The Glorious Farce of “Um Football” – A Global Tour of Hesitation, Bureaucracy, and the Beautiful Game’s Beautiful Confusion By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you type “um football” into a search engine anywhere outside North America, you will receive 1) a polite correction to “football,” 2) a flurry of American university athletics pages, or…
For most of the planet, “Florida” is no longer a geographic coordinate so much as a cautionary mood board. From Lagos to Lisbon, the word has achieved the rare feat of becoming both proper noun and punch-line, a shorthand for the moment when weather, politics, and human ambition combine like badly-mixed cocktails on an empty…
Boston College and Michigan State—two universities whose names conjure images of crisp autumn Saturdays, over-caffeinated freshmen, and the faint smell of burning tuition money—met again on the gridiron last weekend. From a distance, it looked like just another collegiate turf war: helmets clacking, alumni wallets snapping open, marching bands playing fight songs that sound suspiciously…
ITV’s “Win Win” and the Global Glitter of Manufactured Hope By “Lucky” Lachlan Grimble, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the collapse of the Turkish lira and the re-election of a man who sells $60 Bibles in the United States, ITV quietly rolled out “Win Win,” a game show that promises contestants a lifetime salary…
The World Watches as Two Southern American Colleges Duke It Out—And Pretends to Care Geneva, Switzerland – While the United Nations Security Council was busy debating the finer points of who gets to veto whom this week, an arguably more urgent geopolitical flashpoint erupted in the American Deep South: Louisiana-Monroe versus Alabama. Yes, the Warhawks…
UNC vs Charlotte: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World Already Burning By Our Correspondent in the All-Too-Cozy End Times Raleigh—If aliens ever bothered to tune in to earthling “sports,” they’d probably mistake last night’s North Carolina vs UNC-Charlotte tussle for a particularly well-choreographed food riot. Two bands of unpaid laborers—sorry, “student-athletes”—chasing an inflated sphere…
The United States Open—once a quaint tennis tournament where polite applause and strawberries-and-cream nostalgia collided—has metamorphosed into a hard-court casino where the house always wins and the chips are denominated in human cartilage. This year, the purse swelled to a record-smashing $65 million, a figure that, if converted to Sri Lankan rupees, could probably bail…
Nevada Football: The Desert’s Last Honest Rebellion Against Global Sanity By Ramón del Plata, International Correspondent at Large Las Vegas—If you stand on the cracked tarmac of Allegiant Stadium long enough, the jet-wash from the next London-bound 787 will sandblast your notebook into origami. That’s fitting: Nevada football is essentially the same exercise—folding something stubbornly…
Mexico: The World’s Favorite Punchline That Keeps Punching Back By Dave’s Foreign-Desk Misanthrope-in-Residence Mexico wakes up every morning to the sound of three alarm clocks: one made in China, one programmed by Wall Street, and one fashioned from the recycled brass of deported dreams. Each ring reminds the country that its sovereignty is a participatory…
Minsk, Belarus – The only European capital where arriving diplomats still keep their luggage on the seat beside them, just in case the plane has to turn around mid-tarmac. That small, paranoid courtesy tells you everything about how Belarus—population smaller than greater Los Angeles, GDP smaller than Delaware’s rainy-day fund—manages to punch so far above…
Immigration Appeals Court: Where Hope Goes to Get a Number and Wait in Line Forever By the Global Affairs Correspondent who has watched passports change hands more often than a €500 note in a Bulgarian nightclub. Walk into any immigration appeals court on the planet and you’ll find the same décor: fluorescent lighting that flatters…
Wimbledon 2025: A Green-and-Purple Refuge While the World Burns By our man in the press box with a Pimm’s and a grimace London, June 2025 – The All England Club has once again rolled out its immaculately striped lawn like a giant picnic blanket for the planet’s remaining optimists. Outside the gates, Britain’s fourth government…
