Silly/fun story of the weekend. The leading British grocery chain henceforth will give up making and selling curved croissants in favor of a straight croissant. Even though croissant is French for “crescent”. Why the change?

[Read more →]

France may be one of the few countries in the world where a significant fraction of native speakers prefer to see movies screened in their original language — with French subtitles. We saw the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! tonight in an old-fashioned, one-screen cinema, and not only is the movie fairly current, it ran in […]

[Read more →]

Talking about the weekend that just passed. The one after the Super Bowl but before pitchers and catchers report. It is a weekend, in American sports, anyway, that has pretty much nothing that matters. Or it seems that way to me. A former colleague and I had a bit of a discussion on this — […]

[Read more →]

Leave it to Lionel Messi to do something that will have soccer fans buzzing for a day or three. In this case, it was a semi-controversial move: A penalty kick that he did not aim at goal, instead knocking it sideways to Barcelona teammate Luis Suarez, who subsequently scored. Some were amazed and giddy at […]

[Read more →]

If you had asked the average fan — and maybe even the average college football coach — who would be the best NFL player off the 2005 Colton High School football team, Allen Bradford probably would have been the clear choice. Especially among fans. Bradford, a bruising tailback and linebacker, was the centerpiece of a […]

[Read more →]

Wine is big in France. Of course. That’s well-known throughout the world. The French and their wines. Sure. What is not as universally grasped is the French connection to cheese, or “fromage”, in French. This is a country that produces at least 350 varieties of cheese. (Americans over a certain age remember a youth with […]

[Read more →]

This is Day 2 of what will be at least five days without access to the worldwide web in the rental home where we are living, in southern France. The local telecom, like all telecoms everywhere, is incompetent and probably instinctively evil and, after failing to acknowledge any problems for a week or two (“Have […]

[Read more →]

In a 20-team soccer league, how often do the top four in the standings meet one of the other three on the same day — two-thirds of the way through a 38-game season? We must assume someone involved with England’s Premier League, which is increasingly interested in American-style statistics, has looked up the answer to […]

[Read more →]

For a couple of days here, it was almost like Grantland never went away. ESPN.com … just the regular ol’ website most of us go to for scores and boxscores … generated a pair of lengthy, NFL-oriented entries that are highly readable and worth the 20-minute (each) investment. One (4,500 words) was an extremely clever/funny […]

[Read more →]

  Eating with American fast-food giant McDonald’s may be a bad idea, in terms of consumption, but I continue to be impressed by their schemes for trying to localize their menu. To wit: The McArabia, in the UAE. The American Winter menu, here in France. This is fairly ingenious.

[Read more →]