How quaint. A phone book, left in our mailbox here in the south of France.

I thought they had gone the way of the afternoon newspaper. Curiosities remembered by old people. “Back in my day …”

But there it was, the pages jaunes bit of it, that is. The yellow pages. Which perhaps remains useful and profitable, after the long-ago death of the (individual person) white pages.

(Remember when you lived in the big city and the annual phone book was at least as thick and heavy as several volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica? Often the youngest child, was boosted to meat-stabbing height at the dinner table by sitting on the glorious compendium of digits.)

So, I was so curious about the pages jaunes that I flipped through it, and discovered a book fighting to remain relevant and not doing a bad job of it.

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I have been thinking about the Dodgers this week signing left-hander Rich Hill, who will be 37 ahead of the 2017 season, to a three-year, $48 million contract.

I endorsed the decision. The Dodgers need a strong No. 2 and the Rich Hill baseball saw the past year-and-change looks like he can handle the job.

But I cannot get out of my head a couple of points made by the Los Angeles Times reporter who attended the Dodgers press conference announcing Hill’s new contract.

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A compelling article from the Columbia Journalism Review is making the rounds in print journalism, and the whole of it rings true:

In a piece entitled “Print is dead. Long live print.” … the author suggests newspapers have no future online. Never have. Never will.

Chasing hits is pointless and profitless and newspapers should instead focus on their print product, which remains the source of the overwhelming portion of their revenue.

That, if I may be so bold, is the essence of the CJR piece written by Michael Rosenwald.

It questions … and nearly mocks … print journalism for chasing the online chimera, a process that can be summed up in this damning paragraph:

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The sappiest and silliest expression of eternal affection in Paris over the past decade has been the “love lock”.

What whispers “be mine” quite as beguilingly as a big, ugly, heavy brass padlock attached to a bridge in Paris? And left behind to become an eyesore as it begins to rust away?

But this has been a “thing” in Paris for several years now, and it has become a structural problem for certain bridges as well as a form of visual pollution, and two years ago calls were made to ban the practice.

Sixty-five tons of locks have been removed from Paris bridges over the past year-and-a-half, since it was decided that the extra weight of all those locks were causing structural damage.

And now the city has some ideas about finding a significant way to dispose of all that cold medal.

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Can’t say the Dodgers didn’t learn a thing or three during the 2016 season.

No, Clayton Kershaw cannot pitch every every fourth day, let alone every third, despite how the Dodgers used him in the playoffs this fall. He’s the planet’s best, but he’s not quite a machine.

Meanwhile, Scott Kazmir is not a No. 2 starter, despite what the Dodgers were hoping last spring. Not for a team with championship aspirations. Maybe the Dodgers thought if they wished really hard it might come true — after Zack Greinke, one of the best No. 2s in modern history in 2015, signed with Arizona last winter.

The upshot is, ahead of the 2017 season, the club have signed the man who probably was the best available free agent, and they knew where to find him. On their postseason roster.

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I feel confident in saying I am as big a soccer fan as anyone in my age cohort who was born and raised in the United States.

Came to the game late, got involved as a self-taught AYSO coach, volunteered to cover the U.S. national team, saw Paul Caligiuri’s Shot Heard Round the World, went on a 12-year ride with the USMNT and covered four World Cups.

Later, came six-plus years in the UAE, which is all about football (English, Spanish, Emirati or otherwise), in which I saw (over my shoulder at the office) three or four or five Premier League matches per week and managed to make a pilgrimage to Camp Nou to see Barca and Real Madrid finish 2-2 with Messi and Ronaldo scoring all the goals.

As soon as we got TV in the south of France, I paid for the package that would give me the English Premier League, which I can (and do) watch for six or seven hours a pop on Saturdays and three or four more on Sundays.

Even given all that, I still feel like soccer is a flawed game, and that flaw is right out there for everyone to see.

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Pretty much had to happen.

Someone is selling a hipster nativity scene. Have a look.

For $129.99 a San Diego-based company named Modern Nativity will sell you their take on a hipster update of the birth of Jesus.

It has gotten Modern Nativity a lot of attention in the media. Including the San Diego Union Tribune asking: “Is this Modern Nativity scene trolling Christmas or hipsters?”

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It has been out only a few days, but the quirky director Wes Anderson is getting rave reviews for his latest piece of work.

It is an uplifting and very Wes Anderson commercial set on a train and starring Adrien Brody as Conductor Ralph, three minutes and 52 seconds in length, for the Swedish clothing chain H&M.

Some of the reviews.

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This is one of those things that seems unworkable and maybe a bit crazy … right until you step in a pile of poo left behind by someone’s dog.

The mayor of Beziers, the biggest city in this part of the Languedoc, wants to collect DNA samples from the city’s dogs.

Why?

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I always have had a fondness for professional athletes who were good at what they did despite having something less than the ideal physique.

Terry Forster, a Los Angeles Dodgers reliever circa 1980, was one of them. He knew he was on the “stout” end of the size spectrum and famously said of his weight struggles: “A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”

Edgar Martinez was another one of those guys who was never mistaken for a Greek god. He looked old even when he was young, and he was a bit lumpy.

All he did was spray hits around Major League Baseball stadiums, finishing with a .312 career batting average and a top-20 all-time on-base percentage of 41.8, thanks to his plate discipline — 1,283 walks against 1,202 strikeouts.

He was enough of an offensive force that he is on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot for the eighth year in succession, and again, the electorate from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America will grapple with this difficult question:

Does a player who spent the large majority of his career as a designated hitter (DH) deserve to be in the Hall along with players who actually played in the field?

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