Spend a few days in and around Epernay and Troyes, sampling Champagne and meeting up with my brother
Drive back to Paris, drop the car and spend about five days there…probably visiting the Louvre a couple of times, the Musee D’Orsay, Versailles, maybe the catacombs, maybe just hanging out in St-Germain or Montparnasse.
So that’s the plan.We’ll cover A through I in first six days, then as our energy wears off we’ll start to wind down in Champagne and take the better part of the final week in Paris.
Anybody have any tips for those areas? Any can’t-misses?
For a while now I’ve been meaning to blog about some survey results I saw over at The Financial Brand:
A study by Financial Finesse shows stark differences in the ways men and women feel about money. The firm analyzed more than 3,000 responses to an online financial planning questionnaire, revealing trends regarding spending, saving and investing.
What do you think? Does this sound right to you? This doesn’t seem to accurately represent my female friends, but I think I have a skewed sample to draw from. Also, question #2 might be misleading: I’m betting people who don’t have/use credit cards were still counted as a “no” response.
Several years ago I watched an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher which featured among its guests Michael Moore, Ralph Nader and former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell. In that episode Maher and Moore pleaded (literally) with Nader to not run in 2004 and dilute the Democratic vote, as he had in 2000.
I don’t know if it was intentional that they had Campbell on, or if she just happened to be hanging around the studio that day, but she brought some Canadian perspective to the discussion, specifically the benefits of having more than two parties.
American politics are so radically polarized that nuance and reasonable compromise seem hopelessly outdated concepts. There are two parties: Democrats and Republicans. You vote for one or the other. You believe one or the other, regardless of what they’re saying or doing. Many times even your preferred news network favours one or the other.
Based on my observations, rational political discourse in the US is all but vanished. Sound argument is a waste of time. Neither party spends time saying what they think is right; what’s important is contradicting the other guy. Politician A can spend his whole career saying the sky is blue; if their opponent politician B suddenly says the sky is blue (no doubt claiming some sort of unique insight for being able to make such a determination), politician A will surely claim the sky is red.
To wit: Cash for Clunkers. In case you don’t know, Cash for Clunkers is an American program offering consumers rebates on new cars when they trade in a much older model. Essentially it’s an economic stimulus program which benefits troubled American car manufacturers and helps the environment (to a limited degree, anyway) by taking inefficient cars off the road. Now have a look at my last sentence, and the three key points therein: 1) economic stimulus; 2) supports big American business; and 3) benefits environment. Now, while this is a Democratic initiative, 2 of those 3 key points are the bread and butter of Republicans and fiscal conservatives everywhere. For the most part they don’t care about reducing carbon — or, at least, their talking points tell them not to care — but that form of economic stimulus is essentially a tax break for consumers and a free revenue boost to automakers, and Republicans love them some tax breaks. Unless it’s Democrats who suggest them.
To wit: this clip from The Daily Show. Watch from about 1:10, where news networks explain how well the Cash for Clunkers program has worked to date. Note the reaction from Fox News and house Republicans. All of a sudden the idea of tax breaks seem like anathema.
Rather than go on with more examples I’ll just quote a comment left on this Economist graphic:
The commenter’s name, by the way, is “The Other Guy” so five’ll get you ten this guy keeps a copy of Unsafe At Any Speed on his bedside table.
“American politics of Coke-vs.-Pepsi has been throwing off the stale stench of disfunction [sic] for quite some time. Dem-Rep bifurcation is slow, superficial, and has been predictably producing less than adequate results, and that’s a charitable phrasing.
A third party, even or perhaps preferably a small yet significant one, needs to step forward to inject a degree of instability.”
Now, I’m not suggesting the Canadian political system is perfect by any means, and certainly having too many political parties can have some frustrating side effects (constant minority governments, the Bloc Quebecois, etc.) but I’d have to think it’s healthier than the slapfight happening south of the border. Politics is a huge, hairy topic, far too complex to boil down to a binary choice between 0 and 1, let alone to declare that 0 or 1 is the only answer you will give for the rest of your life.
In closing, let me just say: Coke sucks, and you should never ever drink it.
I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging more lately. I have interesting topics lines up, really I do, but Wii Sports Resort is sucking up ALL MY GODDAMN TIME!!!!!1! More specifically, level 19 of the Swordfighting showdown. I cannot beat it. I got to 94% once, and have never gotten that close again. I’ve been hurling a lot of curse words in general direction of the TV/Wii, and am constantly on the verge of throwing the Wii remote through my window in a fit of anger.
Your regularly scheduled blogging will resume once I figure out a way to kill all these cartoony little bastards. Stay tuned.
It’s been too nice to blog this weekend (as that would mean sitting inside), so here’s the point form version:
Friday night CBGB, Nellie and I went to Harlem, a place right around the corner from us that we’d just never made it to. We’re bad at that. Anyway, it was pretty fantastic. The starters (chicken lafayette, bourbon baby back ribs and seafood fondue) were all good, and while my main (jambalaya) and Nellie’s (barbecue chicken) were pretty good, everyone agreed that CBGB’s fried chicken was the winner. I ignored the giant cocktail list and drank Red Stripe all night. We book-ended dinner with drinks on the balcony. Awesome night.
Saturday was a day to get stuff done. I returned two ill-advised purchases: one at MEC (which I traded in for a pair of shorts) and another at Harry Rosen: a dress shirt that I somehow exchanged for two Etro shirts, which were on sale but would normally each be more expensive than the shirt I was returning, and still had a $60 credit left over! I considered this quite a coup, but my guy at Harry pointed out the downside: that I could now be developing a taste for very expensive shirts. After all that we set to the painstaking task of sitting on the Bier Markt patio and drinking cold, cold beer. I enjoyed my Weihenstephan so much we popped by the LCBO on the way home and picked up some more.
Today was movie day. We saw Funny People, which was good-not-great, and 500 Days Of Summer, which was fantastic. We then came home and watched Burn After Reading, which was mildly amusing (mainly for Brad Pitt) but not that impressive for the Coen brothers.
No work tomorrow. Thanks, obscurely named civic holiday!
Well that was a pretty good 34th birthday, considering it was in the middle of the week and I was at work for most of it. Nellie surprised me with two presents in the morning (Wii Sports Resort, which I can tell is going to be hours of swordfighting & wakeboarding fun, and a fancy new Hugo Boss jacket). At the office some folks took T-Bone and I out for lunch, and other co-workers had a cake in the afternoon. I got some good news at work (which I shall keep to myself) then came home and played the Wii for a while while Nellie cooked us up a ginormous Cumbrae’s steak. We paired it with the bottle of Eclipse we got at L’Acadie earlier this month and ate while we caught up on Durham County. After some happy birthdays phone calls (how quaint) we had a quick video chat with my brothers and sisters-in-law since they’re all in one place right now.
Back to work tomorrow morning, which sucks, but that’s the price I pay for using up all my vacation on France and Nova Scotia. Happy non-birthday, rest of world!
Tanning beds and ultraviolet radiation cause cancer and have been moved up to the highest risk category by international cancer experts.
The new classification means tanning beds and UV definitely cause cancer in humans, just as tobacco smoke, the hepatitis B virus and mustard gas do.
Ha ha ha ha…mustard gas!
OK, OK, I’m sorry, I know this isn’t really something I should make fun of, but come on…what did these people expect? Tanning beds involve folding yourself into a glowing goddamn photon torpedo tube and dosing yourself with ultraviolet-A radiation. Either you just didn’t think very hard about what you were doing when you got in, or you did and were vain enough to do it anyway. Now all those people who actually believe the base tan myth aren’t just silly, sunburned and out of pocket…they’re more likely to develop health problems too.
I wonder how long it’ll take life insurance companies to start asking whether or not you use a tanning bed?
In today’s instalment of “What’s the most ridiculous and offensive thing said today by someone who should be educated enough to know better?” we have art critic Brian Sewell, as quoted in The Independent. Emphasis is mine:
“The art market is not sexist,” Mr Sewell said. “The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist.
“Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children.”
Bravo, Mr. Sewell. I think you take today’s prize. I won’t even go after you about the “never been a first-rank woman artist” as an art critic would surely have a better sense of the historical ranking among artists than I, and I don’t know what you consider first-rank, so you could at least point out some kind of evidence to support your argument. How good that evidence is I can’t say since, as I said, I know next to nothing about art.
However, to state that “only men are capable of aesthetic greatness” is patently absurd. I’m pretty open to any argument if it can be backed up with some evidence or logic, but this one’s indefensible.
Also, I’m pretty sure, assuming you’re straight, that you’ll never ever get laid again. Cheers.
Interesting, too, this line from the Economist’s blurb accompanying the picture:
“[A] shortage of jobs for the young means that political instablity, in many Arabic countries, is likely to persist.”
Here’s why this is worrying: remember that among the biggest enablers of the ascent of fascism in Europe in the 1930s was economic disarray due to astronomical inflation and then worldwide recession. It usually takes a confluence of economic factors to cause societal distress, one or more of which isn’t a typical part of economic cycles — in Weimar Germany it was the cost of the war and war reparation payments, followed by the Great Depression — and this chart points to the makings of another potential confluence in Arab countries.
By contrast, in the US or Europe today you have an economic downturn, which looks awful and feels awful and is treated on the news and in opinion columns as if it’s different from all the other downturns. It’s not, of course, except perhaps in magnitude. But economies will recover. It’s a natural part of the cycle — we flew too high, now it’s time to bend and scrape. Again, the differentiating factor in Germany’s case was the additional repayment due the Allies combined with the monstrous debt of the four-year war itself which drove hyperinflation, all later piled on top of a worldwide economic crisis. That disrupted the cycle and caused a kind of slow-burn chain reaction, leading to economic turmoil, which led to social unrest. The added political kindling of the threat of Bolshevism (a dictatorship, dressed as a left-wing movement) opened the door for Fascism (equally dictatorial, but perceived as the right-wing enemy of a left-wing enemy and therefore a friend) to take root.
So, back to the Arab countries. For years they’ve had little economic cycle to disrupt, as rich Western countries and corrupt political leaders have kept the wealth (primarily from oil) for themselves. Put another way, the average person hasn’t that much to lose. Still, that inequity in itself is a basis for simmering discontent, if not periodic crisis, and so it lies in wait for an accelerant. When you add in this impending economic crisis of unemployment driven by an incredibly high birth date in Arab countries, you have all the makings of a bomb waiting to go off: persistent economic imbalance and hordes of disenfranchised youth in a region rife with religious fundamentalism and armed conflict. All it needs is one last spark to push it over the edge.
So what happens if that final factor occurs, if the match is lit? In Germany, under such circumstances, desperation led the people to vote themselves a tyrant, and their manufacturing capacity made them a war machine again. Presumably the reaction in Arab countries would be different. It’s unlikely they would elect a party who would mobilize for widespread war, though that must be precisely the scenario Israel dreads. I’m far from informed on the topic, but my feeling is that there would be a dramatic surge in terrorism, as well as targeted attacks against western workers and corporations in Arab countries, compounding the economic problem and creating a downward spiral.
The Nazis were the result of multiple compounding factors, some controllable, or at least foreseeable, like economic depression and war reparations, and some not, like hyperinflation and Bolshevism. Back to the present day: the economic draining of Arab countries is easy to spot…it’s been going on for decades, so that’s factor #1. The Economist has made this demographic shift (which will inexorably lead to mass unemployment) plain to see…and there’s #2. So what’s the unforeseeable event going to be? What unpredictable economic catastrophe would be big enough to light the fuse?
I got my hair cut yesterday, as I do about once a month. Any longer between visits to the barber and two things happen: my hair starts to drive me nuts, and my barber gives me grief for leaving so much hair on his floor.
Actually, I have two barbers. Ralph and Nick have been cutting my hair for seven years, from the time I moved to Yonge & Bloor and even since I moved out of that neighbourhood. I’m not fussy which one of them cuts it, I just sit down at whichever chair is free. Ralph’s English isn’t as good, but he’s probably (as I’ve said before) the most cheerful guy I’ve ever met. Nick’s chattier, and always asks me whether I’ve been back to Nova Scotia recently. He likes his seafood, and marvels at the fact that someone who grew up on the east coast doesn’t like fish. I bring him maple syrup once in a while.
Yesterday I went in, this year’s maple syrup in hand and ready to recount my latest trip to NS. Nick wasn’t there so I sat down in Ralph’s chair and asked where Nick was. Ralph told me quietly that “Well, my friend, sometimes we get good news and sometimes we get bad news. For Nicky,” Ralph said, “it was bad news. He died.”
Dammit. Dammit dammit. Poor Ralphie, he’d probably been telling people all month. I must be one of the last to know; the last time I got my hair cut was just before Nick died. I was sorry I made Ralph explain it again, but sorry most of all because I didn’t get to say goodbye to Nick.
You were a gentleman and an awfully nice guy, Mr. Tunzi. I’ll miss you.
