This was a fine idea. An anglophone couple on the other side of our little town — about 150 yards away, that is — hosted a “reception” for New Year’s Eve. A fine idea, and also handy on the safety/law-and-order front, in that most of the people who arrived walked less than five minutes to […]

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Someone will get hurt. Actually, lots of someones already have. OK, then. Someone else will get hurt. Seriously hurt. This weekend or next. Or both. Soccer’s goal celebrations. Out of control. Mindless, actually. Exuberance perhaps is to be expected, following something as rare (in many soccer games) as a goal. However, in their enthusiasm to […]

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Landon Donovan apparently is considering continuing on in Major League Soccer. This, after a couple of months of interesting-but-not-scintillating play with the LA Galaxy at the end of the 2016 season. That he could keep up at all is impressive, in his nine games back, during the autumn. He is 34, will be 35 in […]

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I am impressed by how often the cameramen, and directors, of sports broadcasts manage to get images of athletes spitting … into our living rooms via television. Baseball’s World Series manages to get bearded players spewing streams of brown “tobacco juice”. If a viewer is lucky, guys in the dugout might limit their expectorations to […]

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Well, that was ugly. And perhaps unfortunately timed. Bob Bradley, the first American to coach a team in one of Europe’s biggest five leagues, was fired by Swansea City today — only his 85th day on the job of the English Premier League club. He was a dead man walking since Swansea’s 4-1 home loss […]

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A pressure washer. That is what men really want. I know what you’re thinking. “Darn. And with Christmas behind us now.” You could have gotten your father, brother, son a pressure washer. A German company that happens to make pressure washers commissioned a marketing and research firm to get to the bottom of this — […]

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We concluded most of our holiday activities on Christmas Eve, aside from getting a photo of “hanging Santa” (above, info below). So that left me free to eat a lot of turkey and watch NBA December 25th games till tryptophan and hoops overload knocked me out. I saw the whole of the game of the […]

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I like to attend Christmas Eve services. Preferably of the “candlelight” variety. I have attended one every December 24 since I was 13 — aside from one year in Long Beach when we got the starting time of a service wrong and arrived just as everyone was leaving. Options for church-going in this part of […]

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I recently mused about the significance of a big contract for an athlete who had spent years as a marginal player. Being part of a cash-soaked sport but not really being part of it for a decade-plus. First, Rich Hill, Dodgers pitcher. Now, Justin Turner, Dodgers infielder. The former is getting $48 million over three […]

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In France, I cannot spell my own name. Not because I have forgotten but because no one here would understand my pronunciation of the letters. Turns out, the French not only have “a different word for everything”, as the comedian Steve Martin put it, they also have quite different pronunciations when naming several of the […]

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