We are doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

Again.

Once could have been enough, but we are giving “the Camino” another try, a year and a month since we first did it.

Why? Because it’s there? A little.

But mostly it is about offering some companionship to two of Leah’s dearest college friends. Devout Roman Catholics, they have hankered to walk the Camino for years and years, and here they are, ready to go.

One of them had never been in Europe till they landed in Paris yesterday. The other had not been for 31 years. They are keen to see some sights — and take some walks — and their enthusiasm is infectious.

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Many of us have strong opinions on X percent of the books we read, perhaps evenly divided between “loved” and “hated”.

Several of those in the latter category will tend to come from English classes in high school or college. Assigned reading for our greater edification. Books considered classics, though we may often wonder why.

Apparently, we are not alone.

GQ, the magazine once known as Gentlemen’s Quarterly, is a mostly harmless, occasionally edifying magazine (a Pulitzer this year!) that originally set out to make better dressers out of men.

(And goodness knows many of us could use some fashion advice — though we almost certainly are not regular readers of the magazine.)

But back to books: GQ editors and writers in the April edition identified 20* books that appear in this or that “canon” of great literature.

The contributors to the story beg to differ, with various well-known books, explaining why we do not need to read them and suggesting a more worthwhile alternative. (This is by no means an original idea; lists of “why do we have to read that?” have been going around for decades.)

Among the books GQ believes can be avoided are A Farewell to Arms, Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catch-22 and Lord of the Rings.

And what do lists like this do?

Create controversy and stimulate debate. Maybe even sell a few more copies of GQ.

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Where to begin?

Don Markham.

Rebel, loner, iconoclast. Admired, loved, loathed.

One of the great football minds to stride across the sport’s stage in the history of Inland Empire prep football, as well as one of the most polarizing personalities.

Markham died at age 78 yesterday, and anyone who saw his teams play will remember him.

First, some links.

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I don’t spend a lot of time watching the NBA’s Toronto Raptors. For the longest time they were reliably awful, then they were good in the regular season before tending to run into LeBron James, who tended to run them over.

Like this season, when James and the Cleveland Cavaliers swept the Raptors in the second round of the playoffs. Crushed them, actually.

So, just two days after Dwane Casey got a coach-of-the-year award for leading the Raptors to a team-record 59 regular-season victories and the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference … the Raptors fired him on Friday.

And I had to look at that story a little more closely.

Turns out, firing Dwane Casey apparently was very much like shooting Old Yeller in the sappy Disney film of the same name. That is, if we take the general manager and Raptors players at their word.

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David Price is a left-handed pitcher and former Cy Young Award winner who is in Year 3 of a $215 million contract with the Boston Red Sox.

Unfortunately, he cannot pitch at the moment, due to pain in his left wrist, and when he had a doctor look at it, the doc had an interesting diagnosis:

Price is suffering from carpal-tunnel syndrome, which leads to pain in the wrist, often quite serious pain, for those who come down with it. And who are those people?

Often, people who use keyboards for their jobs.

Or people who play a lot of video games, which call for heavy use of wrists and fingers and thumbs.

Price, turns out, spends hours and hours and hours playing video games.

However, he said he does not ascribe his carpal tunnel to all that time playing video games — and in particular one named Fortnite — but for the sake of appearances he said he will give up playing his video games in the clubhouse.

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Sports injuries have become a “thing”. Seemingly not a day goes by without some fairly prominent athlete going down with a prominent injury.

I remember when none of us were quite sure what an oblique was, but straining/tearing it would put a guy on the shelf for weeks.

Those were the good old days.

Now we read about issues like thoracic outlet syndrome and grapple with something called CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) that destroys the brain of some athletes.

As time goes by, I find myself wondering if playing professional sports is worth the inevitable injuries. Talking any team sport.

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Not many strong opinions here about the game of golf.

I do wonder why so many people eagerly spend so much time and money playing a soul-crushing game. But some of us are Los Angeles Chargers fans, too.

What I do object to is the Masters tournament — “A tradition like no other” — being won by guys hardly anyone wants to see win.

Such as Patrick Reed, champion at Augusta National yesterday.

Who was the ideal winner — aside from his rampant unpopularity among fans, galleries, fellow players and college teammates.

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Another benefit of waking up at 4 a.m. in France.

West Coast baseball is just getting started!

And I stumbled on to the start of the Los Angeles Angels home opener, versus the Cleveland Indians — also known as “Shohei Ohtani’s first game in Anaheim Stadium.”

And the Japanese Babe Ruth acquitted himself well, slugging a home run in his first at-bat and adding two more base hits in the Angels’ 13-2 rout of the Indians, a game Ohtani spent as the designated hitter, just a few days after he was the Angels’ starting pitcher in a victory.

It was about halfway through the game that the TV crew produced a copy of what is purported to be Ohtani’s high school hopes/plans for his future, from age 18 through age 42.

It makes for fascinating reading and demonstrates how ambitious is the Angels’ 23-year-old pitcher/hitter.

First, the list:

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The Guardian, an English newspaper, is amused by the concept of ballpark food. England having nothing quite like it — baseball is just about nonexistent there, so the idea of baseball food … not going to happen in their daily lives.

It doesn’t mean the writers and photographers and editors aren’t fascinated/horrified by some of the more over-the-top creations that ballclubs and their concessionaires (Aramark, often) come up with on an annual basis.

Which leads to photo galleries like this one — which this year carries the headline: “Here comes the meat and cheese Armageddon: MLB stadium foods 2018”.

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The Los Angeles Angels have under contract the consensus “best player in baseball”, one Michael Nelson Trout.

For all the won-loss good it has done the club — which has not won a postseason game during Mike Trout’s six full seasons.

It appears that one great player, surrounded by mediocrity (or worse), is unlikely to drag a team to the playoffs, which has been the case in five of Trout’s six seasons.

The Angels are sensitive to the charge that they are “wasting Mike Trout’s prime” by not getting competent players around him, potentially making him the supercharged version of Ernie Banks, a Hall of Famer who played exclusively for the Chicago Cubs and, like Trout, was twice voted league MVP but never participated in a postseason game.

Trout’s chances, and the Angels’, of getting back to the playoffs pivot on two key club decisions, neither of which looks like a winning strategy just now.

1) Continuing to play the once-great Albert Pujols, 38, whose “wins above replacement” (WAR) number last season was minus-1.8, presumably a factor in prompting the stat-wonk website fivethirtyeight.com to declare him “the worst player in baseball.”

2) Signing “Japanese Babe Ruth” Shohei Ohtani and embarking on reinventing how baseball in the majors is played to allow the 23-year-old rookie to pitch every sixth game (in a six-man rotation) but also to let him serve as designated hitter for two or three games a week, when he is not pitching. Ohtani’s at-bats push Pujols back onto the field, at first base, where the creaky veteran’s lack of mobility will be on full display.

Those two decisions appear to suggest the Angels have a competitive death wish: They act as if they want to win, talk about it, bring in some solid veterans, make a high-visibility signing — but how is pandering to a rookie and hanging on to a faded veteran making them better?

The problems are straightforward.

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