Agent Palmer

Over the past decade or so, I’ve recapped most Tours due France. I’ve watched all of them, but somehow it has only recently become an annual thing.

I also watch every Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and sometimes I write about them. As a spectator, both Tours offer excitement, and for me, it’s the joy of experiencing two Tours per year, which I’m all for.

It’s that time of year when I wake up with my coffee and watch the best cyclists in the world tackle the most prestigious race in the world, the Tour de France.

The 112th edition of the Tour had more than its share of crashes, heartbreak, and as much triumph as is usually had over the three-week race.

Everything’s coming up Earnhardt, and for Dale Jr, that’s great. For NASCAR, it may be a different story.

Dale Earnhardt Jr, AKA Dale Jr, is featured heavily in what was Amazon Prime’s summer coverage of races in June. He was prominent in advertisements and as a featured commentator for those races. He’s also featured in a new IHOP commercial. And a new Amazon Prime docu-series about his Dad, recently released to acclaim.

I enjoy baseball, and I enjoy spy and espionage books, films and series. It would seem, then, that The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was bound to not only interest me, but intrigue and entertain me as well. I would argue that sociologists and psychologists would also enjoy this book, as the curious case of Moe Berg is more than what it seems.

Despite the research completed here by author Nicholas Dawidoff and other books written about him, the constant in this book is what we don’t know.

Soccer Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper was first published in 1994 with the subtitle “How the world’s most popular sport starts and fuels revolutions and keeps dictators in power.” I recently read the updated 2006 version, but since a lot has happened in those intervening years, like for example a World Cup in Qatar, this book is just exhibit A. This book is about Simon’s research by being boots on the ground in places like Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany,…