The initial weekend of the NCAA Tournament laid further waste to my bracket. As of the Sweet Sixteen, only ten of the spots are occupied by winners I picked. The East Regional was the worst, where I picked only one of the four winners. I’m sure I have a lot of company here, though, since …
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My perfect bracket is already history with Day 1 not even half over—#12 Princeton lost to #5 Notre Dame, though the tightness of the game suggests the reasonableness of the pick. Oh, well. Maybe there’s a consolation prize out there for me. Also saw that my alma mater, UC Davis, won their play-in game to …
Monday Night: 3/13/17 – Most of the interest in NCAA basketball, I suspect, comes from the gambling opportunity offered by the March Madness Tournament. It also doubles as a free lottery ticket if you take one of the many free online bracket challenges, in this case Yahoo Sports. Only a few days remain before the …
Last Friday evening, my wife held a ladies’ bunco party at my house. Needing to make myself scarce, I paid a return visit to the Kings in Sacramento to see them play the Washington Wizards, who have been a rising team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference as recently described in The Ringer: https://theringer.com/nba-washington-wizards-scott-brooks-john-wall-bradley-beal-33e6a60ed931#.4j9ntquc1 The Wizards …
Last Sunday I visited the new arena for the Sacramento Kings, the Golden One Center, and what I found made every other NBA venue look like a D League gym. On the outside, the building resembled with its aluminum skin an alien spaceship that happened to land downtown—the roof has enough solar panels to render …
Those of you who have heard about the problems at Oroville Dam in northern California may wonder if I am among the 180,000 people that have had to be evacuated. Fortunately, I live about 50 miles north of the affected area, so I have been able to stay put. It was reported that the Tehama …
In the wake of the New England Patriots’ recent come-from-behind victory over the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI, many commentators have seen the game correctly as a final exclamation point for the legacies of quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichick, and the current New England Patriots sports dynasty: seven championships, two additional Super Bowl …
Last Sunday, writers and activists gathered at Writers Resist, an event held in over 100 venues in cities across the nation to commiserate and find ways to respond to the unthinkable turn of events from last November 8. In Portland, about 600 people came to the Aladdin Theater to see Cheryl Strayed and other local …
Dexter Filkins, the primary Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker, has written a genuinely terrifying story about the Mosul Dam in Iraq. The terrifying part is not that the dam was temporarily occupied by ISIS, but that it sits on a foundation of soluble rock and requires a constant flow of concrete to be …
This may seem naïve, but I was actually a little surprised to hear that Chip Kelly was fired as coach of the San Francisco 49ers after their 2-14 season. No one realistically could have expected Kelly to win with the worst roster in the league, and hopefully he will get some benefit of the doubt …
I thought I had heard everything in sports, but now we have the New York Yankees accusing the Boston Red Sox, with their recent trade for Chris Sale, of being the Golden State Warriors. Who would have ever thought that the original Evil Empire would be looking up at the Dubs? http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/18223011/new-york-yankees-gm-compares-red-sox-warriors This quote by …
Sports books don’t come anywhere close to romance novels in their share of the publishing market, but there are still enough of them out there to present a bewildering array of choices for someone looking to purchase a gift for that special someone who likes to consume sports on the page as well as on …
The photos of Mt. Shasta were taken in the morning of Friday, November 11 on my way from California to Portland. Those of Multnomah Falls and the Columbia Gorge were taken on Saturday, November 12.
A new and imaginative microbrewery, the Labrewatory on NE Russell Street, has arrived on the scene in Portland. The owners, Chris Sears, Patrick Walsh, and Joe Watzig, invite larger brewers in the area to use their four-barrel system to experiment with recipes that would be more expensive to attempt on their larger-scale equipment. The Labrewatory …
At a time when diversions from real life seem more welcome than usual, it is a pleasure to announce the start of the NBA season and the return of the Portland Trail Blazers to the Moda Center. Last Friday, the Blazers took on the Sacramento Kings in a tight, high-scoring contest that went into overtime …
No, the title is not a misprint. In fact, this post is mostly an excuse to write that line, which has been so long in coming. One person with extra motivation to be happy today is Aroldis Chapman, who escaped by the narrowest of margins the fate of becoming the latest victim of the Billy …
Tickets to the World Series at Wrigley are starting at nearly $2,000 just to get into the park. If you want a place to sit down, start talking at $2,500: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2016/10/23/chicago-cubs-win-sets-stage-for-most-expensive-world-series-tickets-in-baseball-history/#3f872de55eab For many, the price is worth it. You can hear from some of them here: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Want-to-see-World-Series-at-Wrigley-It-will-cost-10174338.php If the Cubs win, we may never see …
Who would have thought that Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw would show up to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series without his curveball? It didn’t take long for the Chicago Cubs to figure out that he couldn’t throw it for strikes, and they wasted little time in taking advantage, running up a …
The ninth inning of last night’s Game 4 of the recently concluded series between the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs was as brutal a finish to a game as I’ve ever witnessed. Five Giant relief pitchers combined to cough up four runs and render what had been a 5-2 lead into a 6-5 …
It’s a good thing I don’t make my living as a prophet. I expected last night’s Giants/Mets game to go something like this: Madison Bumgarner would give up a run or two early, as he often does when settling into a game, and that would have been the difference as Noah Syndergaard pitched another shutout. …
The San Francisco Giants, as they did in 2014, managed to slip into the very last available postseason spot and earn themselves a road trip for a do-or-die playoff. With five wins out of their last six games, they are looking better of late than for most of the season since the All-Star Break. Even …
Vin Scully, who spent 67 years as the voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, announced his last game yesterday at AT&T Park. I’m not sure what is more astounding about his career: that he set an unbreakable record for longevity or that he did so with undiminished sharpness at 88 years old. His …
On Sunday, we got a definitive evaluation of Chip Kelly’s San Francisco 49ers, and the news wasn’t good. Their loss to the Seahawks in Seattle wasn’t nearly as close as the final 37-18 score, since the Niners scored their two touchdowns in what was essentially garbage time in the fourth quarter. The Seahawks, who had …
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. –Dylan Thomas The San Francisco Giants’ even-year championship dynasty is coming to an end. It may seem premature to write their epitaph with two weeks left in the season, …
For those who may have missed it, the San Francisco 49ers beat the Los Angeles Rams 28-0 last Monday night. This was good news for their new coach, Chip Kelly, but the general media consensus suggests that the score reflected the putridness of the Rams more than a Niners resurgence. This article on Bill Simmons’s …
Last Sunday, I paid a visit to the new statue at AT&T Park: Gaylord Perry, who spent the first decade of his career in a San Francisco uniform alongside Juan Marichal as a mainstay of the Giants pitching staff during the 1960s. Perry’s most famous pitch was a spitball, which he discussed at length in …
In light of the recent stories about Roger Ailes and what appears to be the locker-room culture at Fox News, this would be an appropriate musical theme for their broadcasts: Fountains of Wayne’s, “Traffic and Weather”. “We belong together, like traffic and weather . . . “
Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir, Wild, became a successful movie with Reese Witherspoon, is a good storyteller whose online talks and Q&As never contain a dull moment. It was during one of my searches for her talks that I learned that she had resurrected her advice column, Dear Sugar, as a WBUR podcast with Steve Almond, …
Oregon’s Willamette Valley has some of the best wine country on Earth, especially if you’re into the Pinot Noir variety that Rex Pickett made famous with his novels Sideways and Vertical, the latter of which is set in Oregon. For those who live in Portland or are just visiting, most of the wineries are within …
This news may only be important to the truly NBA-obsessive, but for those who haven’t heard, Kevin Durant has left the Oklahoma City Thunder to join the Golden State Warriors. From Durant’s standpoint, the reasons are obvious. He believes that he has gone as far as he could with the Thunder and sees the Warriors …