We are in Southern California, where the weather has been a bit raw. It snowed a bit in the mountains. Yikes! But nothing like it has been back in the south of France. Where we live has been getting inches (inches!) of snow. This does not happen there. Certainly not to the extent we have […]

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I suppose I have always believed that some people were sleepwalkers. Enough sleepwalkers talked about it, certainly, and I seem to recall episodes where I witnessed a family member moving around the house without being awake. Perhaps even being able to answer a question without being awake. But I had never gone sleepwalking myself — […]

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Here’s guessing that most American fans of the Winter Olympics watched pretty much anything that was put in front of them. Aside from curling. What is curling, anyway? Does it have lots of thrills and spills built in, like sledding or jumping or shooting? It is a high-aerobics sport where only the elite can survive, […]

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What a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles! A great piece of piano music, arranged for orchestra by another classical-music great, played by modern virtuosos led by an inspired director in the finest venue in the western half of the United States. It was so powerful it almost knocked me […]

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The Los Angeles Times has done a fun story on Farhan Zaidi, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ general manager, who apparently is a fantasy football whiz. To the point that he has won the past three championships of the club’s fantasy league — which also perfectly reflects the length of time Zaidi has been in a […]

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This is a topic addressed by the Ringer website, and millions of American families can relate to it. Which family board game is the most harmful to domestic tranquility? The Ringer comes up with a dozen or so suggestions, from The Game of Life to Risk to Parcheesi. I have played several of the games […]

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What’s better than a Snickers bar, in all its chocolate-caramel-peanutty goodness? Two of them! Or should it be three? And what is better yet? The ultimate Snickers bar! That would be the one seen above — one full pound of Snickers that the Mars company prefers to call the Slice ‘n Share bar. It recommends […]

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We are staying with relatives who are serious hockey fans. (Yes. In SoCal.) There was never any doubt over what was going up on the big-screen TV from 8:10 p.m. (PST): The women’s hockey gold-medal match pitting the United States and Canada at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. And there we sat for four-plus hours, increasingly […]

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It is the nature of sports fans to crave a connection to star athletes in some (typically obscure) way. Chelsea fans had, until today, a pretty good statistic that they could bandy about. In eight Champions League matches versus the London club, Lionel Messi had never scored. That drought ended in his ninth Champions League […]

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Turns out, Tara Lipinski is a fine broadcast analyst at Olympic skating competition. But we might be looking at Michelle Kwan on NBC TV, instead of Lipinski, if the former had won an Olympics gold at some point in her long and productive career. As Lipinski did at Nagano 1998. Lipinski had a much shorter […]

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