This has driven me to distraction for decades, going back to when I was a know-almost-nothing parent coaching my kids’ soccer teams in Highland, California. I was hazy about numerous concepts of the game, but one I understood quite clearly … and in the decades since have seen screwed up all the time, from kiddie […]

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I follow ice hockey in fits and starts. It is difficult to keep track of the sport on this side of the Atlantic; it’s not like it’s background buzz in generic sports news, over here. Also, at my last job, “hockey”, without a modifier, was assumed to be field hockey. No. Really. (India used to […]

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Last week, on the 63rd anniversary of Roger Bannister‘s breakthrough “sub-four-minute mile”, Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge ran the fastest marathon in history. Kipchoge covered 26.2 miles in two hours, 25 seconds, falling 26 seconds short of cracking the increasingly less awe-inspiring “two-hour barrier”. The Rio 2016 Olympic gold-medalist’s run came as part of a Nike-sponsored effort […]

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Never minimize the United Arab Emirates’ ability and willingness to be part of any conversation about overindulging. The country may not have invented wretched excess, but it has embraced it. Take, for instance, the so-called “freakshake”, described in this story in The National newspaper as “basically, oversized, pimped-out milkshakes. … The bigger, the better.” Freakshakes […]

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Baseball is becoming dull, and the strikeout is to blame. I woke up early today, with the TV still running, and while looking for the NBA playoffs I came across the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, at Wrigley Field, just as the bottom of the ninth was happening. I decided to stay with it […]

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Pretty sure that when I heard about central London south of the River Thames, say, 30 years ago … it was largely dismissed as a crime-ridden area with nothing to see. No need to go. Terra Incognito, down there. Even the locals seemed to ignore it, although the area has been part of London for […]

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I was prepared to like The Book Of Mormon, the musical that deeply involves the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show made its debut in 2011, but only last night did I get around to seeing it, at the Prince of Wales Theater in London’s Soho district. I have a sense […]

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I must have missed this. Some time over the past year or two London has become a post-cash society. Yes, a few holdouts can be found, mostly among immigrant-run businesses that don’t like the idea of credit cards. Such as the Chinese noodle house on Wardour Street, in Soho. A pot of tea had already […]

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That is what a person does. You go to London, you eventually make your way over to the West End and settle in at one of those grand old theaters and let someone sing and dance at you for two or three hours. We carried out that plan perhaps too aggressively.

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I have lived in France for about 15 months now and I am sometimes asked: “How is your French coming along?” The answer? It ain’t. As I told a fellow Yank, a few weeks ago: “My French is nonexistent.” He chuckled at that. “Nonexistent. Ha.” It would help if I were trying harder than “puzzling […]

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