It can happen, if you don’t have redundant systems in place.

Separated in a Metro station, a realization a few minutes later, one person with a cell phone and an address for a meeting, the other person with a key to the apartment.

And never the twain shall meet.

This is how we managed to get into this mess.

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It was 10 months ago that terrorists entered the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 people, most of them journalists, including the editor in chief. A 12th person was killed nearby.

It was a few days ago that I realized the offices of Charlie Hebdo were in the Paris arrondissement where we are staying, the 11th, and I decided to walk down and have a look at the scene of the tragedy.

It was a sobering experience because of what I knew before I arrived. If someone were to drop by, at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, he or she would have no idea of the cold-blooded murders that went on in a room above the street.

(For a fine recap, posted a week after the shootings, see this BBC piece.)

There are no markings at the scene of the murders. No plaque in a wall. Looking at the building, from across the narrow street, it is almost as if the slaughter didn’t happen.

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France is approximately the size of Texas, so it takes a while to get wherever it is you’re not.

Planning is key. Detailed, to-the-minute scenarios involving four people, a Westie and four forms of conveyance. What could go wrong?

All sorts of things. In annoying, embarrassing, silly ways.

Here are 12.

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In recent years, Paris Saint-Germain by some distance has become the most formidable soccer club in France. And now it has aspirations to win a first European continental club title.

Paris, then, ought to have been in a froth tonight, as PSG played at 10-time-European champion Real Madrid, with the winner all but guaranteed a place in the final 16 of the Champions League and likely to win Group A and gain the right to face a less-scary second-place group team in the two-leg round-of-16 pairings.

So, how did Paris react to this big game at Madrid’s Bernabeu Stadium?

From what I can tell, from central Paris … the great majority of the city’s citizens didn’t react at all.

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I am comfortable in saying I lived at least 40 years without owning a scarf. As well as never wearing one.

You grow up in Southern California, and “scarf” was a word used almost exclusively as a synonym for “eat” — with a undertone of bolting food, perhaps messily.

But now? In Paris, hardly anyone leaves home, October through May, without carrying a scarf.

Including me.

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What happens after you have been to Paris more than a few times … you no longer have the same plan of attack. The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre-Coeur … you’ve done them, and probably more than once.

Instead, you might take a look at a Paris activity you missed the first “x” number of times around, for the sake of something new — as well as avoiding the tourist hot spots, which in the mind begin to be associated with “pain and suffering”.

So, a busy day — without a museum or a famous restaurant. A different sort of Paris but no less interesting.

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Champagne is a beverage many of us will happily go out of our way to sample.

Yesterday, we went about 100 miles east, to Epernay, one of the capitals of the Champagne wine region, to taste some of the local bubbly and admire a tidy little town built by the manufacture of sparkling wine.

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The Grantland sports/pop culture website, inspired and formerly led by Bill Simmons, was shut down today by ESPN.

Here is the ESPN media release on it.

Some media reports suggested the site lost gobs of money, which is easy to believe given the number and competence of its many contributors, which could not have been inexpensive, against any obvious advertising — as well as the lack of a paywall.

From that perspective, having learned the hard way about corporate entities and their need to burnish the bottom line, ESPN pulling the plug seems like no surprise.

But I will miss the site, for several reasons.

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The bistro historically has been the backbone of the Paris dining experience. Smallish, usually unpretentious, serving traditional French food in all its glorious buttery/caloric majesty.

Some believe the bistro is in trouble, and numerous stories along these lines have been written over the past decade. Here is one from 2006. Here is another, from 2010. Here is a third, from last year, which seems to suggest the first-rate bistro still exists but requires a careful search.

Bistros seem to be doing well enough, here in the 11th arrondissement; I’d guess we could find a dozen with a quarter mile of where we are staying.

And we went to one of those tonight.

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Paris has a fine transportation system. Bus lines, the Metro, and the RER rail lines crisscross the city, significantly reducing the need for a personal car or an expensive cab.

The bus-Metro-RER troika was inadequate in one significant sense: They sent spokes out into the city, and then the suburbs, but there was no “wheel” linking them at the peripherique of the city.

That is where the Paris Tram Line 3 comes in, which we learned first-hand this week.

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