Just so January isn’t a totally blog-free month on Cocagne, am putting up these breath-taking photos of Paul Wolfowitz’s socks and toes. My, my, the president of the World Bank.
Thank you, Guardian.
I’ve been taking a break from blogging these last few weeks, waiting, wanting to see what rises to the top when the waters are undisturbed. But I just read a particularly insightful explanation of Little George, the current president of the USA, by author Jane Smiley, that leaves me breathless. It is so convincing and so frightening that I want to mention it here in the hope that it will bring a few more people to read it, and like me, tremble with fear for the world’s future.
Link to article.
In this morning’s NY Times there is a cute little article entitled “Talking the Yanks Under the Table” which is about how much cleverer the British are perceived to be than we Americans when it comes to conversation. At least, that’s how us Americans tend to see it.
I for one, dutifully admit that conversation over dinner with a bunch of Brits or French is usually more fun than with Americans (happily, there are notable exceptions) because the conversation will almost certainly be more daring, the range of admissible ideas much broader, and hey, the food will be better than meat loaf or pizza with ‘everything on it’. The French have the art de vivre down pat while the Brits I know living in the south of France are usually foodies, so sitting down à table will usually be a treat.
But back to the NYT article. One American living in London who was interviewed says
People are more relaxed here and they’re not thinking, ‘I’ve got to get home because I’ve got to get up to work.’ It’s looser here; there isn’t that grind.
This quote was fascinating to me in light of an article I came across just yesterday on the BBC website that analyzes the current state of the British diaspora. (For conversationally-challenged Americans, a diaspora is the migratory spread of a people out from their homeland into what we Americans affectionately call the Rest of World). It is always astonishing to discover how many Brits feel that Life is probably better on the other end of an Easyjet flight.
Many British expats are interviewed by the BBC, and when asked why they left Britain, the responses are breathtaking:
I don’t miss the rushed pace of life and I definitely don’t miss the British government.
or
I lived in London for 12 years and spoke to my neighbours three times. Fed up with the stress of my job, long days and expensive cost of living, I left the UK to see the world.
A first conclusion is that dumbed-down Americans can reasonably look to Great Britain’s dinner parties for the intellectual stimulation that is missing from American life. And that alienated Brits can reasonably look to anywhere to the south to flee alienation, dysfunctional healthcare, and long periods of bad weather.
II.
In the BBC article, we learn that 2 million Brits are living permanently in Australia, 700,000 live in Spain, but only 200,000 have settled down in France.
(This last factoid is surprising. Here in southern France, it often seems that every third person is British. What can it be like in Spain? Is every third person Spanish?)
Just after reading the BBC article, I happened to speak with a knowledgeable English friend living down here and learned yet another astonishing fact: apparently, there are more Frenchpersonnes living in Britain than there are Brits in France!
However, it is a sad reality that explains this fact. The French who go to England do so because they can’t find work in France. They are generally young, dynamic, and definitely not part of the 75% of French youth recently polled by Le Monde whose priority is finding a job for life in the civil service with a solid pension at 60. The French in Britain are generally involved in the finance and IT sectors, parts of the modern economy that are not joyously recognized in France. They are part of what is called the fuite de cerveaux (’Brain Drain’) that is a common subject of conversation at french dinner parties.
The Brits in France on the other hand, are generally pensioners, coming down here to live the good Life. Few attempt to become part of French economic activity, because the difficulties of doing so are starting to be well-known. I suppose that those wanting to continue working account for the larger expat populations of Spain or Australia, places where work is not frowned upon..
Every morning, over coffee and computer, taking care not to spill one on the other, I read the Guardian, the IHT, Le Monde and then I turn to Reddit.com, aka, “What’s new online?”. At Reddit, the ‘community’ posts web pages that they like and other visitors vote on these articles if they are interesting or well-received. With enough votes, a website can make it to the very first page of Reddit, which lists the most popular 25 URLs (out of I don’t know how many candidates. Hundreds? Thousands?).
The first page of Reddit is presumably the best of the best and getting your content on it is supposed to be what Web 2.0 marketing is all about.
I was meditating on all this on day before yesterday, Friday afternoon, when I had a wonderful idea. For laughs, I would post one of my own blog entries to Reddit, see what happens. I mean, I get 20-30 visits a day, mostly from curious (and/or loyal) friends, but wouldn’t it be better for the world if more people read my bons mots? What if Reddit really works???
I chose The Official French Business Calender, which I had written in August, to nominate. As the holiday seasons approaches, I had had the thought that the Calendar was On Topic again for a few weeks. If you read it, I think you’ll understand. (And anyway. I didn’t have anything totally up to date to propose 
)
Anyhow, I post the Calendar at around 15h Central European Time and an hour and a half later my son, who manages the server where this blog lives, calls me to ask me “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”. He says it with a twinkle in his voice, laughing even, but the undertone of server administrator panic was there too. Turns out my article had made it to the first page of Reddit with extreme rapidity, and the result was that the MySQL database that this blog uses was getting 150 requests a second, which is about 400 million times more than it had ever received before.
150 requests a second is not a lot for MySQL, but there must have been something wrong with the way I had installed WordPress, because, for the first time ever, the Reddit rush brought our web server to its knees.
At 17h, we were obliged to a) take my blog offline and b) take off my posting on Reddit, which fortunately is possible. About 1 hour later, the rush slowed down, (3200 visits were logged in that first hour) but we kept my blog offline overnight, just in case. We all had better things to do on a Friday night than sit up with a sick web server.
Saturday morning, I looked around the web and found the excellent Wordpress Cache plugin, which I promptly installed. WP-cache creates static versions of popular blog entries, bypassing MySQL, so that it doesn’t overheat when the Reddit Effect hits. It seems to have solved the problem.
Today is Sunday, all is well, and I find myself wondering if I should repost the Calendar to Reddit. Nah, I think I’ll wait.
According to an article in this morning’s Le Monde, autumn 2006 (defined as September, October, November) has been the warmest fall in 500 years throughout Europe.
The average temperature over and above the daily average during the period was 2.9° C. in France, which beats the former warmest autumn record of 1.4° daily (which was in 2005, for those of you who love surprising factoids). Similar conclusions can be drawn from examining British and Scandanavian climate records.
Climatologists Elena Xoplaki and Juerg Luterbacher of the University of Berne (Switzerland) have created an historical climate model for Europe going back to the year 1500, using diverse historical references such as harvest dates, flowering periods, etc. which I suppose is how monks spent their time recording back then.
They point out that
Autumn 2006 was warmer even than 1772 and 1938, 2 particularly warm autumns, historically.
I for one am very excited about living in such momentous times, so full of world records.
In his latest column in the NY Times, concerning the mounting number of indicators pointing to an upcoming economic recession, Paul Krugman finishes off:
Luckily, we’ve got good leadership for the coming economic storm: the White House is occupied by a man who’s ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait.
Wait, indeed.
I used to live in southwest Colorado: Durango, Bayfield, Cortez, the Four Corners.
Marlboro country (cough, cough).
Before the US of A was taken over by religious fundamentalists, this was God’s country.
When you’re there, you can feel the wind in your hair, watch the last of the bald eagles fly around like they still own the place. Trek through canyons that are as close to the primal rush as anything I’ve ever experienced. Your neighbors are Navajos, Mesa Verde is just up the road. You can even stand in four states at once, if you like that sort of thing and don’t mind feeling foolish.
So it is with great consternation that I just read that a woman in Pagosa Springs CO, a small town just up the road a piece from where I used to live, has been severely sanctioned by her neighbors for putting a Christmas sign on her lawn that had a peace symbol on it. You know, ‘Merry Xmas, Peace on Earth, good will towards men’ (and women, I imagine).
Unbelievably, 4 of her neighbors complained that such a sign was unseemly, unpatriotic, anti-war, satanic. Yeah, the devil’s own work. The president of the homeowner’s association has imposed a 25$ a day fine on her until she removes the sign. The advisory council (whatever that is) refused to support the president’s fiat and were summarily fired.
Our heroine is refusing to take down the sign, saying “Peace is way bigger than not being at war. This is a spiritual thing”.
This is democracy at work. What we wanted to bring to Iraq. If you’re curious, there’s more information here.
In this morning’s Guardian, talking about the damage that has been done, and the good, in spite of 6 years neglect, that still needs doing…
That long political hurricane has now at last blown itself out for a while, but not before leaving America with a terrible legacy that includes climate-change denial, the end of biological stem-cell research, an aid programme tied to abortion bans, a shockingly permissive gun culture, an embrace of capital punishment equalled only by some of the world’s worst tyrannies, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and his replacement by a president who does not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.
A friend of mine, who works at the European Commission, explained to me her theory about Iran and it’s president’s intentions. It has the ring of truth.
Ahmoud Ahmadinejad is not particularly evil, (no more so than any number of world leaders, certainly not in a class of evil with Cheney or Rove). Also, he is rather more intelligent than most american pols.
And yes, he is frightened of the Ruff Tuff Cream Puff (aka Bush’s America) which seems to love using its shiny new war toys and its love of warfare to create chaos Here and There. Ahmadinejad justifies this exotic view by looking over his border to Iraq. He is determined to defend himself and country.
So what he’s doing is generating just the credible minimum amount of signal to noise that would make it look like he is preparing a belligerent, nuclear Iran. This is the perfect country image to impress and perturb the imbeciles that create US foreign policy.
He is playing that image for all its worth. It is a very effective strategy.
Email sent this morning, after the results of the American elections were known, from a friend of a friend to a friend (both French):
Since yesterday, I love Americans…
Buried deep in a BBC article appearing today:
A recent poll found 53% of Americans opposed the launch of the channel [Al-Jazeera's newly launched english version] and two-thirds of Americans thought the US government should not allow it entry to the US market.
Voila, the values of liberty, democracy, freedom of speech that America wants for the world. Truly noble, and for 67% of Americans, they only need apply to others.
The Chicago Tribune cites a University of Illinois study that estimates that the average American
and that this means that he/she has consumed approximately 938 million more gallons of gasoline annually than if they had all stayed circa-1966 svelte. The nearly one billion gallons can be attributed to the excess work that car motors, especially the inefficient ones that Americans love, need to provide to drag the extra tire around.
Is America obesity the principle factor causing climate change? The study does not say.
From the Miami Herald:
Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.
…
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot — essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
So, the Florida voting authorities have the situation under control. I am so reassured. And since the people who make voting machines generally make banking ATMs too, I wonder how often cash machines go out of sync and what it looks like when they do?
From this morning’s Guardian. Someone must be very angry with British Rail.
Transport police are hunting for an “exceptionally antisocial” man who has been defecating on trains across the country, causing tens of thousands of pounds-worth of damage.
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 greater danger.
Goering at the Nuremberg Trials
There must be about 4 Americans left who still believe that our country is the pinnacle of truth and justice, but for the rest of us, here is an interesting vision of the [tag]US propaganda machine[/tag], culled from diverse sources.
In this morning’s NY Times, there is an article about [tag]TV Marti[/tag], an uplifting US-based reality TV sunbeam, lasered by special airplane down to Cuba’s huddled masses.
The federal [tag]International Broadcasting Bureau[/tag], which also operates the Voice of America, says the purpose of Radio and TV Martà is to broadcast “accurate and objective news and information†to Cuba, where news is tightly controlled by the government.
although not all agree with this assessment:
‘The really shrill, outrageous kind of stuff they broadcast has no credibility in Cuba,’ said John Nichols, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies Radio and TV MartÃ.
Who to believe?
This interesting display of worldwide [tag]Newsweek[/tag] covers that is circulating around the ROWWW (Rest-of-World-Wide-Web) might help inquiring minds see more clearly:
Regrettably, I wasn’t able to find an example of Newsweek’s cover for Cuban distribution to complete this entry.
Our ADSL went down for 5 days. Pretty awful occurrence. (Worse still is the realization of how important our high-speed internet connexion has become for mental well-being. But that’s another tale.)
Anyway, we’re back now, thanks to the intervention of an old friend who works at France Telecom. If not for his efficiency (3 hours from first panic call on fifth day without to final resolution) we would have been three weeks without! We would have spent those 3 weeks, making endless calls to FT and to Free (our ADSL provider), who would each, in turn, say it was the fault of the other.
By a strange coincidence, my neighbor, a graphic designer, got his ADSL back on the same day as we did. But he, who didn’t have a good friend up in the FT hierarchy, had spent the full 3 weeks without.
Two extraordinary excerpts from the recent NY Times article on Diabetes in India.
In a changing India, it seems to go this way: make good money and get cars, get houses, get servants, get meals out, get diabetes.
and
The world has now reached the point, according to the United Nations, where more people are overweight than undernourished.
