They probably should give a bit more thought than usual to avoiding trouble as they travel to Champions League group stage matches in Moscow in the coming days.

One fine idea might be to hold off on consuming copious amounts of alcohol in the hours before kickoff.

Why? Beside the calories?

Because English club fans will be far from home tomorrow and Wednesday nights, first with Liverpool taking on Spartak Moscow and, a night later, with Manchester United at CSKA, another Moscow club.

And in case any of the estimated 2,000 Liverpool/United fans who are traveling to Russia were unaware of what authorities in Moscow have in mind … the head of security for the Russian Football Union warned that those who behave badly might face “a long stay in Russia.”

English and Russian fans have some recent history, going back to last summer, when they clashed twice, first in Marseille and then in Lille, at the 2016 European Championships in France.

[Read more →]

The National Football league prefers to focus all attention on what happens between the lines, even when brains are being battered.

So we can be confident that league executives took no pleasure in the confusing mess that was the players’ protest during the national anthems at 14 stadiums today.

The protests were not unexpected. They can be seen as a reaction to the inflammatory remarks Donald Trump made on Friday, when the president suggested that owners peremptorily fire players who signal that they are protesting, during the anthem.

For many in the NFL, it must have seemed as if they were under attack by the president of the United States, and they wanted to react. And it wasn’t just the players. The league sent out a press release criticizing Trump’s statements, and several club owners were on the field for the protests today.

Most players appeared to be protesting, in some way, though it is inaccurate to describe what happened as an expression of unity — as can be seen in the espn.com compilation of the actions of every team.

Some players did not take part in the protest. (The whole of the Carolina Panthers stood during the anthem, same as usual, according to ESPN’s reporter.) Some players took part with half-hearted enthusiasm, like the Kansas City Chiefs players who stood, hand over heart, but behind the bench, instead of on the sideline.

Of those who protested, it seems as if locked arms was the No. 1 attitude. But others sat on the bench. Some took a knee, a la Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49er who was the first to kneel during the anthem, a year ago. At least two Broncos stood with clenched fists raised, according to ESPN.

We are left to guess which action was considered the strongest protest.

Many fans at the stadiums booed the players, and fan opprobrium is never good — those are the people who get everyone paid.

One former New England Patriots lineman, Matt Light, said it was “the first time I’ve been ashamed to be a Patriot” and said he was sure he wasn’t the only former player to feel that way.

So, let’s assume the NFL would prefer not to have a repeat of what happened on Week 3.

Here is what the league should do, and it is a solution that already has been tested.

[Read more →]

By population, the city of San Diego ranks No. 8 in the country, with approximately 1.4 million residents.

By professional sports teams, however, San Diego now ranks perhaps No. 40 in the U.S.

It has baseball’s San Diego Padres … and we are done talking about Big Four U.S. sports teams based in one of the world’s wealthiest and most-livable cities.

Once upon a time, San Diego had an NBA team (the Clippers) and an NFL team (the Chargers), each of which abandoned the city to move to Los Angeles.

Which would seem to leave something of a void for another sports entity to step into, there in San Diego.

Like, say, a major-college athletic program and, particularly, its football team.

Which improved to 4-0 tonight with a victory at Air Force in a wind- and rain-lashed game halted for 88 minutes halfway through the second quarter because of concern about lightning strikes, in Colorado Springs.

Let’s look at what is going on with San Diego State’s football program.

[Read more →]

The exchange of insults between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un heated up this week, with the Korean dictator/president for life puzzling many in America by threatening:

“I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.”

I don’t know how Kim’s insults are translated into English, whether it is a bot or an English-speaker with a wide vocabulary.

But it turns out lots and lots of Americans had no idea what a “dotard” is. Despite it being a fine and specific English word for 600 years, give or take a century.

I’ve known for a long time what “dotard” means, perhaps mostly because I read Lord of the Rings when I was 12 and author JRR Tolkien uses the word at least twice in the third book of the masterpiece fantasy trilogy.

Here is one definition.

Dotard: noun. “a person, especially an old person, exhibiting a decline in mental faculties; a weak-minded or foolish old person”

(Pronounced “DOE-terd”)

Shakespeare apparently uses “dotard”, too. But I did not read the Bard. (Maybe Kim’s translator did.) I read Tolkien, who loved old words, especially old Anglo-Saxon words.

Here are two usages of the word from Return of the King. Even a 12-year-old could figure it out, from context.

[Read more →]

Young sports fan me, ages 9 to maybe 15, would have been very happy with how this day turned out.

My two favorite pro teams won!

Dodgers 5, Philadelphia 4, leaving them one victory shy of clinching the National League West.

The Rams 41-39 over the San Francisco 49ers, their greatest rivals, on the Thursday night game.

Young teen and pre-teen me, however, would not have been able to stay up till 5:15 a.m. (here in France) to see the Rams survive those hideous uniforms as well as some late attempts and self-destruction. The kid version of me would have been pushing his luck to see Kenley Jansen get the final four outs. That one ended about 11 p.m., on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

These two results potentially are important.

[Read more →]

And I thought it was my idea. No, really.

Someone already on the continent who is keen to see some well-known capitals of Europe that are not the usual London, Paris, Berlin, et al.

Let’s get out a map …

Hey, wait!

Budapest, Vienna and Prague are arranged more or less on a straight line of about 340 miles!

Shorter than the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco!

We can do those three in a couple of weeks, three or four days in each, before the weather in central/eastern Europe gets chilly.

And off we went!

[Read more →]

It wasn’t only because we found meals in Vienna to be expensive, compared to nearby cut-rate European capital cities Prague and Budapest, that we avoided Vienna’s restaurants for most of our stay in the Austrian capital.

Though that was much of it.

Another major factor?

A chance to binge on American-made movies in VO (version originale) showings. No subtitles. Same as everyone back home saw them at the multiplex.

Channing Tatum doing a hillbilly accent. Kevin Spacey chewing the furniture. Samuel L. Jackson dropping Eff Bombs.

All in their own voices!

If you like movies at all, and live outside the states, A place called Artis International, in Vienna, will exert a magnetic pull on you.

And once we found the place, during a driving rainstorm a few days ago, we kept returning.

To the point of seeing four feature films in three days. Right there around the corner of an alley in Vienna’s Innere Stadt.

[Read more →]

A canal separates the monument-rich “inner city” of old Vienna, Austria, from the newer neighborhoods to the east.

Behind those housing districts is a sprawling park named the Augarten, where citizens and tourists can frolic or exercise or relax.

However, the Augarten has two squat, ugly towers that look out of place. In fact, they are — ugly and out of place.

Each of the buildings is an imposing mass of reinforced concrete, and each was designed, in the latter years of World War II, to have two functions: 1) As gunnery strongholds to shoot Allied planes out of the air and 2) as a bomb shelter for Vienna’s civilians.

Right there next to the enormous park are two “flak towers”, mute reminders that Austria fought on the side of Nazi Germany in World War II and, actually, was a constituent part of the German “Reich” — having been annexed to the rest of Germany in 1938, a year before the Second World War began.

[Read more →]

Living in France, one comes to appreciate the daily niceties, at least in the country’s small towns.

It is considered declasse’, bordering on overtly rude, to pass someone — anyone — in the street without saying hello.

The encounter can be with young or old or snarky teen, and still social conventions call for a hearty “bonjour!”

And if you are introduced to that person, you must immediately announce enchante’! (which literally means “enchanted” but stands for “nice to meet you”).

And if you subsequently meet up with a person to whom you already have been introduced, you are pretty much obliged to do the three (in the south) bisous (air kisses). Left, right, left.

In the Slavic/Magyar/German world we have dwelt in for nearly two weeks … Can we maybe get a nod of recognition that we exist?

[Read more →]

Not making this up. The three words in the headline are an actual bit of explanation for an item entitled “Tewa’s cheesecake” on the menu of the comfy bio-bistro where we had dinner, in Vienna.

It reinforced what I have been learning, here in Austria:

I may be able to conjugate common verbs and translate oft-used nouns, but when it comes to German-only menus … I am in deep trouble.

Kokosblutenzuckerflocken und Beerenmus is a good example of a couple of words I never learned from Herr Klenner.

And what does that mouthful of bistro dessert translate to?

[Read more →]