I was sitting in a Long Beach apartment when the Iraq war began 10 years ago this week.

I spent the previous night sleeping in my truck in a grocery store parking lot. I was eating carne asada and drinking a bottle of beer with three friends when it...

My mom recently described my wife as the “most happy pregnant girl she’d ever met.”

And she was right. For seven months, Bianca owned her pregnancy like the gift from God that it was. We went camping almost every weekend during the months of June and July (her 6th and 7th months...

Let's start this off with a tidbit from of Urban Dictionary as it relates to the expression "YOLO."

YOLO: Acronym for You Only Live Once. Mainly used to defend doing something ranging from mild to extreme stupidity.

YOLO, as defined above, reached popularity with the Drake and Lil Wayne song...

Quite honestly, if any other Republican presidential candidate were to have stopped by the UC Davis quad to give a campaign speech last week, there's little doubt in my mind that it would have been overshadowed by some form of protest.

We're talking about the same quad...

My good friend Tanner -- who was an A's fan while we were in college from 2001-2005 -- posted the following on my Fantasy Baseball league's message board shortly before our draft this week. The gist is that he's an A's fan who is prepared to sidestep to the Giants during...

I usually prefer to actually read something before I decide if I want to share it with my friends. The Washington Post Social Reader removes the ability to make that choice, and that's why it's a bad thing.

It's like me saying, "Hey, I saw a flier for a band...

I enjoyed Sunday night's halftime show more than others from recent years. That's coming from a guy who has paid money for albums by The Who and Paul McCartney, and attended concerts by the Rolling Stones and Tom Petty.

Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction was a...

The difference between ESPN and Deadspin was put nicely on display during coverage of the now-famous LSU-Alabama teabagging video that went viral after the BCS championship game.

ESPN didn't use the word teabagging one time in their coverage; not even in quotes. They (along with the...

About a year ago, I watched Boise State kicker Kyle Brotzman botch two very makable field goals in a game that would have sent his team to the National Championship game.

I felt horrible for that kid.

I felt that way again this week, while enjoying...

Nothing shakes up a routine like a shot of pepper spray to the face. At least that's been the case for me as a reporter in Davis.

I'm the editor of Davis Patch, and although I was not on the receiving end of Lt. Pike's now-famous

I found myself liking Stephen A. Smith the other day. It was a first for me.

I realized quickly though that it was just because he was sharing the camera with Skip Bayless, who might as well have been barfing onto the debate desk of ESPN's First...

John McCrea of the band Cake writes songs about small things that would otherwise seem borderline meaningless.

He doesn't need to fall in and out of love to write a song about a girl. He just needs to hone in on a short skirt and...

I wrote a blog post a few months ago in which I referred to the band Old Crow Medicine Show as "everything you could ever want in a bluegrass band." One HuffPost user immediately held me accountable:

cjmccardle: "To call OCMS music Bluegrass is totally...

By the time I picked up my copy of the San Francisco Chronicle the morning after Osama bin Laden's death, I had already consumed every piece of national news within its pages.

It may be sad, but it's the first paper I bought all year. I can count on...

I was scanning the San Francisco skyline through a chain-link fence and swigging wine from a plastic cup when I realized I was at one of the cooler shows I'd ever been to.

By this point, Old Crow Medicine Show and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic...

A Masters degree in journalism is not cheap. Couple that with the fact that the industry is low-paying, very crowded, and rapidly changing, and what you have is a pretty complex career path.

A friend of mine recently graduated from UC Berkeley's journalism school and is thinking...

This is a story about a time I traded a $3 burrito for an Adderall pill.

It's also about a realization I had one year later, after taking a power-nap in an office bathroom stall.

2006

The only thing that stood between me and my bachelor's degree was...

College in America has been over-glamorized, and the effects have been damaging to the country. Consider two issues we currently face:

• Millions of kids, fresh out of university, are jobless and deep in debt with student loans, kind of like me.
• Our country is...

In hopes of making my loan payments, I play guitar in the subway. Here are a couple of reasons why:

1. My payments are crippling.

2. I'm in an artistic rut: I don't play music or write songs nearly as often as I did when I was in college.

Since...