The French call weather like this the canicule — which pretty literally means the “dog days” of summer. But this round of heat packs a particularly nasty bite. France, like much of Europe, is going through what may be the hottest summer on record. The nearest big city to where we live is Montpellier, and […]

[Read more →]

The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

[Read more →]

No one will ever accuse France of not sufficiently celebrating its second World Cup championship. Quicker than you can say “Kylian Mbappe”, every piece of national-team apparel seemed to have that second star on it. For those not familiar with the “star” system in international football, a team is entitled to wear on the jersey, […]

[Read more →]

Russia 2018 is over. It was France 4, Croatia 2 in the championship match, and the final whistle had barely been blown before some pundits were suggesting it was the best World Cup final in the history of the event. Granted, six goals is a good place to start. That is as many goals as […]

[Read more →]

A twist on a post from last week. I wanted a France-England final to the 2018 World Cup, and I think most soccer fans did, too, and I posted to that effect. The headline to that one was: Croatia Needs to Get Out of the Way Since I went unheeded by Croatia, which came back […]

[Read more →]

I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

[Read more →]

The great Gary Larson, creator of the incisive and usually funny-as-hell one-panel cartoon known as the Far Side, has often been on my mind, as the 2018 World Cup enters its second week. One cartoon, in particular. It shows several hugely obese people, relatives, I think we are meant to understand, sitting on a porch […]

[Read more →]

Usually, the hare-brained schemes are mine. Or were. A night college football game followed by a 1 p.m. NFL kickoff the next day — in some other state — followed by a flight back to SoCal after filing. … The plan to drive from SoCal over the Rockies and to Denver in about 22 hours, […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]