I have written numerous times before about my somewhat abortive quest to visit all 50 states. I honestly thought I had a chance to make it. I have actually lived in 10 different states and during my years as a sportswriter I covered events in states I might never have seen otherwise. States like South …
When my friends Mick and Chuck and I started playing golf in the mid ’90s, we played on a second-rate public course in Los Angeles County. As a threesome in those days, we were often asked to add a single to complete a foursome. Some of them were nice guys, others weren’t. It was all …
The 1890 census was a fascinating one in showing a transitory period for the United States. It was the first one in which more than one city had a population of more than a million people. New York City had topped 1 million in the 1880 census, and Chicago and Philadelphia joined it in 1890. …
For the first 16-plus years of my career as a journalist, I covered sports. Starting with high school football games in Northern Virginia in 1979 and finishing with a CIF high school football championship game in Thousand Oaks, California, in 1995, I covered just about every major sport at every level. I covered a Super …
Divine Right of Kings, in European history, a political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. That definition out of the Encyclopedia Brittanica refers to a belief going back hundreds and hundreds …
My wife Nicole is the smartest person I know. She would be high on the list just because of the fact she is fluent in two languages, although our daughter Pauline outranks both of us in that area. She speaks three, maybe four languages and at one time or another has been pretty good at …
“I couldn’t have raped her. She’s not my type.” That quote is actually a slight paraphrase of what ex-President Scumbag, er, Trump said about why he is innocent of raping writer writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Trump gave several other reasons, including that it was a crowded department …
“If the white race is ever threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.” Did people ever actually talk like this? When was this, 200 years ago? …
The most recent television series that I loved watching from beginning to end was “Madam Secretary.” For five and a half good seasons, Tea Leoni played a dedicated public servant, first as Secretary of State and then as President. Week after week from 2014-2019, America got a look at the inner workings of the Foreign …
I don’t know why I let lists of the greatest this or that other people make up bother me so much. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinions, and the one thing that seems to bother me the most is that so many of them seem to believe the world started the day they were born. …
