Tag Archives: France

Why the Quebecois version of the Simpsons is so great

Posted on May 3, 2023 | Comments Off on Why the Quebecois version of the Simpsons is so great

Apparently, there are two French versions of the Simpsons: one for France, and one for Quebec. This is great for two reasons, I think, as this piece explains: The French version of the Simpsons is oddly fascinating | indy100 | indy100:

  1. “When faced with an episode that used the French language itself as a narrative tool, the Canadian team were again able to fall back on the differences between French and French Canadian.” (Bart in Paris shows this brilliantly.)
  2. “In the Quebec dub, the Simpsons family speaks with a thick working-class dialect of Montreal French called joual. They also do something the France dub doesn’t do: they regionalize the scripts, subbing in Quebecois politicians or places for the more US-centric references.” You can see this in the famous bit with Principal Skinner and Steamed Hams bit:

Brilliant/brillant!

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The Louvre’s Mona Lisa problem

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Comments Off on The Louvre’s Mona Lisa problem

The Louvre has two problems with the Mona Lisa. 1) It’s too hard to see:
Looking for Elbow Room, Louvre Limits Daily Visitors to 30,000 and 2) it’s too delicate to take out of the museum: The Mona Lisa Will Not Be Going on Tour After All, the Louvre Says.

Sadly you could paint a fake Mona Lisa and no one would know, since it is so hard to see it if you are in the Louvre. Maybe that’s what they should do! Seriously I don’t know what the solution is: people have it on their bucket list of things to so (and I can only imagine it is worse now in the heyday of social media).

Needless to say, billionaires like the fictitious one in Knives Out: Glass Onion could not do what was portrayed there. 🙂 Want to see the painting: take your chances and battle the crowds in Paris.

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The Surprise of Rousseau (be surprising too)

Posted on June 15, 2022 | Comments Off on The Surprise of Rousseau (be surprising too)

Henri Rousseau is the Great Outsider. An outsider to the Establishment of the Art World, from the Salons to Picasso. Despite rejection and mockery, he persevered and painted and exhibited.

Recently the Guardian featured one of his masterpieces, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (also known as Surprised!). It is seen here. (That National Gallery link provides a nice interface you can use to zoom in and out of.) You can read more about the painting here. I highly recommend you check both of those sites out.

In some way Rousseau surprised his fellow artists. Artists like Picasso were fans but mocked him too. You can read about that here (Le Banquet Rousseau: Picasso and Rousseau’s Friendship) and here (When Henri met Pablo, The Guardian).

Keep Rousseau in mind whenever you are doing something you love with little encouragement and even mockery. You may not be making something great, but you never know. Keep going nonetheless. Surprise them.

 

 

 

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COVID comes for the French Wine Industry


And the result, if you are a fan of French wines, is tragic: Of Wine, Hand Sanitizer and Heartbreak – The New York Times.

You can read it straight up, but it’s worth pondering what it tells us about our values right now, and what they were before. Times are tough in the pandemic era, for winemakers in particular as well as all of us in general.

(Image thanks to Sven Wilhelm).

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Posted on August 5, 2020 in food, new!

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A different way to see Paris

Not for everyone visiting Paris, but if you want to see Paris in a way untypical of most visitors, consider this: Paris on Foot: 35 Miles, 6 Days and One Blistered Toe – The New York Times

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Posted on July 28, 2019 in new!, nytimes.com

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The rise and fall of French cuisine?

Posted on July 28, 2019 | Comments Off on The rise and fall of French cuisine?

So says this article: The rise and fall of French cuisine | Food | The Guardian.

I tend to disagree with the pessimistic assessment, but regardless, I recommend the piece because it really does cover what has happened to food and cooking in the last 50 or so years. For people who love food, it’s a worthwhile read.

I think the decline of French food is relative. So many more cuisines have been discovered and appreciated, from Italian to Vietnamese, that French cuisine has competition for people’s attention. That comes across in this piece: Bon appĂ©tit! How I rediscovered the joys of French cuisine | Food | The Guardian.  

It’s a good thing we have so many people writing and thinking and preparing food in new ways. French cuisine may no longer be dominant, but it is still great. And if you are going to Paris,  then check out this list of David Lebovitz for what he recommends in his city.  Or this list, somewhat dated, may still have value:
Top 10 budget restaurants and bistros in Paris | Travel | The Guardian

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A marathon for food lovers: Marathon du MĂ©doc

Not your average marathon, this. For example:

Marathons and footraces are a world of granola bars, blister care, and sugary packages of energy-giving goo. This classic French race through wine country has all that, as well as a party atmosphere and 23 stations that offer wine, cheese, oysters, and foie gras, often set out like a tasting at a picturesque winery. The tone is set the night before, when participants tend to complement the traditional carb-loading pasta dinner with healthy helpings of local wines. Each year’s race has a theme (think “Amusement Park” or “Tales and Legends”), so don’t be surprised to see a runner dressed as Robin Hood vomiting at mile five.

If this sounds like you kind of marathon, get more information here:  Marathon du MĂ©doc – Gastro Obscura

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Posted on June 26, 2019 in new!, running

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How to forge a painting in the Louvre 

Posted on October 22, 2017 | Comments Off on How to forge a painting in the Louvre 

Painting in the Louvre
Easy! Just follow these three simple steps:

  1. Apply for one of the 250 permits the museum gives out each year.
  2. Bring your supplies and stand in front of the painting you want to copy. You can do this most days in the months of  September through June from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
  3. Start painting.

Ok, it’s not quite that easy. Even if you can perfectly reproduce the work you stand before, the staff of the Louvre take steps to insure no one mistakes your work for the original, as this NYTimes article points out. For example, in this article, they made sure that the copyists used

canvases that were one-fifth smaller or larger than the original, and that the original artists’ signatures were not reproduced on the copies. Then (the staff) stamped the backs of the canvases with a Louvre seal, added (the staff’s) own signature and escorted (the copyists) from the museum.

It’s a fine article highlighting a great tradition of the Louvre: well worth reading.

(Photo by IVAN GUILBERT / COSMOS and linked to in the article)

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Posted in art, nytimes.com

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Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon, a candidate right out of a Philip K Dick Novel

Posted on April 19, 2017 | Comments Off on Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon, a candidate right out of a Philip K Dick Novel

Melenchon hologram
In France, politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon plans to be in seven places at once using  something similar to a hologram. According to Le Parisien:

Strictly speaking, these are not holograms. Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon will be present in seven different places thanks to … an optical illusion discovered for the first time half a century ago by an Italian physicist

Virtual MĂ©lenchon reminds me of the politician Yance in Philip K Dick’s novel, The Penultimate Truth. We may not be far off where we get virtual candidate that look like people but behind the scenes we have AI or some combination of AI and people.

For more on the technology, see the article in Le Parisien. For more on Dick’s novel, see Wikipedia. Read up now: I think we can expect to see more of this technology in use soon.

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Posted in AI, ideas, IT, politics

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Autumn is here. You need new dishes to make. Here’s coffee-braised lamb shanks from David Lebovitz

Posted on September 23, 2015 | Comments Off on Autumn is here. You need new dishes to make. Here’s coffee-braised lamb shanks from David Lebovitz

If you enjoy lamb, this recipe for lamb shanks braised in coffee with ancho chile and other great flavouring sound great. Not too hard to make, either. See this link, Coffee-Braised Lamb Shanks – David Lebovitz, for the recipe. (Check out the other recipes on the site, too. Lots of great things there.)

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