It is an unmistakable sound, though it may take a city boy a minute or two to place it. The steady “tinkle ” or “clank” of domesticated animals wearing bells, maybe just the other side of a rise of land, and on the move. A combined herd of sheep and goats is being raised somewhere […]

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During much of the Super Bowl, early this morning in France, I was complaining how awful it was. It reminded me of the sort of game I associate with the first 20-or-so editions of the NFL’s championship game, which often were wretched spectacles — uncompetitive or poorly played, or both. With turnovers, dropped balls, penalties […]

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Luckily for me, a French music TV station has the free-to-air rights to Super Bowl 50 and will be showing the game live at 12:30 local time tonight/tomorrow morning. Why does station W9 bother with the championship of American football? The French sports newspaper L’Equipe asked that question, and others, of the director general of […]

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  The newspaper Le Monde is probably the most important (and august) daily publication in France. It is known for the density of its prose and the nuances of opinions expressed, but the newspaper is not so stuffy as to overlook the Super Bowl. Perhaps it was 50 years of history or the game’s status […]

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Winter weather in this part of France can be fluky, we are learning. Yesterday, we were bundled up (well, by SoCal standards) during a walk to a nearby town — but were quite cold throughout because of powerful winds that took the wind-chill factor to 47 Fahrenheit. Today? Bright sun. Very little wind. Temps cracking […]

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For 2.5 years I sat across from an Englishman who detested Ashley Cole, who at the time was a left back with Chelsea. My coworker inevitably would get around to paraphrasing the quotes from Cole’s biography, My Defence, in which the player said he was “trembling with anger” in the summer of 2006 when his […]

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I must first have noticed the city of Sete on the map, where the Languedoc region of southern France creeps down to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Sete is near the southern end of a confused stretch of French coastline, where land gives way to water and back again from west of Marseille almost […]

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A great thing about staying in the greater Pezenas area, north of Beziers and southwest of Montpellier … are the walks from one little town to another. The town we are in (year-round population of less than 600), is about 45 minutes from another little town in a variety of directions. I have done two […]

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I have been fascinated/haunted by the death last week of an Englishman named Henry Worsley, who succumbed to an infection the day after he was air-lifted by a rescue team after giving up his attempt — 30 miles from success — to cross Antarctica alone. He had begun his quest back on November 14, dragging […]

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