“The end justifies the means.” It’s difficult to identify the real origin of this quote. Many people credit it to Niccolo Machiavelli, but he actually only said similar things, and the famous five-word quote was around long before the renaissance. It’s something you could imagine Donald Trump saying, although he would only see it as …
Any minute now, I’m expecting Donald Trump to say we didn’t have all these mass shootings when he was president. It couldn’t be any dumber than what the congressman representing the site of the latest shooting said in response to people on social media attacking the usual platitudes about thoughts and prayers coming from Republicans. …
November 25th, 1967. September 12th, 1992. February 12th, 1980. September 29th, 1973. I have a really strange memory. Half the time when I leave the house to do an errand, I forget something I meant to take with me. But if I hear a song from the ’60s or the first half of the ’70s, …
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with George Will when it comes to baseball. He and I were born at opposite ends of the same decade and have lived on opposite sides of the political spectrum. He’s conservative, although thankfully not of the MAGA tribe. We don’t agree on much politically, but I take …
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 …
