We are doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Again. Once could have been enough, but we are giving “the Camino” another try, a year and a month since we first did it. Why? Because it’s there? A little. But mostly it is about offering some companionship to two of Leah’s dearest college friends. Devout […]

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Actually, I suppose the overnight air flight never really disappeared. It just seemed to, for those of us who do the majority of our flying inside the United States. (And it is called the red-eye because of how you look the morning after flying most of the night.) After what seemed years since I had […]

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It is the nature of sports fans to crave a connection to star athletes in some (typically obscure) way. Chelsea fans had, until today, a pretty good statistic that they could bandy about. In eight Champions League matches versus the London club, Lionel Messi had never scored. That drought ended in his ninth Champions League […]

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I was made aware today of this video, which is based on the Barcelona midfield standout Andres Iniesta showing “There is a first time for everything” by trying something new — American football. It is an advertisement for an online foreign-exchange trader known as UFX, and the notion of the elfin Iniesta (5-foot-7, maybe 130 […]

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This is not an exercise in academic rigor. I did not have someone sitting with a note pad writing down literally the first 10 facts I could recall pertaining to sports in 2017. But … it is a fairly accurate recreation of a fairly quick trip through my brain to see what stuck from the […]

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Twice, I have seen Lionel Messi play at Camp Nou. In 180 minutes of La Liga play witnessed by moi, he has scored three goals (and Luis Suarez has another) … but FC Barcelona did not win on either occasion. The first Camp Nou match for me was a 2-2 draw with Real Madrid in […]

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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 […]

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By happenstance, we are in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, a day or two ahead of what could be a momentous local decision — declaring independence from Spain. We had planned months ago to meet up with a friend here, a leading tourist destination a few hours south of the Spain-France border. We had no idea […]

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Catalonia took another step on the road to sovereign status in a referendum today. And, as we typically do in reflecting the world of sports, we make it about us. To wit: “If  Catalonia leaves Spain … what does this mean for FC Barcelona and the Spanish league and the Spanish national team?” The short […]

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Oh, for the comparatively sane salaries of American sports! The NFL gives out big contracts but rarely means it — most of the money is not guaranteed and often is not paid out. The NBA spends enormous sums on players but 1) the league has a salary cap, which taxes big-spending clubs and 2) its […]

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