It’s true that many basketball fans and pundits thought LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers had almost no chance to win the NBA Finals. It’s true that a prominent ESPN talking head said, before the Finals, that LeBron would surrender the NBA “King” title to Stephen Curry, if Curry and the Golden State Warriors defeated […]

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Now that it’s over, with the Cleveland Cavaliers overcoming a 3-1 games deficit to win Game 7 in the NBA Finals, what does our 20-20, after-the-fact vision tell us? Lots of things we did not believe just a week ago. To wit: –Stephen Curry was the unanimous regular-season MVP, but LeBron James remains the league’s […]

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If you come across one of those 10 most decisive battles in human history lists … the Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815, invariably will be in there. It was a victory for a coalition of forces, mostly British and Prussian, that marked the end of Napoleon’s bloody attempts to bring the whole of Europe […]

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This is a bit embarrassing, but it shows what happens when you make assumptions about a place new to you. One enormous blunder. One not as ridiculous. But each could have been avoided had I asked around before I hit “publish”.

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Perhaps no professional athlete in this century has ridden the crest of a popularity surge the way Stephen Curry has, for the past two years. Remember, ahead of the 2013-14 NBA season the Golden State Warriors shooting star was widely considered something of a one-trick pony, an interesting player with one good season, one playoffs […]

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Ichiro Suzuki had two hits yesterday, and by one form of accounting that gives him one more hit in his career than Pete Rose had while setting the Major League record — with 4,256 hits. It seems some are going to suggest that makes Suzuki the MLB “hit king”, displacing Rose, but that is not […]

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France is host of the ongoing European Championship. We live in France. We have never been to a Euro tournament match. A few matches are being held in Marseille, the closest game site to where we live, in the Languedoc. One of those Marseille matches is Saturday and involves Iceland and Hungary, two long shots […]

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This month, we moved from a spot on the edge of this little town to one just a few steps from the heart of it. Only then did we finally figure out that a town of 700 people has not one but two bells tolling on the hour and half hour. And, not unlike the […]

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Six months ago, I had never heard of Clermont-Ferrand. Which probably left me in the overwhelming majority of people living in Europe. But the notion of it began to grow on me, and today we spent six hours in a car to drive the 190 miles or so to Clermont-Ferrand and back. Our first major […]

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A visitor would never guess that in this part of small-town France, swimming pools are a common feature in the backyard. If a house has a backyard, or a courtyard, the odds are good it will have a pool. Often one of those above-ground things, sometimes, but quite a few old-fashioned, dug-into-the-ground pools. For cooling […]

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