Never minimize the United Arab Emirates’ ability and willingness to be part of any conversation about overindulging. The country may not have invented wretched excess, but it has embraced it.

Take, for instance, the so-called “freakshake”, described in this story in The National newspaper as “basically, oversized, pimped-out milkshakes. … The bigger, the better.”

Freakshakes apparently were invented in Australia, made their way to London and now can be found in several gut-busting varieties in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Take, for instance, the Mud Pot freakshake (see above), which they will whip up for you at the Central Grounds in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel Downtown, in AD. One of the seven freakshakes they make there.

What is in the Mud Pot?

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Baseball is becoming dull, and the strikeout is to blame.

I woke up early today, with the TV still running, and while looking for the NBA playoffs I came across the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, at Wrigley Field, just as the bottom of the ninth was happening.

I decided to stay with it and see how Aroldis Chapman fared in his chance to close out the game.

He failed, the Cubs scoring three to tie, the third “driven in” by Mike Rizzo, who allowed a ball to bang off his arm with the bases loaded.

That led to nine more innings of baseball, and lots and lots of strikeouts. To the point that the game I was watching set a Major League record for most strikeouts in a game. (Which is, perhaps, the first MLB record I have seen “live”.)

Forty-eight whiffs. A four followed by an eight. 48. Shattering the previous record of 43, set in 1971 by the Angels and Athletics, who needed 20 innings to get to that number. (The Cubs and Yankees zoomed past it in the 17th.)

And it reminded me how the strikeout often is the dullest event in the game, and lots of people think baseball already is plenty dull.

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Pretty sure that when I heard about central London south of the River Thames, say, 30 years ago … it was largely dismissed as a crime-ridden area with nothing to see. No need to go. Terra Incognito, down there.

Even the locals seemed to ignore it, although the area has been part of London for years now.

The areas of Southwark and Lambeth, two major chunks of the south-of-Thames bits off the city, were almost off the grid, in terms of transport.

Even now, an area that would be served by a dozen Underground stops on the “city” (north) side of the Thames parcels out exactly five tube stops in Southwark and Lambeth — Lambeth North, Waterloo, Southwark, Borough and London Bridge.

And why are we talking about this?

Because we have just now discovered that hotels in this part of London not only tend to be cheaper, they put the tourist within walking distance of many of the city’s top destinations.

In short, if you anticipate some dry weather, Southwark and Lambeth make key parts of London walk-able.

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I was prepared to like The Book Of Mormon, the musical that deeply involves the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

The show made its debut in 2011, but only last night did I get around to seeing it, at the Prince of Wales Theater in London’s Soho district.

I have a sense of humor crude enough that much of Parker & Stone’s material in South Park, the TV show, or their two movies, delights me and very little of it offends me … but The Book Of Mormon?

Mildly but consistently offensive, arguably racist, with music that leaves no impression on the mind.

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I must have missed this.

Some time over the past year or two London has become a post-cash society.

Yes, a few holdouts can be found, mostly among immigrant-run businesses that don’t like the idea of credit cards. Such as the Chinese noodle house on Wardour Street, in Soho. A pot of tea had already arrived when we spotted the “cash only” notation on the menu, and picked up and left.

To that point, we had gone nearly 24 hours and a dozen business transactions via credit card, in London. Including for a cab ride and a couple of small drinks at a theater.

So, after the incident at the Chinese resto, 10 minutes later and two blocks north, after being seated at the Hummus Bros. Levantine Kitchen, we asked the proprietor if he accepted credit cards.

He laughed. “Of course! Nobody in London uses cash anymore!”

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That is what a person does. You go to London, you eventually make your way over to the West End and settle in at one of those grand old theaters and let someone sing and dance at you for two or three hours.

We carried out that plan perhaps too aggressively.

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I have lived in France for about 15 months now and I am sometimes asked: “How is your French coming along?”

The answer?

It ain’t.

As I told a fellow Yank, a few weeks ago: “My French is nonexistent.”

He chuckled at that. “Nonexistent. Ha.”

It would help if I were trying harder than “puzzling through French text” and “listening for key words in the conversations of others”. By, you know, taking lessons or devoting myself to study. But I prefer to take a whack at the idea of gradually absorbing the basics through osmosis.

Part of my problem with French is that it doesn’t have enough words. No. Really.

Steve Martin, the comic, once complained, tongue in cheek: “The French have a different word for everything!”

But he is wrong. The French often have the same word/sound for wildly different topics.

Take for example, this infamous French sentence: “A green worm is going toward a green glass.”

And how would the French say it?

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I settled on Al Jazira as my favorite soccer team, in my six-plus years in Abu Dhabi. In large part because the club was about 200 yards from where I lived and about 300 yards from where I worked.

A club considered one of the biggest in the nation was awfully handy to me; I could see the stadium’s lights by stepping outside.

If I happened to pass by, while they were playing, I could display my media credential and drop on in. I did that more than once.

Jazira also was pretty good. My first season in-country, the self-declared Pride of Abu Dhabi finished runner-up to the city’s other club, Al Wahda, marking Jazira’s fourth consecutive season finishing second.

In 2011, they finally broke through to win their first league title, also winning the President’s Cup.

But that was it for the Pride of Abu Dhabi for five years, chasing tradition-steeped Al Ain and free-spending Al Ahli of Dubai.

Until this weekend, when Jazira crushed little Hatta 5-0 to clinch Arabian Gulf League championship No. 2.

Finally.

I have been following, from a distance, and I was glad to see five or six familiar names in the clinching victory.

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Sometimes we forget that this part of France is not just thinly populated … it is rural. It is farmland. Vines, mostly, acres and acres of them, in every direction.

Towns are small and grew up here as places to support working in the vines. In our town, population 600, many of the garages we see are not for parking personal vehicles … they are for the storage of farm equipment needed to grow grapes as efficiently as possible.

Thus, the people here have almost a farmer’s view of weather developments. What they hope for is weather good for the growth of their crops, with special attention paid to the many things that can go wrong.

Such as freezing temperatures after the vines have begun to sprout.

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Dodgers fans certainly know about Madison Bumgarner.

He was a key performer as the San Francisco Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014, and especially in the latter, when he gave up only one run in 21 innings and won Games 1 and 5 and threw five innings of scoreless relief in Game 7.

Yes, that MadBum.

World Series MVP in 2014, 4-0 with a save in his World Series career. Who has started 270 regular-season games for the Giants, become recognized as one of the greats in the club’s long history and never taken a trip to the disabled list.

Till now.

This is not about the typical “exploding (fill in applicable joint or ligament)” suffered every day by someone who throws baseballs for a living. Instead, it was about a bad decision on a day off in Colorado.

On April 20, Bumgarner went dirt-bike riding outside Denver with a couple of relatives and, he said, after two hours of riding suffered a bad spill.

Bad as in bruised ribs and a Grade 2 separation of his left (throwing) shoulder, with a partial tear.

The Giants today confirmed the severity of the shoulder injury and said Bumgarner would not be ready to pitch until “around” the All-Star Game, which this year is on July 11. That is, he will be out nearly three months. And maybe more.

Presumably, his Giants contract contains some of the standard language about risky off-the-field activities, but the Giants do not seem at all interested in punishing him.

They have made the right decision.

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