The New York Times has an interesting piece about three smart-alecks who cooperated on a newspaper hoax in 1941, convincing several newspapers (including The Times) to run the weekly scores of a make-believe college football team and its make-believe opponents.

What the hoaxers did was simple: They called in the made-up score to the sports desk of the NYT and other major papers — and several of them, including The Times, ran it in the small type known as “agate”.

It was that easy. The people taking the result asked cursory questions … or no questions at all.

If we knew how much of this sort of thing went on, it probably would be disturbing — in part because much of the fake news probably was never exposed for what it was/wasn’t.

For decades, newspapers depended on outsiders to provide results, often over the phone, and our only defense against hoaxes was context and familiarity and trust.

We never ran a fake college football score; getting two fake names past us would have been too difficult.

Our vulnerability would have been on the high-school level, or other local-local news.

Such as the instance, nearly 40 years ago, when a local source made up a story — a good one — as he stood at my desk, and I promptly did a few hundred words on it. Which appeared in the morning sports section.

That hoax was quickly shot down — by those who were portrayed badly in the non-story I was given.

[Read more →]

It dawned on me, finally, that three of the most prestigious/expensive beach communities on the Mediterranean Sea are located within 20 miles of each other, here on the Cote d’Azur.

From east to west … Monaco, Nice, Cannes.

Beach property. It is where people who can afford the expense want to be, in the summer, but also in the spring and fall, when warmth also can be found on the Mediterranean — when it already has fled the France of Paris and the north.

We landed in Nice two weeks ago, and have heard good things about it, and how it is on the rise … and this week saw Monaco, the tiny principality next door to Nice … and we completed the trifecta today by driving to Cannes, best known for its film festival.

All three cities are internationally famous/glamorous. And a person could visit all three in the same day with not all that much time given over to travel.

[Read more →]

A benefit of staying pretty much in the middle of the Cote d’Azur … is the ability to visit the famous resorts of the area, up and down the coast.

Among them?

Saint Tropez, last week.

This week, Monaco.

It is a jewel of a little city-state, all 0.87-square-miles of it, with 38,000 people jammed (highest population density in the world) between the Mediterranean and the mountains, bordered on three sides by France and one by the sea.

So, we popped over today, 90 minutes from our perch in Les Issambles and, after taking the steep and winding road from the mountaintop to the the city below, we were there.

Some of the highlights.

[Read more →]

If we have (almost) learned anything in sports over the past three or four decades, it is this:

Don’t get too cozy with your professional sports heroes or your sports teams.

And that pertains particularly to the National Football League — which today committed to sending the Rams to Greater Los Angeles in time for the 2016 season.

It should not be missed by anyone that the Rams are the same franchise who did this move in reverse 21 years ago — going from SoCal to St. Louis.

Here is a guide to dealing with professional sports teams/players:

[Read more →]

So, we lived to see it. The National Football League is returning to Los Angeles.

One or two of three teams apparently will be headed for greater L.A. by the end of Wednesday

The concern now?

The NFL will contrive a way to mess this up.

[Read more →]

I have written about this in the past — how easy it is for NFL teams to expect perfection from their kickers, and then turn their backs on them if they happen to miss.

Blair Walsh could tell you about it.

The Minnesota Vikings kicker missed a 27-yard field goal with 20 seconds to play, allowing the Seattle Seahawks to win the NFC wild-card game 10-9.

For some as-it-happened commentary, check the radio broadcasts of the crucial kick here. And for a sample of the Twitter storm, look here.

Walsh apparently has been around long enough to get that kickers are allowed to cite any factors other than their own horrible-ness, after a missed clutch kick. After the game, he said it was “all his fault”.

Of course it isn’t. It never is.

[Read more →]

Much is being made about the brutal cold expected at the NFL playoffs game in Minneapolis on Sunday.

The Minnesota Vikings versus the Seattle Seahawks at the University of Minnesota — with a forecast temperature at kickoff of 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

That will make it one of the coldest games in NFL history, though the record of minus-13, for the infamous Ice Bowl of 1967, seems to be safe.

It is something of a fluke the game is being played at all. This is the second of two seasons the Vikings are playing at the University of Minnesota, which has an open-air stadium. The game required the Vikings to be good enough to get a home playoffs game, which seemed unlikely right up till the final day of the regular season and, of course, required them to do it during the 2014 or 2015 seasons.

It is so cold, many fans are expected to stay home and let their tickets go unused.

And all this chatter (of teeth, too) led me to muse about cold events I have covered as a journalist.

[Read more →]

After a seven-hour round-trip to the other side of the Rhone, and finding an apartment … we decided a restaurant dinner was a suitable reward, back on the Cote d’Azur.

Most restaurants in this summer-oriented strip are closed this month, so we went to one we knew was open — the Cafe de France in Sainte Maxime, just down the coast from where we are staying.

And we stumbled into a two-hour celebration of moneyed seniors, well-dressed, well-preserved and seemingly keen to enjoy themselves as long as they can.

[Read more →]

It is not the sort of thing you expect to see while driving along the shoreline of the Cote d’Azur, or French Riviera — a World War II landing craft marked “US 282” parked on a beach near the upscale city of Saint Raphael.

The second Allied invasion of France is not particularly well known; even as it was going on, from August 1944, it was considered far less important to the war effort than what was happening in northern France (after the Normandy invasion of June 1944) and the Eastern Front.

The whole of the invasion of southern France, known as Operation Dragoon, has been criticized by many military commentators as being unnecessary to the defeat of Germany — as well as being an effort that took away from operations in Italy and potential operations in the Balkans, which were about to become part of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Cold War.

[Read more →]

This might have been about a single store of the American fast-food chain, which is quite popular in France, the land of haute cuisine — as well as more than 1,300 McDonald’s stores.

But I think it’s more than that.

In a more working-class neighborhood of the Cote d’Azur … McDonald’s is not necessarily where you go to eat, it’s where a wide variety of people go to pass an hour or three.

[Read more →]