I have become … oh, not obsessed but definitely interested … in the notion of saying hello to strangers. As the French do.

On our most recent trip to California, I tried out the French method, in English, to people I encountered while walking. “Good morning!”

It met with some success, suggesting that suburban Americans are perhaps still more inclined to politeness, in random interpersonal exchanges, than we might think.

In September, we visited Prague, Budapest and Vienna, and I remarked on the social distance I felt. People were not saying “good morning”. Not, as far as we could tell, and I for sure would have noticed in Vienna thanks to my rudimentary German.

London is another city where saying hello is met with suspicion, as this satirical item from BBC Two’s The Mash Report points out.

The basis of the not-real-but-could-be story is that saying “hello” is a regional thing, in England.

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Most of us who have lost most of our hair … we’re pretty much the last to know. Or the last to accept it.

“I’ve got plenty of hair over here. I can just stretch it across …”

No, really, you cannot. And when you reach the point where you are desperately trying to make hair from the sides of your head cover the crown (looking at you, Mr. President) … it’s time to give it up.

But we don’t give up easily, do we? If we can deny it … maybe the erosion of hair will stop.

And as an example I present to you a Russian conductor, who really ought to know how sad his comb-over looks, particularly when he is sweating at the podium — and he seems to be sweating by about the 10-minute mark of any performance.

Let’s find some proof of that.

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(Above: A statue to a bullfighter, in Seville.)

Passing references have been made on this site to our tour of the Iberian Peninsula.

Normally, more of that would have appeared here, as we went along, but the Dodgers were in a seven-game World Series — which vied for attention on this blog — originally intended to be oriented toward journalism and, particularly, sports journalism.

The morning after crossing back into France, on the 18th and final day of the trip, seems like a good time to review the long drive — my longest road trip since driving from Long Beach to Washington D.C. (and back) just the other day — in August 1975.

This one covered right around 2,260 kilometers in a near circuit of Iberia and into areas old to history but new to most of us.

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Did the usual thing. Asleep around midnight Central European time, “called” to wake up around 4 a.m., and this time around I saw the final innings of Game 7 of the 2017 World Series.

Won, sigh, by the Houston Astros.

It was the bottom of the eighth when I checked in from a hotel room in Barcelona, and already 5-1, and the Astros’ Charlie Morton, a 33-year-old journeyman pitcher who chose the 2017 World Series to have The Time of His Life, was pitching well again. And I certainly could not have been the only Los Angeles Dodgers fan with a sense that the team was not going to score four runs before making six outs. They seemed exhausted. Spent. Beaten.

It ended 5-1, with Morton retiring the final 11 batters he faced, and it the Astros celebrated.

How will this World Series be remembered? Beyond Who Won and Who Lost?

For two factors, both which broke in favor of the Astros.

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I remember being in second or third grade, at First Lutheran School in Long Beach, California, and Mrs. Bolton, our stern and 50-ish teacher asking, on October 31, “What day is this?”

Lots of hands were raised, including mine, no doubt (I loved to be called on) and someone was picked and triumphantly blurted: “Halloween!”

Mrs. Bolton seemed disappointed and said, “No, that’s not it. Think. What day is it today?”

And after a pause as it sunk in that Halloween was not the correct answer, a kid raised his hand, was called upon and said timorously … “Tuesday?”

Mrs. Bolton said, “No, that is not it.”

And someone else said something random like, “the day after Monday?”

And, exasperated, Mrs. Bolton said, “It’s Reformation Day!”

Her feeling was that every child at a Lutheran school should know when Reformation Day was, and following our failure to give the answer she was looking for … she again went over the history of it, explaining why it mattered … why it was more important, even, than Halloween and trick-or-treating.
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I can’t adequately explain how this happened.

A couple of months ago, we finalized a commitment to an 18-day trip to and through Spain and Portugal.

Not a crazy idea, considering we are already close to the former, which is attached to the latter. Also, not crazy considering that 1) we have spent little time in Spain, aside from Barcelona, 2) had never been to Portugal at all and 3) a good time to visit both countries is … October.

But the plan left one major event not at all considered.

The World Series.

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I woke at 5 a.m., in Portugal, and instead of the Dodgers and Astros being done for the evening, back there in Central Daylight Time USA, the teams were tied at 12-12 going into the top of the 10th.

Perfect timing for my mental energy — explained and celebrated in yesterday’s post — to push the Dodgers over the top in Game 5 of the World Series.

Alas, my deeply held assumption that I could aid the Blue Crew in their time of need was dashed.

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“Juju” is a noun with two definitions, according to Merriam-Webster.

1: a fetish, charm, or amulet of West African peoples

2: the magic attributed to or associated with juju

I do not have a fetish, charm or amulet, but like many sports fans, I have a sneaking feeling that I can influence, by my attentions and actions, at a distance, the outcome involving “my” teams.

The Dodgers in the World Series, for instance.

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The Dodgers can’t have expected Yu Darvish to throttle the Houston Astros in Game 3 of the World Series.

Well, maybe they did, given his solid performances in his first two outings of the postseason. But Yu has been fairly consistently inconsistent for the past two seasons — or since returning from more than a year off following Tommy John elbow surgery in March of 2015.

And, bang, there he went, up in flames, gone in the second inning of a 5-3 Dodgers defeat tonight that puts them in a 2-1 hole in the 2017 World Series.

There were signs of a possible conflagration with Yu on the mound.

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As the capital city of Portugal, Lisbon was one of the world’s most important cities in the early days of the Age of Discovery.

Portugal was, by almost a century, the first European nation to seek out trade and conquest in areas previously unfamiliar to the rest of Europe. In particular, in sub-Saharan Africa, India and the area that now comprises Malaysia and Indonesia. The Portuguese even got to Japan, where they set up a trading post, and China, where they planted themselves in Macao.

While the rest of western Europe was mired in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, little Portugal took advantage of its window on the Atlantic to send out explorers in the early 1400s under the aegis of Henry the Navigator.

It led to an empire that may not have quite matched Britain’s subsequent (by 300 years) empire upon which “the sun never set”, but Portugal’s elite, anyway, was enriched by its colonies, from Brazil to Malacca.

The country held colonies for nearly 600 years (as recently as 50 years ago, Portugal still held the sprawling African countries of Angola and Mozambique), but was not benevolent.

(Portugal may have been the least effective and most repressive of all European colonial powers. As recently as 50 years ago, the little country still held, under the dictator Salazar, the sprawling African countries of Angola and Mozambique.)

Lisbon is the repository of the history of empire, which today seems scarcely believable, given the small size of Portugal’s country and population of about 11 million.

Today, most tourists come to Portugal from the north of Europe, seeking sun and sea and inexpensive goods and services from what is now one of the least-wealthy countries in the European Union, west of the Balkans.

To move around in Lisbon, which is a surprisingly compact city, is to be reminded of empire, as well as one other epochal event.

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