Tagline: To smoke is to be a slave of tobacco.

It’s clear that who ever was responsible for this anti-smoking ad for teens in France was in search of shock value. The article from the telegraph says it shocked France, but I doubt that. It’s definitely in poor taste and has a lame sexual innuendo but I believe people here would just do their Gallic shrug and unexcitedly say, “Pffff.” I’m sure these anti-smoking ads will not in the slightest deter teens from smoking, in any case.

Here’s an excerpt from the telegraph:

The adverts, presented earlier this week, show an older man in a suit pushing down on the head of a teenager with a cigarette in her mouth, in a position that suggests oral sex. Another version of the advert shows a teenage boy in a similar position. The accompanying slogan reads: “Smoking means being a slave to tobacco”.

“The campaign trivialises sexual abuse – worse, it implies guilt on the part of the abused,” read one angry comment on the website of “Droits des Non-Fumeurs” (“Non-smokers’ Rights), the organisation behind the campaign.

Droits des Non-Fumeurs said the posters showed neither rape nor abuse, but were meant to shock.
The adverts, which will be published in newspapers and bars, are designed to target young people in France, who are beginning to smoke in increasing numbers despite a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants.

Read the full article

HEE. Doesn’t everyone already KNOW he’s short? Anyway.

From the telegraph:

Twenty short people were ordered to stand behind French President Nicolas Sarkozy to make him look taller while delivering a televised speech.

They were bused in after being “vetted” by aides of the French President who made sure none were more than his own height of 5ft 5ins.

The extraordinary scene unfolded at the Faurecia motor technology plant in Caligny, south of Caen, in Normandy, last Thursday.

Despite Mr Sarkozy’s lack of inches, he looked far more statuesque than usual as he posed in front of the group of white-coated technicians on a specially erected stage.

In a broadcast on French television on Monday, a woman researcher admitted on camera that she had been chosen because of her small size.

Asked by the TV journalist Jean-Philippe Schaller if it was necessary for her to be no taller than the President’s 5ft 5ins – a height which rises to around 5ft 7ins thanks to his stacked heels – she replied: “There you have it.”

Pictures were then shown of the 20 workers on board a coach which brought them in from other parts of the three-mile-square Faurecia site.

All admitted that they were among the smallest members of the 1,400-strong Faurecia workforce, and had been selected to replace the usual workers in the unit where Mr Sarkozy made his speech about the car industry.

Mr Sarkozy, who is notoriously…

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From AP:

Paris’ Picasso Museum is closing its doors for renovations, spiriting away its masterpieces under high security to government warehouses for more than two years while seeking to expand the much-visited but cramped site.

The museum will be free to all visitors Sunday, the last day before the work begins.

It will stop lending out Picasso artworks during the overhaul, which will begin with experts updating, computerizing and restoring the inventory, museum director Anne Baldassari said Saturday.

The museum, in a baroque mansion in Paris’ Marais district, opened in 1985, and it traces the Spanish-born artist’s prolific career. Picasso died in 1973.

Renovation of the 3,000-square-meter (32,000-square-foot) space will begin early next year. It is expected to last two years and cost euro20 million, the museum said in a statement.

“It needs modernizing,” Baldassari said, citing electrical problems and the need to make it more accessible to people with reduced mobility.

She also wants to boost attendance — currently at about half a million people a year — and attract more young people by expanding exhibition space and adding halls for student activities.

While the museum has about 5,000 pieces in stock, it only displays 250-300 at a time, she said. “We can’t continue like this,” she said.

To guard against theft of the museum’s riches during the renovation, the artworks will be packaged and shipped, under tight security, to storerooms managed by the national museum authority, Baldassari said. The entire process is very “locked-up and watched by police,” she said on France-Info radio, declining to give further details.

Picasso’s paintings, sculptures and sketches are among the world’s most coveted artworks and are often targeted by thieves.

The museum will continue to host education and cultural events related to the Picasso collection at other sites while the renovation is done.

From the guardian:

“So Alton Towers has banned embarrassingly titchy swimming trunks at its water park. But spare a thought for France, where the opposite is true: local authorities regularly force men to ditch their Bermudas and parade in skin-tight budgie-smugglers for the greater public good.

One Paris-based Irish journalist recalls how he attempted some early-morning back-stroke in a pair of standard Marks & Spencer navy swim shorts that came “about halfway down my thighs”. As he lowered himself into the shallow end, the pool attendant screamed that…”

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From wired:

“1693: Champagne is said to have been invented on this day by Dom Pierre Pérignon, a French monk. It almost certainly isn’t true.

Because Dom Pérignon lived at the Benedictine abbey in Hautvillers at the time of his “invention,” the village in France’s Champagne region, not far from Èpernay, is generally regarded as the birthplace of the bubbly.

But like many historical claims, the night they invented champagne appears more …”

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Related: The Making of French Champagne, Radioactive French Champagne

From stereogum:

“Turns out there’s still hope of getting paychecks in indie rock, just be cool with getting low-balled by French heads of state. The Wesleyan boys are seeking damages for President Sarkozy using “Kids” as his campaign soundtrack and in two web videos without just compensation. The administration did pay 53 euros to license the track, but MGMT’s lawyer claims that isn’t enough to cover the additional internet usage. Sarkozy’s counter offer: a sizable 1 (i.e. one) euro. Le you-got-served, MGMT. Actually, Sarkozy got served. With a lawsuit. Because that is statutory rape of his artist-fee obligations. (I’m a civil law expert, don’t worry about it.) Worth noting: The French government is in the midst of pushing through extensive anti-piracy and file-sharing legislation (i.e. vague irony). Sorry Sarkozy, MGMT are a very sexy duo who have international counsel for real. And all this after MGMT taught Paris the meaning of Thanksgiving. More at BBC.”

I wonder if Jeff Koons, the artist whose sculptures are displayed at the Château de Versailles (until Dec 14), is responsible for those condom ads.

Versailles Exhibition (slideshow and article at nyt)

From time:

“Perhaps nothing symbolized the American team’s efforts at the Bocuse d’Or better than its beef cheeks. At the world’s premier chef’s competition, which ended on Jan. 28 in Lyons, France, the Estonians transformed the cheeks — a required ingredient this year — into pot-au-feu, the Brazilians stuffed potatoes with them, and the Malaysians spiced them up into rendang. But the U.S. competitors, 28-year-old Timothy Hollingsworth and his assistant, Adina Guest, braised the meat until it was silky, set it on a tiny round of baby turnip, and topped it with a floret of broccolini. Smuggled through customs, the vegetables came straight from the garden of the famed French Laundry restaurant in Napa, California, where the two chefs work, and gave the presentation a delicious, locally grown flavor that could only be American. Sadly, in a context where extravagance and adherence to the rules of classical cooking take precedence, that might have been part of the problem.

In fact, for the young chefs who compete in the contest — founded by revered French chef Paul Bocuse — navigating between the desire to demonstrate the glories of their national cuisine (to say nothing of their own creativity) and the wish to please a jury that tends to favor the classic French style is precisely the challenge. “If you’re playing soccer, you can’t use your hands,” says Antonio Saura, a Spanish filmmaker whose 2007 documentary El Pollo, el Pez, y el Cangrejo Real featured the competition. “The Bocuse is the same way: you have to play by their rules.”

Those rules are … ” continue reading

From kotaku:

“Just as researchers in Scotland say Brain Age works, researchers in France say it doesn’t. According to data from University of Rennes, Brittany, Brain Age failed to show any significant jump in memory.

What’s more, the game apparently made memory worse.

The research had a sample of ten year-old children split into four groups: The first two groups did a seven-week DS memory course, the third group did puzzles with pencil and paper, while the fourth group just went to school as regular. Before and after started each program, the groups did logic tests.

The results? The DS control group did not do significantly better — save for a 19 percent increase in math. (However, the pencil-and-paper group also had the same increase in math, and the just-go-to-school group had a 18 percent increase in math.) However, the pencil-and-paper group showed a 33 percent increase in memorization, while the DS groups did 17 percent worse. The kid who just went to school showed a 20 percent increase.

According to Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes, “The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it’s fine, but it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test… There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants.”

Professor Lieury is publishing his findings in a new book, Stimulate Your Neurones, which is out this month.”

From smh.com.au:

“Frenchman Lluis Colet broke the world record for the longest speech after rambling nonstop for 124 hours about Spanish painter Salvador Dali, Catalan culture and other topics.

Colet had set the record once before in 2004 when he spoke for 48 straight hours.” [source]

From iht:

“When the sommelier in the overpriced Paris restaurant started to refill the glass without asking, François Simon stopped his hand in midair before a drop could fall.

The spiced chicken with pine nuts and golden raisins filled the dinner plate, but was…” continue reading

From france24.com:

“America’s most famous French bookstore will close its doors this year after 73 years in business, unable to bear a staggering rent increase in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Outside the Librairie de France, hordes of tourists take pictures of the Center, its ice-skating rink and tree, but inside one of the first retail tenants, the shelves are slowly emptied of books.

The reason for closing this venerable institution located at one of America’s most cherished retail addresses is a simple, albeit familiar one: the rent, which is due in September, is rising, from 360,000 dollars to a million dollars per year.

Online book sales at bargain prices and declining interest in foreign-language books have also affected the landmark Fifth Avenue business.

And in another sign of the times, most shoppers these days come to the area in search of clothes, cosmetics or electronics.

“Of course, we sell for 20 dollars a book that costs five euros (seven dollars) in Paris, but there are also shipping fees for online orders,” says Emmanuel Molho, who manages the family-run bookstore with his two children.

“No, what changed is the whole bookstore culture and the Rockefeller Center has become no more than just a commercial center…”

tags: france, french, sad, french bookstore, new york

Molho’s father, Isaac, immigrated to the United States in 1928 after he attended a French school in Athens and met officials from major French publishing house Hachette in Paris.

Isaac Molho opened his bookstore in 1935 at the invitation of the Rockefeller family, who wanted Europeans to occupy retail space in the extraordinary new building complex developed by the oil tycoon and real estate magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr.

During World War II, the bookstore also ran a publishing house, La Maison Francaise, that published authors fleeing Nazism such as Andre Maurois, Jules Romains and “The Little Prince” writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

“My uncle would print the books,” Emmanuel Molho told AFP. The mock-ups were imitations of the “collection blanche,” or white collection of French publishing giant Gallimard.

“The 1960s were the most glorious years. French was in fashion, we had 50 employees and we imported two tonnes of books every week.”

People came here to talk literature and buy books, Molho recalled. “The clients were American Francophiles, visiting Latin American francophones. They stayed to chat. At the time, we imported at least 3,000 copies of the latest Goncourt (French literature) prize winner. Today, it’s a few dozen at most.”

In 1993, Molho closed another French bookstore he maintained in southern Manhattan, and a year later he shuttered another one in Los Angeles.

France, he said, gave him the cold shoulder despite the letters he sent to French culture minister Christine Albanel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who dined at Rockefeller Center in September but did not stop by the bookstore.

On top of the declining popularity of French-language books, the coup de grace came with staggering rent hikes. In 1980, half of the store’s well-established space went to French cosmetics company L’Occitane.

Today, a few treasures can still be found in the basement: books that are out of print, old Michelin tour guides or women’s fashion pages published in Paris in the 1920s.

Molho plans to retire in New York or perhaps take up piano, delegating to his daughter the task of taking the family business online.” Link

tags: france, french, sad, french bookstore, new york

Unusual sales are taking place in Strasbourg. Read about it here. (in French)

From torrentfreak:

“French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge.

Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF), an umbrella group for several record labels in France, claims that the four file-sharing applications facilitate mass copyright infringement. Although the companies (and applications) themselves have nothing to do with copyright infringement, SPPF believes it has a strong case.

The record labels argue that the Vuze and the others are knowingly distributing software with the purpose to permit unauthorized access to copyrighted works. In essence they are saying that everything, or every application which allows a user to share files, will be indeed used for illegal purposes. In contrast, in the US, companies that don’t encourage their users to commit copyright infringement with their applications, are not acting illegally.

SPPF had already sued the various companies and organizations last year, but until now it has been unclear whether the US based companies behind the applications could be prosecuted under French law. A French court has now ruled that this is indeed possible, which means that they can proceed to court.

Recent French legislation which inspired the labels to go after the P2P companies, suggests that all P2P applications must have a feature to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. The clients that are sued by SPPF obviously don’t have such a feature. In fact, it is questionable whether it would be technically possible to develop such a filter. Nevertheless, SPPF demands it, and is claiming millions of dollars in damages for lost revenue.

Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa stated in a response to TorrentFreak, “While we appreciate the intent of the new French law, we believe SPPF’s complaint is misguided. Vuze is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content using new technology. In that sense, our interests are aligned with the interests of all content owners, including SPPF’s members, against piracy.”

“We are disappointed that SPPF has taken this approach, given that our business is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content,” BianRosa added. “SPPF’s claims against Vuze are simply wrong. The Vuze business complies fully with both French and American law. The recent ruling of the French Court was solely on a jurisdictional issue, not on any merits, and we believe it is in error.”

Interestingly, SPPF is also going after Sourceforge, the open source development website, because it hosts the P2P application Shareaza. Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially …” Read the full article

From iht:

“Misshapen fruit and vegetables won a reprieve on Wednesday from the European Union as it scrapped rules banning overly curved, extra knobbly or oddly shaped produce from supermarket shelves.

For 10 other types of fruit and vegetables, including apples, citrus, peaches, pears, strawberries and tomatoes, shape standards will …”

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tags: europe, france, vegetables, misshaped, eat your veggies

From torentfreak:

“Edging ever closer to becoming law, France’s “three-strikes” proposals have received support in the French Senate which voted overwhelmingly in favor for these draconian measures to deal with piracy. Now, a new report suggests that online piracy has become something of a ‘national sport’ in France.

The online file-sharing debate is really heating up in France. Contrary to advice from the European Court of Justice, France is pressing ahead with its plan for a controversial “3 strikes” or “graduated response” framework to deal with alleged file-sharers. Now, supported by a Le Figaro headline, “Piracy Has Become a National Sport in France”, a new study from market research company TNS Sofres is set to add fuel to the fire.

According to the poll of 2,011 people over 15 years old, the French use a diverse range of digital media to store or play pirated content. Of those questioned, 34% said their media players contained pirated files, with 20% admitting they go as far as using external hard drives to store illicit content. The USB storage key was used by 8% of respondents to shift illegal content, with 7% admitting to using mutimedia-capable cellphones.

Although the piracy ‘problem’ seems to be massive in France, it is certainly not limited to that one country. Just over the English Channel from France lies the UK, where an estimated 6 million people engage in online piracy – roughly 10% of the population. Across the pond, in the United States, a 2007 study found that 18 percent of the total US online population downloaded at least 1 movie from the Internet, illegally.

The French survey shows that the ‘problem’ is not limited to the younger generation, as is often assumed – it affects the entire population. The report further suggests that the actual numbers might be much greater than reported, but with news of draconian measures to deal with online piracy making headlines regularly, just how many people are prepared to be honest about their piracy habits?” [source]

tags: france, french, piracy, internet

Update: According AFP, this item is a best seller at amazon.fr. heee!

From reuters:

“French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company unless it withdraws a Sarkozy doll that comes with a “voodoo manual” instructing readers to plant pins in it, his lawyer said.

The doll is emblazoned with some of Sarkozy’s most famous quotes such as “Get lost you pathetic arsehole” — his words to a bystander who refused to shake his hand at a farm show last year. Readers are encouraged to plant pins in the quotes.

“Nicolas Sarkozy has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image,” lawyer Thierry Herzog wrote to publishers K&B in a letter published by newspaper Le Monde.

Confirming details to Reuters, Herzog said Sarkozy would sue the publishing firm if it didn’t respond and pull the product. K&B has issued 20,000 copies of the manual and doll.

The company has also issued a Segolene Royal doll representing Sarkozy’s rival in last year’s presidential election. Her lawyer said she was also considering legal action.

Voodoo is a religion rooted in West Africa that is practiced in parts of the Caribbean, especially Haiti, and parts of the southern United States.

According to a widespread belief, voodoo worshippers can plant pins in dolls representing their enemies to curse them from afar.

However, voodoo experts say the practice has been widely misunderstood and misrepresented by outsiders.”

tags: france, french, sarkozy, voodoo doll

The people over at gizmodo find the new cable box, “le cube” a lot more “stylishly French” than I think it is… I don’t find it stylish nor particularly French, except for the fact that it’s in France. I WANT to like it, but it’s not working for me. Anyway. More about it below.

From gizmodo:

“French cable provide Canal+ teamed up with touted OLPC and Jawbone designer Yves Behar to produce “Le Cube,” their new, ultra-stylish HD cable box with DVR and video on demand functions. Looking like a Wii all dressed up for a formal event, Le Cube blends simple geometry with simple colors to create something that’s visually striking.

But looks aside, this thing puts all of its interactive electronics and LED display into the black square portion of the box, leaving the rest relatively unscathed. It even comes with a remote control that matches the black and white motif. Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t mind moving to France just to have this in my living room. Le Cube will be available for Canal+ subscribers around November 4.” [source]

tags: france, french, cable box, canal plus, olpc, jawbone, le cube, yves behar

From bbc:

“Football matches in France will be called off immediately if spectators jeer during the French national anthem, says the country’s sports minister.

France’s national anthem was booed in Tuesday’s friendly win over Tunisia.

“Any match at which our national anthem is whistled at will be immediately stopped,” said Roselyne Bachelot.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the booing was “insulting” and that in the event of a repeat it would be necessary “to call off matches”.

“It’s insulting for France, it’s insulting for the players of the French team, it should not be tolerated,” he added.

“I think we should stop the matches when the anthems, whichever they are, are booed.”

Two goals from Thierry Henry gave France coach Raymond Domenech a much needed boost in cementing a 3-1 win in Paris.

But the booing and whistling by some in the crowd – many of them Tunisian – as the French anthem was played infuriated France’s political establishment.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has demanded an investigation into the matter.

President Sarkozy’s aides said he had summoned French Football Federation president Jean-Pierre Escalettes following the “scandalous incidents which occurred at the Stade de France”.

Bachelot added: “Government members will immediately leave the arena where our national anthem has been whistled.

“When whistling of our national anthem happens, all friendly games with the country concerned will be suspended for a period yet to be determined by the federation president.”

Sports Minister Bernard Laporte has suggested that France no longer play friendlies against Maghreb region countries.

There have been similar problems in recent years in matches against Algeria and Morocco.

Friendlies against North African sides traditionally attract widespread support from sizeable immigrant communities in and around the French capital.

Some booed when the names of the French players were read out over the PA system before kickoff, reaching a crescendo for Hatem Ben Arfa, born in France to Tunisian parents.

Arfa opted to play for the country of his birth despite overtures from the Tunisian Federation.

“I’m not really angry with them,” said Ben Arfa. “It’s a bit of a shame but it’s not a major problem. They need to exist, you have to understand them.”

tags: france, french, football, boo, french anthem

Over several years now, a strange thing has happened in France: the coffee started to suck. Yes, there were cafes that served terrible coffee forever, but for the most part in the early 2000s, it was still flavorful, very drinkable sludge espresso. It was French coffee, the coffee that I expected to have each time I came to France. I liked it, and the quality was very consistent from cafe to cafe. So when we moved to France six years ago, I was happy to be able to live the cafe experience, meeting people, hanging out, watching passers-by and sipping tasty coffee as often as I pleased. I used to always be surprised that I wouldn’t get the shakes if I had a double shot. However, soon afterward, I began not really enjoying my cuppa because of a declining quality, and in some cases, I developed a strange rash from drinking some brands of coffee, not to mention, getting the shakes (which I get when I drink American coffee). Slowly and surely, I reduced my consumption of coffee, and today, I don’t drink any coffee, whatsoever.

I miss it but I can’t seem to find anything I like. Apparently, I am not alone.

More and more people have stopped going to cafes, which has forced many cafes to close. In fact, since the beginning of this year, 610 cafes in France have closed their doors to the public forever. They just couldn’t make it. Many of these cafes had been in business for many generations.

Why did this happen? Expert have found many reasons that have played a contributing role, but for me, ultimately two were responsible, and it’s specifically these reasons that acted as the final coups de grace:

1.) The Case of the Free Coffee Machines – In the early 2000s, thousands of cafes were offered “free machines” for their establishments. “Free” is not entirely accurate and this “free” had heavy strings attached. In exchange for the free machines, the cafes were obliged to use coffee supplied by the company that offered the free machines. Guess what? That coffee is CRAP, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which company offered the free machines. (see appropriately numbered, number 2 below)

2.) Good coffee companies were bought by evil corporations – There is no doubt in my mind that corporate mergers brought quality down in coffee; it happened right before my very eyes and taste buds.

There are other factors why cafes have shut down.

3.) People stopped going to cafes. Why? The coffee sucked! Also #4 below.

4.) Weak Purchasing Power – Crazy inflation occurred when France turned to the euro. Prices went up but salaries did not. That said, even with less money to dedicate to little luxuries, I feel that people would still frequent cafes if the coffee was good.

5.) The popularity of home coffee makers using capsules – I hate these with a passion, and I hate that they have become so popular. I don’t care what they taste like because I find them to be very unfriendly to the environment. So wasteful. Why oh WHY did George Cluny agree to do those “What Else” spots? Doesn’t he CARE? Having said that, I think people in general were looking for alternatives to find more tasty coffees since they couldn’t find them at the cafes.

6.) The Smoking Ban – Since smoking is no longer allowed in cafes, that has hurt businesses in a big way.

Related: Dirty Secrets of a Paris Cafe Waiter, What happens when Europeans watch too much American TV, Bamboo Coffee Filters,

tags: france, french, coffee, cafes, end of a french tradition

From sinolinx:

“France has recalled sweets and biscuits made with Chinese dairy after finding high levels of an industrial chemical.

In China, four babies have died and 53,000 have fallen sick after consuming milk products contaminated with the chemical melamine.

The EU banned imports of Chinese baby food containing traces of milk in response to the scare last month.

The recall of White Rabbit sweets and Koala biscuits is the first such order to be made by a European country.

French consumers were warned to destroy or return the tainted products after tests showed high levels of melamine, which can cause kidney failure.

“The first results of tests conducted in France have shown a melamine level above the warning level set by the European Commission at 2.5mg per kilo,” the agriculture ministry said in a statement.

So far there have been no identified cases of health problems associated with the contamination in France.

The recall is the strongest measure yet taken by a European country amid a worldwide health scare over Chinese milk products that has led several countries to ban dairy imports from China.

It came as China issued new quality controls for its dairy industry and promised more severe punishment, including public naming, for anyone found to have violated safety standards.

Some Chinese dairy farmers are accused of fraudulently adding melamine to watered-down milk to make the product appear rich in protein and to fool quality control tests.”

From macworld:

“Network operator Orange will rate the environmental impact of the fixed-line and mobile phones it sells, it said Friday.

In France mobile phones—and most other electrical and electronic goods—are already subject to a special tax called “eco-participation,” intended to fund recycling of the products at the end of their lives. Although the current eco-tax on mobile phones differs from that for, say, photocopiers, it’s the same for all models of phone, and at just €0.01 (US$.01), is nowhere near enough to influence customers to choose more environmentally friendly products.”

tags: france, french, orange, iphone, environmental impact of cell phones

From bbcnews:

“…They are angry that the law does not allow them to use more modern hair-removal techniques on their clients.

On Monday hundreds of beauty workers – estheticiennes – demonstrated outside the health ministry in Paris to demand that the industry’s governing regulations be brought up to date.

They accuse dermatologists and other professional groups of waging a turf war to keep out new competition.

“French beauticians are the only ones in Europe…..” Continue reading

tags: france, french, beauticians, protest, hair removal

From iht:

“The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President George W. Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or….” Read the rest

tags: france, french, view of america by the french

From gizmodo:

“One of the croissant-snarfing editors at Gizmodo France passed along this article that alleges the Mac Pro gives off toxic vapors. Translating from the language of lose to the language of guns, soccer moms and hot dogs results in a bit of discombobulation, but the gist is that a CNRS lab researcher got a Mac Pro, and after his eyes and respiratory tract were repeatedly agitated by a “stench,” decided to break down the noxious vapor coming off the Mac Pro. They found “seven volatile organic contaminants.” Though the worst they do inhaled is cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation—ingested is another story—benzene is the most troublesome, since inhaling it eight hours a day over could affect one’s bone marrow. Apple’s response?

The researcher says that after first alerting Apple to the issue, “I got the same answer each time, our skate launcher warning: ‘Our engineers are working on the problem.’” (I’m assuming “skate launcher” is a Google Translate cock-up. Giz France editor says “Skate Launcher warning = the guy from the CNRS lab who tried to warn Apple.”) Since publishing the report, Apple has promised “to resolve the problem in eight days.”

I wouldn’t chuck your Mac Pro out the window yet, but if you’re particularly digging that new car smell, I’d probably cut back on huffing it, until this is sorted out.”

tags: france, mac pro, apple, toxic computers

From Timesonline:

“France may be home to some of the world’s finest wines but it could be about to join the tiny club of Muslim states that forbid their promotion on the internet.

Winemakers and other players in the drinks industry are fighting to avert a ban on advertising, sales and even vineyard websites that has been looming ever since a court ruled that the internet should be included in France’s strict laws regarding alcohol advertising.

The Heineken beer company was forced by the ruling last February to block French access to its corporate site. Since then, some of the biggest drinks brands have shut out French visitors for fear of prosecution. “Today in France, the sight of a bottle of wine has become as offensive as a picture of war or pornography,” said Daniel Lorson, a spokesman for CIVC, the industry body of champagne producers.

The industry complains that it is being demonised and that an internet ban would penalise hugely one of the glories of the French economy and the national heritage. A click from France on Courvoisier cognac, for example, elicits the message: “Sorry, the regulations of your country do not authorise us to give you access to our site.”
Web users from France are even banned from dropping in on Orlando wines in South Australia, because they are owned by France’s Pernod Ricard drinks group. The site does, however, welcome visitors from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Even the…. Read the article

tags: french, internet ban on advertising alcohol, strange

From AP:

“After tainted baby milk, now toxic chairs from China.

Customers in France who bought Chinese-made recliners are complaining of stinging allergic rashes and infections.

One customer, Caroline Morin, said yesterday that she was stunned to learn the chair she bought last December appears to have caused the skin problems she says she suffered for months.

“You sit comfortably on something and in fact you have a bomb under your butt,” she said.

The French distributor, Conforama, warned clients in July that some of the chairs and sofas presented an allergy risk “in rare cases.” It has withdrawn them from sale and now says the health problems were linked to an anti-fungal chemical in the chairs.

The case gained attention this week following French media reports exposing problems suffered by people who bought the chairs.

One was Dolores Ennrich, who says that because of long-term illness she spent a lot of time sitting in the recliner she purchased in March 2007.

She says she suffered painful eczema and skin infections on her left thigh, back, and left arm.

“It went away, it came back, it went away. That went on for more than a year,” she said. “It is very painful.”

Conforama says it has severed its commercial ties with the Chinese supplier, Linkwise, and told its other suppliers to no longer use the chemical, dimethyl fumarate, to prevent mold.

Linkwise is based in the manufacturing hub of Dongguan in southern China.

A man who answered the phone at the company said yesterday that the firm is working with the Chinese government’s quality inspection watchdogs to investigate the problem. He would not give details.”

tags: france, conforama, dimethyl fumarate, anti-fungal chemical, toxic furniture

From AP:

“Plastic forks, disposable diapers, drafty houses _ if it hurts the environment, make it cost more. That’s the message France’s government wants to send with a raft of proposed new taxes.

France’s ecology minister said Sunday the government is considering a “picnic tax” on disposable dishes to encourage people to use reusable plates and cups instead.

Speaking on Europe-1 radio, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said the plan wouldn’t stop at picnicware. For example, she said, “We could make it so that in all public maternity wards, you would be taught to use washable diapers.”

She said a new carrot-and-stick plan already applied to cars is being spread to other environmentally damaging products such as paints and detergents.

The plan offers a bonus of up to $7,000 to buyers of fuel-efficient cars, but as of next year it will slap extra fees of up to a few thousand euros (dollars) on the cost of heavy polluters like SUVs.

The idea is meant to change the habits of both consumers and manufacturers by getting people to calculate the environmental cost of their waste, though some critics _ even within the Finance Ministry _ fear it could crimp growth.

Kosciusko-Morizet said the plan could be spread to some 20 other types of products, from paints to household appliances and detergents. She said the tax would be determined based on the “recyclability” of the product, among other things.

And she said it could even be extended to homes, based on how energy-efficient they are.

The financial details of the taxes have yet to be worked out. Some will be introduced in the 2009 budget, which the government will present at the end of the month.”

tags: france, environment tax, picnic tax

This time the uranium leak is in Pierrelatte, which actually shares the same nuclear power facilities as Tricastin, where the last two leaks were found, but the media has been suspiciously removing “Tricastin” from this news and are making people think that Pierrelatte is not in the same place. Well, it IS in the same place.

Tricastin and Pierrelatte are villages next to each other and they share the same nuclear power site, referred to as “Tricastin-Pierrelatte.” Pierrelatte happens to be in the Drome department and Tricastin is in the Vaucluse department but they are literally “across the street” from each other. Areva, the company responsible for the nuclear power plants, is the very same company responsible for all of the other uranium leaks in the area, and again is saying that it is a “small” leak and therefore of little consequence.” YEA RIGHT. article (in French)

Links: more uranium leaks, Greepeace suing Areva

tags: france, real estate, uranium, contamination, radioactive leaks, tricastin, pierrelatte, corporate lies

From AP:

“France’s broadcast authority has banned French channels from marketing TV shows to children under 3 years old, to shield them from developmental risks it says television viewing poses at that age.

The three companies behind BabyFirstTV are Regency Enterprises, a film and TV production company that is a partner of News Corp.’s Fox Entertainment; Kardan N.V., an investment group based in the Netherlands and Israel; and Bellco Capital, a private Los Angeles-based investment fund.”

tags: france, television, france bans tv for babies, baby first tv, baby tv

From time:

“Too much wine, it is known, can cause violent behavior. But few have gone as far as the grape growers of France’s Languedoc-Roussillon region, the world’s biggest wine-growing area by volume. Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to “wine terrorism” in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them.

On July 26, police arrested a vineyard farmer from the region for production and possession of illegal explosives. Apprehended in a hospital where he was being treated for injuries suffered when those explosives unexpectedly detonated, 34-year-old Jérôme Soulère confessed to police that he’d been responsible for the July 2006 bombing of a tax-collection office in a neighboring village. He also admitted, police say, to authoring the failed bombing last year of a site the Tour de France was set to pass the following day.
Those incidents are just two of many in a series of violent and destructive acts by local grape growers over the past three years that has targeted public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever shrinking prices. Claiming responsibility: a clandestine group known as….”

Read the full article

Related: Don’t Mess with French Farmers

tags: france, wine, vandals, wine lake

From reuters:

“A herpes virus is killing young oysters in France because they have spent too much energy developing their sexual organs rather than their natural defenses, an oyster crisis team has found.

Scientists have spent weeks investigating a mysterious surge in mortality among the mollusks that the French love to devour with lemon and white wine.

France’s main marine research institute, Ifremer, set up the crisis team on July 3 and its members have been working flat out to understand why 40 to 100 percent of oysters aged 12 to 18 months were dying in all but one of France’s breeding areas.

An Ifremer spokeswoman said on Monday the team had established that a virus called Oyster Herpesvirus type 1, or OsHV-1, was killing young oysters, helped by unfavorable weather conditions that had weakened the mollusks.

“We had a warm winter followed by a rainy spring, which caused high levels of planktonic plant life to develop,” spokeswoman Johanna Martin said.

“This meant that the oysters were particularly well fed and spent a lot of energy developing their sexual organs to the detriment of their natural reserves, leaving them vulnerable to OsHV-1,” she said.

There is no cure for OsHV-1.

Ifremer is continuing its investigations and admits that other factors could be contributing, such as toxic seaweed or Vibrio Splendidus, another virus present in France this year.

France produces about 110,000 tonnes of oysters a year, according to Ifremer data. It is the world’s fourth biggest producer after China, which alone accounts for 83 percent of world production, followed by Korea and Japan.

All of France’s oyster breeding areas, of which 90 percent are on the western coast, are affected by high mortality rates except one area at Arcachon in the southwest. Scientists do not know why Arcachon oysters have been spared.”

From the timesonline:

“The world economic crisis has hit borrowers in the US, banks in Britain and homeowners in Spain. Now it has claimed perhaps its most startling victim to date: the Gallic gastronome.

Lunches are being skipped, dinners shortened and apéritifs overlooked as the French cut back on their most cherished pleasure in an attempt to save their euros, according to new figures. Restaurants, bistros and cafés are reporting an historic drop in takings this summer amid signs that le pays de la gastronomie is turning to sandwiches and picnics.

Chefs say that the rare customers still reserving tables are resorting to one-course meals and a single glass of wine, sipped with glacial caution.

Diners are tending to abandon les entrées, les desserts and e café under a drastic cost-saving drive, they say.

“People have a lot less money now so when they go away on holiday, they have to chose what to spend it on and they often decide to cut the food budget,” Francis Attrazic, the vice-chairman of the French Union of Café, Restaurant and Hotel Owners, said.

“Lunch is disappearing almost completely a lot of the time, people don’t always have an apéritif any more and the evening meal is being lightened.” A survey by his union revealed a fall of up to 30 per cent in restaurant and café custom in tourist regions this month compared with July last year.

The study suggested that the number of holidaymakers is stable but that they are spending less on food. The findings do not apply to foreigners, notably the British, Germans and Russians, who are still dining in style. The French, though, are forgoing les plaisirs de la table.

On the French Riviera, for instance, restaurants no longer have a key role for holidaymakers, who tend to prefer a sandwich at lunchtime and a show rather than a meal, the survey said. In the south west, chefs said that their restaurants were alarmingly empty at midday and in the evening.

Interviewed on Europe 1 radio yesterday, a café owner in Toulouse said: “People just don’t have enough money to hang around in bars any more.

“And when they come, they consume a lot less wine, no more than is strictly necessary. They make their glass last a long time and they don’t knock back one glass after another these days.” Guy-Noël Chatelain, a partner in OC&C consultancy, which spe-cialises in consumer trends, said that the French were rediscovering the picnic and the sandwich to make a dwindling disposable income go farther.

His words were borne out by the Saint Martin canal in Paris yesterday where Raphaëlle Davin, a 26-year-old office worker, was eating a salad she had bought for €6.60 (£5.18). She said that she would have paid double that for a meal in a restaurant.”

france, french, changing eating habits, troubled economy, tightening belts , weak spending power, france, pouvoir d’achat

[source]

By now, you’ve probably heard about a correlation between cell phone use and cancer. But geez, you can’t listen to those things because you absolutely love your cell phone. Who doesn’t? You were so freakin’ relieved to find out that those popcorn popping celphones were a hoax. Don’t lie. This love you have for your cute electronic companion has conveniently ousted from your head any negative publicity your mobile beloved has received. You really want to ignore them! Here’s you, “cell phones are dangerous??? NAH….. Don’t be silly! Cancer? Pfff. That is ridiculous. I use mine all the time and I’m fine!”

Do you say that because you don’t WANT it to be true? You can want all you like but just because you don’t want it to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

No one WANTED cigarettes to be the leading cause of death, cancer, heart disease and lung disease (among other things), did they? Many cigarettes smokers said, “they smoked all the time and they were fine!”

No one wanted to believe that the building material called asbestos would kill them. No one wanted to think that anything was wrong with their PVC window frames? Check your hospitals, do they have any PVC? Answer: No. “But the PVC pipes and windows were so cheap,” people say…

Hospitals also don’t allow cell phone use, or wifi for that matter. Do people wonder WHY? I wish they did.

The warnings have been around for a long time but it has been in French news more and more this year. I mean, you can’t let your peeps keep doing harmful things to their bodies, can you France?

French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin also went on France 2 TV and rehashed the well-worn theory connecting cell phone use with cancer.

In the U.S. neurosurgeons can’t admit that cell phones are dangerous and cause brain cancer, but they WILL admit that they NEVER put a cell phone up to their heads. Ever! What do BRAIN SURGEONS know, anyway!??!

Hang on. Aside from being rant-errific, I do have some useful information that might prompt you to reduce the amount of risk to which you subject yourself.

Both Europe and the U.S. have defined safety limits for exposure to radio frequency (RF) energy produced by mobile devices. The SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) or DAS (débit d’absorption spécifique) in France is a measure or index of the rate at which RF energy is absorbed by the body when exposed to radio-frequency electromagnetic field.

In the United States the FCC requires that phones sold have a SAR level at or below 1.6 watts per kilogram (W/kg) taken over a volume of 1 gram of tissue.

In the European Union, the SAR limit is 2 W/kg, averaged over ten grams of tissue. For whole body exposure there is a limit of 0.08 Watt/kg averaged over the whole body.

What you can do: Find out the index of your mobile phone then act accordingly. If it’s too high, get a different phone that is safer. Here’s a chart with a list of phones and their SARs.

As an example, the new 3G iPhone’s SAR (or indice DAS in French) is 1.388 W/kg. The first generation iPhone was 0.974 W/Kg. Other examples: Motorola Razr2 v9 is 0.52. The Samsung SLM is 0.48. As low as some of the phone’s indices are, neurosurgeons STILL won’t put them up to their heads!

What you can do: Like neurosurgeons, DON’T put the cellphone up to your head. Use speaker phone mode. Note: Bluetooth devices and unshielded wired-earphones amplify the signal. In other words, they radiate more, NOT less.

What you can do: Remember that the industries will ALWAYS deny the existence of any dangers. Not only that, they are responsible for those “counter” studies that come out after researchers warn about the dangers of a product. Scientific studies have been suppressed by the cell phone industry and the government to protect their profits. Do not buy that game.

What you can do: Reduce your cell phone use to a bare minimum. Keep conversations short.

What you can do: Don’t let kids use the phone at all if possible. If they must, not for more than a minute at a time. Ideally, they should never use them or use them only for emergency situations.

What you can do: Turn your cell phone off when it isn’t needed and especially when you are driving your car. When driving with your cell phone on, the waves ricochet inside the car because cars are metallic, creating a Faraday Cage.

What you can do: When possible, keep the cell phone as far away from your body as much as possible.

Links: SAR, Get Little Kids Away from the iPhone and iPod Touch, Cell Phone Dangers Revealed, Patents Prove Cell Phone Dangers from Wired, Hidden Dangers of Cell Phone Radiation, Chemical and Cell Phones, Harmful Effects of Cell Phones, Hazards of the Wireless Age, Reduce Risks, Mobile Phones more dangerous than smoking

france, How to Reduce Your Cell Phone Risks, cell phones and cancer, SAR, Indice DAS

I think there might be more visitors to Vimy from now on…

From afp:

“A French couple were given a four-month suspended sentence and made to pay one euro in damages to the Canadian state for making a porn video at a World War I memorial, officials said Wednesday.

The site draws around half a million visitors each year.”

tags: france travel vimy wwi memorial sex video one euro fine

From the iht:

“As a kid in Brooklyn Steven L. Kaplan ate pale sliced Wonder Bread like everyone else but had an epiphany in Paris as a Princeton student in 1962 when he happened on a small bakery on the Rue du Cherche-Midi called Poilâne and bought a bâtard which he filled with cheese and ate in the Luxembourg gardens. “I can still taste that first bite,” he says.

Kaplan went on to become a professor of history at Cornell University, always fascinated by bread as one of the principal actors in French life: it is bread, he says, that seals the social contract in France, the link between the government and the governed.

When in the United States Kaplan, from what he views as necessity, bakes his own bread. In France he is recognized as the bread authority, compared recently in Le Monde with Robert O. Paxton, the American historian who forced French eyes to open on the subject of Vichy. The occasion of the comparison was Kaplan’s new book, “Le Pain Maudit” (Cursed Bread), a study of an unsolved mystery dating back more than half a century but which lingers even in the memories of those not then born: the affair of the poisoned bread.

What became a national disaster began on Aug. 16, 1951, when the inhabitants of the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the Gard region of southern France were suddenly stricken by frightful hallucinations of being consumed by fire or giant plants or horrid beasts.

A worker tried to drown himself because his belly was being eaten by snakes. A 60-year-old grandmother threw herself against the wall and broke three ribs. A man saw his heart escaping through his feet and beseeched a doctor to put it back in place. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets. There was no treatment, no cure and only one possible explanation: something in the bread baked the night of Aug. 15-16 had caused the calamity….” Read the rest

tags: france Steven L. Kaplan Pont Saint Esprit Le Pain Maudit poisoned bread

According to the independent, there’s an escargot shortage that is threatening French life as we know it. OH NON! Most of the snails people eat in France are from Eastern Europe. Gasp! Oui oui. It’s true. But now the snail harvesting profession there is frowned upon. NOT very glamorous. How will they supply this year’s snail chow down?? Hohum.

People should come to the forest near our house. There are GOBS of snails after a rain.

Anyway, here’s the article:

“A slow-motion crisis threatens the French way of life – the great snail shortage of 2008. Shell-shocked French food processors have warned that they can no longer obtain sufficient quantities of snails from eastern Europe, their principal source of supply.

What is the attraction of eating snails? Is the taste not just in the sauce? “If you eat the processed snails, yes,” she said. “Wild snails, they are quite different. Ah, the taste of a wild snail. That is very special and delicate.”" [source]

Related: Escargot Posts

tags: france escargots snails shortage

Excerpt by Bernard-Henri Lévy from tnr:

America has changed. It was the conservative Samuel Huntington who said it in his latest book, “Who Are We?”: America is no longer a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon country, European by tradition and white by vocation, that cannot seriously imagine a black man running for the presidency. George W. Bush’s two terms? The swing to the far right the country took after 9/11? The campaigns by those opposing abortion, or the partisans of anti-Darwin creationism? Sure, one could see a marked tendency, a fundamental movement. Or one could also, as in my case, see the shock and desperate mobilization of an America that knows it is dying but is trying nonetheless to delay the moment when it realizes it must surrender.

Four years ago I was one of the first to acknowledge, after having heard, then met, Obama, the emergence of a meteor. I hope that today I will not be wrong in announcing that he will very soon be the face of the United States. In any case, I am marking my calendar.

Read the full article

From AP:

“Tests show that uranium levels are diminishing but have not vanished from rivers in southern France after a leak from a nuclear site, regional authorities said Wednesday.

The Commission for Independent Radioactivity Research and Information said the leak led to the release of radioactive material 100 times that which the site is allowed to release in a year. Greenpeace said the leaked waste was more than 130 times the permitted level.”

From the iht:

“COLLOBRIÈRES, France: Christine Amrane says it is mostly about profit, not just protest and nostalgia. This isolated village has decided to accept the French franc in everyday commerce, along with the euro, and the colorful old bills adorned with French heroes and writers have got people thinking.

France is thought to be the beating heart of the European vision, but the last time the French voted on an earlier version of Lisbon, in 2005, they voted no – and polls say they would reject it in its current form….

Full article

From iht:

France’s space agency, CNES put its entire UFO sightings archive on the web.

“The saucer-shaped object is said to have touched down in the south of France and then zoomed off. It left behind scorch marks and that haunting age-old question: Are we alone in this big universe of ours?

This is just one of the cases from France’s secret “X-Files” — some 100,000 documents on supposed UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena that the French space agency is publishing on the Internet.

France is the first country to put its entire weird sightings archive online, said Jacques Patenet, who heads the space agency’s UFO cell — the Group for Study and Information on Nonidentified Aerospace Phenomena.

Their oldest recorded sighting dates from 1937, Patenet told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. The first batch of archives went up on the agency’s Web site this week, drawing a server-busting wave of traffic.

“The Web site exploded in two hours. We suspected that there was a certain amount of interest, but not to this extent,” Patenet said.

The archive includes police and expert reports, witness sketches (some are childlike doodlings), maps, photos and video and audio recordings. In all, the archive has some 1,650 cases on record and some 6,000 witness accounts.

The space agency, known by its French initials CNES, said it is making them public to draw the scientific community’s attention to unexplained cases and because their secrecy generated suspicions that officials were hiding something.

“There’s always this impression of plots, of secrets, of wanting to hide things,” Patenet said. “The great danger would be to…”leave the field open to sects and charlatans.”

He said many cases were unexplained lights in the sky. “Only 20 to 30″ could be classified as “Objet Volant Non Identifie” — UFOs that appeared to be physical objects, leaving “marks on the ground, radar images,” he said.

Even Gen. Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime hero who became its president, got the UFO bug.

“In 1954, there was a wave of sightings of phenomena in France, and it went up to the highest levels of state. Gen. De Gaulle himself assigned … an aide and told him, ‘Look into this for me, study it to see if something needs to be done,’” Patenet said.

That year there were hundreds of sightings over several months, but generally there are 50 to 100 reported each year.

Only 9 percent of France’s strange phenomena have been fully explained, the agency said. Experts found likely reasons for another 33 percent, and 30 percent could not be identified for lack of information.

Other cases were impossible to crack. The most baffling were labeled “Class D aerospace phenomena” — which the agency defines as “inexplicable despite precise testimonies and the (good) quality of material information gathered.” Some 28 percent of sightings fall into this category.

Patenet singled out the January 1981 case of the saucer-shaped object that a witness said he saw land in Trans-en-Provence, a village inland from the French Riviera.

Some 2.5 meters (8 feet) across, the zinc-colored object made a whistling noise as it landed. The witness later drew a picture: It resembled a wok with a lid and legs.

“The machine stayed a few seconds on the ground and then left very quickly but it left marks that were analyzed and allowed us to determine that the ground had been heated up, that the object must have weighed several hundred kilos (pounds), and that surrounding plants underwent biological changes,” Patenet said.

“So something really happened. It really defies analysis.”

The agency said everything in the archive would be published, except for psychological reports about witnesses as well as their names.

Most of the time, Patenet said, witnesses were sincere about what they saw. “Very few look for publicity, because they fear most of all that they will not be taken seriously.”

Still, there were frauds.

In 1979, in Cergy-Pontoise outside Paris, a man showed up at a police station claiming that his friend had been abducted by a UFO — a bright light that appeared on the road and swallowed up his car. Several days later, the man purportedly reappeared in a field, emerging out of a sphere of light.

Investigators went so far as to test the man’s blood for signs that he had recently experienced weightlessness — and they found none. The agency labeled it a hoax.

Some cases took years to unravel. In 1985, two farmers near the Atlantic coastal city of Royan saw a burning object drop into a field nearby.

Experts initially concluded that it was part of the propulsion device of a recently launched satellite. Eventually, they realized it was a piece of leftover German World War II ordnance that spontaneously exploded four decades after the war.

Among the unexplained cases, one of the most perplexing concerned a 1994 Air France flight. While flying over the Paris region, the airplane’s crew noticed a large brown-red disk hovering in the horizon and constantly changing shape. The case “has never been explained to this day, and leaves the door open to all possible hypotheses,” the agency wrote.

So, do we have neighbors out there, after all?

“I don’t have an answer to that,” Patenet said. “Even if there is such a planet, given the size of the universe, what is the probability that two civilizations … will meet or come across each other? I really don’t know. It’s very complicated. It’s incalculable.”

CNES
___

Associated Press writer Angela Doland in Paris contributed to this report.

From the nyt:

“Next to the Palais de la Découverte, just off the Champs-Élysées, is a flight-of-fancy sculpture of the 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset daydreaming about his former lovers. As art goes, the expanse of white marble is pretty mediocre, and its sculptor, Alphonse de Moncel, little-remembered. For me, however, it is a crucial marker. To its right is a path with broken stone steps that lead down into one of my favorite places in Paris, a tiny stage-set called Jardin de la Vallée Suisse.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated….”

Read the full article

tags: france travel hidden gardens in paris

From bbcnews:

“The French president has irritated female members of parliament by sending them what they say is an ill-judged gift to mark France’s EU presidency.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s office sent a sleek black case to all MPs, male and female, including a pale grey tie.

Socialist MP Aurelie Filippetti proclaimed it “yet more proof of male chauvinism in the political class”.

Others took it more lightly, gamely adding the ties to their outfits or even wearing them as headbands.

Junior minister Nadine Morano – one of Mr Sarkozy’s most loyal staffers – defended her boss’s blunder by saying that “even for a woman, wearing a tie can be nice,” the Guardian reports.

Some 18% of deputies in the National Assembly – a total of 107 – are women.

Mr Sarkozy chose many women for cabinet-level posts, including Justice Minister Rachida Dati and Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.

Women also hold the finance, higher education, culture and agriculture ministries and the health, youth and sports portfolio in Mr Sarkozy’s cabinet.”

Arts & Management International, bidding on behalf of an unknown (to us) client, received the winning bid for Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphéas for $80.4 million. Bargain!

“Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” from 1919, a large horizontal work measuring more than 3 feet by 6 feet, is from a series of four that Monet signed and dated and that experts consider to be among the most important paintings from his late period. Unlike most of his late works, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1926, this series was sold by him. One is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; another was cut in two; and a third is in a private collection, having been sold at Christie’s in New York in 1992 for $12.1 million, a stellar price at the time…

Read the full article at nyt

From Maureen Dowd:

“The French are different from you and me.

“I was seduced by his…”

Read the full article

From the nyt:

“When Youssoupha, a black rapper here, was asked the other day what was on his mind, a grin spread across his face. “Barack Obama,” he said. “Obama tells us everything is possible.”

A new black consciousness is emerging in France, lately hastened by, of all things, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. An article in Le Monde a few days ago described how Mr. Obama is “stirring up high hopes” among blacks here. Even seeing the word “noir” (“black”) in a French newspaper was an occasion for surprise until recently.

Meanwhile, this past weekend, 60 cars were burned and some 50 young people scuffled with police and firemen, injuring several of them, in a poor minority suburb of Vitry-le-François, in the Marne region of northeast France.

Americans, who have debated race relations since the dawn of the Republic, may find it hard to grasp the degree to which race, like religion, remains a taboo topic in France. While Mr. Obama talks about running a campaign transcending race, an increasing number of French blacks are pushing for, in effect, the reverse.

Having always thought it was more racially enlightened than strife-torn America, France finds itself facing the prospect that it has actually fallen behind on that score. Incidents like the ones over the weekend bring to mind the rioting that exploded across France three years ago. Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, the country has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate.

This black consciousness is reflected not just in daily conversation, but also in a dawning culture of books and music by young French blacks like Youssoupha, a cheerful, toothy 28-year-old, who was sent here from Congo by his parents to get an education at 10, raised by an aunt who worked in a school cafeteria in a poor suburb, and told by guidance counselors that he shouldn’t be too ambitious. Instead, he earned a master’s degree from the Sorbonne.

tags: france obama hope

Then, like many well-educated blacks in this country, he hit a brick wall. “I found myself working in fast-food places with people who had the equivalent of a 15-year-old’s level of education,” he recalled.

So he turned to rap, out of frustration as much as anything, finding inspiration in “négritude,” an ideology of black pride conceived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s by Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician from Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became Senegal’s first president. Its philosophy, as Sartre once put it, was a kind of “antiracist racism,” a celebration of shared black heritage.

Négritude and Césaire are back. When Césaire died in April, at 94, his funeral in Fort-de-France, Martinique, was broadcast live on French television. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his rival Ségolène Royal both attended. Just three years ago, Mr. Sarkozy, as head of a center-right party and not yet president, supported a law (repealed after much protest) that compelled French schools to teach the “positive” aspects of colonialism. The next year, Césaire refused to meet with him. Now here was Mr. Sarkozy flying to the former French colony (today one of the country’s overseas departments, meaning he could troll for votes) to pay tribute to the poet laureate of négritude.

That said, as a country France definitely sends out mixed messages. “Négritude is a concept they just don’t want to hear about,” Youssoupha raps in “Render Unto Césaire” on his latest album, “À Chaque Frère” (“To Each Brother”). A regular short feature on French public television, “Citoyens Visibles,” hosted by a young actress, Hafsia Herzi, celebrates French artists with foreign origins.

At the same time, it’s against the rules for the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million.

“Can you imagine if French officials said, ‘Well, we’re not sure, the population of France may be 65 million, or maybe it’s 30 million’?” declared a somewhat exasperated Patrick Lozès, founder of Cran, a black organization devised not long ago partly to gather statistics the government won’t.

When he sat down to talk the other morning, the first two words out of his mouth were Barack Obama. “The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal,” he said. “But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal.”

He ticked off some obvious numbers: one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.

To this may be added Cran’s findings that the percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

“There’s total hypocrisy here,” Léonora Miano said. She’s a black author, 37, originally from Cameroon, whose recent novel “Tels des Astres Éteints” (“Like Extinguished Stars”) is about race relations as seen through the eyes of three black immigrants.

“For me it was really strange when I arrived 17 years ago to find people here never used the word race,” Ms. Miano said over coffee one afternoon at Café Beaubourg. Outside, African immigrants hawked sunglasses to tourists. “French universalism, the whole French republican ideal, proposes that if you embrace French values, the French language, French culture, then race doesn’t exist and it won’t matter if you’re black. But of course it does. So we need to have a conversation, and slowly it is coming: not a conversation about guilt or history, but about now.”

“The Black Condition: An Essay on a French Minority” by Pap N’Diaye, a 42-year-old historian at the School for Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, is another much-talked-about new book here. “We are witnessing a renaissance of the négritude movement,” Mr. N’Diaye declared the other day.

The surge in popularity of Mr. Obama among French blacks partly stems from the hope that his rise “will highlight our lack of diversity and put pressure on French politicians who say they favor him to open politics up more to minorities,” Mr. N’Diaye said. “We in France are, in terms of race, where we were in terms of gender 40 years ago.”

He laid out some history: French decolonization during the 1960s pretty much pushed the original négritude movement to the back burner, at the same time that it inspired a wave of immigrants from the Caribbean to come here and fill low-ranking civil service jobs. From sub-Saharan Africa, another wave of laborers gravitated to private industry. The two populations didn’t communicate much.

But their children, raised here, have grown up together. “Mutually discovered discrimination,” as Mr. N’Diaye put it, has forged a bond out of which négritude is being revived.

The watershed event was the rioting in poor French suburbs three years ago. Among its cultural consequences: Aimé Césaire “started to be rediscovered by young people who found in his work things germane to the current situation,” Mr. N’Diaye said.

Youssoupha is one of those people. He was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside. In modest neighborhoods like this, France can look remarkably harmonious.

“Césaire is in my lyrics, and I was upset when people misinterpreted what I wrote as anti-white because négritude is the affirmation of our common black roots,” Youssoupha said.

Ms. Miano, the novelist, made a similar point. “There is no such thing as a black ‘community’ in France — yet — partly because we have such different histories,” she said. “An immigrant woman from Mali and another from Cameroon view the world in completely different ways. You also shouldn’t think there isn’t racism among blacks in France, between West Indians and Africans. There is. But ultimately we’re all black in the face of discrimination.”

Then she smiled: “Too bad I forgot to wear my Obama T-shirt.””

[source]

From the telegraph:

“Erika La Tour Eiffel, 37, a former soldier who lives in San Francisco, has been in love with objects before. Her first infatuation was with Lance, a bow that helped her to become a world-class archer, she is fond of the Berlin Wall and she claims to have a physical relationship with a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom.

But it is the Eiffel Tower she has pledged to love, honour and obey in an intimate ceremony attended by a handful of friends.

She has changed her name legally to reflect the bond.

She revisits the massive structure as part of a documentary on Five on Objectum-Sexual women. There are around 40 people in the world who have declared themselves OS, all of them women and many of them also Asperger’s Syndrome sufferers.

The OS term was first coined by Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, a 54-year-old woman who has been “married” to the Berlin Wall for 29 years.

Before returning to Paris for her first wedding anniversary, Mrs La Tour Eiffel visits the Berlin Wall, where her affection for what many Germans see as a symbol of repression leads to an uncomfortable encounter with a member of the staff at the Checkpoint Charlie museum.

“I just don’t understand how some people can bring someone into the world like a child – an object – and then not love them,” she said….”

Read the full article

tags: france travel eiffel tower paris woman marries eiffel tower fetishes

There’s a strange article that you’d imagine would come straight from The Onion but it’s from the New York Times. Ok, everyone many consider the nyt to be an equivalent… Anyway, it’s about an obsessive disorder, a “Sarkosis,” if you will, with the afflicted being passionately for or against Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sounds like a paid PR stunt attempting to increase Sarkozy’s popularity, if you ask me. But, for what it’s worth, here’s a tidbit:

“PARIS — Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among the French: obsessive Sarkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

But Dr. Hefez, too, has been infected by the disease he was among the first to diagnose. And like any good analyst, he is fully aware of the problem, and the irony. The heated reaction to his article “was interesting for a psychiatrist and didn’t surprise me,” he said, laughing, “because it corresponds precisely to the …”

Read more

From reuters:

“PARIS – Hundreds of activists marched in Paris on Tuesday ahead of the expected approval of a law they say blurs the line between natural and genetically modified (GM) foods.

The bill lays down conditions for the cultivation of GM crops in France, Europe’s largest grain producer and exporter, and creates a body to oversee GMO use. The vote is due to take place late on Tuesday or on Wednesday.
Protesters, some wearing yellow hats in the shape of maize cobs and others dressed in white suits imitating scientists, gathered near the National Assembly to voice their opposition.

“We must give consumers the choice of eating quality products, with or without GMO,” said Jean Terlon, cook at the restaurant Le Saint-Pierre in Longjumeau, close to Paris.

While GM crops are common in the United States and Latin America, France and many other European countries are dubious about using the new genetic technology in agriculture.

France banned the sole GM crop grown in the European Union, a maize (corn) developed by US biotech giant Monsanto, in February because it had serious doubts about whether it was safe for the environment. GMO cultivation is still legal, however.

The new French law, which would implement a European Union directive adopted in 2001, sets the rules a farmer has to respect to grow GM crops. These include limiting dissemination of pollen to conventional fields.

The text is criticised by pro-GMOs who say it does not go far enough and by the antis, including deputies of the ruling majority, who say changes made in exchanges between the parliament and the upper house make it too lax.

LEGAL CONTAMINATION

Approved amendments include a rate of GM dissemination to conventional crops of up to 0.9 percent, a level fiercely contested by ecologists seeking to protect France’s biodiversity and organic crops from GM contamination.

“The problem of this law is that it legalises contamination because anything with a GMO content of less than 0.9 percent can be called GMO-free,” Romain Chabrol, a spokesman of the environmental group Greenpeace France, said.

The rate in Germany was set at 0.1 percent.

French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said the new law would be the “most protective in the world”.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly said he does not want to close the door on the technology or ban research so as to limit the number of biotech companies put off by the destruction of their outdoor experiments by activists.

French cooperative Limagrain, which has a 70 percent stake in the world’s fourth-largest seed maker Vilmorin, said this year its research unit Biogemma had moved its tests on GM crops to the United States after repeated attacks on its fields.

Such attacks would be more severely punished under the law.”

From wired:

“So you’ve decided to leave the comfort of your nerd-friendly lair and head out to explore the larger world. Perhaps a conference in Bangkok beckons, or maybe a Linux gathering in Europe. Even a trip with the family to some deserted isle?

Whatever the case, no self respecting geek goes globetrotting without preparation, research and a serious stash of appropriate gadgets. To save you from having to scour the net, here’s Wired’s guide to mastering the art of high tech travel.

Inspector Gadget

Here’s the first question: what gear should you bring? Furthermore, how do you keep it powered up and safe from harm and/or theft?

For full details on what you need to make sure all your gadgets have plenty (and the right kind) of electricity, check out our Stay Plugged In While Traveling guide. Once you have your power adapters in order, it’s worth asking which devices you should bring and which ones you can get by without.

Laptops

The laptop is tempting, and in many cases a must-have, especially if your destination is a conference or meet-up. But if you’re just traveling for pleasure, a good internet cafe is all you need. Going “topless” also spares you the added weight and hassle of lugging a computer around.

If you do have to bring your beloved portable, PACK A CABLE LOCK. This gives quite a piece of mind if you want to leave your hotel room for a dinner without having to worry that your hardware is gonna be missing when you get back.

The availability of internet cafes abroad varies, but generally speaking, they are not hard to come by unless you get well off the beaten tourist path. Do some searching and see what those who have already been to where you are going have found.

Tip: Mac users take note, you will almost always find Windows PCs in internet cafes.

Tip: A number of internet cafes have started banning USB sticks, which ruins your ability to Carry Your Desktop Anywhere with Portable Apps. The practice isn’t widespread enough to preclude carrying a USB stick, but you may encounter a few spots where your thumb drive is frowned upon. On the plus side, more and more have Firefox installed.

Tip: Bring a USB stick that is…”

Read more

From the guardian:

“Authorities in southern France fear a possible mosquito invasion in tourist resorts this summer and blame EU regulations which prevent them from using the most efficient insecticide.

For the first time since the early 1960s they cannot use temephos – a pesticide now banned by the European Union. Instead the EID says it is obliged to turn to a bacterium considered to be more environment-friendly, but which experts argue leaves little margin for error….”

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From the guardian:

“Britain’s assault on French cookery has been stepped up by a Yorkshire bakery which has started exporting lorry-loads of baguettes across the Channel.
Fosters of Barnsley has used a legal loophole to beat local boulangers to a contract supplying the narrow loaves to the whole of the French railway system.

The order follows a double whammy for North of England butchers who stole Grand Prix d’Excellence awards earlier this year at Europe’s biggest black pudding contest in France. The Real Lancashire Pudding company went on to take two gold medals in the usually French and Belgian-dominated tasting organised by the Compagnons de la Gastronomie Porcine.

The baguette triumph, which has earned Fosters managing director, John Foster, the French media title of “most hated man in France”, is down to the firm’s expertise in making long-life loaves.
French local law forbids the use of fat which is key to the long-life process, Foster said yesterday, but competitors from elsewhere in the European Union can sidestep the ban, under European legislation. Building on the “rolling stock” order, the Barnsley bakery is now challenging the brioche market in France, using the same method.

“Their own bakers could give them a good product, but it didn’t fit the railway’s needs,” said Foster. “In Yorkshire we’ve a tradition of giving customers what they want. They asked for baguettes which don’t go stale and we said yes, we can do you them. We’re shipping the stuff out by the wagon-load.”

Foster said he had been surprised by the “cheek” of the mismatch between French and EU law but recognised a good sales opportunity.”

From yahoo:

“The French government will “suspend” the use of new software for recording the personal habits and affiliations of its citizens in a police database, following an outcry by civil rights groups.

But Synergie-Officiers supported storage of information about the race and religion of suspects and victims. In France some violent crimes attract tougher sentences if motivated by racial or religious hatred, and the union warned that if campaign groups want such hate crimes pursued more vigorously, then police need a way to identify the relevant information about attackers and victims during investigations.”

Tags: france, big+brother, privacy+threatened, software, civil+liberties

Michel Fournier is at it again. Remember two years ago? He dropped out of the stratosphere from an altitude of about 130,000 feet (40 kilometers, nearly 25 miles) above the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada. This year he hopes to do the same while breaking the sound barrier and breaking some more world records.

From AFP:

“64-year-old retired French army parachutist said Monday he hopes to smash through the sound barrier with a record-breaking 40,000-metre (130,000-foot) freefall jump over Canada next month.

Michel Fournier hopes to set four new world records at once: for highest freefall parachute speed, at 1,500 kilometres (2,400 miles) per hour, 1.3 times the speed of sound, along with fastest and highest jump and highest air balloon flight.

The Russian Evgeny Andreyev made the highest recorded parachute jump with a 24,483-metre plunge in 1960, while the American Joseph Kittinger claimed an unverified jump of 31,000 metres in 1960.

The veteran French parachutist will take off from May 25 from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in a pressurised capsule, harnessed to a 161-metre helium-powered balloon, rising to almost four times the height of an airline flight.

Pressure will be let off gradually to allow him to exit and make his jump, wearing a specially-developed protective suit with two oxygen bottles, in conditions similar to an astronaut leaving his spacecraft.

Fournier told a press conference in Paris his jump would have “considerable repercussions for aeronautics and space, for medicine and high-technology.”

French astronaut Jean-Francois Clervoy, who is sponsoring the project, said it could help shed new light on the behaviour of the human body at the speed of sound, with potential applications for future rescue operations in space.

The French army piloted a similar project in the 1980s, aimed at developing an ejector capsule for European spacecraft, in which Fournier was due to take part before it was finally aborted.

With more than 8,600 jumps to his name, Fournier holds the French height record at 12,000 metres.

His project, which drew teams of specialists in high-altitude and underwater conditions, spacesuits and extreme condition health experts, cost 11.8 million euros (19 million dollars).”

From electronista:

“France-based Carrefour Group will launch a movie download service, the world’s second biggest retailer announced at the PEVE Digital Entertainment conference in Paris on Friday. The service will allow customers to buy movies or rent movies and rent TV programs. The Group already operates supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores that carry DVDs in Europe, and wants to expand its focus on entertainment, bringing it closer to customers.
Carrefour’s international non-food chief, Christophe Geoffroy, said the shopping experience would be simple and fast, with downloads taking about 3 minutes, suggesting a possible streaming experience. He went on to say video-on-demand market in Europe isn’t great, but is expected to grow. Some analysts predict Europe’s movie download market will be worth over about 690 Euros (over $1 billion) by 2011.

Carrefour isn’t the only or the first major retailer to seize the opportunity, as earlier this week, British retailer and grocer Tesco opened its own music and video site, with a larger focus on MP3 album and singles sales.

The group would continue to sell DVD videos at its current stores throughout France, Spain, Belgium and Italy, of which it has a 13.3% market share. Pricing for its downloads, nor a launch date, have yet been announced.”

From Michael Ruhlman:

“Eduardo Sousa, a farmer in the Extremadura region of Spain is, according to chef Dan Barber, raising geese that bear the best foie gras the chef’s tasted. The critical part of the story, though, is that Sousa does not force feed the geese. He apparently lets their inclination to gorge themselves, once required for migration, take care of the fattening and simply makes sure they have all they want—nuts, olives, etc., but no corn. This suggests of course that farmers who force feed their geese and ducks are simply controlling what the ducks would do naturally and that the folks who want to prohibit the production and sale of foie gras on the grounds of animal cruelty have one less leg to stand on.

I never thought they had any leg to stand on if they …”

Read the article

[via]

Tags: spain, best, foie+gras, food

From iht:

“Nearly a year into his term, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February, he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list.

Every French president since the Liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now.

Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for…”

Full article

Tags: france, sarkozy, embarrassing, french+politics

From wwd:

“Make no mistake — Louis Vuitton is well-equipped for combat against counterfeiters.

Tonight, Vuitton is celebrating Takashi Murakami’s “© Murakami” exhibition with a “Brooklyn Ball” at the Brooklyn Museum featuring a special performance by Kanye West, the unveiling of a new camouflage print developed by Murakami and Marc Jacobs called Monogramouflage and a special installation designed to bring attention to one of the industry’s biggest travails — counterfeits.

But rather than simply hand out leaflets to alert guests about the importance of protecting original designs, the French luxury goods house will be taking a novel, somewhat intriguing route. Outside the museum, Vuitton is setting up 10 New York-style street vendors — not to sell fakes, but rather authentic Louis Vuitton product and special Monogramouflage canvases that Murakami has created specifically for the exhibition.

While it may seem lighthearted on the surface, the presentation is meant to underscore just how serious Vuitton executives are taking the counterfeit trade, and how diligently they are working to stop copycats from getting their merchandise to consumers.

“We always thought that counterfeit requires zero tolerance for several reasons,” Yves Carcelle, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton, told WWD in an exclusive interview. “It’s a gray economy that escapes all rules of normal labor and normal economic rules and taxations, so it’s a bad thing for every state in the world. Secondly, it’s bad for any kind of creativity, research and development, because if you don’t protect intellectual property, why should people dedicate time and energy to create?”

Carcelle will highlight the issue in a press conference with Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and New York City deputy mayor Ed Skyler prior to the gala’s cocktail hour tonight.

Vuitton is no newcomer in the fight against counterfeiters. This year also marks the centennial of its first court case. In 1908, the brand won a ruling from the Paris Appeal Court to halt the distribution of look-alike trunks.

The luxury brand now employs a 40-member team that focuses exclusively on protecting its trademarks, designs, models, copyrights and domain names. The team is based in Paris, with regional offices in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Milan, Dubai, Buenos Aires and Guangzhuo, China.”

[via]

From counterpunch:

“Nicolas Sarkozy, allegedly the most Anglophile (or rather Americanophile) president of the 5th Republic failed his Science Po degree in the late 70s because his English was so poor that he was barred from sitting the politics exams. In the run up to the war in Iraq, the allegedly “Anti-American” Chirac was able to explain the French position in English before the US media, a small feat totally out of reach for the monolingual Sarkozy.

Sarkozy did not have to make small talk in English when he recently met the Queen in Windsor Castle since the British Monarch is fluent in French. On this occasion, some may have warned the Queen that Sarkozy’s French is generally most unceremonial: his crude crack at a person who refused to shake hands with him at a Paris farm show or the derogatory use of the “tu” form to address strangers (in the French context, not a cool way to behave, but rather a condescending or bossy one) have become Internet hits. Meeting youngsters from the banlieues a few months before his election, Sarko boasted to the kids: “I speak like you, I could be one of you”. “Bling-Bling Sarko” confuses familiarity with vulgarity. As one of his critics in the French media cruelly put it: Sarkozy is not small, but low.

Before Sarko, the Gaullist right was not quintessentially vulgar and anti-intellectual. Charles de Gaulle was a well-read man who had the good taste to choose André Malraux as Minister of Culture. Georges Pompidou was an Agrégé de lettres and a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The apparently less highbrow Jacques Chirac is a great connoisseur of Japanese civilization (and, some cynics might like to add, of his banking system) [and leaves the splendid Branly museum as a monument, Editors]. Sarkozy breaks with the Gaullist tradition on that count: he is a self-professed idiot. To one of his advisers who suggested that he visit a museum during a trip in Madrid, Sarko replied: “The idiot thanks you!” (Le con te dit merci!). The ironic jibe fails to conceal Sarkozy’s deep insecurity with regard to the world of knowledge in general and to intellectuals in particular. Sarkozy admitted hating school and underachieved as a student. Recently, he was heard fuming in public against “those researchers who find nothing”.

Sarkozy does not read and does not even pretend that he is in the least interested in literature or arts, which constitutes yet another break with the tradition of French presidents. He is the son of an immigrant from Central Europe who made it to the top of French politics without studying in the elitist Grandes Ecoles. These features should have earned him the sympathy of the French people as they like to back the underdog. However, Sarko has squandered this opportunity: his ostentatious nouveau riche profile and his courtship of the mega-rich have put off the whole nation.

In the end, Sarkozy may fail to substantially Americanize France if the French people find the political resources to defeat his neoliberal rampages through the economy. In the meantime, the country is run by a president who, like George W. Bush, thinks that the world is divided between “good” and “bad people”, that intellectuals are sissies and, last but not least, that it is alright to be not so educated, filthy rich and brag about it.”

Philippe Marlière teaches French and EU politics at University College London (UK) since 1994. He is also an activist on the left-wing of the French Socialist Party. He can be reached at p.marliere@ucl.ac.uk

Those opposing the new Eiffel Tower “hat” can breathe a sigh of relief. The new hat for the Eiffel Tower is a No-Go. Not only that, it was never a GO, nor part of a design competition; it was never approved for restructuring the famous landmark. WHO invented THAT story??

From nyt:

“David Serero, principal of Serero Architects, said in a telephone interview that his firm’s proposal was merely a spontaneous design it had submitted to the Eiffel Tower management group in view of the tower’s approaching 120th anniversary and, he said, was neither a response to a design competition nor solicited by the tower’s management.

The Guardian’s Web site reported Monday that the Eiffel Tower’s management group, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, had approved a temporary restructuring of the observation platform, which would alter the tower’s overall shape. After the report was picked up by other news organizations, the management group said that it had never solicited a redesign and that it envisaged no changes to the tower’s appearance.

Mr. Serero said his firm submitted unsolicited designs and put them on the Web, where they were later seen by news organizations.”

From AP:

“SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn’t sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.
The 10-second clip of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune,” taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison’s “Mary had a little lamb” — previously credited as the oldest recorded voice — by 17 years.

The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.

Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott’s — from 1857 and 1859 — in France’s patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.

“What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea,” Giovannoni said. “He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work.”

“We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott’s) technique wasn’t very developed,” Giovannoni said. “There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound.”

So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott’s papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.

“When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair,” Giovannoni said. “We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them.”

While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.

Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.

The scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” to read Scott’s sooty paper. They immediately got sound, but because phonautograph was hand-cranked its speed varied and that changed the recording’s pitch.

“If someone’s singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting,” said Cornell. “We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations.”

On March 3, Haber and Cornell sent audio back to Giovannoni, and another engineer further fine-tuned the recording to bring the voice out more from the static.

“When I first heard the recording as you hear it … it was magical, so ethereal,” said Giovannoni. “The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”

Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his phonautograms, but the result of this work will be played in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.

Audio of the “Au Clair de la Lune” recording: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/

From decanter:

“For the first time in their history, Paris pawn shops have agreed to take bottles of wine in exchange for cash.

More than 350 bottles with a total value of €60,000 (£45,000) have been pawned – inlcuding a €5,000 Domaine de la Romanee Conti.

The initiative was launched by Crédit Municipal de Paris, the local authority pawnshop – which usually deals in family heirlooms and pieces of jewellery – last week.

The wine is to be stored in the 18th-century cellars under the Crédit Municipal building…”

Read the whole article

[via]

From IHT:

“Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a longtime humanitarian, diplomatic and political activist on the international scene, says that whoever succeeds President George W. Bush in the White House may restore something of America’s battered image and standing overseas, but “the magic is over.”

In a wide-ranging conversation Tuesday with Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune at the Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris, Kouchner also held out the eventual hope of talking with Hamas, the Palestinian movement that controls the Gaza Strip but has been ostracized by the West and by its Palestinian rival, Fatah.

Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, “It will never be as…”

Read the full article

From the belfasttelegraph:

“Saint Céneri could hardly be more French and yet its rich history has been shaped, for good and ill, by foreign missionaries and invaders. The small settlement, just within lower Normandy, was created in the seventh century by an Italian saint and hermit – Saint Céneri himself – who conjured up springs and parted the waters of rivers by pointing his stick. During the Hundred Years’ War, in 1434, the village castle was besieged for months and then demolished by 15,000 obstinate Englishmen.

After 561 uneventful years, the village fell, willingly this time, into the clutches of another foreigner – a Yorkshireman. For the past 13 years, Ken Tatham has been the mayor of Saint Céneri-le-Gérei, the only British mayor in France.

On Sunday week, 9 March, he is up for election for the third time. There are no opinion polls in Saint Céneri but Mr Tatham, 62, is likely to win by a miniature landslide.

How many voters would that mean exactly? Mr Tatham considers for a moment. “We have a population of 140, of whom 160 can vote,” he said. “This is just like Corsica, although you’d better not quote me saying that.”

Mr Tatham has lived in Saint Céneri for 38 years. He is married to a…”

Read the full article

From UPI:

“PELLEVOISIN, France, Jan. 20 (UPI) — Residents of a French village may turn down a $2 million bequest because they find conditions attached to it are unreasonable.

Helene Louart, who many village residents did not even realize was wealthy, left the money to the 900-person village of Pellevoisin in her will, The Sunday Observer reported. But before the local government can get a single franc, it would have to rename the Avenue de la Republique after Louart, hang her favorite paintings in the mayor’s office and sell her house only to people from Paris.

Perhaps the most controversial requirement is that a chunk of the money be spent on a housing project for the poor — a prospect many residents say would change the character of the town.

The long list of conditions led one resident to say the gift is really a form of revenge on the village, but more sympathetic townspeople said they believe Louart really intended to help the poor.”

From ENN:

It’s widely known that lead poisoning poses a threat to public health. The metal’s negative effect on the nervous system as well as its propensity to cause renal and cardiovascular diseases has promoted the FDA to continually lower the legal limit of lead content in paint, children’s toys, and playground substrate since the late 70’s.

In October ’07, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics released an alarming report, “A Poison Kiss,” on the lead content of lipstick. They found that more than half of the name brand lipsticks tested contained detectable levels of lead. France’s Largest Cosmetic company’s L’Oreal Colour Riche “True Red” topped the list at .65 ppm lead. Even Burt’s Bees Lip Shimmer Merlot contains lead (less than .1 ppm.) However, with a little bit of research and awareness, you can find safer (and environmentally friendly) lipsticks.

A French court ruled that Amazon.fr must stop its free delivery.

The court gave Amazon 10 days to start charging for the delivery of books, which should at least allow the company to maintain the offer through the end-of-year gift-giving season. After that, it must pay a fine of €1,000 (US$1,470) per day that it continues to offer free delivery. It must also pay €100,000 in compensation to the booksellers’ union.

Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France. (read the article from MacWorld)

A Sidenote: Amazon France offers books in English!

From IHT:

As one of eight children born to parents who came to France from a mining area in the south-east of Morocco, I grew up in a housing project near Valence, in the kind of high-rise blocks that everyone saw in the scenes of torched cars and street battles on television in the rioting in 2005 and again a few weeks ago. In both instances, the unrest was sparked by allegations of police harassment but exclusion and joblessness were also key factors.

The paradox is that the rioters, for all their alienation, behaved in a very French way. Like farmers and union members who go readily into the streets, they wanted to be listened to.

What is dangerous is that people have reached a point where they see violence as the sole way of calling attention to their misery and, while I am horrified at the violence, I understand the hopelessness and anger behind the riots.

You need to look at the realities of life in the tower blocks of the urban periphery. Here there are three basic sources of income: what was known in my family as “the fruit of your labor,” i.e. staying in school to get the education that would lead to earning a good living; relying on welfare benefits; or getting into the underground economy of drugs and crime.

There will always be people who slide into the last two alternatives. The real problem comes when working hard and getting qualifications doesn’t lead to being able to earn a decent living.

In the high-rise districts around Paris and other cities the figure for unemployed youth can be as high as 60 per cent, and it’s not just school-leavers with few or no qualifications who can’t land jobs. Moreover, many of the jobs that are available to young people, even highly skilled ones, tend to be short-term and poorly paid.

My family saw education as the path out of the ghetto. My father always said, “You are the needle and your brothers and sisters are the thread. If you succeed, your siblings will follow through, so get every qualification you can.”

My parents gave me the motivation and the discipline to work hard, and taught me to believe in the system. It was only when I graduated with three degrees in economics, and was turned down for every job I applied for, that I started having doubts. When I applied for graduate work, I was turned down. I was told that while I was well qualified for the course, I would never get a job afterwards as …..

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From Cleantech:

“A prominent researcher shared a nuclear secret today that he said not even everyone in the U.S. Department of Energy knows.

Is the U.S., in fact, storing a large amount of nuclear waste produced by France’s nuclear reactors?

That was the suggestion in a keynote today at the ThinkEquity ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco by Dr. Yogi Goswami, former President of the International Solar Energy Society, and prolific author and University of Florida professor.

“One small bit of information that most people don’t know, even in our Department of Energy: a large majority of the nuclear waste from France is actually shipped to the U.S.,” Goswami said.

“It’s stored in…”

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Interesting take on Sarkozy and the European Leaders as they relate to “handling” the U.S.

“…when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from…”

[Excerpt from Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker - read the full article]