Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors went up against the NBA’s best defensive team tonight, and that San Antonio team is also the clear second-best team in the league … and Curry and the Warriors destroyed the Spurs, 120-90.
Curry played only 29 minutes but scored 37 points on 12-for-20 shooting, including 6-for-9 accuracy from three-point range.
Which led to my deciding that Curry might be the best thing that has happened to American basketball since Michael Jordan.
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I realized by the end of the day that I can’t yet decide which team I prefer to win Super Bowl 50.
My only concern was that the New England Patriots (and Bill Belichick and Tom Brady) not win it, and the Denver Broncos addressed that concern with their 20-18 victory in the American Conference championship game.
Carolina’s Panthers thrashed the Arizona Cardinals 49-15 later in the day, and that creates a Super Bowl matchup that leaves me … wondering how I can develop a preference over the next two weeks.
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Over the past few decades, most humans came to grips with the reality that in exchange for “progress” we were going to have to breathe bad air.
Life in nearly any megalopolis is an invitation to huff ozone and particulates.
Conditions are particularly dire in the big cities of rising economies like China’s and India’s. Beijing has the scariest air I’ve seen, but I haven’t been to Delhi yet.
The ubiquity of vile air has become so accepted, over the past 50 years, that to be in a place where the air is clean is … revolutionary. But such is the case in this part of the Languedoc, in southern France.
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Our little town in the Languedoc has just the one cafe. Across from the church, in the main place of the little town. Le Coin des Aromes.
We tried it tonight, and liked it. Quite a bit. We even encountered a local wine that was quite good, ending our losing streak.
Cost of dinner for two and a nice bottle of wine?
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Right? This is almost impossible.
We are in France, not some theme-park version of it, and the notion of several days of bad wine or several consecutive bad baguettes … is incroyable.
Wine and baguettes? That is the heart of French cuisine.
Yet, there we are. Three bad-to-awful bottles of wine, several awful baguettes, including two in five minutes.
This cannot be happening!
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Whenever helium gets in a fix, whenever neon is at risk, whenever argon and krypton and xenon and radon are ganged up on by the other 110 chemical elements … and we know they are pretty much inert … “Nobleman” is ready to shed his civilian dress and come to the rescue.
Those six elements constitute the Noble gases … so-called because they are very stable, usually inert and “very suitable in applications where reactions are not wanted”.
Noble gases are not going to do something crazy; helium is not going to go all flammable and bring down a dirigible. Krypton’s green incarnation has an odd thing with Superman (which is why Nobleman is needed), but that’s about it for irrational behavior by these guys.
And that’s what the chemical world needs … a bunch of elements who are predictably inert.
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Unless our 2013 vintage Syrah tonight was an aberration, it appears Philippe Gallart was a better rugby player than he is vigneron.
That was one of the selling points — well, in a peripheral way — as we got down to the business of tasting local wines, here in the Languedoc.
“Philippe Gallart played internationally for France,” said the pleasant woman at Le Wine Shop — a British-run place in nearby Pezenas, which appeared to specialize in local wines.
It turned out to be one of those quickly evolving wines that ended up in a sad place.
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It was about noon when the small, white flakes began to drift to the ground. I thought it was ash; maybe a fire somewhere near our little village, or neighbors using their fireplaces.
One odd part of it was … the ash didn’t begin to accumulate on the ground. It hit the flag stones in the backyard of the home where we are staying, and left wet spots behind.
Eventually, we came to the semi-startling realization:
We were watching snow fall. Here in the south of France, a matter of miles from the Mediterranean.
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This is an issue for Yanks in France.
How many kisses to give to someone you are meeting again … or meeting for the first time?
Outsiders can’t be expected to get it right, but they risk being judged by locals for their performance on the bisous (French for “kisses”) front. It’s at least as complicated as a fraternity handshake.
At least one Englishman seems to have lost his cool over the difficulties of getting right la bise — the phrase given to a single kiss as well as to the process of meeting.
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This was the idea:
We would try to live three months in each of four Mediterranean-oriented European countries, places where they enjoy at least 300 days of sunshine per year, and when we were done we would choose, presumably from those four stops, a place we would want to live for at least a year.
A month after leaving Abu Dhabi, we took the first step on what was the original plan when we left a friend’s place in Les Issambres, on the tony Cote d’Azur, and drove 205 miles west to the little town of Nizas, in the far-less glamorous Languedoc, where we plan to stay for 75 days.
After that?
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