The Guardian, an English newspaper, is amused by the concept of ballpark food. England having nothing quite like it — baseball is just about nonexistent there, so the idea of baseball food … not going to happen in their daily lives. It doesn’t mean the writers and photographers and editors aren’t fascinated/horrified by some of […]

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The Los Angeles Angels have under contract the consensus “best player in baseball”, one Michael Nelson Trout. For all the won-loss good it has done the club — which has not won a postseason game during Mike Trout’s six full seasons. It appears that one great player, surrounded by mediocrity (or worse), is unlikely to […]

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It is part of the original Major League Soccer playbook: When trying to gain attention, sign someone with a big name. And few names in soccer are bigger than Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the towering forward from Sweden and veteran of many of the biggest club sides in the world. He is a different sort of end-of-career […]

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So many people have elegant signatures. And why not? Even in the Computer Age most of us sign our names often enough to have pretty much perfected a signature. Know who usually has stylish and perfectly legible signatures? Athletes. Perhaps from giving autographs. (And perhaps from some clubhouse boy with an elegant hand slavishly signing […]

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In the U.S., sports fans must be talking about the top-seeded University of Virginia losing tonight to a 16 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament. A No. 1 seed losing to a 16 had never happened, not in 135 previous encounters, until Virginia succumbed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMDC) by 20 points […]

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A challenge/request was registered on this site this week, and I concede it probably is time to make some recommendations on wines we like that come from this part of France. One of the difficulties of doing this is making clear what geographical area this is. It is not the Cote d’Azur; it is not […]

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This blog commenced on March 10, 2008. Ten years ago today. It was four days after I had been fired by the Los Angeles News Group, and I wanted to let co-workers and other journalists know what had happened, with as many specifics as I could recall pertaining to the (then mostly novel) concept of […]

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Well, in theory, they could be killers. But they are more likely to make your dog or cat sick. Caterpillars! Processionary caterpillars, they are called. They are some nasty customers who live here in the south of France, and in southern Europe, in general. They are destructive to pine trees, where they spend much of […]

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The best opening sentences in literary history. Always a fun exercise. This has been going on pretty much forever. An early leader for “best opening line” has to be Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” There’s a book you want to check out, just from the […]

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In The Los Angeles Times, columnist Bill Plaschke has done a laudable thing: Hold the Dodgers accountable for the club’s lack of TV exposure in most of its home market.

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