We are at Los Angeles International airport, headed for France. Flying on New Year’s Eve may seem a little anti-social, but December 31 also has a reputation as one of the least expensive days to fly. And here we are.

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Wow. What a mess. USC football may be at a low ebb, at least in this century. The coaches and players who contrived to lose to Wisconsin in the Holiday Bowl tonight constitute a program that is in trouble. The Trojans, over decades, have too often embraced the dim-witted arrogance of the biggest and most […]

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An added attraction at the San Clemente home where we have been staying is a collection of at least a dozen paperback books containing cartoons from The Far Side. I can page through those for 20, 25 minutes at a pop, smiling at many of the (typically) single-panel cartoons that so often tweak science and […]

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Back in the UAE, we paid a significant amount of money to get English Premier League soccer, despite usually being limited to one game in English when as many as six were going on and getting little more than highlights in the games we didn’t see. We figured the situation would be worse in California. […]

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I have been away. Have I mentioned that? And it’s hard to see the NFL play where I was living, on the other side of the world. But, back in the USA for a slow Sunday … I slipped back into the couch potato mode and pretty much just stared at the NFL all day. […]

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I am a fan, more or less, of the English Premier League club Arsenal and the American football team from UCLA. It occurred to me today why it is that I settled on each of them: My own appreciation of skill and style … ahead of the more significant essence of physical and mental toughness. […]

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The NBA has taken over Christmas Day. Not long ago, this was a day ceded to second-tier college football bowl games. The Blue-Gray game was the first thing up. Maybe the Sun Bowl in the afternoon. Nothing that mattered much. For decades, the NBA didn’t do much to take the day away from the random […]

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An American Christmas. We had not done one of those since 2007. A semi-surprising stat, in retrospect, given that I had not been outside Southern California on December 25 for a very long time … and maybe never, through 2007. Then came Hong Kong in 2008 and Abu Dhabi from 2009 through 2014. And I’m […]

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The San Clemente Pier reaches 1,296 feet into the Pacific Ocean. The concrete benches along each side of the pier’s length have messages written on them, with text provided by the people who donated that bench to the city. One of them reads: “Welcome to paradise.” That would seem presumptuous, nearly anywhere else in the […]

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A few cultural concepts don’t travel well outside the United States. Barbecue. “American” football. Country-and-western music. Pie. Pie doesn’t seem that difficult, does it? A fruit filling. A flaky pastry crust. A glazed top-crust. A pie tin. But it just doesn’t seem to work out, most of the time, if you are outside the borders […]

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