The web has scads of pages pertaining to bad sports tattoos. There are so, so many, after all. Just search “bad sports tattoos” and you can spend an afternoon paging through them. It has been suggested that an athlete probably should have a better idea for a tattoo than his own name, which often is […]

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It would have been so tidy. Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach who is leading the U.S. national soccer team into irrelevance, was interested in the England job. England was interested in him. At points over the past two weeks, bookies in England (they will bet on anything in Britain; anything) had the German as the favorite […]

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No, really. Sometimes we know things before someone in the advanced-metrics community produces the numbers that tell us so. Mike Trout is really, really good, and his Angels teammates are really, really not good. Anyone who watches the Angels for a weekend (or follows the club’s boxscores for a week) could have deduced that. But, […]

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The most frustrating aspect of the nearly 40 years I spent in sports journalism was how the blight of doping always lurked in the rear-view mirror. We sped up, slowed down, turned left, turned right, and we could never shake the druggies. Eventually, we suspected nearly everyone — which was unfortunate because I’m pretty sure […]

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We returned from Paris to the Languedoc yesterday, and I remarked on how crowded the TGV was. It seemed as if the train had more people than seats; several travelers seemed to spend hours standing in the small spaces between cars. I was informed that the Saturday following Bastille Day — and this is what […]

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All politics aside, I have always been fascinated by the concept of the coup d’etat. This must go back to the 1960s, a particularly busy decade for overthrowing governments — which I would have followed, once the news finally came in. The coup is about as old as government itself. The oldest on record, recorded […]

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Over the previous few weeks, France seemed to have resumed being its old mostly carefree self, the horror of several terror attacks, including two in Paris, not forgotten but perhaps compartmentalized. Some could dare to hope a corner had been turned. France had hosted the 31-day European Championship of soccer, which attracted hundreds of thousands […]

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We mention the words “massive military parade” and we think of repressive regimes. The Soviet Union, and now Putin’s Russia. China. North Korea. And France? Yes. France has a big military parade each year on July 14, Bastille Day, which is a sort of a Fourth of July for France. Except for the enormous military […]

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The 20th-century dictator Benito Mussolini was famously credited (deserving or otherwise) with “making the trains run on time” in Italy. About now, France could stand more than a little improvement in its trains’ on-time performance. That’s four consecutive French trains now, that I have met or ridden, that failed to arrive on schedule. None of […]

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If you don’t look too closely, Normandy’s beaches, from Vierville-sur-Mer and five miles to the east, look like any other holiday spot in the northwest of France. Long, sandy stretches that can be hundreds of yards deep, when the tide is out. A sea wall, in many places. And steep bluffs rising behind the beach. […]

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