Finally saw The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie about the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers. It was an afternoon screening at the multiplex at the nearest semi-big town. And it was in English. So.

I recommend that all former newspaper journalists see the film. And most certainly those over the age of 50, for whom the “period piece” (set in 1971) might dredge up a lot of memories, back when what we did mattered. And sometimes mattered a lot.

It is a movie that made me lament the collapse of the industry, and it made me wistful for Things As They Were, but also thankful that I was in the business for the whole of my working career. We all were very, very lucky.

I am going to turn this into a list (I don’t do enough of those) … of my 10 favorite moments in the movie.

Let’s count down backward, from 10 to 1.

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I have been in the slough of despond for most of a month now.

Once the NFL’s “divisional” round of playoffs was complete, it became obvious to anyone who has been keeping track of the most basic of the league’s trends … that the New England Patriots would win yet another Super Bowl. And that is what I wrote on January 14, ahead of the conference championship games — Jacksonville at New England and Minnesota at Philadelphia.

I am even more convinced than I was then that we will get to watch the Patriots passing around the Lombardi Trophy at the end of Sunday’s game.

Which I will make a point of not staying up to watch.

It’s all good news for the Patriots.

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If you live in France and get a batch of English-language programming on your TV deal … you can watch a ton of NBA games.

There are the ESPN nights, and the TNT nights and whoever has the weekends … and it feels like I can count on an NBA doubleheader at least four nights a week, each with a format rather like “best game in EST or CST early, best game in PST or MST late”.

And by “late” we mean early, here in France, with the second game beginning around 4:30 a.m., on this side of the Atlantic, finishing at 6:30, and I have seen a lot of that second game over the past month or two, a level of NBA-watching perhaps previously unknown in my life.

Which is all introduction to the point of today’s post:

Having studied the Clippers several times over the past month, I am convinced they were not going anywhere with Blake Griffin, who was getting 35 percent of their total payroll, and I am all in on their trading him to Detroit for three players and two draft picks.

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When I decided that, oh, what the hell, I was a fan of Arsenal FC, the English Premier League club … I was concerned at being branded a front-runner.

Straddling the turn of the century, Arsenal won the Premier League three times in seven seasons, and this was when Alex Ferguson, the knighted coach of Manchester United, was still roaming the touchline.

The third of those Arsene Wenger-led Arsenal league champions, the 2003-04 club, went all 38 matches unbeaten, never done before or since, and are known, modestly, as The Invincibles. Not that I knew about it, at the time, given my generic disinterest in European club football.

However, by 2009 disinterest had morphed into a bit of interest, coinciding with a soccer-heavy, four-month stint on the sports desk of the International Herald Tribune, in Hong Kong.

In previous entries here I have mentioned crossing paths with Wenger in the press box at the Stade de France while covering a World Cup qualifier in the summer of 2009. (France versus Romania.) He was there to work in a broadcast booth, I believe.

He seemed like a decent, dignified man, tall and a bit patrician in bearing, but friendly with French journalists he recognized.

And, eventually, I just decided that I liked Wenger’s commitment to an attacking style of play, and that the club felt more like an international entity than something parochial and particularly English (like, say, Newcastle or Everton) … and that was that.

And how has that Arsenal decision turned out?

Not well, and getting not-weller.

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Another ride in the Wayback Machine, inspired by poking around the other day for the Firestone “Wheels Are Turning” television ad.

In this one, the advertising spot is fairly lame … but the product it is flogging is Just Plain Weird.

That would be the Sixfinger toy kit sold by Topper Toys and promoted heavily on TV, in the mid-1960s.

Check the video.

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I do not appreciate Roger Federer as much as the generic tennis fan should.

I know for certain that I rooted against him throughout the Aughties, mostly because I was sick of him winning everything — which is pretty much what he did for years at a time, back then.

From 2004 through 2007 Federer won 11 of the 16 Grand Slam events, finishing second in two more.

He also played a leading role in exploding what had become the quaint American expectation that one of its native sons would win a major tennis tournament every year — and sometimes more than one.

It was pretty much all Roger who turned Andy Roddick into a big-hitting also-ran, defeating him in four slam finals, from 2004 to 2009, including three Wimbledons, punctuated by the crushing 2009 final that ended 16-14 to Federer in the fifth set and maybe broke Roddick’s spirit.

That result also broke a record for “most major championships, 14”, which previously had been held by another American, Pete Sampras.

It was Federer, too, who did not see the romance of a battered Andre Agassi reaching the 2005 U.S. Open final, beating him and pretty much ending his career.

But I have come around a bit on Roger. I know; it’s quite generous of me.

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The New York Times today posted a very interesting and very alarming long-form piece on the practice of selling social media accounts.

The story suggests that 15 percent of Twitter accounts are actually “bots” — bogus accounts created to help ethically challenged entrepreneurs amass enormous lists of account holders which they can sell on to individuals to inflate artificially the number of their “followers”.

Twitter is not believed to be a creator of those for-sale bots, but the site may have as many as 48 million bogus accounts, according to The Times.

Most purchases are intended for individual use by those who crave what appears to be online popularity — or for those who want to join the ranks of “influencers” — who get paid for endorsing products to their hundreds of thousands of followers.

Until a few hours ago, I had a rarely used Twitter account.

It now has been deleted.

I want nothing to do with a company that does not appear truly interested in rooting out its millions of fake accounts.

So I quit. Even after Twitter made quitting the site not exactly easy … and even after they emailed me, wistfully, under a headline that read: “Is this goodbye?” With a following sentence: “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider?”

Oh, I’m very sure.

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No, not about a domestic dispute over a husband taking an afternoon to play a round at the country club.

The title, above, are words from a famous Firestone tires jingle from 1963.

One that was so compelling to a kid in fourth grade that more than a half-century later he can remember the whole of the tune and most of the words in what had to be one of the most effective TV commercials of its era.

Have a look/listen.

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We thought we had buried the XFL after one limp and forgettable season, in 2001.

But now it is back, a ragged zombie out of the grave, with wrestling impresario Vince McMahon planning to take another whack at the 11-on-11 game two years from now.

McMahon promises a “re-imagined” game … and I imagine it will have few obvious links to the 2001 disaster. Or it should not, at least.

What did the original XFL give us?

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Caroline Wozniacki is a veteran tennis player with lots of fans and  accomplishments.

As far as I can tell, she has always been polite, honest and modest, which we like in our athletes (and increasingly do not get).

Wozniacki is not the sort of athlete who complains about fan behavior or who snaps at journalists after a defeat. I have no recollection of her making excuses for this, that or the other. She goes out and plays.

She usually wins.

Wozniacki spent 67 weeks as women’s world No. 1, earlier in this decade. She had a bit of a dip in 2012/13 (back to that in a moment) but now is back near the top of the heap; she was the No. 2 seed at the Australian Open and ended the 2017 season ranked No. 3 in the world.

But there remains a major omission on her resume that probably should not broached as often as it is, in the context of all she has done, but there it is, and everyone paying any attention to tennis knows about it.

She has never won a major championship.

She is 0-for-the-Grand Slams.

A status she can change in Melbourne on Saturday.

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