What we do not know about the natural world around us is an extensive body of information. Quite. In the past decade, for the first time in human history more people live in urban than in rural areas, according to the UN. And we City Kids often don’t know what to make of our surroundings […]

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For as long as I have been a quasi-fan of Arsenal FC, which is about seven years now, the debate has raged, fomented by placard-waving fans or banners pulled along in the sky by small airplanes. Sometimes the argument is loud. Sometimes louder. Is it time for Arsene Wenger, the coach since 1996 of English […]

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The place where we live, in the south of France, has a large room on the ground level. However, it was not necessarily a garage. Until the other day, when we slowly backed a dinky Toyota into a space that offers no more than 10 inches of extra room. Ta-da! Our place has a garage, […]

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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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Sometimes we forget that this part of France is not just thinly populated … it is rural. It is farmland. Vines, mostly, acres and acres of them, in every direction. Towns are small and grew up here as places to support working in the vines. In our town, population 600, many of the garages we […]

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Geez. You spend most of 7.5 years out of the country … and homeland cultural references just blow right past. Until two days ago, I did not know that Bill Simmons‘s new website, The Ringer, had launched. As of June 2016. Which means it is not new at all but somehow had gone unnoticed by […]

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I’ve never really had winter clothes. Because I always lived in places that either were temperate or Just Plain Hot. Long Beach, then the Inland Empire, then Abu Dhabi. But here in Europe, in France, we can go weeks (!) without a single minute in the 60-degree (Fahrenheit) range in December, January, February. Granted, it’s […]

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Polls closed at 8 p.m. in France tonight in the vote for the country’s next president. The results were announced one minute later. At 8:01 p.m., a polling company that an hour earlier had retrieved results from 200 key voting stations … announced which two candidates were going to get the most votes and advance […]

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Let’s get at this the long way ’round. Most of our possessions arrived in southern France, from southern California, in one big crush of boxes along about mid-October. We had them stacked on a big plastic sheet in the garage, and the boxes made for a pile about three feet high and maybe 10 yards […]

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I didn’t plan this. It was early on a Saturday evening and many of the regular TV options were not available, so on went the second half of West Virginia vs. Notre Dame in the NCAA basketball tournament, which I could see via ESPN GB … And nearly eight hours later I had watched much […]

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