played several of the games reviewed by Ringer staff, but to me it is very easy to pick out the game most likely to lead to weeks of bad feelings — if not a board flying through the air before the game is actually finished.

And that game?

[Read more →]