10. Vuvuzelas are the perfect gift for the children of people you don’t really like.

9. “Jabulani” is a word in a Zulu dialect meaning “ball hated by everyone except athletes paid by the company that makes it.”

8. You absolutely cannot use your hands unless you’re a goalie — or you really, really need to prevent a goal that would eliminate your team from a tournament.

7. The growth of soccer can only be helped by the fact telecasts don’t involve Brent Musburger or Joe Buck.

6. If you really want to make sure your flight gets you to a semifinal match in time, you should be royalty, a head of state, a celebrity or arrange traveling with someone from those three groups.

5. Uruguay and Paraguay are not, in fact, the same country.

4. To reach its estimate that 96 percent of the officiating decisions at the World Cup were correct, FIFA must be giving credit for things like showing up at the proper stadium and remembering to wear pants.

3. Also, those four percent of incorrect decisions apparently included 97 percent of the scoring.

2. FIFA, incidentally, stands for Fools In Fear of Accuracy.

1. The sporting world is a better place when there are psychic octopi involved.

Today marks the end of my 95 days of “unemployment.” Tomorrow, I go out to the Riverside Press-Enterprise for the various paperwork and orientation that comes with joining the paper’s staff full-time; Tuesday, I make my debut as the paper’s Dodgers beat writer, although I’ll be in and out of the beat until July.

The quotations around unemployment reflect the fact that I’ve worked a whole lot during this period when I wasn’t working, having picked up the Lakers beat on a freelance basis on April 1. I had 31 assignments in April for the Press-Enterprise (not bad for a 30-day month) and while I haven’t gone back and added everything up, I’m going to guess I had about 70 assignments in those 95 days, for Riverside, the Associated Press (nine times), Cal Lutheran (twice) and the San Bernardino Sun (once).

I’m not yet fully on board with the idea that everything works out for the best — ask me about that a few months down the road — but I have to say that things went a whole lot better than I could have anticipated when I was cast out by That Other Paper on Feb. 16. And I know I’ve defied the odds by landing another newspaper job, on a major beat at a bigger paper, at my age. This involves a whole lot of being in the right place at the right time.

The part of all this that was both gratifying and a little strange was all the support I’ve received from others in the newspaper business, both at the time I was laid off and since landing the new job. It’s felt a whole lot like living to hear your own eulogy.

So many people have said so many nice things. It’s been humbling, gratifying, wholly unexpected — honestly, who really knows what other people really think about you? — and at times, even a bit uncomfortable. (I’m not the greatest at taking compliments; luckily, I guess, they haven’t been handed out very much for most of my career.)

More significant than the praise has been the way people have really gone stepped up to help out. I have to particularly thank Jim Alexander and Jeff Eisenberg, who recommended me in Riverside, opening the door for the freelance work that, in turn, led to the full-time job; Beth Harris, who set me up for work with the AP, short-lived though that turned out to be; Lynda Fulford at Cal Lutheran; several people who went to bat for me at the L.A. Times, though the regular work at Riverside meant nothing ever came of that, and a number of others who offered tips on freelance work or sent work my way.

So, it’s on to the next phase of my career. I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll do with this blog, but I know you’ll be able to keep up with me at pe.com.

Thanks to everyone who’s kept in touch and offered encouragement through the last three months. It’s meant a lot.

For some reason, I don’t feel a whole lot like celebrating the milestone.

In the 24 years, 10 months and 21 days that followed, I went through one reapply-for-your-job merger, one pay cut and at least two pay freezes. I worked out of four offices, for a half-dozen sports editors, and went through uncounted crises — either for the company or journalism as a whole — until the one that claimed my job on Feb. 16.

On the bright side, along the way, I also covered:

— The 1996 Little League World Series, which I remember most for the improbable way Moorpark earned its berth — winning three games in a single day at the San Bernardino regional — and the resulting logistics of getting to Williamsport on one day’s notice. (I ended up having to fly to Baltimore and drive from there to Williamsport. Google Maps tells me that’s a 176-mile trip. It seemed longer, but then, I was operating on about four hours’ sleep and distinctly recall wandering out of my lane as I fought to stay awake over the last part of the drive.)

— The 2002 World Series, one of the great unexpected success stories in my experience, as the Angels just kept winning. As much as I enjoyed covering the success of Mike Scioscia and a very likeable roster, the championship was a bittersweet moment. My dad, a big Angels fan and one-time season-ticket holder, had died the previous summer.

— The Ducks’ Stanley Cup Finals appearances in 2003 and 2007. As a hockey fan, seeing the Cup presented in Anaheim should have been one of the great moments ever, but I was so incredibly sick that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. Still, the memory of walking out on to the ice to do interviews after the Cup presentation — with the crowd still in the building, cheering — still gives me chills.

— Three BCS championship games. The best one, clearly, was the USC-Texas game at the 2006 Rose Bowl, the second consecutive year Vince Young was just dazzling in Pasadena. The other really memorable one was the Orange Bowl the year before — memorable mostly the cross-country trip for about a 36-hour stay in Florida to cover USC’s 55-19 thumping of Oklahoma was such a complete anticlimax to the because Texas-Michigan Rose Bowl I covered before flying out.

— Six NBA Championships. I have so many memories from these that they deserve their own blog entry or entries, which I’ll save for a future date. I’ll note here that the 2004 Finals, the one that saw the Lakers lose to Detroit, marked the high point of the paper’s commitment (and financial wherewithal) to sports. That was the year I covered every playoff game, home and road, learning just how grueling the beat-writer life could be in the process. Between the Lakers coverage, the Olympics, a few other assignments and vacations, I was away from home over 100 nights that year. I like traveling, but even I found that a bit excessive.

— And, of course, the five Olympics: Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, Turin and Beijing. As I’ve written before, I have great memories from each one, and few of those memories revolve around the actual sporting events.

And, as I’ve told a few people over the years, I sometimes think it was a misperception that made it all possible. It was mostly because of Marion Jones that I joined the Scripps-Howard Olympics team in Sydney; she was clearly going to be a big local story for The Star, and there was some thought that, because I’d covered her in high school, it might help us get a little more access to her.

Which, of course, it didn’t — access to Marion was tightly controlled (understandably, when you remember she was arguably the biggest story in Sydney, and there were something like 10,000 journalists covering those games). And, though I never went out of my way to point it out, I had never covered Marion as a track athlete, even in high school. Former Star staffer David Kirvin did the track stories, as well the best single feature about Marion during her high school career. I covered her during basketball season — and still think she was the best girls’ basketball player I’ve seen.

Still, it went well enough that I was part of the Scripps team from then on, until there wasn’t a Scripps team to be part of — the news service passed on Vancouver in a cost-cutting move.

I know about those all too well.

Still, to the extent I’m thinking about that 25th anniversary today — and once I’m done writing this, I probably won’t dwell on it much — I’m grateful for the things I was able to do, and the people I met along the way.

And the support I’ve had over the last month has made it clear it was the people, not the places, that made those 25 years really meaningful.

There’s just not a better guy in professional sports, at least from the writer’s perspective. As good, maybe, but not better.

He’s always understood his need to help promote the game, and so he’s always made himself available. (At the 2006 Olympics, he lost three teeth in Finland’s quarterfinal victory over the United States, and still talked to reporters afterward.) What’s more, he always makes you feel he’s actually enjoying the interaction.

I think the degree to which Selanne’s teammates tried to set him up for the milestone goal over the last two games speaks to the kind of individual he is, and how everyone wanted to a.) see him score No. 600 in Anaheim, and b.) be a part of the moment.

Scott Niedermayer, who assisted on the goal 34 seconds into the second period of the Ducks’ 5-2 win over Colorado, noted, “There was a little underlying feeling when you’re on the ice with him. You want to at least give him the opportunity. It shows what kind of teammate and person he is. He is a great guy and we were definitely pulling for him.”

I covered the Ducks’ game with the Islanders Friday for the AP, Selanne’s second game stuck at 599, and had mixed emotions about the milestone.

On the one hand, having enjoyed him as a player and a person over the years, it would have been nice to be there. On the other, If he’d scored that night, it would have meant banging out a quick separate story to move on the wire, and I had visions of it happening in the final minute of the game, when it would maximize the already difficult balancing job that is filing one story to move at the buzzer (or as close as is practical) and then running to the locker room to get quotes for the “optional,” the second, more fully developed game story.

As it happened, that game was a tough enough write from the AP standpoint, with the Ducks tying the game with 32 seconds left, and winning 14 seconds into overtime, which meant I probably had no more than two or three minutes to go from writing an “Islanders win” story to a “Ducks win” version. I can’t imagine what that would have been like if Selanne had scored either of those goals at the end.

I was just watching on TV tonight, which was much more relaxing. And it freed me to react a little more when the moment came.

It’s a tremendous accomplishment for a great player, and a better guy.

Mendoza, who is unquestionably one of my favorite people, not just favorite athletes, from my 25 years in Ventura County sportswriting, noted she’d be participating in a Thursday night lecture at the Annenberg. I messaged her back to ask when it was (6:30 p.m.) and she graciously offered to add me to her guest list (which was good, since the lecture was fully booked), so I decided it was time to visit the Annenberg.

Not knowing how much I’d be able to see the exhibit in connection with the lecture, I went down in the late afternoon — the Space is open until 6 p.m. — and spent about an hour taking in the exhibit, which includes a short video and projected works by the two sports-photo icons, as well as a number of absolutely spectacular prints.

For a sports fan, this exhibit offers a little bit of the same feeling an art aficionado experiences when walking into the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and seeing Michelangelo’s David for the first time. You’re going to encounter very familiar that which have a whole new power when experienced in person.

The best example of this will most likely come when you encounter the beautiful print of Leifer’s most famous photo, the one of Muhammad Ali glowering over Sonny Liston after knocking Liston down in their 1965 fight in Lewiston, Maine. You know the image, but when you can stand in front of it and appreciate the vivid colors and its remarkable depth, with the people standing and looking on at the other side of the ring, you appreciate it like never before. The power of the young Ali is all the more stunning when compared with a nearby Iooss portrait of the stern, weathered visages of Ali and Joe Frazier taken in 2003.

The perfection of composition of some of these photos is breathtaking. There’s a Leifer portrait of jockey Steve Cauthen on the jockey-room scale at that falls somewhere between a Norman Rockwell illustration and the work of an old master in the way the details surrounding Cauthen only enhance the appreciation of the subject.

The cliché, of course, is that a picture is worth a thousand words. But while 10,000 couldn’t do some of these photos justice, one might: Go. You have until March 14. (For details: http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/)

After visiting the exhibit and walking down the street for dinner, I came back for Thursday’s lecture by Mendoza and photographer Marla Rutherford, one of a series related to the Iooss-Leifer exhibit. (I noted with regret that I missed an earlier lecture by L.A. based photographer Lucy Nicholson of Reuters, who is both a remarkably talented shooter and a very sweet person I was fortunate to get to know during my years as a columnist.)

Ostensibly, Thursday’s subject was last year’s Body Issue of ESPN The Magazine — featuring nude photographs of a wide variety of athletes — when Rutherford did a group shoot with Mendoza (then 8 ½ months pregnant) and Olympic softball teammates Cat Osterman, Natasha Watley and Lauren Lappin.

While that was certainly the starting point, it turned out to be a wide-ranging 90 minutes. The endearingly quirky Rutherford talked, for example, about the challenge of getting people to do things they normally wouldn’t, and of finding the “in-between moments” when people are actually themselves, rather than just responding to instructions. Mendoza — the force of nature who moves from athletics to broadcasting to a variety of causes while retaining energy and enthusiasm for all of them ­— brought along some of her favorite action photos from her career, emphasized her desire to see female athletes photographed in ways that emphasized their athleticism, rather than treating them like runway models.

The term “lecture” implies a formality that clearly was not the case here. This was more like a conversation; not necessarily the most cohesive presentation, in some ways, but no less interesting, enjoyable and informative for that. Rutherford was extremely funny, and Mendoza was as she always has been — perhaps the finest female role model I’ve known in athletics, given her mixture of composure, personality, enthusiasm and commitment.

The lecture has come and gone. The exhibit continues a little longer.

You missed out on one. Don’t miss both.

The studio apartment I’ll be vacating in a few days is in a small (28 unit) building. And the design is such that my front door is on a little balcony shared with three other units.

The neighbors in the three adjacent units (and much of the rest of the building — most of the tenants know each other at least a little bit, which is one reason I’ve liked it here) know I’m moving, either because they’ve seen me starting to carry things out and have asked, or because they’ve heard from others in the building who are aware of it.

They’ve asked why I’m leaving, and I’ve told them. (I’m doing my best to not buy into the idea of feeling ashamed or embarrassed about losing my job; I tend to think those feelings should lie with the people who wielded the ax.) As a result, I’ve learned that two of my immediate neighbors have also lost their jobs in the last couple of weeks.

This means three out of four the four units who share this landing have been struck by unemployment in a matter of weeks. I know there’s a healthy degree of coincidence involved there, but it’s also a pretty sobering reflection of the current state of the economy.

They took the job. They can’t take the memories.

I worked for the Star and one of its predecessors, the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle, for half my life — until that jarring day last week when I was told my services were no longer required.

Needless to say, in the ensuing week, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect — and keep coming across various objects that spur that reflection that much more.

As I sorted through old notebooks, one fell open to a list of names. At the top was Shani Davis, the U.S. Olympic speedskater.  As it happened, on my TV screen at that very moment was … Shani Davis, skating in Vancouver.

The notebook was from the Olympic Media Summit for the 2006 Olympics, held in November 2005 in Colorado Springs. It was the kind of event that made for 10 very eventful between April of 2000, when I became the Star’s sports columnist, and last week.

In those 10 years, I went places I never imagined going — to five Olympics (Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens, Turin and Beijing) on four continents. I became an international traveler for the first time in my life, and discovered what a thrilling, broadening experience that can be.

I walked on the Great Wall of China. I stood before the tomb of Michelangelo in Florence, saw a soccer game in Rome, climbed the hill to the Acropolis. I took one of the world’s great train rides, the Indian Pacific, from Sydney to Perth after the Sydney games.

Everyplace and anyplace, I met people I never would have met, had conversations I never could of imagined.

A lot of times, the conversations were political. On a tram in Athens, I had a lengthy conversation with a volunteer from the host country, who gave a sometimes withering but exceptionally well informed critique of U.S. politics. (“Roosevelt was your greatest president,” he asserted). On a mostly empty media bus in Beijing, two British journalists looked across at myself and another American writer (thanks to our credentials, it was easy to tell where we were from), and without preamble, asked, “How could you elect him twice?” (“Him,” of course, was George W. Bush.) The resulting discussion made for one of the fastest half-hour bus rides of my life.

But sometimes, they were simply people connecting with people.

At the Turin Games, in a break from curling coverage in the small town of Pinorolo, a USA Today reporter and I wandered into a small, family-run restaurant, had one of the great Italian meals of all time, and — as the lunch rush abated — ended up with family members sitting at the table, telling us why they felt the Olympics were important for their city and the region in general.

And Sydney, the night before the Olympics, my colleague David Nielsen and I went out to explore the city a bit, and ended up at a barbeque restaurant in the most Australian of locations — at the harbor end of the Sydney Opera House. Overhearing our American accents, a table of Aussies invited us to join them, then started calling friends to come join the party. We talked for hours about our respective countries, our hopes for the Games, and anything else that came to mind. It was my first night on the Olympic beat, and might still be the most memorable, because the people were so gracious, and so engaging.

All these memories, I know, and not a one has mentioned a score or an athlete. I have those, too, but it’s the things beyond the arena that have been the most enriching.
Of course, plenty of the games have been pretty good, too.

I probably had the most exposure for my Lakers coverage, mostly because I stepped into the columnist beat at the precise moment the Lakers became really, really good. My first Lakers game as a reporter came during the 2000 playoffs; I think the second was the famous Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, when the Lakers used a 15-0 run to rally and beat Portland, advancing to the NBA Finals, where they beat Indiana to begin their run of three straight championships. (My most vivid memory of that Portland game is that I was up in the hockey press box, next to three “reporters” from some Portland magazine who were whooping and cheering as the Trail Blazers built their big lead. They got very quiet, very fast.)

So it’s not surprising that most of my most memorable games come from the Lakers beat.

I was the only columnist at Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game against Toronto in January of 2006. I was standing in the tunnel near the press room — having moved there to avoid getting caught in crowds coming from the other end of Staples Center — when Robert Horry hit the famous 3-pointer against Sacramento in the 2002 Western Conference finals. It gave me a perfect line from his position to the basket, so the moment it went up, I could see it was going in.

And I was in San Antonio when Derek Fisher hit the famous “0.4” game-winner against the Spurs in the second round of the 2004 playoffs. Because of the interest around that year’s team, with Karl Malone and Gary Payton on board, that was the lone year the paper had committed to having me cover every Lakers playoff game, home and road, for as long as the team lasted. When Fisher’s shot went down, I — and everyone else on the Lakers beat — knew for a certainty the team was going to reach the Finals. (And I still believe they would have won the title, had not Malone suffered his knee injury.)

Other favorite memories, away from the court?

Well, there was Angels’ run to the 2002 World Series title — a delightful but somewhat bittersweet ride, since my dad, who had died a year earlier, was a huge Angels fan who didn’t get to see their ultimate triumph. My most vivid memory is of the clubhouse celebration, when Mike Scioscia dumped most of a bottle of champagne over my head, drowning my tape recorder in the process. (The column from that night is, as a result, a little lighter on quotes than might normally be the case.)

There are a couple of Dodgers games in there, too — the Sept. 18, 2006 game with San Diego when the team hit four consecutive homers in the bottom of the ninth to tie, then won 11-10 in the 10th on a Nomar Garciaparra homer, and last October’s improbable playoff game with St. Louis, when Matt Holliday dropped a two-out, ninth-inning fly ball and the Dodgers rallied for two runs, a 3-2 win, and an unexpected victory in the series.

It’s a long list, I know. And it could be longer, if I gave it more thought.

But for all that — for all the things I saw, all the people I most enjoyed meeting (and that’s another entry, for another time) — I have no problem in selecting the single greatest play I ever saw in a game. And it wasn’t in any of the events I’ve mentioned, or from any of the biggest stars I saw play.

No, that greatest single moment has to be Keith Smith’s weaving 98-yard touchdown run against Hawthorne in the 1993 CIF-Southern Section Division III championship football game at Moorpark College. Had it come a little later, in the YouTube era, that play would be an online classic.

Instead, it inspired what might be my single favorite opening of a game story in my career — “In the long run, you just can’t beat Keith Smith” — and lives on in my memory as the reason I loved the job so much.

At its best, it was about great people doing great things.

And how can you not love a job like that?

So please, keep checking back. I’ll have more soon. Thanks.