Arbitrary and Biased

Finally!

2007-07-19T10:46:00.000+02:00

Finally my company has been officially created. After many months, I officially incorporated US Connection at the Chamber of Commerce in Bordeaux. The webpage is also online at www.us-connection.com.

I'll try to keep you informed as to the progress that I make.

(ps: yes, this post is primarily for google/yahoo search results...most of my two readers know this stuff already!!!)

Traffic Control à la française

2007-06-22T12:09:00.000+02:00

So...The Rocade, which is the ring road around the city of Bordeaux got its speed limit reduced from 110kph (~68mph) to 90kph (55.8) yesterday. Of course, since this is a big change, you think that all the media outlets would be talking about it, would be warning drivers...maybe even leading up to the change they would have told us. Naw. I had to hear it from Julie who heard it from her taxi driver on the way home from the airport last night...

Ok, ok...so maybe it's just that I don't pay attention to the news (I don't either, I don't watch TV, read French newspapers, frequent French web sites, etc.). So this morning I took it upon myself to check out the local media...It took me 45 minutes to find an article in the Sud-Ouest...Bordeaux's home-town paper. I also found a quick 2 line article on the website of the local TV station (yeah, there's one...ok, there's actually 2, but one is like public access TV).

Anyway, the given reasons for the reduction of the speed limit are less pollution, ok, that's fine, I agree that you're blowing out less noxious chemicals at 55 than at nearly 70, and more fluidity of the traffic. Hmmm. Lower speed means that the traffic will move better. I'm not a traffic engineer, but this seems odd to say the least. How can making slowing people down result in speeding them up? Yes, the speed limit for trucks is 80kph, which means that there tends to be holdups when two trucks try to pass each other...but I still don't see how reducing the speed by 20kph is going to make me get where I'm going faster. I may even agree to nighttime/daytime speed limits. At night, when there are 3 cars in your rearview and one in front of you, doing 55mph is really tedious...I can understand for safety reasons if they wanted the daytime limit to be different...but this strikes me as typical political BS.

My theory is like this: The politicians in Bordeaux want to build a bypass highway that cuts through the Medoc region so all the truck traffic (and vacationers too) can go around the city on their way to Spain/Portugal or from Spain/Portugal. There was a big grassroots movement against this (I think it needs to be done...yeah, I don't want to destroy ancient vineyards either, but something's gotta be done...We don't live in 1952 anymore and the Rocade gets really really backed up during rush hour and most of the day) and it's been "put on hold." I think that the prefect, who's kinda like the governor of the region...except frequently he's (invariably "he") never lived in the region before his posting...He went to ENA, the famous French finishing school, he's buddies with the president or the PM and he gets posted to province for a couple of years before getting a better post in a better city, figured fine you bumpkins, you don't want progress, well now you're really in trouble because I'm going make it impossible to move around the city in any timely manner.

But that's the way it is in France...You are never right. The politicians know what's best for you so shut you're damn mouth and take it. I've tried to explain the concept of a "libertarian" to the French...It's like talking to a wall, really.

Anyway, you gotta figure at least they'll give everyone a breaking-in period for the new speed limit where anyone travelling less than 110kph will get a warning, but not a ticket. The CRS (the French riot police, who do traffic control when there are no riots) gave out a ticket for 91kph at 10am yesterday (4 hours after the change went into affect). Come on, it's 90 euros for the government coffers that we're talking about, we can't pass that up. Vive la France mes amis!

You Only Vote Twice

2007-05-05T12:37:00.000+02:00

Ok, so the highly disputed runoff for president nears us, with the two candidates going into seclusion until the end (one of many French electoral rules, which states that there is to be no campaigning after Friday evening before the Sunday elections).

O.F.F. (our favorite fascist) Sarkozy looks to be building a insurmountable lead, but the French are historically difficult to judge, so Sunday could bring a big ~~mistake~~ surprise for France. Sarko has fascist tendencies, sure...he wants to more police control, he speaks in slightly veiled racist terms, he's a nationalist; this is something that I've been trying to come to terms with, being that I'd much prefer him to be the president. And then last night, I was driving back from downtown Bordeaux and got cut off three times by cars blowing stop signs, had to stop at least three times to let jaywalkers get across and nearly ran over an idiot 14-year-old on a moped who was passing me in the bike lane (on the right, of course). Sarkozy is a law-and-order guy...there's already 1000s of speed cameras everywhere, which are his legacy. There are things in the US that we take for granted, due process for traffic violations, for example, that just don't exist here. The systems are not the same, but I do not feel that Sarkozy is the next Hitler, and he sure as hell isn't the next Bush (of course comparing him to the two in the same sentence here is normal)...anyone with half a brain and without a political agenda will quickly realize that the heavy-handed government control of the economy that is wielded in France and will continue under Sarko isn't really Bush's thing.

Selective immigration and cracking down on the "scum" (racaille in french: also translated at ne'er-do-wells by some) are normal actions for me. Of course there are racial connotations to all of this, but having a society where everyone is civil is not a police state. And condoning immigrants who will bring something to the country, other than population, is a cause that I believe in. For all of the criticisms raised about the H-visa program in the states, it's hard to argue that it's been bad for the country as a whole...it diversifies the US, it helps our relationships with other nations and it helps the economy. It also makes the brain-drain something that the US benefits from...Highly educated foreigners coming to the US is a good thing and it would be a good thing for France as well.

Ségolène knows she's probably going to lose and has desperately tried to say and do everything possible to insult and demean Sarkozy. It hasn't worked. And Bayrou, the wimp or "couilles mou" as certain French have started calling him, is ridiculous...Trying to play both sides...Someone should tell him about trying to burn the candle at both ends...Good luck with your niche party in the future, buddy.

I know very few people who are voting for Segolene out of conviction...If she wins it means simply that Sarkozy lost...She has no plan...No policy, nothing. She is going to govern with her "Social Partners" (unions basically, but also non-unionized employees in companies, NGOs, Non-profit associations, whomever...) and by referendum. As Julie said, she isn't getting elected President, she's getting elected "Mediator of France."

I'm all for labor's involvement in the process. I think that capitalists have one thing in mind and they don't give a crap about anything but their wallets. There's no reason that you can't have a forward-looking, liberal (traditional sense), and just society. Giving the still-communist unions, who represent 9% (maximum) of the workforce, a voice that is non-representative of their actual influence is as bad as giving the CEOs of the top 50 companies is France that same voice. The unions don't speak for me, or for anyone but themselves. Julie's cousin by marriage works in a semi-unionized environment and has been harassed endlessly to join the union. She doesn't want to, but they won't give up even to the point of subtly threatening her position in the company, etc. The unions are dying here because of the way that French labor relations work (it's a whole another article, but basically you don't have to be unionized to have the exact same rights as the unions. Therefore the people, logically, don't join unions and pay the dues, but still have all the benefits they would have as a unionized employed).

Anyway: All of this is basically to say that I think that Sarokzy offers the best opportunity for France to get out of this malaise that it's found itself in. A vote for Ségolène is a vote for the status quo...and every independent group out there that ranks countries says that the status quo is not what France needs.

The French Election

2007-04-18T09:33:00.000+02:00

Ok, here's the deal. Whatever you read (watch, hear) in the US media about the upcoming election is probably greatly exaggerated. LePen will not win. LePen will most likely not go through to the runoff again. The Communist/Green/far-Left bloc won't get more than 20% or so, but it may be enough to put Bayrou through against Sarkozy, but Bayrou, not LePen.

Here's the most common misperception about the previous election: LePen was sent through because so many people liked him that he was voted through and this means that the entire country is xenophobic racists (ok, that may be true...but...). LePen got something like 17% of the popular vote in the first round...and in the second round...18% (he got 720,000 more votes in the 2nd round out of nearly 32 million voters). That means that even in a 1-on-1 runoff with Jack "You can't charge me with a crime while I'm in office" Chirac, he didn't get anymore (significant) votes. Expect LePen to get between 16-20% this election cycle too. France has problems and a lot of the former communists party supporters have switched to the Front National because they don't feel that the Communist party was doing anything to help their plight. LePen is not at all extreme right economically; it's all social and the terroir-is-life bunch is afraid of all the cheap food and products coming from other countries. LePen promises to stop this.

In the last election, LePen went through because the Left in France is not at all organized (and still isn't). In polls, the combined left represents about 35-45% of the population. But you have 3% who vote communist, 5% who vote green, 4% who vote moderate communist, 4% who vote for the other moderate communists and then 16-20% who vote for the Partie Socialiste. What happened in 2002 is everyone voted with their "heart" in the first round. The "Left" got 49% of the votes, but Jospin only got 16.18% to LePen's 16.68% (this table is arranged in left-to-right descending order). LePen benefited from this type of voting with your heart and/or protest voting - without naming names, I know people who vote FN in the first round, but would be horrified to see LePen as the president. However, there is a fairly strong cadre of extreme-righters who will always vote for the FN. The Socialistes and the UMP (majority rightest party) don't draw the same sort of devotion. What this means, to me, is that even if LePen went through last time and even if he has a fairly strong say in parliament, he's not going to win the election. Sorry Christopher Hitchens, the undecided 40% aren't going to vote LePen.

My call: The runoff is going to place either Sarkozy against Royal or Bayrou. Sarko vs Royal = Sarko Président. Sarko vs Bayrou = Bayrou. If its Bayrou v Royal = Bayrou. If LePen does go through, which isn't impossible, his opponent will win in the second round. In any case, I would hate to see Ségolène as the president. She offers absolutely nothing to the French. It's steady as she goes, but with everyone holding Le Tricolore and singing La Marseillaise. Sorry folks, the woman who thinks that the US is worse than Iran and the Taliban is in power would be a really bad thing for this country that desperately needs to change.

Although Sarko-Fasco (fascist shortened) scares me a bit, I prefer his [relatively] liberal market views. Bayrou would probably be ok, but as the French say, he's a bit mou (soft, undecided, wishy-washy) and I don't know that he's got the couilles to make a difference. Royal would just be a 5-year plague who would make the country a worst place to live. Of course if LePen wins, I'm moving back to the States (and you can quote me on that), but I truly believe that this is an empty threat.

(thanks to Les Fakes de Lobo for the photochops)

House Update

2007-03-29T20:29:00.000+02:00

Ok, consider yourselves lucky! I just took a few pictures and then realized that I hadn't the slightest idea where the USB connector was...lo-and-behold, it was where it was supposed to be! So you get pictures too!

Anyway, it's been a while, and for that I'm sorry. I've had a house to try to deal with, though. Since our move was programmed for last Saturday, the pressure really mounted last week to try to get everything done...Finish the tiling, do the joints, sand the wood upstairs, put down three coats of varnish, try to get all the drywall spackled and sanded...ugh. Needless to say, I didn't leave the house before 9:30pm last week, and didn't work less than 13 hours a day. We got as much as possible done before the big move. Saturday was moving day!

I want to take one minute out of my blog to thank Yohann who was with us from 9am until 9pm and did not stop. I'd like to say that I would be as involved in someone else's move, but I doubt it. It was really helpful because he's about 6'4" and quite strong.

Anyway, the move went as well as a move can go. Stressful, annoying, but nothing (as far as I know) broke and we got all of the big stuff out of the apartment on Saturday...Sunday was the cleanup day, and man does that suck. Anyway, we had help on sunday too so that went by without incident and we'll be getting our security deposit back in its entirety (which is good because its already earmarked).

Anyway, Julie took Monday off, but left for Montreal on Tuesday, so I've been trying to get stuff done this week. It's a lot more difficult to work when you've got stuff all around you. But that's the way it is. My internet came back on Weds morning, which was good. I was without internet for about 70 hours total, but it felt like 4 weeks...I think I'm going to get a Blackberry as my next phone so I never have to worry about this again...

Anyway, here's some pictures. The first one is the floor in my office just after I had finished the final coat of oil (for those keeping score at home, I used a "hard base" (I don't know the name in english, that's the literal translation from French) followed by two coats of non-color oil).

The bedroom - I like the contrast of the shopvac and spackle mix surrounding the laundry.

The closet...I just put up those bars today!

The kitchen (it looks better arranged than it really is. That Ikea (ee-KAY-uh) thing is about 4 inches from the wall because I have plumbing behind it that needs to be moved. One of the feet on the sink broken when I was trying to install the Ikea thing, and to get to the bathroom you have to go behind the Ikea thing

And the living room. Notice the nice touch of the stack of heaters in the middle of the floor.

The House: Days Dwindling

2007-03-17T00:45:00.000+01:00

Sorry folks for not posting earlier; as some of you can imagine giving ourselves 3 weeks to basically redo the interior of the house turns out to be a very stressful thing to do to ourselves!!

Anyway, the upstairs is kinda livable. We have to do something about the wall that is not insulated at all (and by not insulated I mean it has a piece of plywood that separates the cars, people and cold from our bedroom). Other than this we finished the flooring upstairs. My father-in-law showed me how to do it and we did my office together. Then I finished during the week (actually I finished today, but it was just a few tinny bits). I think it's pretty damn well done for an rookie and I'm quite proud of it. We've got a throw up a first coat of paint and we should be able to survive for a few weeks.

Thursday, Julie's cousin got lassoed into helping me do the drywall (poor kid, he's on vacation from med school and just happened to stop by the house to see it...he must regret that move. Oh well, it helped him burn off his spring-break hangover). We got most of it done, and Jean-Christophe and I finished it up this morning before starting on the tiling! Ugh, I'm not sure what's harder, wood flooring or tiling. They both have their negatives. I think that flooring is harder to do well, but tiles are painful. You spend the whole day on your knees, trying not to displace the freshly placed tiles, while reaching waaaaaay over to the back to try to clean up the previous row. At least we bought the glue (or whatever the sticky stuff is called in english) that is already made...it costs more, but man it's so much easier that having to constantly mix up the powder.

Not sure if this post makes any sense...it's quarter-to-one in the morning here. I haven't worked for less than 10 hours this week, yesterday was a marathon 13.5 hour work session. Today was an easy 10 hour day. I've got to hit the hay, but I just wanted to get a few pics up here for y'all.

We also scraped a wall clean so that we can have a wall in stone. This is a ton of work and I was pulling stones out of everywhere for 2 or 3 days.

The House - Day Something-or-Other

2007-03-10T22:48:00.000+01:00

As promised earlier, I am posting a little update on the house. So, I went on Wednesday to get some stuff done. Julie took Thurs and Friday off from work. Thursday, I had rented a truck at the place where we bought the tile to transport the 600kg (~1400 lbs) of tile to our house. I figured since I was there, I would also buy some sheetrock. So I got there at 9:15, deal with the papers, get the tile loaded and we try to load some sheetrock...hmmm, not enough room. So the guy says, 'I tell ya what, I'll charge you only 1.5 hours for the entire morning and you come back (it's about 1/2 hour one-way from our new house) and get the sheetrock.' Ok. So I drive over to the house and unload with Julie 600kgs of tile. Run back to the store. Instead of getting 10 sheets of sheetrock I figure I should get 20...I'll need them and I've got the truck...why not. Then I think, we've got 400 sq. feet of wood flooring at my in law's house..which is right next to the store where I bought the drywall...ugh. Ok, I swing by there and get the 12 packs of wood. Run back. Julie and I unload the sheetrock (each sheet is 85 lbs) and the wood!

The afternoon we continued putting sheetrock on the ceiling...if you've never done this (I had never done it on the ceiling), it's incredibly tiring for your arms (and back, and neck...it's just tiring overall).

Friday we continued with the sheetrock and basically got it finished except for 3 small pieces that Julie's cousin Camille and I finished today.

There's so much work left to do and basically two weeks before we move. The next 14 days are going to be insanely busy. Oh well. There's things that have to be done...the flooring upstairs, the tile downstairs, the walls need to be drywalled...Not a lot of choice.

Oh yeah, and our new windows got installed on Thursday! What a difference double-plated brand new windows make!

I'll put a couple of pictures up here. The first one is Camille feeling the surge of power that only a large tool can give you.

The House - Days 3&4

2007-03-06T09:54:00.000+01:00

Day 3: Sunday. Pouring concrete. I've poured concrete a few times in my life, but I think it's always been from a truck...While it's difficult, the truck comes with the concrete already made. Not this time...With only 0.75 cubic meters (about 26 cubic feet) to pour, it's not worthwhile to bring in a truck. So we load the cement mixer into Jean-Christophe's trailer, bring it to the house, then we go to buy the supplies. JC's trailer is a fairly small affair and we needed to buy about 600kg (1400lbs) of sand. We decide to do it in two loads...Get the sand, set off, strange noise...'Oh crap, the bearings in the wheels are broken!' Well we've only got a mile to go, let's do it and see. It turns out that the wheel wasn't screwed on correctly, but the bearings are fine! Second trip, doubts about the sand...let's buy a little more just in case. Great! That should do fine.

Start mixing the stuff...man, masons are not weak people...my arms, back, legs, ok basically everything are killing me and I just want to be done.

Anyway, we bang that out all morning, and...run out of sand at 2pm...with a piece that was about 1x1.5 feet left to do! Of course we can't buy any sand because it's Sunday afternoon! Ugh. Oh well, no problem we'll finish tomorrow, but still I like to get stuff done all at once.

Anyway, Monday morning we finished the cement and moved upstairs to start working on the ceiling. Of course in our rush to do things we cut a piece of sheetrock backwards so now our ceiling is bi-colored! Oh well, once it's painted it'll all look the same. There's some more pictures below.

Tuesday and Wednesday are dedicated to my company and Thursday we're back in the house working.

Day II

2007-03-03T22:33:00.000+01:00

Today was less breaking stuff up and more getting ready to make stuff tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to be laying concrete so the two halves of our house are level (I phrased that poorly...the house is level, it's just that the floor on the left was lower than that on the right)...ugh. I'm exhausted so this post may make no sense.

Anyway, it was a lot of prep work...tomorrow we'll play in the concrete!

Our house

2007-03-02T22:41:00.001+01:00

We have officially become mortgate holders...I'm wont to say "home owners" but this isn't really the truth now is it?

Anyway, we signed today at 6:00pm CET and we can now [officially] start destroying stuff. For the record these pictures were taken after the signature, in reality, you can see that it is still
light out and it gets dark in Bordeaux at around 6pm...

The previous owners gave us the keys and we promised to [ahem] measure and "not destroy anything" until we signed...I didn't want to, but I was outvoted 2-1 so a bunch of walls become piles of rubbish.

Anyway. Here's some pics of the work...I will try to put more up whenever I have a chance.

Blogging St. Louis

2007-02-17T17:51:00.000+01:00

Wow...what to say. Like I said to Jeff, I flew to the Fly-Over-States...what was I thinking?

To bring my reader (singular of course) up to date, I had to come to St. Louis to meet a supplier. This part went very well. Meeting the supplier. They're a family-owned (for 92 years) business, they're reputable, they're good at what they do, they're really the type of furniture manufacturer that I need. Everything but the 8 hours that I spent with them has been a living hell.

Let's start in Madrid. I was flying Bordeaux-Madrid-Newark-St. Louis. In Madrid, they told me that my connection from Newark to St. Louis was cancelled, but it shouldn't be a problem, 'cause there was a flight at 7pm that I should be able to catch. Ok, get on plane, 8 hours across the ocean. Land in Newark...late, of course. Waiting for my bag to pop out, I asked about the potential connections to St. Louis...Everything on Wednesday was canceled to St. Louis...Good luck, enjoy the night in Concourse C...He also told me that the first morning flight was canceled and the second one was fully booked. GREAT! Get out of customs...nothing to declare...Go to the "Passenger re-routing line (for displaced Continental customers)"...yep, that's the one, there with 40,000 people in it. So I stood in line and tried to call Continental reservations to see if they could fix my problem...15 minutes was the average wait time on the phone...After 8 minutes I lost the call...Call back, press # 20 times until they tell me that don't understand what I want, they'll transfer me to a customer service agent immediately...and they did. No 15 minutes here. Ok, I'm booked on the 9:15am out of Newark. It's now 4pm. Call people, try to get to Rockland...Finally I get to Rockland at 7pm...5:30am, shower, Newark. We board, we leave the gate at 9:30am...and we wait and wait and wait for 1.5 hours. Then the captain says we've waited so long that we need to get more gas, we don't have enough to get to STL...finally we leave about 1h45m late. Arrival St. Louis and of course there's no gate open...we wait some more!

Finally I leave the damn airports! Meet with my supplier for 1 hour, I arrived so late that I didn't have time for me. Downtown STL to look around. Of course the hotel had canceled my reservation, even thought I spoke with 4 different people the day before to tell them I wouldn't be there. Anyway, they fix this. Let's check out St. Louis! My hotel's only a block from the Arch, so I walk down there. It turns out that 0°F is cold. My hands were numb before I made it to the Arch.

Next stop, a pharmacy to buy hair gel, shaving cream and body wash 'cause they "stole" this stuff when I was in Newark I didn't have time to check my bags so everything over 3oz (100ml) was seized 'cause I guess hair gel is the weapon-of-choice of terrorists these days. It turns out that "pharmacies" are unknown to heart-landers...Ok nix that. Next stop a bar...hmmm, ok it turns out that when there are no sports events no one opens their doors 'cause St. Louians don't venture out if there isn't some sort of sporting event. Ok, no bar...Restaurant? Hooters or TGIFridays...ok screw this, I'm going to the hotel. At least they have a bar there, and a restaurant. Slowly slowly defrost over a few pints...eat (I'd missed lunch too because of the stupid travel plans)...then sleep. I love jetlag...I'm exhaused, but at 3am I wake up cause my body decides it's done sleeping.

Anyway, I met again with the supplier this morning and that went great. We talked about business, he's ready to work with me...business was done. I get done early, bring the car back and go to the airport...The first thing I see all Continental flights to Newark "Delayed." I check in, she tells me I can take the 4:23pm flight...great! It'll leave at 6:30pm...what?! That's later than my scheduled flight...ok sir, if you want that one, it's due to leave at 9pm. UGH! I actually missed the 1pm flight by minutes (at 3pm).

Anyway, I'm waiting for this flight to board. Hopefully we'll get to Newark before tomorrow morning.

Conclusions: Don't travel, ever. If you have to, don't fly...Does the QE2 make a port of call in St. Louis? Don't go to St. Louis...it's one big Arch, 40 hotels and 400 banks. Oh, and the military is huge. I saw a Calvin sticker pissing on a sign that said "France and the UN" and some guy named "God" is really big here. This is not the Northeast people.

Two Months: Was it worth the wait?

2007-01-30T12:10:00.000+01:00

My dear reader,

I have not posted in two months! I am sorry, I have been quite busy. This post is going to be very lackluster. I just want to announce the "creation" of my corporate website. Yeah, it's really boring right now, but with time this will get better. I promise.

Anyway, you can now officially visit my website at www.us-connection.com.

Here's my nearly-finished logo, just to make life more fun.

Making Eric Blair Proud

2006-12-02T22:25:00.000+01:00

Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act (1)

The reason to go to war is to save lives(2)

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.(3)

I don’t give a goddamn, I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!(4)

I'll be the first to say that I think the Nineteen-Eight-Four analogy is one of the most over-used, but maybe there is reason. Not living in the US, I've become slightly out-of-the-loop on a lot of the happenings. Sure, the main stuff still filters through. I read mostly US-based news anyway, so I get an idea. But a lot of the day-to-day stuff that this government is putting its citizens through does seem to escape me. They may be monitoring my emails and my telephone conversations that go to the states, and as disconcerting that that may be, I urge them to waste more of [other] tax payers dollars for this Quixote pursuit. I've got nothing to hide when I talk to my parents about my mom's fall down the stairs or with my suppliers about the square-yard cost of different types of vinyls.

However, this week CNN (it's at the top of My Yahoo! RSS links) had a story about Homeland Security tracking travelers meal preferences, among other things. It doesn't seem to be a huge story in the states, like wire-tapping or other blatant Constitution-rights violations have been. I'm not sure why this strikes me so hard, while others haven't. Probably because since I live over here in Europe, and have traveled to the US at least a half-dozen times in the last 3 years or so, I'm sure that they have a folder on me.

I'll save you DOH idiots some time. I prefer not to eat on the plane, but in a pinch I usually take the beef. I usually prefer the window seats if I'm traveling with someone, but have began requesting aisles (I hope I'm not going to be classed as suspicious because of my change of heart). I prefer to fly on Air France, KLM or Delta because of frequent flyer miles, but will fly on the cheapest flight (that explains Air India in 2004) if there's a big difference. I pay by credit card or French banking card. I have bought a few one-way tickets in my life, usually to or from my current place of residence. I have a real US passport that I use for all international travel, for what that's worth, and the best of my knowledge have never committed fraud regarding international travel.

But really, who the hell do they think they're tricking here? After they clamped down on one-way flights after Sept. 11, every talking head with half a brain stated the obvious: A terrorist is just going to buy a round-trip ticket, knowing that the government is flagging one-ways. All it did is piss off a lot of travelers, such as myself, who go stuck in Cincinnati and needed to buy one-way, by forcing them to submit to a lot of time consuming and meaningless security searches. If the four x-ray devices don't find anything in my bags, why do you think some minimum-wage earner with latex gloves is going to?
Do they even have halal meals on most flights? (I've never seen them), so that manner of "screening" seems to be lost right there. Maybe the people eating kosher are actually Arab terrorists? What do they look for? The people who want aisle seats, near the toilets and kosher meals? Either Arab terrorists or incontinent Jews, but we'd better put them on the watch list, just in case.

One of the reasons that this bothers me the most is that a lot of the mainstream press seems to be ignoring it, or at least not making it a big story. CNN has reported on it, but beyond that not a lot of agencies have picked up on it: Although interestingly enough the BBC had basically the exact same report two months before CNN "broke it." Why do I think there was a conversation in the CNN news room that went something like this:
Editor: Can we do any stories that aren't about Christmas?
Writer: Well, it's only 3 weeks before Christmas, everyone is basically looking at Walmart's data from black-friday.
E: Find me something

The writer did some Googling and found this story from 1 October 2006 on BBC's website and just re-wrote it.

In any case, whether it was news in October or in December, this is one more slip down the slope towards increasing control over the every day lives of people in the US. This isn't about foreign nationals being refused habeas corpus or a guy that was misprofiled and got watched by the FBI, DOH, et al, for months because they thought he was involved in the Madrid train-bombings. This is about everyone that has ever flown being databased by the federal government. I'm sure that they develop profiles and what happens, if on one of these trips, I change a habit (holy shit Colonel, Kristian John Salo just ordered a center seat with a vegetarian meal and he paid in cash, plus he's flying to Florida!)? do I get refused boarding? increased screening? a 12-volt battery, probes, a bucket of water and wooden chair in the back room? I won't talk!

You can have freedom or you can not have freedom, but you can't have freedom if the government is refusing to recognize constitutional rights. I do not wish anyone die from terrorist attacks, but is it better we stop one terrorist act that may kill 100 people or we oppress 300 million for life?

Here's to King George's lame-duck two years. May they be as crappy as his first 6. At least there's some opposition now, although I don't think the spineless Democrats have the balls to stop the erosion of our civil rights for fear of looking "weak" to the populace before the next elections.

1.Eric Blair (G. Orwell) [george-orwell.org]
2.Fleischer [Mindprod]
3.Goering at Nuremberg [multiple sources]
4. Bush [Mindprod; Capital Hill Blue]

Thanksgiving: An Expat's Lament

2006-11-23T16:26:00.000+01:00

It's funny. Of the last seven Thanksgivings, I have celebrated two in the US and one in Ireland. The rest I didn't celebrate. Yet, for some reason, today is the first one that I really feel. It's not that I wish I was in the States to celebrate it - although I wouldn't mind. I had the opportunity to celebrate it here with the local French American outreach club (which is frequented mostly by Brits, but that's a different story), but due to procrastination and indecision the deadline came and passed, but I don't really mind - I'm not really feeling up to meeting new people and socializing today.

I think this year the difference is that I have many dealings with the US and knowing that all my suppliers are closed is strange. I keep getting confused between whether it's a holiday in France or not.

I also planned on signing a big contract today, which made for a lot of late night legwork earlier in the week - to be able to beat the US shutdown Thursday and Friday. This morning I got up - still sick (I thought I was getting better yesterday, but apparently the microbes haven't had the last word yet) - but ready. This morning I did all the work I had to do to get everything prepared, but now I can't find anyone to meet with the sign the contract. This adds to the feeling that today is a holiday in France. No one is answering their phones.

My significant other has left (for only one night, but still) to Blighty, so I'm stuck inside (it's raining again like it has for the past week), by myself. I just can't motivate myself to work today. The combination of the weather, illness and the non-finalization of a 6+ month ordering process that should produce some nice dividends, has made it so I just can not find the will to work on a business plan or try to seek out new clients. I've been sitting in front of the computer, pretending to work for the last few hours, but all I've done is learned that Tiki Barber isn't happy with his employers, there was a really big funeral in Lebanon (there's two speeding trains heading for each other on the same track), and they still can't figure out exactly how the KGB (or whatever the the Russian Semantics Agency has renamed it) tried to kill a British resident.

I think I'm going to give up. I've got a mildly interesting book that I'm having a hard time getting into, but one of the protagonists is only pages away from suffering a "mysterious death" and this may help me finish it. I'm going to cook up some tea with copious amounts of honey and enjoy the fact that it's too nasty to go outside.

And to those of you who may be wont to worry, please don't. I not depressed, just feeling "funny" because of the weird way that Thanksgiving is playing out this year in the land where criticizing our celebration of Thanksgiving somehow makes the French atrocities or facilitation there of against local populations seem milder.

Anyway, to anyone reading this today. I hope that all of you are enjoying this holiday, that you're warm and the hatches are batten down (it looks like the NE is getting hit today), and that you all eat well. Happy Turkey Day.

Une Maison

2006-11-13T16:39:00.000+01:00

We're, in theory going to be buying a house! Tonight we are signing the papers to agree to buy it, after that it's just a question of securing funding, which should be doable. It's in Talence, which is basically just a continuation of the city of Bordeaux. We'll be about 10 minutes from the center of town. We should take possession on March 1, after some work, we should move in around the middle to end of March.

Yep, it's lucky number 13.

I was going to link the Google Earth placemark, but there's a few stalkers out there that I would prefer not know where I live. Ok, that's not really true (at least to the best of my knowledge)...I don't have the energy to fight with G-Earth right now. It's not really easy to post placemarks. I'll get it up here sometime.

[Update]
I can't figure out how to get G-Earth to give me a real link to post...If anyone has a easy way to do it, I would be forever grateful!

What's on random in Winamp?

2006-10-28T13:33:00.000+02:00

There was a time when it was "what's in my CD player." Sorry folks, the CD era is over. Sure, CDs are fine, but I'll tell you something: If I buy a CD it's because I can not get it off the internet (certain local and/or unknown bands don't show up on iTunes, eMusic, etc...). As soon as I get it, I rip it to Mp3 and put the CD in some closest somewhere.

[tangent] People have been talking about the "revolutionary" quality of the iPod this week, with the 5th anniversary of Jobs' wizard-machine. I don't think so - the advent of the Mp3 standard of music is much more important than the iPod. Sure, the iPod makes it so you can carry 500 songs in a device the same size and a bit thicker than a credit card, but Mp3s changed the way that we listen to music. Even the 100 disc changers that Sony marketed towards the middle/end of the 90s are no match...It's slow and noisy to change. I like my iPod, but come on, Winamp is much better. I have something like 16.5 gb of music on my computer. My iPod only holds 2 gb...Unless I want to "upgrade" to the brick-like 20/40/60 gb players, I'm stuck choosing a minimum amount of the music that I have available to take on the road. Anyway, conclusion: iPod ≠ Revolutionary. [end tangent]

Anyway, Tom Waits and Damien Rice are both putting out new albums in November. Through the miracle that is the internet, I have managed to listen to both of these before the album release date (anyone remember going to the record store on the Tuesday morning of new releases?).

Tom Waits: "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards"

Tom's first new album since the aptly named Real[ly] Gone, is actually a 3-disc set. Each disk has it's own subtitle (hence the Brawlers, Bawlers, Bastards). The Bastards disc is similar to Real Gone, in that it deviates from normal music (more so than usual for Tom), but the other two discs, while eccentric (what from Tom isn't), are toned down compared to the 2004 effort (which, to listen to seems like work for me). His voice is even deeper and rusty (if that's possible) from his 70s and 80s effort. Each of the discs (since we're still required to talk in "discs") has it's own "feeling." Personally disc 2: Bawlers, is most in line with what I prefer from Tom. Musically songs, where he actually sings and there is actually music as opposed just being eccentric.

The most interest song? My vote goes to the cover of Sinatra's "Young at Heart."

The whole song list can be found here. Right now you can hear samples of all the song on this page on his label's (ANTI) home page.

I can't tell you what my favorite song is: I'm like that with many musicians and especially Tom. I have to hear a song a few times before it starts to catch.

Damien Rice: "9"

Damien Rice's sophomore album is good. As good a "O?" hard to tell. The same thing that happens with Tom Waits, happens with Damien Rice for me. After I got the disc "O" I listened to it maybe two times in 3 months...Then I actually "listened" to it, and my opinion changed. "9" is similar in "feeling" to "O." Lot's of acoustic guitar, piano, upright bass, that at times all of the sudden it starts to pick up. It's obvious (has been since O), that Rice takes a lot of inspiration from Jeff Buckley, and this again is evident on 9. Certain songs start mellow and build and build to the point where he's screaming and playing some heavy duty electric guitar (the New York Times in 2004 described this turn in his songs as "volatile epics of introspection").

I've only been through the album once, but the one complaint that I do have is that Lisa Hannigan, who sang on a lot of the songs on O, is not as present. She has an absolutely beautiful voice and it's a shame that she really only sings on "9 Crimes" and does background work on other songs. 9 Crimes is bound to be the one that you hear on the radio. I kind of like Me, My Yoke, and I.

Thanks to Jeff's research, you can access the entire album on AOL streaming (if you live in the USA and don't mind not using Firefox - I hate you AOL).

The Biggest Sabres Fan in France

2006-10-16T19:40:00.000+02:00

Come on Google, I need this...

It turns out that the last time I posted something on this blog was 1-October. Wow! How the time flies. I haven't been sitting on my postieror doing nothing though. I hate these bulleted posts with a bunch of different random thoughts in them, but hey, you know what? I have to get a bunch of stuff written and I only have time for one post! So there. If you don't like it, move your mouse up to the extreme right hand side of your browser and click lightly one time.

Work: As some of you know, I am a part-time "Chauffeur deluxe" (not my words). Usually this consists of taking obscenely rich people to the wine-producing regions here and trying to convince them to buy stuff like Chateau Petrus (those prices are per bottle folks) from wine stores where I get a commision (ok, I over simplify, it's not all about "me" I also try to ensure that their stay is as fulfilling (usually consisting of Michelin 2-star restaurants and wine tasting as some of the "nicer" places around here) as possible. Anyway, the other day I saw and drove very much not-rich-Americans. While waiting for clients at the private part of the Bordeaux airport, I saw this balding man get out of a car driven by one of our competitors. Expecting the worst, I braced as he lowered his head and looked in my direction...but alas, I am not Italian. Zidane nodded at me and went into the airport. I thought, wow, my brush with greatest! Cool! Little did I know of what was to come.
I got my clients, brought them up to the Medoc to their hotel and came back to the airport to pick up more clients. Just as I arrived, my boss called me and said, "Do you have anything to do tonight?" No, not really. Ok, do you know Anggun? By name. You're going to go pick up her promoter at his house, then go to her concert, watch the concert then take Anggun back to Bordeaux to eat and then back to her hotel...
Of course, I'm just the chauffeur, so I don't count that much for these stars, but still. I was Anggun's chauffeur! It's pretty cool!

Other stuff:
The Sabres are off to a great start. They've started the season 5-0, three of those wins coming in the shootout! Not sure if the Ice Slug is a good thing or not, but it's not having a negative effect on the boys from Buffalo!

I went to the Paris Auto Show last week. Julie managed to get Alex and myself free entry, plus access to the Ferrari stand, which is usually closed to the riff-raff. It's fun to look at everyone from the inside! I'm putting a couple of pictures up here for your viewing pleasure (not all from Ferrari).

Next time, I'll try to post in less than 15 days!!

I [am starting to] Hate Apple

2006-09-20T14:08:00.000+02:00

Apple has never really attracted me. They've tried to sell themselves as the "artists" choice and never an artist, I very easily avoided this marketing strategy. When the iPod come out, I thought it was pretty cool - great idea, seems to be very simplistically made. Then the iPod Nano came out and I was more or less hooked. It was this tiny little thing, with Flash memory that could hold a whole bunch of songs. My ex-coworkers and Julie decided to give me one at the beginning of the year, and I have to say, in terms of the actual product, I am very happy. It is very small as advertised, it's very easy to use, the body itself is strong enough to withstand my inattention when I sit down with it in my back pocket. The very cool white headphones were just junk though. They broke about 3 months after I got the thing. No problem. I don't need to advertise that I have an iPod and was thinking about changing them anyway. Now I have very a very decent pair of AKG Acoustics headphones that are just plain black, not that "look at me" white.

The one big gripe I have is iTunes. Theoretically I don't have to use iTunes. I could use Winamp. But I set it up in iTunes and have stuck with it. However, it's a very heavy program that automatically starts every time I plug my iPod into my computer to charge (yeah, I know, I can change this setting). If I were to buy music through iTunes, I could only use it on my iPod; because of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that is proprietary to Apple, any music that I buy and therefore should become "mine" is stuck in iTunes for ever and ever and I could not use it on another MP3 Player. But that's fine, it's good business practice - you want to make "cost" of changing to a competitor is too high to ensure that your current clients do not become ex-clients.

And this is where my big problems with Apple come in. In their new ad campaign features Justin Long, a hip, 20-something kid, as a Mac and John Hodgman, an overweight, 40-something as a PC. The whole campaigns basically consists of Mac making fun of PC for all of the problems that they have, from viruses (viri?) to the fact that it takes "so much time" to set up a PC. Seth Stevenson over at Ad Report Card on Slate wrote about this campaign a while back and my conclusions are more or less in line with what he says. But even beyond that, this makes me not want to buy a Mac. Ok, so Macs are smug and demeaning machines? When I call customer service are they going to talk down to me like the Mac talks down to the PC? You can find the whole series on Apple's site. I dislike almost all of them (as it relates to Mac - I do get a chuckle out of some of the jokes they make), but "Angel/Devil" is quite annoying. It basically says that PCs can't do anything "fun," like create photo albums. Funny thing, I have Photoshop Album Edition and Picasa, both of these has a wide range of photo album making features: And they are both completely PC compatible. "Network" is just plain stupid. I have a bunch of different peripherals hooked up to my computer and amazingly they work fine. Sure I need drivers and whatnot, but there's never any problem with that. This is the problem I think. Apple/Mac is spending so much time saying untrue things (or true things that are not the "norm") about the type of computer that is in 85 or 90% households. Do they actually think that these people aren't going to say, "what the hell are they talking about, my PC works just fine?" And my last critique is for "Accident." This is soooo dumb. PC are made by how many different types of companies? Any one of them could chose to put a magnetic power cable on their computer if they chose to, but beyond that, anytime the power cord has been kicked on my computer, it just fell out like Mac's allegedly does - my computer didn't shoot to the floor and bust.

And don't let Steve Allen once try to convince you that if he has the majority of the market share he would not take advantage of this in any way possible.

I am honestly starting to look poorly upon people with Macs. I see them as silly people who have just bought into the marketing image of Mac. Fine use a Mac if you want, it even does some things better than PCs do. But it's not going to make you "cooler."

Confusion in Marketing: Episode #34,302

2006-09-06T17:42:00.000+02:00

Ok, I know, every time I go off on the French efforts to do something you all sigh and say: "But Kris, it's the French. You aren't meant to understand."

Anyway, this has been nagging me for weeks now and I can't get it out of my head. Ok, quiz time, hotshots: When you have two packages of one product, one is smaller and one is bigger, logic says that the unit price of which product should be cheaper? If you're French, you undoubtedly are saying to your monitor, but theeze-ees a stupeed kesteeown. Obviously the smaller package should be cheaper. Yeah, yeah, but the unit price: You know the price per kilo? Aahhh oui, yes, that too should be cheaper for the smaller portion.

????

No kidding folks. I think it's the government. Jacky Chirac spent his formidable years (at least some of them) in St. Louis working for the great American piss factory, Anheuser Busch. He no doubt ran across those 35-gallon bags of Doritos and the 50-gallon drums of Coke in his local Stop-n-Shop, or whatever the red state equivalent is. He always remembered this and as a forward thinker, quickly made the link between the 93% American obesity rate and this phenomenon. As he rose through the ranks from corrupt city official to corrupt regional official to corrupt leader of his party to the corrupt head of one of the top 10 or 15 economies in...well, in Europe at least, he decided his most important policy would be to go against every first-semester Economics 101 book and quell the economies of scale before they even got started. Yep, that's right, on a micro economic level France doesn't make any sense...wait 'till you get to the macro stuff.

I'm being honest here: I eat this cereal called Nestle Lion®. It's got enough sugar to keep me going until 11:30 am or so. They sell a 400-gram box and a 650-gram box. The 400-gram box is about 30 cents cheaper per kilo than the 650 gram box. Beer, same thing. Heineken in 25 cl bottles is cheaper per litre than the same in 33 cl bottles. 33 cl cans are more expensive than 33 cl bottles.

If anyone has a differing theory then the one I put forth, please feel free to chip in in the comments segment.

Steve Irwin (1962-2006)

2006-09-04T15:31:00.000+02:00

Steve Irwin, better known to millions as the "Crocodile Hunter" was killed today by a stingray! I would've put money on crocodile (as "Hollywood" as that ending would have been) or poisonous snake, but this just sounds like the freakiest of accidents. Different media reports say that there are only between 2 and 4 recorded deaths in Australia from stingrays and only 15 or so in the world. Apparently, he was swimming over the stingray, while his cameraman was in front of it. The stingray became frightened and swung its tail up (which can measure up to 1+ feet) puncturing the left-side of Irwin's body, and most likely his heart. Death was reportedly instantaneous.

While I always found his crazy like a fox, he provided many hours of educational entertainment (if you can call wrestling wild animals such) that would have instead been wasted [by me] on much more trivial pursuits on Sunday afternoons (The Patriot with Steve Seagal on TNT anyone?). Although very few people have compared the two, I do think that Jacques Cousteau and Steve Irwin were cut from the same cloth. Nature lovers who shared their passion with the world.

Vive le Sud

2006-08-29T10:08:00.000+02:00

Continuing my never-ending saga of French administration:

This one is even better.

The real South is just way better. While I lived in Montpellier, I had to apply for a carte de sejour (residency card) twice. Once while I was still a student and the second time after I was married. Both went easily (for France). The student one is more of a rubber stamp - you prove you're a student and that you entered France legally and they give you another year in their wonderful country. The marriage one is a bit more difficult, but just because you have to prove that you are "married." This I did in 3 or 4, 3 hour trips to the prefecture (governmental offices).

Anyway, now I'm in Bordeaux, and while it's still the "South," it has a more "up class" view of itself. (The word bourgeois actually refers to the residents of the city of Bordeaux). I was supposed to change my residency to here when I moved, but I kind of...umm...didn't because waiting in line for 4 hours for a stupid change of address didn't appeal to me. Anyway, it's time to renew my residency for one more year in France. I ran around trying to get all the documents that I need, according to a private-party website - the French government refuses to publish this on any "official" website - the only way to get the pertinent information is to wait in line (at least 1 hour). Anyway, I thought I had all my ducks in a row, went down this morning to get my stuff done. I arrive at the window and the woman asks if my spouse is with me. I thought of being sarcastic and saying, "of course, don't you see her standing right next to me," but figured I didn't want to piss off the people who control my right to stay here.

I told her no, why? She told me that it was obligatory that my spouse is with me to sign an "attestation of honor that we still live together and are married." This must be done in front of an "Agent of the State" at the prefecture. No way around it. I asked if this was something new, because Montpellier didn't make both of us miss a morning of work to do this junk. She told me no, it's always been that way and if it was done differently "c'était de fraude, monsieur." She also told me that I have to pay €55 for one more year. It was never like this in Montpellier. I thought maybe that between the first request for a married residency permit and the second it was different, but looking at the paper she gave me, it's always been this way. Montpellier is just a cooler place to live.

Anyway, now Julie has to find time to miss work for an entire morning so she can swear before an "Agent of the State" that we're still married and that we aren't in this just so I can get my French nationality. I am curious to see what happens when I apply for nationality ('cause I think it's easier that way - I do it once and then there's no more "foreigner" lines for me). They'll probably come to our house to ensure that we sleep together - who knows maybe they need to install cameras for a month so we can prove that we are actually living and sleeping together. Man, I hate this bureaucracy. For the record, I think it is as bad in the US.

Vacation - Post-Wrap

2006-08-28T12:17:00.000+02:00

Vacation sucks: No really. You take a couple of weeks away from the drag, away from everything, you don't worry about how you're going to pay the bills, you don't worry about creating a company, you don't worry about people calling you for whatever 1000s of reasons that they have. You don't worry about negotiating prices, pay, manufacturing time. Then you come back and BAM! Life hits you like one of those giant mining trucks.

The six people that more or less form my immediate family spent a week in Maine forgetting all of the above objectionable things under a haze of clear Maine air, ever present French and American wine, and too many local beers to count. Many a lobster was sacrificed to our pursuit of relaxation pleasure. We also learned something very important, apparently saltwater crabs can not touch freshwater. According to the 17-year old vendor of one of those typical Maine shacks that sell seafood, the slightest touch to freshwater would cause our crabs to "instantly die" INSTANTLY.

After a week in ME, I traveled through Boston (once again, great job to all of the people who designed the Big Dig - it shouldn't take 50 minutes to get across Boston on a Sunday afternoon) and down to the NY Metro area. Then back up to upstate NY and back to Boston. 1900 miles in 14 days, and most of those were done in 3 or 4 days of driving. Anyone in the market for an SUV - don't even bother with the Saturn Vue. GM wanted to be able to get an AWD, V6 SUV to market at $20K and they did! It turns out that there is cheaper plastic than is used in injection molded Walmart-esque toys. A normal brand-new vehicle should not shake under average braking. Then again, no one has accused GM of making "normal brand-new vehicles."

My vacation ended with a bang - before I even left Beantown. I arrive at the airport a full 3 hours early because I figured that security and everything would be terrible since Boston was one of those airports that was going to be targeted by those English terrorists. Great, I'm on time - after driving the 260 miles from my parents' house to Logan, that was relief in itself. Drop of said POS at Hertz, get to the terminal. Check the screens. AF321, scheduled departure BOS at 7:50pm is being announced at 12:50am. Ugh. After dealing with screaming Frenchmen and 40,000 American students waiting in line, I arrive at the dumbest of all the check-in agents in the world (for the record he was Bostonian with a vague Irish or English accent). He doesn't know anything, but we ain't going to leave on time. If I want real information I need to wait in that other line, yeah that one, the really long one that hasn't moved for the last hour. Anyway, I check my bags in, get my boarding coupons, get told for the 100th time that I can't bring any liquids on the plane and leave. First stop - the bar. Ok, I needed to eat more than I needed to drink, but both were welcome reliefs. The first highlight of the entire day was that the food was really good (qualifier: for an airport). Full of food and beer, I go to the "other" line to see if Air France owes me any money (of course not). Now I only have 6 hours left to wait. I forgot to ask the AF reps to comp me wifi internet connection and I wasn't going to wait in line again, so I killed the rest of the time drinking, reading, and watching the Simpsons on DVD. Finally this ends, we get on the plane and we leave. Woo-hoo.

In Boston, they booked me on a plane to Bordeaux that was due to leave 1 hour after we arrived at CDG. I figured I would miss it. Anyway we arrive, I get off the plane, clear passport control quickly and run through the terminals to the departure terminal for my new plane. Clear security quickly. I glanced at the TVs just before the security and my plane is still boarding...is there hope? will I maybe get one break? Run up to the gate, there's still a couple of AF agents there. YES!..."Bonjour monsieur, the doors are now closed, your baggage has been removed from the plane." Irony: The doors were still open. But nothing was getting me on that plane. Ah, no problem, AF has lots of flights to Bordeaux everyday...they advertise something like 20 per day. Another line, another unsmiling "Customer Service so-and-so." Next plane. 6:45pm. It's now 2:10 local. Most of the flights from Bordeaux go through Orly, the other airport. Ugh. I'm too exhausted to even care.

Anyway, I finally arrive home at 9pm local (30 hours after I left), without my bags.

WELCOME BACK TO REALITY.

Of course, all the work that I managed to ignore for the previous 2 weeks was now waiting for me. Vacation was great, I am so happy to have been able to spend a week with my wife, my parents, my sister and her significant other. No phone, no internet - it was great. I can't wait until the next one. I guess I can delude myself by saying without the realities of life, vacation wouldn't be as sweet.

ON HOLIDAY

2006-08-04T13:12:00.000+02:00

Arbitrary and Biased will be on vacation for the next two weeks.

See you soon.

The straight dope

2006-07-28T11:56:00.000+02:00

Floyd Landis, the miraculous winner of the Tour de France after being virtually eliminated only 4 stages from the end was able to bask in the glory of victory for about 72 hours before his drug-test results came back positive for elevated testosterone levels. Apparently the norm is 1:1 and the limit is 4:1. Landis' results haven't been published, but they are obviously above the 4:1 threshold.

As with everything, I'm pretty sure we will never know the truth. Even if the International Cycling Union (UCI) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) push forward and determine that Landis was "doped," he will undoubtedly appeal and say that one-or-more of the drugs and/or results of his rotting hip have caused his testosterone levels to sky-rocket. Maybe he's just really virile. Maybe, as some sources say, his high testosterone levels were a natural reaction from his performance on Stage 17, or maybe, as the above article also theorizes, he placed a testosterone patch on his scrotum after Stage 16 to try to rebuild his energy reserves (or maybe he was too tired to be "intimate" with his wife and was embarrassed by this enough to take extraordinary steps).

I think that the majority of riders are doped in one way or another. The doctors who develop the performance-enhancing products are always one step ahead of WADA and the doctors who test. No one has been able to create a reliable test for Human Growth Hormone and that's been available for a few years now. So the anti-doping agents use imperfect tests. They test the relative testosterone levels, they test the relative red-blood cell levels. None of these things prove that you were doped, they just prove that you have a higher than normal level of something. But world-class athletes are already freaks, it only makes sense that some of them are naturally beyond the normal range of normal people. Then there are these agencies like WADA who are just so out there. For the past year or so they have stated their desire to ban "altitude chambers," which recreate the low-oxygen conditions of extreme altitude allowing athletes to create more red blood cells. Wow! They can go train up in the Rockies or the Alps (I hope at least, maybe that's the next step), but they can't put themselves into a compression chamber to do at sea-level what can be done at 15,000 feet. One of the biggest critiques of this is that athletes from poorer countries will even get more disadvantages. European athletes, Americans, etc, can afford to go up into the mountains to train. But the Nigerians probably don't have the money to fly to Aspen for 2 months to train. Altitude chambers were the only way they could "naturally" keep up with the rest of the world.

I don't know what the solution is. I'm pretty sure that since there has been competitive sports, there have been cheaters. Legend has it that Pheidippides ran 26 miles Marathon to Athens to create the modern day "Marathon." I bet he took a couple of short cuts and it was only 24.5 miles. When the payoff is big enough, most people will cheat; it's human nature. The current system makes everyone suspicious of everyone and no one can be determined to be truly "clean." Luckily for me, this is just a blog. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I don't think WADA is helping anything. Cynicism, the bane of professional sports? Probably not, but it can't be helping things.

The Return of Politics to Arbitrary and Biased

2006-07-20T12:11:00.000+02:00

Is George W. Bush the worst president ever? Many people are inclined to say yes: Just search "Worst President Ever" in Google...yeah, yeah, I know, that's just people taking advantage of the Google algorithm, but still, there are the "yeas" and the "nays" for this. I'm not sure yet. William Henry Harrison only lasted a month before he died, he obviously didn't make a lot of bad moves in that time, but it's hard to argue that you can get worse than that.

Anyway, before I get off track on a history lesson, the real reason for this post is the complete mess that the current administration is making in the Middle East. One democracy (our friends) are bombing the hell out of another democracy (sort of our friends, but less important). Unnamed sources announced today that the US government was going to give Israel "some time to defang Hezbollah," translated to English (and using metaphor), the US is going to let the husband (Israel) beat the crap out of the wife (Lebanon) because we don't agree with what one of her [adult] children from a previous marriage (Hezbollah) did/is doing. Don't send the cops just yet, that woman needs to learn her lesson about controlling her adult son.

Just a little while ago, the Bushites were gaga about the rebirth of democracy in Lebanon. Someone in the administration forgot to read who was actually going to be represented in this democracy. Hezbollah, as much as they may be a "terrorist" organization (defined by the fact that they get military support from countries that are not our friends), is actually right there in the parliament. They also have more military power than the Lebanese government (this story has some background the problems with the power-sharing in Lebanon). How are we going to get the moderate Middle East on our side, when we let the Israelis bomb the free DEMOCRACY (THAT WE SUPPORTED ONE YEAR AGO) of Lebanon? What's this going to do? It's obviously going to lead more and more Lebanese to support Hezbollah. Hell, if the US doesn't give a shit about us, why should we remain neutral as they allow the Israelis to kill us and our children and destroy our hard work and infrastructure.

I think Germany better watch out, a bunch of those 9/11 bombers lived there for a while. The US is probably drafting plans to bomb Hamburg as we speak. England? Same deal, wasn't Richard Reid living there? He somehow slipped through their fingers and got on a plane to the US. He apparently studied at the Brixton Mosque, anyone in the neighborhood is better off getting out - not sure that nukes are necessary, but hey, George, why not? Why run the risk of other dirty little Arabs studying there?

Of course, I'm not saying that we should turn a blind eye to Hezbollah, or that we should force the Israelis to accept that their two soldiers are gone, but I thought we had a Secretary of State for a reason - to deal with these problems. Condi isn't going to do a lick of good going to NYC to visit with Kofi Annan, he's not the one killing Lebanese citizens. I'm not here bearing solutions; well yeah, I think the first solution is to stop Israel from bombing Beirut, but after that, it's up to the negotiators and the different countries to work out a deal. I just can't believe that our government is allowing it to continue.

On a personal note, Julie visited Beirut about three weeks before the Israelis blew up the airport. That strikes close to home.

YOUTUBING FOR MUSIC

2006-07-18T17:57:00.000+02:00

I just want to post a few Youtube videos here to share some great music with all of you. I'm not going to imbed everything for those of you that are still stuck on dial up!!!

This is a great version of my favorite Tom Waits song - live from the Montreal Jazz Festival from 1981:

(for the record, it's called Tom Traubert's Blues and not Waltzing Matilda)

If you like "I Wish I Was in New Orleans" or "$29.00" (29 dollars is my second favorite Waits song-there's something to be said for a line that goes, "all you've got is twenty-nine dollars and alligator boots"), you can find the video from Montreal here. The two are in the same feed. If you only want to see $29.00, scroll through to 4:15.

Moving to other artists: Jacques Brel died in 1978, but he made some great music during his 50 years on this earth. Le Port d'Amsterdam is what an Irish song would be if it was song in French by a Belgian; "In the port of Amsterdam, there are sailors who drink; and they drink and they drink and then they drink some more. They drink to the health of the whores of Amsterdam, of Hamburg and of everywhere else."
You can tell Brel was passionate about his work (if you disagree rewatch this video starting at minute 2:00, he starts to look like those old videos of Hitler giving speeches).

As my friend Alex said, Jacques Brel donne tout (just watch his face) in this video of Ne Me Quitte Pas ("Don't leave me"). For anyone that doesn't understand French (most of you, I imagine), here's the to-English translation of the song (I know that's not great, but it's the best I could find at short notice - you get the idea):

Nina Simone did a great cover of Ne Me Quitte Pas, but I can't seem to find it on Youtube (so I doubt that it exists on video!). Anyway, here's a video of her singing To Love Somebody (ok we don't actually see her, but it's a video of her music). If you want to actually see Nina, here's For A While from Ronnie Scott's.

Since Nina covered some of the same stuff as Dylan did (plus she covered some of his stuff), I'll naturally move into Bob right now. Here's Dylan doing Tangled Up in Blue Live in 1975.

After Jeff Buckley died, there was so much stuff that could be released for profit that many many more albums were released after his death than before. This video of Forget Her was obviously produced after his death...Notice how he doesn't sing at all in the video? Oh well. Great song. He does sing on this version of Hallelujeh from Canal Plus - He even dedicates it to Nina Simone.

Oops, I was almost ready to end this post, but how could I with something from Stevie!!! Sorry sorry. Here's Life Without You.

One last video, by another Belge: I think he's kind of like the European version of Tom Waits; grand affinity for alcohol (although Tom's gotten over that), eccentric beyond belief, gruff voice, etc. Anyway, here's the song Dans Les Yeux de Ma Mère (In My Mother's Eyes).

Le Tour: Two hours of Waiting and Thirty Seconds of Guys on Bikes

2006-07-12T10:52:00.000+02:00

So Le Tour de France swung by my house yesterday midday. I had looked on the site the day prior, and saw that the riders should come within about 50 feet of my house during the "prerace" or "warmup" period. Not knowing much about what this meant, I figured it would be easier to walk down to the boulevards where the riders would come by, than to get into my car, drive to a place along the route, wait for the riders, be stuck there until everyone had passed, etc. It seemed fairly easy to walk out my front door and watch these athletes go by.

So, I get down there, not knowing much about how the whole thing takes place. I had read on Letour.com that the "caravane" was set to leave the "Stage 9 Pre-Start" at 11:30. I kind of thought that this meant the riders would leave at this point. So I leave at about 11:29 and go down to wait for the riders to come by. For a few minutes there was very little action. A few people were sitting around in lawnchairs and chatting with the cops guarding the route, but there was no action. Then, the first rider came by:

Now, I knew that the tour was in rough shape after a bunch of the top-tier riders got bumped after doping allegations, but I didn't know that they were so desperate that they had to get Lance Armstrong's mother to ride!!! (thanks Jeff).

Anyway, in all truthfulness, there was a lot of waiting involved. After waiting for a long time, all of the sudden there was movement on the horizon! Something's coming! Riders...Ah no, in fact the "caravane" is 45 minutes of "official suppliers and official sponsors" blaring annoying euro-trash music and throwing things at you. On the plus side, I got a lot of tour-related swag. I have a cool Credit Lyonnais bag in awesome YELLOW! I have two Champion hats in that lovely red-on-white polka-dot pattern for the best climber. And a bunch of other stuff that was thrown my way: Fortunately, I was the only person standing on my patch of sidewalk, so I got everything!

Once these 45 minutes had passed a bunch of people who were on the sidewalk with me started to walk away. I started to become afraid at this point...was that it? were the riders actually going to go directly to the real start and skip the prerace part? I was a bit consoled by the fact that lots and lots of team cars kept coming by without bikes on them, so I figured the bikes must be at the pre-start point. Anyway, as it turns out the racers left the prerace start at 1:15 pm. A few minutes prior, the vehicle activity picked up with lots of race officials and cops and reporters and whatnot coming by. Then the "Tour Information" car came by blaring information about the riders and telling us to clear the street! Ok, great, the anticipation is now building and finally I see the yellow jersey:

My god, I knew that EPO and other performance enhancing products were a problem in bike racing, but I didn't know that human growth hormone was used!!!!

Ok, in all honesty, finally after waiting for 1:45, the riders finally came. But (and here's where I learned what "pre-race" or "warmup" means) they all came at once. 171 racers passed me in one group that took a grand total of 30 seconds! They weren't "racing" more than just cruising along. I've seen 70-year-old men going harder on 50 year old 10 speeds than these guys. They were just taking their time to slowly warm up before they got to the actual start! A friend of mine told me last year when I was lamenting the fact that I was going to miss the tour, "watch it on TV, you see much more and it's much more interesting." He is right. I am glad that I saw these guys, 'cause now I have done it, but it's nothing very spectacular. That's why you always see the masses of fans watching on the climbs - it's must be more interesting than watching them on the flat.
In any case, I have seen the tour de france live now. Maybe in the future I will try to go somewhere more interesting to watch them race (climbs, descents), but I'll probably avoid the warmup period in the future (unless of course they are coming within 50 feet of my house and I can make the time to go see them).

The End [Allegedly] - UPDATE IV (Now with video)

2006-07-10T11:14:00.000+02:00

So, Zinedine Zidane, the "Artist" or "Blue Angel" as he has become known by French sportwriters, ended his career with a red card at 110 minutes of the World Cup final last night. Lots of talking heads are throwing around lots of words about this, with reason. It's rare that such a renowned player acknowledges the end to his career in such manner (that he would retire from from all professional soccer at the end of the cup), and it's rare that someone who shows such form ends his career and it's even rarer that someone commits a foul as flagrant and as blatant as the one of Zidane last night. But many of the [english-language] sportswriters are dead wrong.

(disclosure) Before, I get into the meat of this post, I just want to clearly state - I do not condone his actions. He was wrong. He deserved a red card for his actions. (/disclosure)

First things first: Both Domenech and Lippi addressed this issue and the ref is wrong for this reason. THERE IS NO REPLAY IN SOCCER. I will quote Lippi here, because I think his opinion is more relevant than Domenech's:

You will realise that it was not Materazzi who got the attention of the referee. It was the fourth and fifth officials looking at the video at the edge of the pitch. We did not do anything. They saw it and they called the attention of the referee.

I repeat - there is no video replay in soccer. None of the referees saw what happened. Buffon ran to the assistant on the sidelines after it happen, the head ref Elizondo, came walking over afterwards - he showed no inclination to card Zidane (although Zidane thought he was going to be redded, going as far as removing his captain's arm band, before replacing it minutes later when he thought he may get away with it). Only after an extended amount of time did the head ref go over and speak with the fourth linesman, who told him what happened, undoubtedly after seeing the replay on the sidelines. Whether Zidane deserved to be redded or not is not the issue at hand. If the refs say they can't review plays because FIFA does not allow video review, but then sends a player off after one of the refs sees the video replay - this doesn't fly in my book. One standard for all, FIFA.

Now, getting to the buffoons (not to be confused with Buffon) who have written and will write so much drivel about Zidane's "fall." The French love this guy. After the '98 world cup, they were chanting "Zidane, President" on the Champs Elysée. He is a great football player who truly personifies French football. A son of immigrant parents who rose from the tough neighborhoods of Marseille to become a world-class soccer player who is an idol for 1000s of little French footballers, dreaming of playing in the World Cup one day. I do not think that this will have a huge effect on the views here of the man. Zidane, while generally stoic, has a temper. He stamped on a Saudi player during the Cup in '98. He was suspended for 5 games in the Champions League when he played at Juventus for two different acts (one of which was a headbutt). I have seen him be really nasty - spiking players who pissed him off. While it comes as a surprise that he allowed emotions to get the best of him at that point in a match with such a magnitude of importance, I am not totally surprised to see him do such an action. The French will never hate him. It started as soon as it happened, both on French TV ("he was obviously provoked") and with the people who were watching with me. BBC commenter Alan Hansen erroneously said that Zidane will be the "loneliest man in the world after that." ESPN's Soccernet leads with the totally misquoted headline "Domenech: Zidane red cost us the match." Domenech said that it was a turning point and that France realized that the Italians were playing for penalties and that they should have tried to take advantage of this, but with Zidane being sent off they couldn't really do it. He didn't really blame Zinedine, other than say it was too bad that he lost his cool.
Reading some posts from Britain, I think that many normal people (i.e. bloggers) are more or less speaking along the same lines as me - it's not excusable, but it doesn't change what he has done for the last 15 years. I can't read Italian, which is a shame, I'd like to know what they are saying. Lippi, while stating that it was a definite red, basically said the same thing: Zidane is[was] a great player who will be known for his on-field ability. It's basically just the ignorant American press who seems to think that this is going to have a profound change on how people view Zidane.

Just a few notes on the non-red card aspects of the match:
It was ok. Both teams played well. I think from the second half on the French played better, but the Italian defense was a wall - literally (how d'ya like that, Jeff?) - any time the French crossed the midfield line, there were 5-7 Italians there to stop them. If they won, it's because of this. Buffon is probably the best keeper in the world. Just a little statistic: The Italians did not allow ONE "regular" goal in the entire World Cup competition. They conceded an own-goal against the Americans and Zidane's penalty yesterday, but they did not allow any normal-play goals. That, my friends, is insane defense.

Coupet and Barthez: I think that Coupet would've stopped at least one penalty shot.

[UPDATE]: Breaking news. Despite his red card, Zidane won the Golden Ball for best player in the World Cup tournament. I was sure that he was on path to win it, but thought that his headbutt/red card would count against him and I thought that Gigi Buffon would take it home. Not to be. Stick that in your pipes, ESPN et. al. in the American sports press.

[UPDATE II]: French TV is reporting that rumors coming out of the French locker room have Materazzi making racist comments to Zidane before the now infamous action.

[UPDATE III]: FIFA is terrible organization that must resort to lying to try to clean up its own mess. Or put into other words, FIFA denies that video evidence was used to (rightfully) red card Zidane on Sunday night. They claim that although 3 or 4 minutes passed between the incident and the fourth referee telling the head ref (in person) what happened, the fourth ref did not see any video replay and in fact had see the action in real-time and immediately told the head ref over the head set. The head ref then decided to wait for this time period before physically running over to confirm with the fourth ref (who once again, didn't see any video evidence) that the incident did take place. FIFA is ruining football. This World Cup was one of the lowest scoring and the dirtiest (plus there were tons of bad calls - red card for Mastroeni anyone?), yet they're sure they are doing a stand-up job.

[UPDATE IV]: VIDEOS: I just want to put up a couple of video angles of this. If anyone lip reads Italian, this video may reveal to what Materazzi said. Here's the video from TF1 (France).

[No title - Bile welling up]

2006-06-28T13:04:00.000+02:00

Slate, with whom I have passed a great number of hours reading different opinion pieces, usually has thought provoking and intelligently written pieces - even if you don't always agree with their politics. They, like most main-stream media sources, are dedicating a certain amount of copy to the once in four years circus spectacle otherwise known as the World Cup.

Dave Eggers wrote an article last week discussing "The True Story about American Soccer," which for the most part I agree with. His insight into diving in soccer is pretty much point on with mine:

Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix[...]Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured—excelsior!—and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.

Good story, glad to hear that most people agree with me, move on...until this morning I just click on Slate to see what's going on and I see this fine title: Why Diving Makes Soccer Great. I don't read a lot of opinion pieces about football - it's pretty cut and dried for me. There are certain aspects I like and certain aspects I don't like. I can see with my own two eyes and know the rules well enough that this two-bit blogger doesn't need some other two-bit blogger or learned hack to tell me what to think. But, taking into consideration my views on diving in soccer, I think you all can understand my automatic reaction to this, which I won't reprint here, but it was along the lines of "what the hell?!?"

The author, one Austin Kelley, basically argues that diving keeps the defenders honest and states unequivocally, "rarely do athletes tumble without being touched at all. Usually, they embellish contact to make sure the referee notices a foul, not to deceive him completely." Excuse me for one second (at this point small children and the easily sensitive should turn away), but this is complete bullshit. Has this guy watched one freaking football match? Ever! Taking his first argument, that players rarely dive without any sort of provocation...This happens nearly every game. But, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is saying that rarely do players fall without a defensemen for 5 meters. Fine, I can agree to this. The sun rarely shines at night either, I think we can all agree.
It's the second part of his statement that is just worthless. A player feels the slightest brush of contact and flops to the ground. Whether he rolls around like a pig on fire or not is of less concern. THERE IS NO GOOD THAT COMES FROM THIS. Football, in and of itself, is a physical game. 22 men are running at full speed to try to control a ball and put it into the opposing team's net. Contact will happen. Most of the time when a foul is embellished, it's because the player with the ball has been beaten...He kicks it, sees that he won't be able to recover and flops. Either this or he is within 20 meters of the goal mouth.

I do agree with Kelley that FIFA has failed spectacularly in controlling the diving for this Copa Mondial and am not going to get into the cultural differences about diving. The Italians are notorious, the French are better than average, but each and every team does it in each and every match.

Most respectfully, Mr. Kelley, I request that you shut your mouth.

His article is not all bad though. He keyed me into the fact that there has been the discussion of a "Pink card" for divers. I like this idea. Not necessarily PC in today's modern world, but it could help control this a little bit.

Just to come back to this article for a minute. He cites Thierry Henry as one of those players who "will stay on their feet at all cost for the sake of a beautiful pass or a brilliant run at the goal." But what if the pass isn't beautiful or the run isn't brilliant. Henry took a dive from the high board last night. Receiving a glancing blow to his chest from Spanish defender Puyol, Thierry brought both hands to his face and dropped to the ground in agony. This is justifiable, Mr. Kelley? He got touched in the chest. Puyols did not do it on purpose. Play the freaking game clean and straight. Henry's a really good player, and he doesn't dive too much, but that only adds to the fact. In my DP rating, he would be around a 2 and that is how Puyol conceded the free kick and got a yellow card for his efforts. There is no place for these actions in football. I don't care what some writer from Brooklyn says.

How to fix football [soccer]

2006-06-26T21:45:00.000+02:00

So the FIFA World Cup has moved into the knock-out stages and we find the same problems as have plagued world soccer for the last 1000s of years...Apparently drawings of a game that resembles modern football has been found in a Chinese military manual. I am sure that in that manual there is also a drawing of a Han-dynasty soldier taking a dive after incidental contact with a competitor.

Let's face it, the players have only to gain from diving. Yellow cards for diving are very rare, and even if they are given out 1 out of every 20 dives, it's still statistically beneficial to dive. The US got knocked out of WC2006 because of a dive. Australia just lost directly because of a dive. Literally 100s of dives will lead to free kicks and goals in this year's cup. No other sport has such a culture of acceptance of cheating - hockey has it to a degree, but it is no where near as problematic as in soccer. But, what to do? The action is so fast, the refs can not be expected to see every dive. Of course not, the field is big and the action is fast - we can not expect the ref to be able to judge everytime some guy flies through the air and crumples in a heap. Usually the benefit of the doubt goes to the player that is now rolling around on the ground in "agony."

I have two proposals to fix this problem. Fix one is my favorite, but I think that fix two is probably more realistic (please keep in mind, these are my proposals for FIFA events - I think they should be implemented at all levels, but that is up to the individual federations - YOU LISTENING FA, FFF, and FIGC? Oh yeah, and UEFA, you guys may want to pay attention too):

FIX ONE

Active scouting by officials from the above organizations to create a player-by-player list about each player's relative "diving propensity (DP)." I think we could easily place this in a grid as such:
1. Player only falls in case of vital organ rupture or structural support system failure
2. Player is unlikely to dive, but will if stakes are high enough
3. Player usually stays up, but has shown an incidence of fair weather diving.
4. Player has high likelihood to fall under the smallest provocation, especially within 20 meters and in penalty area.
5. Italian

Players would be graded based on previous performances that would more heavily weigh recent matches than old matches. This would be done to attempt to convince the players to improve their game. If a player has a shoddy past record, but has played 4 or 5 games without serious incident, they would be able to move to a 3 rating. A 1 rating would probably be based on a life-time of play and would not be able to be earned after only a few solid showings.

How could we place this system into practice? Fairly easily actually. A group of international experts (or in the case of national leagues - a panel of non-biased arbitrators) would review game tape and make their assessment. After all of the assessements were in the scores would be averaged to create a rating given to the nearest 10th. A player may have a 2.6 rating, meaning he is better than average, but not to be completely trusted.
The referees would be given a list at the beginning of each game to memorize and would base their calls on this. Say player A has a rating of 5. He is running along and falls. The referee would look at the player and if there was no visible blood or visible broken bones, the call would not be made, because it is more than likely that the player is faking it. I could, for example, see an entire game against the Italian national team, with nary a call in their favor.
On the other hand a player that is ranked 1 or close to it would always be given the benefit of the doubt for that specific match. If he fell, it would automatically be a free kick (and possibly a yellow card).
The beauty of the system is that after the match the league would examine the video and adjust the players score. The players would all have a positive reason to stop diving. I can also just picture a player going to the ref and crying for a non-call and the ref pulling his scouting report out for justification.

FIX TWO

This one may be more practical: Any significant dive would result in a fine, maybe small at first but increasing with each offense. Any dive that led to a yellow card for the opposing player would automatically be a one-game suspension. Any dive that led to a red card for the opposing player would automatically be a three-game suspension. Repeat offenders would also receive increasingly strong suspensions (3, 5, 7, 10...). Any dive that results in a penalty at 93+ minutes of a tie elimination game would result in said player being sent to the city or country of the affected team and be forced to go from bar to bar and introduce himself - for 24 hours. No police protection would be given.

People are calling for instant replay in soccer - I don't think that a half-dozen maybe goals in the last 10 years is as big of a problem as these guys falling all over the place for no apparent reason. People over here, in Europe, say that diving is a "part of the game." They don't allow doping, but both allow one player to gain the advantage by flopping on the ground like a cod on land. Show me the difference and I will shut up.

I like fix one, but I doubt it would ever happen, but fix two is truly possible. Other sports review tape of games to make decisions about penalties. The truth is that the pitch is too big for one or two or three refs to be able to make split-second decisions. The current system very much favors the divers (hey, Italy's in the quarter finals) and the only way to be able to fix this for the leagues to step up and make a decision to put a system into place to dissuade the disgusting and unsportsmanlike play that is so prevalent in the game today.

This video is a bit dated (Euro 2004), but it's still funny.

Can a broken soccer team be fixed?

2006-06-23T23:43:00.000+02:00

Let's start with a very simple premise: Team A must beat Team B by at least two points to advance to the second round of a prestigious, world-class sporting event. Team A can possibly win by one point, if there is a winner in the match between Team C and Team D...Ok, this is getting complicated, are you guys confused? I always find it easier when I use real nouns to describe something...Let's give Teams A and B made up names to make it easier to follow. Team A we will call the completely random and made up word "France." Team B will also be completely random and even more made up: "Togo."

So "France" must beat "Togo" but at least two goals to assure advancement. Now to make this more interesting let's say that "Togo" is a tiny little country from one of those poor continents. "Togo" has trouble paying their players because they don't have enough money. "France" is a well-off country from one of those rich continents. Now to make things even better, let's say that "Togo" is already eliminated from competition and no one has expected them to really do anything spectacular, being their first entry in such a well-known tournament. "France" on the other hand is expected to advance, and not advancing will be a huge hit to their federation and country in general.

Now, let's continue on this hypothetical journey. Let's say that someone from the Federation of "France" (we'll call it the "FFF" for short) contacts someone from the Football Federation of "Togo" and says, "sorry that your boys are out of competition, however, we have noted that many of them are playing at a high level and may be in a good position to come to clubs in France. We'd like to help you out..." Or maybe he says something like, "we know that you guys are having trouble paying your players, maybe we can give you a hand by loaning you some money, or by taking other actions...how would you like to play a friendly between the "Togo" national team and the "French" national team in Lomé. It won't cost you guys anything and all the merchandising and revenues from the match goes directly into your cash register. You're not into the National teams? we could probably arrange for our national champions to come down and play some exhibition matches with your teams."

So, maybe they come to an agreement. Now the implementation may be a bit tough. How do you convince a team to fake lose? I guess the best place to start would be in Italy. But after, you need it to look like it wasn't fixed. You can't really get the whole team on board, too risky at such a high level. So you talk to a couple of the key players. Let's say a full-back and maybe a striker. You tell them to play hard, but to make the game turn out "right." Heck, they could even score a goal if they wanted too, as long as the difference is two to make our fake team, "France," advance. Let's say that both teams play hard, both teams fight it out, but eventually the "French" team scores their two goals...Maybe they weren't even fake, they were real goals, but now there are two of them. Let's say that this is around the 61st minute. Now what happens? Well maybe the striker who was aware of what needed to be done realizes that he has done his part and he asks to be substituted.

Maybe the speed of the game slows down greatly. Maybe both teams are happy with what they have done and relax.

I know, this could never happen. We're talking about the pinnacle of professionalism in sports.

On a utterly and completely different subject; good luck to Les Bleus who beat the The Hawks yesterday 2:0 to advance to the Round of 16 and I hope that Emmanuel Adebayor isn't too tired. He looked pretty exhausted when he went off at 75 minutes.

22 Hours - Phase II: The Car & Stuck in England

2006-06-21T23:06:00.000+02:00

Here's the second installment of my recent eventful trip to lovely England. The first entry is here: Part I: Getting In.

So, British customs, in their infinite wisdom let me exit the airport. We meet our contact, Ted, who is going to bring us to the company and to look at the car. Ted's brother, Paul will also meet us at the company and we will get down to business.

Ted, Franck and I laugh a bit about the issues that we had getting in. Then Ted asks us what our plan was...We told him that assuming the car was as expected, we were going to take the car and drive it back down to Bordeaux. Ted laughed. A few minutes later he asked if either of us had driven a limo before. We said no. Ted laughed. Ted asked us if we had ever driven a box truck before, because it was about the same size. We said no. Ted laughed. It was becoming a bit disarming the fact that he was laughing about all of these things. Ted asked us if we knew how long the car was. We told him that we thought we did, but asked him to confirm the size. Ted said "big" and...he laughed.

Finally we get to the office, and we notice that the driveway is a bit "difficult" to navigate. Ted told us that he would have someone help us pull the car out. We meet with Paul and then we look at the car. For me it was a normal sized limo - a Town Car with a 120" stretch. However, Franck thought that the car was smaller. The entire car came out to be 8.5 meters long and Franck thought that it would be 7-7.2 meters. He started looking over the car and started to get cold feet. He started wondering how we were going to get the car to the highway. How we were going to drive it to the train station to take the chunnel. How we were going to get it on the train. How we were going to clear customs to get into France. We started thinking more and more and I (while fairly unemotional about the whole episode - like I told the customs agents, I was there for translation and companionship purposes only) started to imagine seeing us discussing with customs officials for the second time in one day what "business" we had going into a country. If they blocked the car in Calais, we were really going to be in bad shape.

Long story short, after consultations between England and France, the conclusion was, without more knowledge, the risk was too great to leave almost 10,000 euros for a car that may become a big paperweight in France.

Ok great. We are now in Southampton. We have no return ticket. We have no idea what is in this town - is it big, is it small? We had no idea of anything. The only thing we did know was that there was no return flight from Southampton to Bordeaux before Thursday (it was about 4 pm on a Tuesday). Upon further research, the easiest thing to do was take a flight from Southampton to Bergerac, which is about 1 hour from Bordeaux. The problem was that this flight didn't leave until the next day at 11:40. So we were stuck in Southampton for the night. With nothing but the clothes on our backs and a toothbrush each. We then realized that England was playing their world cup match against Sweden and we thought, hey we'll be able to watch the game with the English.

Wow! These guys are really crazy about their footie. We go to the pub at 6pm (the match started at 8pm) to have a few drinks and try to eat (a small side note, English food is as bad as you've heard). The pub was maybe half full when we got in there, and it slowly but steadily filled up. By 7:30 it was full of screaming, and I mean screaming, hooligans. Every single play was cause for booing or cheering. I guess it's like watching the super bowl in a fan's bar in one of the cities whose team is playing. But this is on a country-wide scale. I can think of no sporting even equivalent in the US with this type of support.

In the end we spend the night in a cheap (but expensive) hotel, took the flight in the morning and got back this afternoon. It wasn't very productive, but I had a bit of fun, got out of Bordeaux and learned that there may be easier ways to buy a car.

22 Hours in [not so] great Britian - Phase I: Getting In

2006-06-21T18:39:00.000+02:00

To make a long introduction short, a restaurant that I work with here in Bordeaux "purchased" a Lincoln 120" stretch Town Car on eBay from a seller in Southampton, England. Being that there are a plethora of low-cost airlines in Europe, the manager, Franck, found that he could fly to Southampton from Bordeaux for about 50 euros total. He, not an English-speaker, asked me if I would like to go with him to Blighty to translate and hang out and, assuming the purchase went as planned, take the car through the Chunnel and down to Bordeaux. I, having nothing I couldn't put off on my schedule, said Why not?

The flight was at 2pm out of Bordeaux, next stop Southampton "International" Airport. In retrospect, the fact that the plane took off on time for the outbound leg was probably the best thing that happened to us on this trip. Arrival, on time, at Southampton. Ok, we go through the customs line, and everyone else was either a Brit or French. I get told I have to fill out the landing card to get into their "wonderful" country. I do so and return to the line. No dice, the customs agent doesn't want to waste time with me, so she tells me to step aside and she'll get "back to me." Her two colleagues were standing there watching her work for about five minutes and after everyone got through the three of them came over to me. I still don't know what the problem was (we didn't have return tickets, but they didn't ask if we did either). They wanted to know why I was in Britain – To look at a car. They wanted to know if we were buying the car – I don't know, I'm just here cause I speak English. They want to know how were paying for the car – I don't know. They take Franck away, I guess so they can "question" us separately to see if our stories are the same. They ask me about my residency – I have French residency. They ask to see my French drivers license – I show it to them and they take many notes from it. They want to know why I don't work – getting pissed off at this point I tell them to ask the French government why the job market is so terrible.

Then they ask if I've been to GB before – yeah, I was a student in Northern Ireland. Oops. Now, I'm no longer just trying to sneak into GB, I'll probably a bloody IRA member. Why Northern Ireland? Cause I wanted to go to Ireland, and the North had the best program. What did I study? History, Political Science – crap, now I really am a terrorist. But why the University of Ulster? Cause I had to do a program abroad, Europe seemed good and Derry was cheaper than Copenhagen. But WHY CHOSE DERRY and not some other Irish school – because my school had an exchange with the University of Ulster – oh, that's what I've been looking for all along.

Moving along now, do you have any papers for the car? No, I'm just here to translate. Do you have any documents related to the purchase? Ditto. Who may you buy this car from? Coastal Credit. Do you have a phone number for Offshore Credit? Coastal Credit, and yes I have a number...I'll be back in a minute.

He comes back and now wants to [again] know how we're going to pay for the car – I DON'T KNOW! They bring me into the same room as Franck. He tells me that he told them that the money was going to be paid by transfer (but he actually had cash). They make 2 or 3 phone calls – one to Coastal Credit and then they go out and interview the guy who came to pick us up – taking his driver's license.

They then ask if they have searched Franck's bag (they searched mine twice) and the guy says no. The guy the says, so you have no cash and Franck says yes, yes, cash. And shows them €9,500 in cash. They do a little math, say that comes out to about the agreed price in pounds, they say have a nice day and they leave. That's it.

I still have no idea what they were thinking or looking for...If I wanted to, as a legal French resident, I think I could go to England and request a work permit. Ok, the Derry thing, fine, it may be important to know why an American student chose to go to Derry, but come on – it's not freaking Afghanistan. The whole incident just strikes me a weird...In retrospect I think they may have been bored and don't get too many opportunities to mess around with people...Who knows.

I've never had these problems – Jeff and I went to Switzerland a couple years back, no problem. I've been to Germany, Ireland, Spain, Italy, THE UK before, and of course the US many times and never had the smallest problem and they chose a stupid 1:20 minute flight from Bordeaux to Southampton to do this...I just don't understand. Oh well.

So, 2 hours into our trip we were just clearing customs. I'll post the rest of the trip later.

Seeing Red

2006-06-18T11:41:00.000+02:00

I don't know if anyone watched the Italy-US match yesterday, but it was a good match and a VERY good match for the US team. However, the refereeing was absolutely horrible. Just terrible (and both ways, not just against the US).

As ESPN reported after the game, the ref in question, Jorge LARRIONDA from Uruguay, was suspended from the World Cup in 2002 for irregularity. The DeRossi card was absolutely deserved. He elbowed Brian McBride in the face, McBride's face was covered in blood and he required stitches. Agree 100% with this call. I guess the obvious follow up is a red card for the Americans to "even things up" (another reason to hate soccer), but the card against Mastroeni was not a red. It was a yellow card in any other game. He was late, it was violent, the Italian acted as if his ankle was physically removed from his body, but there is no way that that is a red card in any other game. I didn't see the Eddie Pope second yellow for a red, but I saw the first yellow to Pope and it was not really a yellow. Hard to argue against some yellow cards because a lot of refs pull them out for any reason just to calm things down. But the first booking was marginal. Apparently the second booking was even less obvious and to book a second American for a red after having already screwed up the first red for the Americans, inexcusable. His wackiness continued. He booked an Italian with a yellow for a push that was barely even worthy of a free kick. The waved off goal was probably offsides, but it doesn't make it any easier to swallow.

Anyway, getting to the analysis of something other than the ref: The Americans played with a lot of heart. If they got red cards and McBride got bloody and they came away with a draw it is because they played a real soccer game. They didn't give the Italians anything. They played physically, basically telling those guys - if you're going to dive, we'll give you something to dive for! Down one man for almost 40 minutes, they played hard, physical, inspired soccer, doing the right stuff and even scoring (even if they goal was waved off, it wasn't scored because of the offsides. Beasley broke in and ripped a shot from the left hand side, Gigi Buffon (that's his real name folks) couldn't control it and it went into the net. The line judge determined that McBride, in an offsides position, interfered enough with the play to wave it off). Great goal, terrible it had to be called back - that's the way it happens.

At the 80 minute mark, the Americans couldn't play anymore. They were just holding on by their fingernails with the hope of getting away with a draw (from 80 minutes on I was screaming for Arena to bring in some fresh legs, but I guess the 1000 kms from Bordeaux to Kaiserslautern was too far for him to hear me). Landon Donovan had to be replenished by IV after the game. Now, if the Americans beat Ghana on Thursday (this is not necessarily a given, Ghana beat the Czechs 2-0) and Italy beats the Czech Republic, the Americans are going to the second round (most likely to play Brazil!!).

Nike has a new set of commercials called Joga Bonita. Using French legend, Eric Cantona, as a narrator the ads discuss soccer and playing. There's one where the punch line is, "America: The world no longer looks forward to playing you." Even with absolute apathy at home, the American team is not too shabby. They won't win this year, they may not win in 2010, but sooner or later, the US will field 11 men who will be as good as their peers from Brazil and Germany and Argentina.

Hockey? Are you stilling thinking about that?

2006-06-17T11:37:00.000+02:00

Ok, so I know that since the Sabres lost in Game 7 I have been quiet about the whole hockey aspect of professional sports. Why? Cause I don't have a lot of say. I was really routing for the Sabres, but unfortunately all their freak injuries (they had lost 4 starting defensemen by game 7), culminating in Jay McKee's really freaky leg infection, and a very good Carolina team pulled it off in the end. Suffice it to say, I'm routing for the Oilers for the cup. First and foremost, because the Oilers didn't eliminate the Sabres, so there is less animosity there and second, the Stanley Cup should be in the North...or at least north of the Mason-Dixon line!

This is the crux of the problem. North Carolina does not deserve to call itself the home of the Cup for the next year. Hockey has no business being in southern states. When I look at the Hurricanes, I don't hate them as a team. I kind of like Mike Commodore - he reminds me of Ogie Ogilthorpe with his bush of flaming red hair (yeah, I read that somewhere else, but it doesn't mean that I didn't think about it). Cam Ward has the makings of a terrific goalie ('course he's no Ryan Miller). Laviolette is a good coach. So, in summary, I don't have anything against the team. It's against where they are.

In an excellent article by Chris Shott in Slate, the author basically says that hockey should not attempt to expand their fan base. He argues that it's better to stick with the die-hard fans that they have, to become a sport with a cult following, nothing more. He advocates contraction (notably from those too-hot locales such as Florida and, yes, Raleigh, NC). To help back up his point he quotes the following figure:

During Carolina's semifinal matchup against the Buffalo Sabres, hockey ratings in western New York were between three and seven times greater than in Raleigh.

Not to say that NYers are better than those down south, but as hockey fans they surely are. It's commendable (to a point) that Gary Bettman et al have tried to expand hockey's reaches beyond the Northern US and Canada, but let's get real. It's time to make this league smaller, more efficient and not try to attract only fairweather fans for a couple of odd playoff runs. Go to Toronto or Boston or Montreal, all cities that have teams that missed the playoffs or got knocked out in the first rount (Montreal). Ask some people about hockey. They'll talk until blue in the face about hockey. Now go to Phoenix or Tampa or Atlanta and ask them. I've a pretty funny feeling that it will be different. Sure you'll find fans in the southern cities, just as you'll find non-fans in the North, but I'm pretty sure that the fan base is significantly stronger up North. Leave the South with NASCAR, football and spring training, we'll keep the Cup where it belongs: in a region that sees "snow" and "ice" that have naturally formed.

The DaVinci Code - A simple review

2006-05-26T11:08:00.000+02:00

So, I saw the DaVinci Code last night (it's was Julie's choice, but what the heck, I had nothing better to do with $11.25 US - yep, €8.90 per ticket). Before you all scream the question that is on everyone's mind, I just want to assure you all, Tom Hanks' hair did not bother me. Why are people focusing on this anyway. It's just hair; many people can grow their's longer or shorter, depending on their mood. Tom Hanks had longish hair for this film. Fine.

Anyway, being that my brain tends to purge large amounts of irrelevant and semi-irrelevant information, I had basically forgotten the book. Sure I remember the overall premise. An American guy drives around Paris in a smartcar and somehow ends up in Scotland with a Frenchwoman with a heavy accent. Best of all I forgot who the overall villian was. It added to my movie experience. We could say that the DaVinci Code (the book) didn't have a terribly marking impact on my life. My review of the book was...eh! I read a lot of pulp fiction and the Code was not the best and not the worst that I had read last year.

Anyway, getting to the movie. It was mediocrity in THX surround sound. Sure it was an enjoyable 2 hours and 20 minutes (or something like that). Jean Reno was not at his best - "Leon/The Professional" saw him in better times. Audrey Tatou was okay, if not a little flat in her English-language blockbuster debut (she has done some other lower budget films in English). Tom Hanks - whatever, he didn't make any huge mistakes. Ron Howard did a good job at totally desexing the relationship between Langdon and Neveu. As I said, I don't totally remember the book, but I do seem to recall that there was at least the hint of a relationship between the two protagonists - here, nothing.

I was going to avoid a spoiler, but what the heck, this is my biggest critism of the movie, so I'll have to officially state: SPOILER ALERT, stop reading now if you didn't read the book, haven't seen the movie and want to be mildly surprised if you do see it.

I don't remember exactly how this was done in the book, but in the movie, Teabing's reason for revealing his evil is so stupid and flat. He tries to force Langdon and Neveu to reveal the secret by force, but they are already trying to do this. Why the hell didn't he just let them continue? This rang very untrue in the movie. THERE WAS NO REASON FOR HIM TO FORCE THE SUBJECT!! Even if we learned that he was "The Teacher," he didn't need to reveal this. He'd already killed Remy, why not sit back and let our two characters do the work. His only motivation was that the secret be revealed? Ugh. Just terrible. I know I know. American sense of justice etc, means that he has to somehow be punished for his actions.

Anyway: I would have a hard time recommending this to anyone, espeically at over $11 a ticket. Rent it on video, read some reviews so you get the general premise, whatever. It's too long and too tedious at parts to really say that this is a master oeuvre. Or what the heck, go see it if you want. Someone has to pay Dan Brown's take and Hanks' $25 million.

Oh and just my little post script on the whole religious aspect. IT'S FICTION DAMN IT! I don't understand why so many people are up in arms about this thing. We have movies about Robin Hood, the World Wars, Aliens, the CIA, and Michael Moore's entire catalog that no one takes seriously. Why do they take a piece of pulp that purports that Jesus was married to be serious? Come on, grow up and take it for what it is - fiction, pure and simple.

Two wins to go

2006-05-25T17:26:00.000+02:00

Awwww, the poor Hurricanes, all depressed after there loss! Sorry. I shouldn't be gloating until the Sabres win the series; not that this is done yet, but I like the way these guys are playing. Unfortunately their defensive corps is taking quite a beating.

I just realized this: Brind'amour means "A little bit of love," ain't that sweet. It makes me think of the old Molson commercial with Guy Lafleur, which I have looked all over the internet for (ok, I searched Lafleur Molson on Youtube - but still) and can't find. If anyone knows where I can find this ad, let me know. This second photo is just to rub it in a little more: Come on Carolina, why is he all alone? Where's the defense?!?

First Blood to the Sabres

2006-05-21T11:58:00.000+02:00

Nothing's done yet, but I'm happy that the Sabres (who are getting no love from American hockey "experts" - although the Canadians seem to prefer them) have started the series strong, with a win in Carolina. I hope that this continues. Sorry Karl, your 4-0 series win for the 'Canes seems to be wrong!!

With luck we'll see a lot more pictures like this one of the Canes goalie, Cam Ward.

All Lost in the Supermarket

2006-05-16T17:37:00.000+02:00

I can no longer shop happily: 'Course I don't know if I ever could.

I needed to buy a new toothbrush (yeah, I know, this has all the makings of a wonderful blog post, right? Stick with me). Usually I don't over think this - I run into the toothpaste/brush aisle, I grab a toothbrush and I run away. For some reason I didn't make the decision quick enough yesterday and ended up getting stuck in the quagmire that is the tooth care section of Carrefour. I was there for about 5 minutes and then started thinking about how ridiculous it was that I was taking so much time deciding. This only made the process worse, because I tried to force the issue, but couldn't decide between the name brand that looked just like the store brand that was 50% cheaper.

I'm all for choice. We live in [for the most part] capitalist societies, and we therefore have multiple choices. I'm sure the Russians didn't have this problem 20 years ago. They were have to have any toothbrush. Anyway, choice good, blah blah blah. But do we need 150 freaking choices? Ok, each brand has their own toothbrushes, fine, but do they each need 20 different types? Is the toothbrush that costs €2 half as good at cleaning my teeth as one that costs €4? Will it last half as long? Then you have the different names. Is "Professional" a higher grade than "Expert?" If it says diamond clean does that mean there's little diamond chips on the brush? I don't want that, I have a feeling that could damage my enamel.

After a while I started thinking, this is stupid. It's a damn toothbrush, it's not that important. Then I started thinking, yeah, but I really like my teeth where they are, notably in my jaw, I need the best tool available to do this. After a while, I basically closed my eyes and reached out and took the first one I touched. It's an "Expert" grade brush - I'm assuming that they mean it is the only toothbrush used by toothbrushing experts, and that this will thereby ascend me into their ranks.

I reached a couple of conclusions based on this: 1. I need a job so I don't have time on week day afternoons to linger in the food store - Saturdays are the best time to go because the entire population of France decided to cram into the same supermarket. Therefore you're just happy if you can get half the products you need, much less make a "choice" 2. Julie needs to do the shopping more often. She wouldn't have these problems and 3. I may need to seek professional help. Somehow it doesn't seem normal to spend 15 minutes trying to decide which toothbrush to buy.

More Photos From Spain

2006-05-15T12:41:00.000+02:00

I've been meaning to post these pictures for a while - at least a couple of weeks - but have got sidetracked on other stuff (who knew that looking for a job could take so much time!!). Anyway, just a couple more pictures that I have from my sejour down on the Costa Brava.

The first is Olivier throwing against Julien from my current club (33 Tours). The second is a beautiful photo (that has been such recognized - it won the photo contest for the tournament). That's Julien of 33 Tours catching against Eric of the pickup team.

Lastly you have a pleasant beach view. Cheers and enjoy.

Give 'em some credit

2006-05-15T12:20:00.000+02:00

Ok, it's starting to annoy me now - all of the talking heads of hockey are stating that the Senators "failed" again in their 4-1 series defeat against the underdog Sabres. I would like once to hear some people credit the Sabres gameplay, and not blame the Sens for losing. Sure, they couldn't get the job done, but the Sabres have been doing this all year long. Winning. They were only 3 points short of the Senators at the end of the season - how does one "highly favor" the men from Ottawa for this? They play the same teams all season long.

I, officially, am calling for Buffalo to win the Eastern Conference final against the [surely] heavily favored Carolina Hurricanes. Why? Because I'm a fan? No, because I think that the Sabres are a very well-balanced team and that they have the talent and above-all the team spirit to beat the ugliest man in hockey and his team.

There, start giving these guys respect 'cause they deserve it (and that way I can go back to ignoring my blog...sorry folks, I'll try harder).

Bruce Springsteen: The Closest You'll Get to Tom Waits on Tour

2006-04-22T14:14:00.000+02:00

Bruce Springsteen just released a new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a collection of covers of songs that are somehow associated with Pete Seeger (he wrote them, he performed them, he was involved somehow). I've been listening to it all morning and it has a lot of good stuff. People that are fans of "The River" and "Born to Run" may not appreciate it as much as people who are fans of folk/swing/jazzy music, but it's nice mix of different styles, with the classic Bruce voice. However, in listening to it, I momentarily thought that Winamp somehow messed up and started playing Tom Waits. The song "Eyes on the Prize" (click here for 30 second preview in Realplayer...[sigh] for those people still stuck under Microsoft's clutches, here's the WMA file) is a dead ringer for a Waits song, right down to the prevalent stand-up bass that Tom tends to use in a lot of his music. But it's more than that, Bruce really roughs up his voice for this song; mixed with the banjo and fiddles in the background, it could be mistaken for a Waits song (true connoisseurs won't be tricked, but should see the link). Funny thing, Rolling Stone associated Bruce's interpretation of "O Mary Don't You Weep" (Real, windows media) as having a Waits-esque twang to it, but makes no mention of "Eyes on the Prize." Let me know down in the comments section who you think is right, me or Rolling Stone!!

My favorite song is "Mrs. Mcgrath," (real, windows media) an Irish-twinged song that has also been called "Mrs. Mcgraw" throughout the ages. If you're interested in other versions, I found this a capella (sort of, there's a bit of drum) version in my web searching.

As you can tell, this is not a full review; that's better left to the "professionals" who get paid big bucks by Rolling Stone, Amazon.com, et. al., to tell you and me what to like. I'm telling you what I like and hoping to key you guys into some music that I find enjoyable.

WOW!!! The Antas GT

2006-04-21T22:34:00.000+02:00

I like cars...a lot. But it is very rare that I find a car where I drop everything and just say, "Wow, that is beautiful." That just happened as I stumbled upon the Autoblog posting for the Antas. Other people are bound to have different opinions on this car (and I must confess, I'm not a big fan of the fin), but I love the looooooooong hood and the flowing lines. Unfortunately, no one I know is going to be buying this car anytime soon, it's a one-off by Italian designers/coachbuilders Walter Faralli and Luca Mazzanti.

Just for you classicists out there: It's carburated (and no, for everyone born after 1980, this has nothing to do with bubbles in your Coke or the Atkins diet), but still gets to 100 km/h (~62 mph) in about 5 seconds!

You can find a bunch of additional photos at the official site of the car.

Lord Stanley's Cup

2006-04-21T12:45:00.000+02:00

The NHL hockey playoffs start tonight when the Tamba Bay Lightning travel up to the capital to meet the best team in the east and the Oilers from Edmonton (is there any oil in Edmonton?) travel to Motor City to play the best team in the league. I, of course, won't be watching any of this. However, those lucky Europeans with access to the North American Sports Network (NASN) will have a whole range of playoff hockey this week! Jeff was just complaining the other day about the difficulty watching sports in the Metro NY region...At least he has hockey to watch, I've been waiting for months (and shall be waiting for many more) for Free to get their act together and get the NASN onto my TV (it may be coming in August!). Of course I can't really complain too much, I did voluntarily expatriate myself, and with that I lose my hockey watching ability. Oh well.

League jackass and all-around scumbag, Pat Quinn was fired by the Leafs (isn't the plural form of "leaf" "leaves"?) yesterday. The respectibility of the entire NHL immediately went up by a couple points when Toronto made the announcement. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I'm not one for making blognostications (scroll down to the "BBB" section), but I'm going to make one here: "Real Definition" is going to become the next big term. With the proliferation of high-definition TV (HD) certain people have started to refer to regular programming as standard definition (SD) TV. Therefore, the logic goes that sooner or later someone is going to coin the term real-def (RD) to indicate the live viewing of something. "I caught U2 in RD last night at the Garden and man, I'm telling you, there's nothing like it" or "Yeah, I saw the game in HD last night in a bar; I really wanted to see it in RD but couldn't get out of the city in time to catch it."

Lastly, a little bit of home team cheering: Lindy Ruff for Coach of the Year!! Arguably this man has done the most with the least in the NHL this year. The Sabres are a bunch of 2nd and 3rd line players who managed to have the 3rd best record in the Eastern Conference and 5th in the League. They have one of the best away records, the number 3 powerplay and the number 2 penalty-kill in the League. This team owes it's [very] solid regular season finish to Lindy. Quick, name one star on the Sabres team this year. Name the leading scorer...Unless you follow hockey really close (or you're a Sabres fan) these questions will remain unanswered!
Even Karl agrees:

From: karl-2.wagner@_____.com
To: Kris Salo
Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 11:33 PM

Yeah, how about a little Ruff Love!!!

This Blog Should be in Spanish

2006-04-21T12:17:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Jeff, I've been keyed into Statcounter which basically tells me how many readers I get per day (average around 3), where those people are located (at least where their [proxy] server is located), what browser they are using (IE is winning, much to my disappointment, by a stunning 71% - hey people get Mozilla Firefox, it's much better), the time they spend on my blog (averaging around 20 seconds) and the key words they used if they came from a search engine (very few people use search engines - most come directly to my site).

Anyway, after the frisbee tournament on the Costa Brava, I sent links to my posts to my entire pickup team, and the Spanairds have starting reading my blog en masse. France is still number 1 as the location of origin (41%), but most of these page loads are from me checking to make sure my posts are appearing correctly, etc. Spain is a close number 2 with 39% (with almost half of those people checking in from lovely Barcelona - hey Barcelona, qué pasa?). The US is a shameful #4 on the list (after Belgium!!!!!).

Unfortunately, 8 years of middle and high school and college level Spanish have done nothing for my ability to write, speak, read or otherwise "know" Spanish in anyway. So, a big "lo siento" to all the Spaniards, this blog isn't going to be changing languages anytime soon (and even then it will be much more likely that French becomes the language of choice because je me débrouille en français).

As you may be able to tell, I'm a little low on ideas right now. No one is rioting in France for the moment, I still have no job, and I have no [big] reason to be pissed off at the world...except for a couple of minor things that I'll probably post in the next few days.

Have a good weekend!

The Pickup Team (the best damn 1-8 team of the tournament)

2006-04-13T13:14:00.000+02:00

(l to r) Claire, Freek, Fabien, Eric, Olivier, Alizé, Kris)

The Pickup team at the Costa Brava Frisbee Tournament was the most fun to play with, in my opinion. As a pickup team, it took us a while to work out how the others would play, but by the end of the tournament, we started to have the foundations of a true team. With one dedicated female (thanks Claire) in a tournament that was supposed to have 2 girls playing all the time, we were always in the hunt for more females to join our team, even for one game. The core group consisted of three French, two Spaniards, two Colombians, one American and one Belge. On top of this we had all kinds of nationalities join us for various games. Thanks to all who joined us for one game, two games, many games (special thanks to Alizé who played with us whenever her team wasn't playing!)

(Eric and Olive playing solid D)

The offense took a bit of time to warm up. Who can throw? how do those throws act in the air? all kinds of questions that took a few games to figure out. The funny thing was, we started nearly every game quite strong (except those bloody Irish, they killed us from the get-go). But once teams got to know how we played - after 15 or 20 minutes, they tended to out play us. Nearly every team commented on our strong D though. Between Olivier who measures in at 1.98 meters (nearly 6'6") and has arms that must be about 5 meters long, Eric who would dive at every pass that came near him and Freek who never stopped running, we were definitely a defensive force to be reckoned with! I really think that with a bit more practice and a bit fewer changes in the team (every game we had new players and lost old players) we would have been quite a strong team (for example we could've beat those silly Bordelais and they know it!).

We were also possibly the most relaxed team at the tournament. I am not 100% sure, but this picture of Fabien may have been taken during a game!! In any case, the beer flowed freely on the beach, the discs flew well and good times were had by all.

Thanks to everyone who played for us, and special thanks to David, Oscar, Eric, Freek, Olivier, Fabien and Claire for helping to form a team that was truly memorable to play for!

The Aftermath

2006-04-11T16:47:00.000+02:00

Lloret de Mar (see it with Google Earth download the .kmz file here): the Myrtle Beach of the Southern Costa Brava (apparently). Speaking with Americans from NC, I was told that Myrtle Beach was like this. Thousands of shops selling t-shirts, plastic real-look guns, alcohol, and other touristy stuff. I can not imagine going there at the height of tourism season. April was bad enough!

Anyway, I'm throwing a couple of photos up here for your viewing pleasure. The first one is the view from the hotel. When viewing this, I think you have to realize that I had been going on about 4 hours sleep (for 3 days) and playing up-to one hour games on the sand all day long. I just got out of the shower so my hair is a mess and apparently I just wanted to get the picture over!

Here's a pic of the main drag in Lloret. "The Boulevard" as it's called is all about drinking and drinking and drinking. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 nightclubs on a 1 mile stretch of road. The worst is there are these guys out in front of every club telling you "exceptional offer for you, free entry" but after three nights of this my friend Olivier (bottom photo) remarked, yeah, but every club has free entry!
We learned that you just have to ignore them. If you engage in conversation, you are stuck for a couple of minutes because they keep doing things to try to make you stay.

Since this tournament was technically about Frisbee, I will include this picture of my buddy, Olivier on the beach. It was really a beautiful area (I should have some more photos soon that show more scenery) and frisbee tournaments are usually a ton of fun. Everyone is there to have fun and relax and there is a very convivial atmosphere where everyone tends to chat after the games, during the games, at dinner, in the bars. Plus it gives you a reason to go to the beach. I'm already looking for more tournaments on the beach; there's one on the island of Mallorca (Google Earth .kmz file here) in October that I'm truly going to try to go to.

I'll try to post some more photos once I have them - I'm waiting for people to send me some pics because I didn't take a ton of photos.

PS: Congratulations to France for their brilliantly foresighted move in cancelling the CPE: Precarité forever!

Spanish Bombs (and Militants for the Status Quo)

2006-04-07T10:42:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the title...I've been listening to the Clash of late and it's the first phrase that I thought of with "Spanish" in it...although, I guess since I'm going to a frisbee tournament, there may be some long throws that could be referred as "bombs."

Anyway, I'm off to Lloret de Mar in a few hours to spend 3 days eating, drinking, socializing, and I guess playing a bit of frisbee - possibly on the beach shown at left!

The weather is supposed to be nice - Check out the picture-forecast for Saturday (below). I'll be at that sun symbol in the lower-central part of the picture.

I was thinking about bringing my computer down to try to do some real-time blogging, but it's just too much of a pain in the neck, so you'll have to wait until Tuesday to get my full report. I promise to take as many pictures as necessary to make you all completely jealous of my life as a "chomeur" (unemployed french resident).

Changing subjects completely here, Newsweek has an article with an excellent title: "France's Militants for the Status Quo" by Christopher Dickey. It's [another] piece from an American standpoint about all the stuff that's happening over here, but it has some good analysis about what's going on.

What's a President to do?

2006-03-24T13:35:00.000+01:00

France is still rioting. Next Wednesday the unions and student leaders have called for a nation-wide strike; it's a good thing that I'm coming back from Paris on Monday; if I'd planned to return on Weds, I'm sure these plans would be nixed. Anyway, the labor unions and the students are saying they won't negotiate until the CPE is gone. De Villepin (Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to his close friends), who headed this whole CPE thing, is desperately seeking support, and has so far refused to scrap the plan. Sarkozy (or Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa to his intimates) is biding his time and waiting for de Villepin to collapse so he can sweep in and save the French right and [of course] become president in the process. Chirac, has remained fairly quiet letting his feuding underlings grow their own wings. But many people are asking - where is Jacques? Is he still alive? After his "vascular incident" last year he has dropped from public view and some people (me at least) are wondering if he didn't die and the government is just holding the image of him up until they can figure out the next best course of action (we are talking about a huge bureaucracy; it wouldn't happen over night). You all saw "Dave" right? If they can do it at the White House, they can do it at the Elysée Palace.

Anyway, that was all proven false yesterday in Brussels where Jacques Chirac is back in stunning fashion. When the French head of the EU Business lobby, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, gave a speech in English because it is "the language of business." Chirac threw a tantrum and stormed out with his Finance and Foreign Ministers. The news reports that I have seen do not delve into subject any more than to report that Jacqu-o left and that Seilliere and the French government are at odds for, among other things, the official governmental policy of "what is French is French and we don't give a s--t what is good for the economy as long as Suez, Sanofi, Thales, Alstom, etc, remain part of the FRENCH economy." Of course when it's a French company* doing the buying there's no problem.

I am getting off track here; what started as a criticism of Chirac has [once again] degraded into a criticism of the French economy in general...why does this always happen? Anyway, as I was saying, I don't know any of the inside story as to why Chirac stormed out, but does it matter? The man speaks English...well. Crying about something won't change the fact that English is much more used in the world and in the world of business than French. Yep, your all-expense paid trips to famous French chateaux may convert a few EU Politicians to speak a little French, but are you kidding. The Indians and the Chinese and the Saudis and the Russians are not going to learn French when they can already get by with their limited English.

This whole problem is France's fault though. The French language demands an enormous amount of study and focus to speak and write. With something like 80,000 different conjugations per verb it's a lot of work. On top of this, the French are very stuffed up about the practice of the language. A French person that makes a speaking error is below dirt. A peasant at best. Foreigners get a little bit of slack, but they are insanely rigid about the language...There is no English Academy (of course the site wouldn't be in English) to define the "real" words in the language - we let society determine this, not a bunch of stuffed shirted sitting in some huge library in Paris. If everyone is speaking English it's because it is an easy language to speak poorly, but we don't really care how you speak it - as long as we can get the jist of what you're saying. I read somewhere that people can effectively do business with 500 English words. That's not a lot considering that there are around one-half million recognized English words. French has around 100,000 (less if you consider L'Academie's numbers), but sometimes I think you need all of them; plus certain French people like to shove their vocabulary down your throat - it's a mark of honor if you can use a word that the other person doesn't know.

The meeting was also discussing certain nationalistic attitudes taken by certain EU countries to ensure that certain companies remain part of these certain countries. I think Chirac was trying to make a point about the whole thing, but if anything this makes him look dumber.

*Yeah, I know that the Alcatel-Lucent talks are about a "merger of equals," but does such a thing exist? In a merger of equals, Alcatel would account for about 65% of the combined company...

Don't work, burn a car

2006-03-21T22:18:00.000+01:00

Where to start? I'm sure you heard about the new rioting in France (if you haven't look here or here, or here, here, or ici). If it's not ghetto immigrants burning cars, it's upper class white kids. 'Course there's a big difference here - the CRS (French SWAT basically) doesn't confine these protesters to the banlieues around the city, but allows them into the downtown areas to ply their arsonistic tendencies. I have read the theory that this may be a concerted effort by the Republic to allow the protesters to lose public support by over-doing it. Whatever, if this is the government's grand plan to keep the CPE, it's going to be a tough sell with the polls saying around 68% (last week) of the people were against these new contracts.

Ok, here's the thing. In theory the law is a good one. France needs to liberalize their economy. Let's take me for example: I worked for 1 year as an intern, which doesn't count as real work for the government; basically meaning I don't pay taxes on it and the company doesn't pay tax on me. Then I was kept on as a contract employee for 6 months. I left after 6 months and now the government is going to pay me, for up to 7 months, about 70% of my previous take-home pay. It's nice, sure; I'm not even gaming the system, I'm just following the rules. But I did a little bit of bar napkin math and figure I'll earn about 10 times as much from unemployment as I paid in during my short-term contract. This is one small example of a nation-wide phenomenon. For me, the company was paying about 100% taxes on my pay; meaning that my salary was actually doubled for the employer. I was on a CDD (fixed-length contract), so either myself or the employer could end this whenever the other wished, but figure I sign a CDI (non-fixed-length contract). The company is stuck with me come hell or high water. It's good for the employees, bad for the companies.

Many Anglo news sources have discussed the fact that France needs to change, I am not really going to get into this. Anyone who isn't French and understands anything about today's world knows that things can not continue as is. The thing is that the French could care less what the Americans or the Brits think; on the contrary I am sure that certain protesters who used the Anglo news sources as even more reason to fight this. See, the 'Ricans (this is their [semi-]derogatory name for Americans) think the CPE is a good thing, therefore by definition it must be a bad thing. I was watching the spokesman for the government the other day on the news and it was very funny to watch him describe the type of economy that he (or the government) foresees in the future and he starts to talk about the liberalization of the labor markets, etc, and basically discuss that the changes are needed, like some countries. From the way he was speaking, I totally expected him to say Ireland or Britain (never the US, of course), but he (and I'm sure this was very deliberate on his part) totally avoided Anglo-Saxon countries and said, "Like Spain and the Netherlands who have recently started to liberalize labor markets with very good results."

The problem with the CPE is not the introduction of a new type of contract. I think this is a good idea (much better than the idea that letting everyone work for 35 hours would lead to more jobs) in principle. However, the French mentality is so set on these damn contracts, that the protesters have legitimate axes to grind. There will most definitely be abuses. Right now companies can only hire worker on CDD (short-term) contracts for up to 18 months, I think. In any case, it is a short period of time, and this can only be done in 6-month periods. Therefore, the employees take a temporary-work attitude and it's not really efficient. However, by using one of these CPE contracts, companies can hire workers out of school for up to two years and then fire them after 23 months and hire a new one. IT WILL HAPPEN. Because of this ingrained mentality of contracts they will do everything they can to work around signing CDIs. On top of this, many banks and lending agencies will probably treat this as a temporary contract and not avail young workers to money needed to buy housing, vehicles, whatever. I think the country needs to change, but I'm not sure that one sweep of the pen with a new law such as this can help things.

However the irony is the dinosaur labor unions who are screaming that everything is fine as the French Titanic rolls through the ever darkening skies of the North Atlantic. Nothing is fine and they either don't realize it or don't care. You have to realize that this is an election year. Chirac's term ends soon and the elections will be called early in 2007. The Socialists desperately want to take back the government and they can read the polls just like everyone else. Two-thirds of French people who dislike the CPE are a lot of voters. The unions are going to protest anything that threatens their way of life (maybe they should get together with the UAW in Detroit and discuss things like jobs banks for all of their criticism of the “American labor style”) and the students are sick of being cooped inside all winter and see an opportunity to get out into the early spring sun.

There you go; if you polled me, using the correct words, I too would be against the CPE. I think the country needs radical change and the CPE is the type of thing that needs to be implemented. Maybe it is the first step (the first step is never easy) to changing the mentality of the French (both employers and employees) over the labor markets. Whatever the case, you can not look at it from an American view point and just make a snap judgement that it's the right thing for France. It's much more complicated, as I tried to present here.

French Driving [It gets worse]

2006-03-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

File this one under "Do your research before admitting to any driving infractions."

So, most of you know of my on-going struggles with the French government's stringent driving license process. So I jumped through as many hoops as possible, got everything done, finally got my driver's license here and 3 weeks later got "flashed" by unmarked car while doing 62 kph in a 50. Since the car is registered in my wife's name she originally got the ticket; I figured I would do the "right" thing and take the hit. It's a strange process here, but I sent the letter out on Monday to say that it was in fact me driving and that I would lose the point and pay the fine. Today [so Wednesday] I called the prefecture (your one-stop shop for all things bureaucratic here] for this nagging doubt I had about a strange date on my license.

In principle my license should be good for life, but it has a date of 10/14/2005 to 10/14/2008 on it. So I did a little research, didn't fully understand and contacted my friends at the prefecture. Well, it turns out that since they issue licenses here for life, they are incapable of understanding that other governments do not do so. My CT license was issued 10/14/2005 and they recognize this as my driving start-date. I tried to explain to the woman that I have been driving for 11.5 years in the US. She wanted nothing of it. Since 11 of those years were in the great state of NY, which incidentally doesn't have a reciprocal agreement with the French government, it is like I didn't drive for any time (yep, I made it to 28 without driving! Idiots!). So, those dates above are actually the time that I am on probation. 3 years to prove that I can drive. Along with this lovely statute that is reserved for 16 years old (and me), I only have 6 points to play with. So I just shot myself in the foot here. Welp, I now have 5 points for the next 3 years.

I love learning all these fun idiosyncrasies of life in a foreign country. Next time I'm doing my research before I admit to anything and I'm driving at the speed limit (yeah, these things will happen).

Think about the irony

2006-03-03T20:58:00.000+01:00

I won't stop chiropracting unless you think about the irony. Sorry for the non-Simpsons fans out there, but I had to make the reference.

Anyway, getting to the irony of the situation:

In 12 years of driving I have never had a speeding ticket. I have slid a couple of cars off of the road - never hurt the vehicle, people or small animals. I have been stopped by the cops twice in the US. Once when I was 18 at 2 in the morning. I was speeding, sure, but the cop was nice and let me go. The second time was at 19 or 20. I got clocked at 78 in a 65. The cop again was fairly nice and I got away with a "failure to obey a traffic device." 2 points and 60 bucks. No big deal.

Anyway, I've been in France for a little over 2 and a half years now. For the first 2 years and 5 months I had a US driver's license that allowed me to drive, but gave me virtual impunity from any traffic related issues - yeah if I got caught speeding or whatever, I would have had to pay the fine, but let's face it, the French government isn't going to contact the NYS authorities to say that I have been speeding or running stop signs. In this time I never had any problem with the French authorities. Now that I am married to a frenchwoman, I had to apply for a French license - I had one year from the date of my marriage - so I had until September 24th 2006 to do this. I figured it was better to do it sooner, rather than later. I spoke with many people about the issues of getting a French driver's license. I couldn't transform my NYS one into a French one because of asine bureaucratic rules. So I moved to CT in October and applied for my own French license in December of 2005. I received my wonderful pink (I don't know why pink) license on the 31st January of 2006. On the 17th February I was clocked at 62kmh (~39 mph) in a 50 (around 31 mph). DAMN IT! Less than 3 weeks! Ok, it's not the same as in the US. I only got 1 point (out of 12) and your insurance premiums are not based on any moving violations that you have - so I really only have to pay the hefty 90 euro fine, but I just can't believe the terrible timing of this freaking ticket!

Moved to Bordeaux

2006-02-14T15:57:00.000+01:00

We moved from Montpellier to Bordeaux at the end of January and are currently without reliable internet connection. We should have internet in the next 2 weeks or so - but until that point you will probably not get a lot of posts from me. I leave you with this picture of one of my going away parties (we had a couple) from Montpellier.

Department of Justice Requests Search Information from MSN, Google, Yahoo, AOL

2006-01-22T18:32:00.000+01:00

Apparently back in August the DO J requested that the four big search engines turn over search data from the sites. MSN, Yahoo and AOL rolled over like the fluffy poodles that they are, while Google held fast - for the time being. Google's probably going to be forced to turn this over sooner or later, so I have an innovative idea. If the DOJ wants to see what the people search for, let's give them something to look at. Personally, I think "Screw the DOJ" (click the link to search Google now) has a certain ring to it. There is always the less pleasant variation of this that you could search as well.

I honestly think that if enough people do this we can tell Alberto where to go.

UPDATE: Ford's Big Gay Problem

2005-12-21T22:11:00.000+01:00

Ford has reinstated GLBT-targeted advertising. Whether this is because of a a non-existant backbone, a legitmate business decision, or in reaction to AFA declaring victory, no one can really know.

Follow the link here (pdf) to the letter that Ford sent to GLBT groups.

Ford's Big Gay Problem

2005-12-10T00:44:00.000+01:00

Too bad Ford can't layoff 30,000 gay employees; it probably wouldn't make a big difference in sales right now.

Ford, formerly a powerhouse American automaker, announced this week that they would be caving to the American Family Association (AFA) demands to stop advertising to gays. As I write this I am actually getting more pissed off. It seems so idiotic that I can't really get my head around it.

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, back in June AFA called for all good Christians to boycott Ford (and Ford Motor Corp) vehicles because Ford is “the company which has done the most to affirm and promote the homosexual lifestyle." The basic problem from AFA's point of view is that Ford has homosexual-targeted ads for their Land Rover and Jaguar brands, and offers to donate $1,000 to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for every vehicle sold to a GLAAD member. Right now I don't see the big problem with a donation to an anti-defamation group, but I guess I'm not a good Christian.

In any case, Ford, who needs every single sale they can find (they are seriously bleeding money in the USA - $1.4 billion in losses through Oct), decided that they didn't want to fight the membership of AFA and would instead fight the entire gay and lesbian community of the USA. I don't know, this seems kind of bad for Ford. This decision was made mid-week and as far as I can tell there is currently no official word from Ford (press time: 23:09 GMT Friday, Dec. 9). No spin, no nothin.' If you're going to do something as radical as give in to a bunch of right wing hate mongers, you'd better have a pretty good line to explain to the people you're stabbing in the back, why you are doing exactly that.

I do not, in theory, have a problem with the AFA trying these tactics. Everyone is allowed to be bigoted, rascist, sexist, etc. I may not agree with their viewpoints, but they are allowed to try to use their own money or power [in whatever legal means possible] to change things that they would like for their profit. That's the essence of the first amendment of the US Constitution. However, the fact that Ford does not have the balls to stand up to these people and say, "We will put our advertising money where we would like to, thank you very much for your concern," bodes very poorly for them. It's bad enough that the religious fringe is running the White House; however, this I can do very little to change (except wait for Nov. 2008), but I can refuse to benefit a company that has shown its true colors.

I'm incapable of organizing any sort of boycott, nor am I interested in it. But I do request that anyone who is in the market for a car think twice about what Ford has done before making a purchase. If you can live with it, good for you - I won't.

UPDATE:
I missed this when I first wrote the above piece. Ford has been anything but mum on this. They released the following statement on Dec. 7th (I'm sorry I doubted them...):

FORD STATEMENT ON DIVERSITY AND ADVERTISING
Featured Stories
Press Releases

Dearborn , Mich. , Dec. 7 – Ford's commitment to diversity as an employer and corporate citizen remains unchanged. We have employment policies that are second to none regarding our commitment to inclusion. Any suggestion to the contrary is just plain wrong.
Advertising decisions for all our brands are driven strictly by a business case, including Volvo, which has decided to market directly to the gay and lesbian community.
Dec 7, 2005

Calvin and Hobbes of the Day

2005-12-06T22:38:00.000+01:00

As a change from the French bashing that has infiltrated my posts lately, I'd like to lighten the mood a bit:

I'm not sure why I like this one so much...

(sorry, I think you'll have to click through to read it, I can't make it legible here)

TV Network to Display French Values

2005-12-01T15:13:00.000+01:00

A French international TV network starting up in 2006 will be a vehicle for transmitting France's values and world vision to other parts of the globe, President Jacques Chirac said Wednesday.

Where to start? For my French constituency, I would hate to flat out laugh about this, but come on...Is it possible for the French to be "first in the global battle of images?" Let's see, CNN is an established, PRIVATELY-held news organization, that has existed for over 25 years. CNN International is seen in over 185 million homes and has been on the air for over 20 years.

The BBC is a public company. The company has existed since the inter-war era and has built a reputation of responsible journalism, with (as far as I can tell) few allegations of governmental interference - even if the Board of Governors is appointed by the Queen herself. BBC World, while linked to the BBC, is a commercially funded adventure that has existed for nearly 15 years and in Nov. 2004 could be seen in 256 million homes.

CFII (Chaine Française d'Information Internationale - the French International News Network) which would seem to want to have a website of cfii.com or .fr, is located at ciitv.com. Who knows why, I'm sure there's a good reason. CFII is starting with the objective to be a French propaganda force against BBCw and CCNi. Chirac said that it will "carry the values of France and its vision of the world everywhere on the globe." The French government is planning to invest nearly a half a billion USD in this channel from now until 2010. Excuse me for being cynical, but come on, this is plain and simple propaganda. The government is going to insist that their $500 million buys them a lot of good coverage. Lastly, if you decide to go to the CFII website, the latest news is dated...hold your breath, 2 March 2005. This is their breaking news. For €20, I will write a couple of articles that are current. Sorry, this bodes really poorly for the French. They just announced that this channel is going live on 1 January - in 1 month. People are bound to...ummm, research? this channel, and they come to the breaking news page that has breaking news from eight months ago! Come on Jacques, try a least a little bit!

What I don't particularly understand is this: Euronews already exists, since 1992 this pan-European channel has been broadcasting live to clients in seven languages. I understand that the French want "their" competitor for the Anglo-American force of international news broadcasting. But, would it not be more practical to invest in this existing structure. Euronews reaches 118 countries worldwide. On top of this, Euronews is based in Lyon, France. They have a infantile structure that could serve the interest of the Europeans as a whole, without the French propaganda slant. Your 1/2 billion dollars could buy a lot of stuff for Euronews.

Don't get me wrong. I am not against competition for the American/British point of view on things. Obviously, CNNi has an American bias - Ted Turner puts a lot of money into it. The BBC has a marked British/Former-British colony slant to it, but is more reputable around the world. I do not see CNNi as being a mouth-piece for George Bush. Anyone that knows Turner, knows that the last person he is inclined to prop up is Dubya. If the French could do this in a subtle way - I mean, come on, why start a channel with the express written objective to spew governmental crap - it may have worked. But with 20 hours of French coverage and 4 hours of English coverage off the bat, to be followed by Arabic and Spanish broadcasts in the mid-term, all trying to convince the world why France is still relevant: I don't see people eating this up.

French is the 18th native-language in the world (67 million) and 9th overall (130 million speakers, native and second). English is third spoken as a mother tongue (380 million) and second overall (500 million to 1 billion). It is the most taught second language in the world. A large percentage of the world knows a little English (even if we use the very low number of 1 billion, this is about 15% of the world's population - assuming 6.5 billion people). For French this number stands around 2.3%). I am willing to extrapolate these figures to say that the percentage of the world's population with access to satellite television ('cause that's what this is all about) has an even higher percentage of English-language knowledge and on the same token a higher percentage of French language knowledge. In any case, there is a huge difference between 2.5% and 15%. With only 16% of the programming going towards this 15% of the world population, I find it hard to believe that this channel is going to have any significant success outside of France, Quebec and certain parts of Africa - on top of this there may be problems with domestic French distribution (but really does France need another channel that is supported by the government and TF1? they all are already) and Canadian distribution. The people who will be the happiest will obviously be French expats, but how many of them are they (around 2 million).

I do love however, the lip service that CNN pays to CFII: "We wish them well in their new venture and stand ready to help." (i.e. Our PR people told us we had to say something!)

Riots? What Riots?

2005-11-27T00:35:00.000+01:00

So, France burned for over three weeks. I left for Germany for a week. And when I returned the TV news was back to talking about school kids who learn to play Chopin from the age of 5, FIVE!, near Clermont-Ferrand. The riots were but a bad dream.

The SNCF (trains) are on strike, again. Corsica got snow. Lyon didn't win for the first time this Champions League season. Hey, business as usual, right?

Ok, this may be a gross overstatement, but not completely untrue. Since I've been back (a week), I have seen virtually no coverage of riots. They've talked a little about the banlieues (the lovely areas where most of the action took place) and what is being done, etc. But I haven't seen the type of intensive "retrospective" coverage that is so typified by American media. Is this a cultural difference? Sure...but why? Now that things have calmed down and Paris isn't burning anymore, wouldn't this be the best time discuss, in depth, the real problems? Who knows...

I know others have spoken at length about this. Time magazine, my one hard-copy link to the States, has been running cover stories for the past 3 weeks about this. Ok, some measures are being taken. Citroen announced a new step in their production process to try to deal with the crisis, but it seems that a large part of the country has kind of moved on to more important things (26 shopping days to Christmas!!! (exceptional openings on the two Sundays leading up to Christmas!!!)).

While in Germany (I was there for a trade show for work), I met with a number of different Middle-Easterners, mostly distributors, but nearly without fail they brought up the riots and asked if it was dangerous in France...whoa! A distributor from Palestine who asked me if it is safe to be France right now....ummm, hmmm, yeah, wow, this is bad! The Iraqi contingent that kept looking at us and nodding knowingly - always a bit disheartening. The Saudis who wanted to give us tips on how to stay secure in an unsecure environment. YO, SARKO*, THIS IS GETTING BAD!

One of our distributors in Albania or Serbia (I can't remember which) asked us if we wanted to enact the Force Majeure (Act of God) clause in our contract so we would be able to delay shipment of the devices for up to 2 months. Great, now the Balkans are worried about us too! (this is actually true)

I'm pretty sure that Pakistan offered to withdraw some of their troops from earthquake recovery to help the CRS (French SWAT) clean up the mess.

At least this is helping the Brits at the negotiating table. "If the French social model is so great, why is the country in flames?" -Peter Mandelson, E.U. Trade Commissioner before talks with the French Foreign Minister (lifted from Time, European issue of November 28, 2005)
If only the French government could've spun it this way: "Your continued rioting only puts us in a weaker position while we discuss further European help (ahem...money) for all things."
The only thing with a greater affect would have been to say that the rioting helps Bush in some way.

Is there any proof that Chirac is still alive? Where is he?
Damn! I wish our lame duck president would disappear like this.

*Sarko AKA Nicolas Sarokozy, Internior Minister and Policitian Extraordinaire.

**Some of the incidents in this may not have taken place. The author has taken certain artistic liberties in an attempt to make a point...oh, and no, Citroen isn't really run by a guy called Claude Lefeu.

We're here tonight to talk about two young kids...

2005-11-10T17:50:00.000+01:00

The words of the ever clueless French aristocracy - spoken by Dominique de Villepin last Tuesday on the TF1 news at 8pm.

I can’t do an entire history of this thing. I started and it is too complicated. So I am going to focus on what I think:

This country is messed up. Where to start. I think the above statement (that for honesty’s sake, what only part of his introduction to his little speech) sums up a big part of the problem. They (the French aristocracy) can not accept that there is any sort of institutional problems in the country.

The “French way” of accepting immigrants has always been: Come, and be like us. Really. Starting in the mid- to late- 19^th century different groups of people have come to France. There were Poles, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese who all came, and became French. Here in the south there are as many Fernandezes and Reyes as there are Martins and Duponts. But you wouldn’t know that they are first or second generation French because they all act “French.” This is how it is “supposed” to be. I have been talking about this for the past few years, the current societal make up is not conducive to a “conform to us” ideology. Why? First, since the fall of the French empire…umm, ok, since the end of WWII…there have been a huge influx of immigrants from the former colonies of France. France’s way of dealing with them is; give them cheap housing and welfare and other help and basically sweep them under the rug. Creating a society that allows people to go for years and years without working and forcing them all to live in the ghettos will only cause problems.

These people simmer in these areas. They are harassed by an arrogant and irrespective police force. They are marginalized and called scum by their government.

I do not for one moment think that they are innocent in this. They talk about how there is no jobs; how selling dope is the only job they can get; how it's all the government's fault for their position.

I don't buy all this crap. When you can sit on your duff all day long and do nothing, you do. When you can suck at the teet of the others, you do. No job, find one. They have trains, they have buses. When you are under 26, you usually have great deals. University education is FREE here. Get a diploma. Get another. The government pays you to go to school. They'll help you pay for your apartment. You can get help to buy food, stuff like that.

It's a question of a government (and a people) who are too used to giving and/or taking that they can not do anything to give people motivation to work.

Slate has an article today, "The French Eat Their Young" taht discusses some of this, but I don't think the author goes far enough. She fails to discuss the fact that the social system allows some of the people to have received welfare (or other similar things) for 10s or 20s of years. How do you expect people to work when they don't have to?

It's hard to believe the people that they interview who say, "Yeah, I'm looking for work, but because my name is [fill in name of stereotypical northern Africaner], no one will hire me." I know a few people who are 'looking for work.' They've sent five resumes in the past year and damn it! they can't find anything.

Bird Flu Mania

2005-10-22T17:52:00.000+02:00

NOTE: Last night I wrote a much better article in the same vein as below, but then my aging computer had a minor stroke causing me to lose that post. It was really good.

It's time for me to push the potassium iodide (for that impending nuclear attack) aside in my bathroom and make room for flu masks and Tamiflu.

From what I have heard, I'm as good as dead from bird flu. Western Europe is the next stop, and obviously this thing is going to mutate into a human-to-human transferable disease. Just great; and top of this all, Roche, the makers of the best medicine against this mutant disease want us all to die because they didn't want to allow other companies to profit from their propriety medication. Hmm, freaking Swiss, first they hide Nazi gold and now this...

This all got me thinking; Roche owns the rights to make this stuff. The generics don't. Why should Roche turn over the rights to a product that they paid good money for (apparently they didn't develop it) and own the patent for? Why should Dr. Reddy or Barr Labs make a lot of money off of this? Because the world is panicking? Can Roche make enough to protect the whole world? Has anyone asked this question or are all the TV talking heads just sheep running around scared because there may be a wolf in the woods?

This is a public health issue; we can't have millions of people dying because Roche refuses to license the rights to these products, but really, where the hell where all the other companies when they were developing anti-flu medicine? Hey Cipla wants to sell an anti-bird flu pill or shot - great, get your R&D teams the money necessary and start slaving away; these things don't develop themselves over night. Naw, it's probably better business to wait for these crises to pop up, there is no development costs, your stock price is going to shoot up because you're making generic Tamiflu and best of all Roche gets screwed.

If Roche does license the rights to this, I hope the agreement is that the generic that makes it doesn't get one penny of profit from it - they can recoup their costs and that's it. If they really believe the crap that they are spewing about it being for the good of mankind, they will do it for the good of mankind. The generics can't play the capitalism card only when they need to lay people off...

It's actually probably in Roche's best interests to license some of the production. They are going to have to build up a significant stockpile in case this does mutate; then if it doesn't they're going to be stuck holding a pretty big ball. By licensing it they will protect themselves from the event that this global hysteria fest is wrong.

Oh, and please, don't buy any Tamiflu from "Dr. Doctor" who sends you that nice email telling you that he can also sell you Vi@gra and Ci@lis. Really, don't.

Eat, Drink and be Married

2005-10-21T23:39:00.000+02:00

Ok, bad pun, oh well. As many of you probably know, I have recently wed. Since I don't have a post on the top of my head, ok, ok, not true I have a couple, but I figured I would get a little recap of the last 4 weeks of my life out there in the milky medium that is called blog-land.

Anyway, I will start you off with the typical "Happy Couple Leaving Site of Ceremony" (in our case the French mairie (or city hall for the 5 times more people that speak English as a first language than speak French as one.))

The wedding was a great success thanks to many factors including the fact that a number of my family members could make it across the ocean (I never liked the "pond" thing, I don't know why) to share this occasion with us.

After the wedding we went to the states to party like it was 199...ummm, wait, what do we say now? Stupid Prince, he really wasn't looking at the future when he wrote that song was he. Pfppt, only thinking nine years into the future...Anyway, in short we went to the states to hang out with the folks that didn't get to come over.

Due to the fact that my in-laws were with us, we decided to rent an Explorer (even with the price of gas I do not regret it - I would not have wanted to cram all of our junk into a Chevy Aveo.) Anyway, Julie wanted to snap a picture when we finally managed to get loaded up at JFK. I remember at the time grinding my teeth; having already traveled for 15 hours and it being only 3pm I felt it was prudent to get rolling (another 5 hours stood between us a shower, bed, or basically anything that resembled "home"). Anyway, thank you Julie because this is the only photo we have to prove we contributed a small part to Northeastern pollution.

After traveling to my parents house we continued our journey to see Boston - they were playing some rinky-dink club in Utica - ok not really, the actual city (or sub-city if you ask your average New Yorker). Anyway, I was still a bit jet-lagged, so it was a rough ride; plus it rained the entire length of the Mass Pike, at night. We finally get to BOS, we cruise through the city like it was the middle of the night (most likely because it was) and get to our wonderful 4-star hotel that I had reserved on Boston Bay. Finally, the trip is over, the hotel's lobby was great, we all wanted to crash...Actually I wanted a drink and then to crash. Unload 800 pounds of weary traveler gear, go to reception.
"Ah, Mr. Salo, yes nice to see you, how are you tonight"
"Mmm"
"Well, Mr. Salo, here's the thing...blah, blah, blah, yah, yah yah...no room...blah blah blah...y..[wait, I thought I just heard you say "no room"]"
"Yeah, well blah blah blah, yah yah yah, radar, blah blah, fog, blah blah, don't worry." The room was at/near Logan Airport.
At this point I think I was more-or-less incapable of worry, he assured me that he would find a hotel for me. Finally about 3 dog-hours later he came back and told me that they were going to put us up in a wonderful hotel that he didn't know of, but the guys who loaded and unloaded the bags would be able to help me find. Allegedly they will repay my usurped rooms for the night and I didn't pay the other room; so we had one night free in Boston. Not bad, I guess.
The next morning we went back to finally check into our real hotel...Different reception guy...I tell him my name...he laughs...they cancelled my reservation totally, not just one night but both. Anyway, the guy was very accommodating and managed to work it out after about 5 minutes. Here's the funny thing, I would stay there again. The hotel was on Boston Bay. Our rooms faced downtown...see this lovely photo that was taken from our window - really. And it was a four-star hotel, so the service wasn't what you find at Motel 6.

Anyway, I know this is a pretty lame post, but it beats the other one that has been up here for over a month. I have a couple of other things in mind...stay tuned.

Whoring Myself for an Apple

2005-09-19T22:42:00.000+02:00

So, Autoblog, a site that has helped me pass many an afternoon at the office, is going to give a brand new iPod Nano to the person who gives them the funniest/hippest/strangest (who the hell knows) props by posting their favorite 10 links from Autoblog.

I've always been partial to free stuff and figured, why not; I won't win, I don't really have the humor to make this thing work right, nor the time, nor do I even have any idea what my 10 favorite posts were (hey at least I'm honest and don't link the first 10 I come to). Autoblog gives me an insight into the automobile industry that I have never had before. Sure, I've read a lot of auto mags in my time, but I never have time to sit down and flip through all the stories. However, by presenting information in nice ADD sized chunks (i.e. 1 paragraph), I can chose if I want to look into something further. Ok, I really didn't want this to be a fluff piece for Autoblog, but I figured for my regular readers (all 1.5 of them) I should at least introduce the site that I am shilling for.

Right about now, you're probably saying, "but wait, he doesn't even know his favorite 10 post." You, my friend, are correct. The problem is that I read the posts throughout the day, or at night, or on the weekend, and then I forget them. Many of the posts have made me laugh hysterically, although none have made me cry. I am going to go back over Autoblog to refresh my memory of my favorite posts…

Well, here are my 10 favorite posts in absolutely no particular order.

3 dead in Duesenberg accident: The tragedy of this is that the owner spent so much time and money into restoring this thing, only to have it kill him (and some of his family) in the end. I would not have come across this post elsewhere and for that am truly appreciative.

Stretched Mini Spied: I love the old Minis, and especially so the old Clubman. One used to live in the same parking lot as my car and it always pained me to climb into my econobox when such a classic (and classy) car was parked right next door. It has since left, I hope it's still alive and not in some junk yard - I would have loved to buy it. Anyway, I like the new Minis, but they are so numerous here (France) that you'd have thought they were rabbits. However, I hope that the new Clubman will have the same allure about it, while being just rare enough that every Tom, Dick and Jane don't own one.

Ask Autoblog: Should I get a new Audi A3? Or Certified Pre-Owned A4?: As an unavowed Europhile when it comes to cars, my interest is always piqued by anything related to European cars. Currently, I'm not really in the market for an A3 or A4, but in the next few years I will to be. Posts like this truly help me understand the pros and cons of new versus certified used programs.

SUV City - the film: The best thing about the blog factor of Autoblog is that it allows for all the wackos to come out of the woodwork and have their 10 seconds to scream in posts. Nothing brings this out more then posts like this one that links to a SUV (and SUV-owner) critical short film. I'm glad the post was there for the film, but it's so much more fun to read the comments from the wackjobs on both sides of the aisle.

Tom Waits sues GM over Opel radio ads: I had already seen this story, but this is my favorite post this month for one simple reason: "Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car. I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor..."

The mandatory “car tips to improve your mileage!” post: The irony of Chrysler, the maker of Jeep and Hemi brand products, teaching us average joes about "fuel economy" just cracked me up - plus the post has some pretty funny parts.

Smaller and Cheaper Maserati: It gave me the opportunity to totally bollux up a beautiful Maserati in Photoshop!

What's Going on with Mazda?: The Mazda 3 is one of my favorite contemporary cars. As David Thomas talks about, what the hell is Mazda thinking, contemplating changes to this product? Doesn't make me regret the move away from the US I made a few years back. I know the Mazda 3 is going to stay the same in the EU.

Ethanol vs Gasoline: This is only one link related to the whole ethanol issue, but Autoblog does not pull any punches and doesn't seem to be under the influence of the corn farmers who want ethanol to work. They tell what passes for the truth these days and they don't have an agenda (ok, they do, they want to do silly contests to get people link to their site - still better than trying to sell me a car that I don't want).

Simpsons Criticized for not Wearing Their Seatbelts: Anything that combines two loves of mine, the Simpsons and motorized vehicles, into one post is perfect. As I explored a bit more in another post on my site, no one seems to have a problem that Homer can get Tom and Jerry-esque smacks to the head and not go down, but that when the Simpsons don't do something that "needs" to be socially engineered into humans, people start to complain.

My Life: My Renault Clio I

2005-09-08T20:51:00.000+02:00

For new cars, there are tons of car reviews out there; every main web portal has starting offering research and "reviews" of cars. None of these reviews really offer true opinions on the cars. The magazines, newspapers, websites, etc, that test these cars rely on their relationships with the manufacturers to continue to get cars, to test, to report on, to sell mags or ad space. The LA Times learned the hard way that GM doesn't like any lip. GM pulled advertising from the LAT after carman Dan Neil said that GM should get rid of their CEO, Rick Wagoner. Robert Farago of The Truth About Cars has had his last remaining syndication contract removed by the San Fransisco Chronicle for a less than flattering review of Subaru's new SUV. He goes into detail about this and swears not to change in his column from 1 September 2005.

Anyway, all of this history to say, I have not read any objective reviews of a 1992 Renault Clio in a while. Therefore, in my pursuit of the truth, I will review my lovely 15-year-old car for the greater good of all human kind.

For a car that has lived with French drivers for 15 years, it is in excellent shape. It only has a few patches of matte white paint around the windows and to repair some scratch marks on the passenger side. The passenger's back panel looks like it was hit with a ~~sledgehammer~~ rubber mallet. The driver's side window washer spout doesn't work, the driver's side lock has fallen out and needed to be fixed back in place with generic rubber cement. Like I said, it's in excellent shape.

The performance numbers may shock and surprise you. 1.2 litre engine making a spritey 55 bhp with an earth-grinding 64 lb-ft of torque, this baby really makes you realize there is a god, a god of thrill, when you wind it out to the engine to its redline (which I can't tell you because of the lack of a tachometer). 0-100 km comes before you know it. A mere 15.2 human seconds pass before you are traveling at highway speeds (I'm pretty sure they tested this down a hill with a tailwind, but none-the-less...). The quarter mile, well, let's just say, most days it can go a quarter mile with no problems. A stunning top speed of 150 km/h (92 mph) is well above the US and French legal limits. However, it does scream a bit at highway speeds (if only Renault 4 cylinder engines had the same acoustic properties of an Audi V8).

You can't really go around turns very quickly, mostly because one of the front CV joints are a bit bent so you get some heavy-duty thumping whenever you turn and accelerate at the same time. No one has tested this on the skid pad, but I am almost sure that this is due to special interest pressure from Ferrari and Porsche. If they tested it it may have resulted in some redfaces in Maranello and Stuttgart. Ok, in reality wicked understeer kicks in very quickly.

Basically to summarize, this car is perfect for you if you want to use it anywhere but: On the highway, in situations where you have to accelarate quickly, or any types of turns.

If you're interested in buying a near-mint example, I know where you can find one at a good price...

The "best" picture from New Orleans

2005-09-08T20:38:00.000+02:00

I am hesitant to use the word "best" to describe this photo; "most emotive" is probably better. Anyway, this picture is the most moving that I have seen since the beginning of this thing.

It was taken by Mario Tama of Getty Images; I found it on slate.com.

Mini Clubman [Update]

2005-09-07T19:42:00.000+02:00

Well folks, here it is, the first real image of the upcoming Mini 5-door. Unlike the previously posted, digitally enhanced, images these are real. As Motoring File notes, it is highly disguised with plastic add-ons, but we can very clearly see that it is significantly longer than the standard Mini.

However, what was not noted, but I noticed immediately is that the butt of this car looks disappointingly like the rear of the new BMW 1-Series hatchback/wagon/whatever, that has been out in Europe for the past year or so. You'd think that Beemer could do a better job at making this car distinct, since they'll probably end up as near rivals; at least in Europe (plus I don't want my Mini to look like a BMW and visa-versa).

More picks at the link.

Not Necessarily a Mea Culpa, but...

2005-09-06T21:33:00.000+02:00

Previously I had expressed my opinions about the people who chose to stay in New Orleans while Katrina slammed into them.

I didn't fully know the story when I went off like this, and I still do believe that it was crazy to stay, but I do realize now that many of these people had no place to go and nothing else to do, and in certain circumstances no means of personal transportation out. In the same situation I think I would have chosen to get out...No, I know that I would have chosen to get out (and made it happen no matter what the situation was), nothing for me would be more important than ensuring that I got out.

Solidarity Doesn't Mean Losing Money

2005-09-06T16:57:00.000+02:00

Anyone who knows anything about France, knows that they love to strike here; and they love to support the strikers (although this has been changing in recent years). Bus strikes, train strikes and airport strikes, plus electricity and natural gas strikes are more or less the norm.

What is becoming more popular however in the last 10 years or so is disgruntled truck drivers blocking roads or gasoline depots. In 1997 there was a very bad strike where the European Union had to step in and tell the French government to work this out or there would be consequences on the supra-national level. Then in 2000 or 1999 they blocked the gasoline depots and France had to live without petrol for a couple of weeks. They tried again in 2001/2002 which led to great panic, but a much lower overall impact.

So fast forward to 2005. The price of a barrel of oil is hovering in the $70 range. Everyone is unhappy. The French government imposes some of the harshest taxes on petroleum products in the world and the truckers are pissed off. So they decide that they will not suffer alone (although I am still not sure how they think they are suffering alone - gasoline is an equal opportunity commodity). Anyway, they decide that if they have to pay too much for fuel, well no one should have it. They try to block the depots. They thought they would get support from the farmers and the fishermen in their trespassing and menancing of these depots. Well, they just choose the wrong time: Sébastien Pons of the organization Young Farmers said; "We are solidary with their action, but we are in the middle of the grape picking period. After the season, if the situation is still bad, we will wholeheartly put ourselves into the action."

"You can't actually expect us to hurt ourselves? Can you? Hell we have no problem blocking the roads and hurting the entire country, but pffht, you can't seriously think we'd do something to hurt us!!?!?!"

The cops came in and cleaned out the truckers after less than 24 hours of strike.

A little editorializing:
Yes, I realize that these guys get hurt by the increase in the price of fuel, but so do all the rest of us. It's a market economy, right? That's the point, when something is in short supply, or the supplies are threatened, it costs more. The truckers obviously use a lot of money on diesel - I don't know how the billing is done here, if they have to pay themselves (it wouldn't seem logical, I would think that the freight companies would be paying for the fuel - and they, in turn, would be passing it on to us, the consumers) it is obviously tough for them. Yeah, the farmers have it tough, they have to buy diesel too, but don't get me started on the French farmers and their government handouts. It hurts the fisherman as well, but I am sure that these groups can deduct this money from their tax returns. In any case, I am completely floored by the fact that this is accepted by the French; even if only by not doing anything against this. They allow their country to be held hostage by these protestors.

It is good news for the free-loving residents here that the authorities put an end to this before it got out of hand (I just hope that the farmers don't get angry after the grapes are picked and decide to take up arms as well...)

Today's Lie

2005-09-02T13:44:00.000+02:00

THE LIE
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. Now we're having to deal with it, and will." -George W. Bush, Good Morning America, September 1, 2005 (quoted from NY Times, Sept. 2, 2005)

THE TRUTH
NEW ORLEANS FLEES AS KATRINA APPROACHES GULF COAST
Posted 8/28/2005 8:02 AM USA Today Online

"The fear is that flooding could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, as well as waste from ruined septic systems.

Nagin said he expected the pumping system to fail during the height of the storm. The mayor said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was standing by to get the system running, but water levels must fall first."

Journalism with a capital "E"

2005-08-31T22:48:00.000+02:00

Being here in France, I have two English language TV stations (which is better than zero...) to get my anglicized news from. CNN International and BBC World. BBC hasn't covered this hurricane to the same to degree as CNN has - obviously, most Brits don't live in the affected areas. CNN has decided that 70% of their programming must revolved around this, because hey, the Chinese, Europeans, and Africans need to know about this evolving story. This has actually been good for me. I wanted to know what was happening; the French stations were discussing the back-to-school procedures in the regions of France. BBC was interviewing someone with a thick accent about the affect the hurricane will have on global oil prices; only CNN was covering this with actual reporters on the scene.

This has its positives and negatives. They wasted (and I really mean wasted) 4 minutes of the lives of 100s of millions (or at least millions) of viewers while two local weather people were discussing where they used to live in Biloxi, Miss. This was insane - they just went on and on about the neighborhoods where they used to live...The funny thing was neither knew what the other was talking about.

But, this isn't the actual subject of the post. I want to know, has disaster coverage always revolved around the shameless exploitation of the harmed? Is this a new thing? I have only began to notice it, but I feel it is terrible on CNN lately. Anyone who has watched CNN has seen the middle-aged black man explain how he was holding his wife who was in the water and he had to let her go. He knew she was dead. CNN has made this man the "face" of the hurricane. I find this so disgusting, I can not begin to explain it. This poor man just lost his wife, at least partly because he wasn't strong enough to save her; and this damn station is using this, time and again. I have seen it in print on their site, and seen the video a half-dozen times. Leave this man in peace and mourning.

Then, in another coup, they managed to get video of a woman telling how her husband didn't have time to evacuate and got stuck at home. He called her after the worst had passed to say that he lived; but she hasn't heard from him in something like 24 hours since. As opposed to ending the clip there, they stick the microphone more into her face and wait as she descends into crisis as she thinks about losing her husband! I understand that we need to humanize the situation - I too have a hard time visualizing the people - but be humanitarian at the same time. We all understood the implications of what this woman was saying; we don't need you to force her to live her nightmare on international TV! The heartlessness of this is astonishing.

...oh, and hey, good thing that Bush has been planning on cutting back on FEMA's disaster prepareness, huh?

Idiocy Rules in the Big Easy

2005-08-29T21:40:00.000+02:00

Let me just preface this with: I feel very bad for everyone that is and will suffer through Hurricane Katrina, and I wish no one any harm, but...

There was a mandatory evacuation order given to the residents of New Orleans, yet some idiots decided to stay, and lo-and-behold, they got stuck on the roofs of their houses (not the photo at left). CNN was reporting that police had received over 100 reports of people stranded in the 9th Ward.

I realize that there has been some debates about the have and have nots and where they are riding out the storm (far away for the haves, in the city for the have nots), but the city made the Superdome available for all residents. It was not full, and as far as I have heard they didn't turn anyone away. Yet some mavericks (or just plain idiots) decided to stay home and then when they needed help they called the cops, causing the already strained public services to waste their time to save their dumb-asses; let hope that other people don't die because of this senseless transfer of manpower.

As soon as I heard about this, it made me think about the law that Arizona passed back in 1995, being called the "Stupid Motorist Law." Arizona, in their wisdom, decided that if a motorist - usually an SUV driver - decides to do something stupid with their vehicle in questionable conditions (such as in a state of emergency or closed roads), the state or local government can now charge them for the rescue operation. As if the lack of insurance on formally closed roads wasn't enough...$2,000 per person would make me feel better about this rescue operation.

Maggie hits Homer with Hammer = Ok: No Seatbelt = Bad

2005-08-29T21:19:00.000+02:00

Some researchers out in CA have decided that it's a bad example to people that the Simpsons don't wear seat belts in their show.

Ok, obviously we would all like every TV show (and for that matter radio program, book, and magazine) that we enjoy to preach to every possible moral and social issue in the book, but come on...

We're talking about a show that is a) animated and has seen b) Homer fall into the Springfield Gorge; Homer get hit on the head with nearly every object known to humankind; Homer drive drunk, many times; The Sea Captain get speared with a swordfish; I think you get the idea.

For real, ok maybe it is a bad example, but if people are making their seat belt wearing choices based on a animated television (that if it romanticizes anything, it's the stupidity of Homer), maybe they deserve what happens to them because of their lack of a seat belt.

from Autoblog

Mini Clubman coming back in 2008

2005-08-27T18:21:00.000+02:00

One of my true passions are cars. When I have time I scour the automotive press for interesting information. Apparently, the hugely popular Mini is going to greatly extend it's model line in 2008. Parent BMW, no satisfied selling overpriced hunks of metal to only yuppies, have decided to offer everything from a mini "station wagon" to a mini truck during the next gen of the models.

The original Mini Clubman was a 2 door "wagon," that was essentially an extended regular Mini. There used to be one that lived in the same parking lot as my much less interesting cars. It was authetic Mini style, just a bit different, and much, much rarer.

Well, BMW has decided to offer the 2008 Mini in Clubman guise, including Mazda RX-8-esque suicide doors in the rear. I find this really cool. I'm hoping that enough people forego this model for the more typical 2-door, that it will be as rare as the original clubman. The 2-door New Mini, of course begs the question;when enough people buy Mini's to be "different" than the mainstream, that it becomes mainstream, where do these people find themselves? Are these people now mainstream? Anyway, there are too many of the original new Minis on the road today for a puchase to equal a "different" choice (at least where I live).

Thanks to Edmunds for the story.

Finally, a blog that I can call mine

2005-08-27T14:40:00.000+02:00

About 18 months ago Jeff K. told me, "You really should get a blog, it's a really good way to communicate with your family and friends." I told him, yeah, yeah, I'll think about it.

A blog works well for Jeff; he's a meticulous person. A close look at his blog will confirm this (I assume absolutely no responsibility for the posts on his site, click at your own risk). He posts fairly often. I know me - It's going to be tough.

But...he has a point. So 18 months after it was suggested to me, the launch of "Arbitrary and Biased" is complete!. This blog will give me the ability to #1 vent my angers at the world (and believe me there are many) and #2 stay connected with the family and friends that I have back home in the States. I'm a current resident of Montpellier, France; where the sun shines 320 days per year, the average August temperature is about 85° F and the average January temp is around 50° F. I live five minutes from work and 10 minutes from the Mediterranian coast. Needless to say, life could be worse...Now to try to hall this post back on track; my parents do not live anywhere near France, nor do most of my Ami friends. So in an attempt to keep them in the loop as to my doings I'm going to try to be diligent and post here frequently.

Also, in keeping the "family friendly" format I'm going to try to keep this blog in the PG to PG-13 range. I share a blog that frequently (or quite possibily "always") dips into the "R" range, so I on this one I'll try to ensure that everyone is welcome!

Welcome!

2005-08-27T14:04:00.000+02:00

In my ever increasing attempt to steer clear of Fox News (and their lawyers) - hell I even left the country - I am the antithesis of "Fair & Balanced." Ok, to tell the truth I (don't think I) have any outstanding lawsuits with Fox News, nor do they even know I exist. I just needed a blog and had a hard time coming up with a title that would be relevant in a couple of months. I didn't want to make one that was quickly dated. Anyway, that's that. I'll get some more info up here soon.

Welcome to my opinionated universe.