September 2003 Archives

Just to balance the previous picture. The next door has a sign that says "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!"

Provincetown is a lovely place. It's off season, I really wonder how this place looks like in the summer.

It's always nice to be welcomed! I was tempted to say the same to the shop owner, but we shall be more civilized than our guests, shall we not?

G.W. Bush — I need French troops in Irak
Jacques Chirac — Do you want French fries with that?

Damelon thinks that they shouldn't stop the renaming:

If you really want to make friends with the French again try injecting just a little sincerity into your conduct. Actually treat them as a sovereign nation and quit threatening them whenever they don't do exactly what you want! But if that's not possible and all you can manage is to rename some food, rename some of your own. For instance I am sure it would greatly amuse the French if you would rename American Cheese with a little accuracy. How about: Oil and water sludge.

I'm putting this weblog on hold for a couple of weeks. We're flying this Monday to Boston, then we'll take a bus to Montreal and drive around Quebec (up to the lake Saint Jean I hope), then to Ottawa and we'll fly back from Toronto on the 29th.

I'll try to post pictures if I can get a decent access to the Internet. That's the problem when you travel in those young developing countries, you never know what you'll get (do they have Internet in North America?)

Michael Moore to Wesley Clark: Run!

Michael Moore likes a general? I never thought I'd write these words. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I want to know more about you. I want your voice heard. I would like to see you in these debates. Then let the chips fall where they may -- and we'll all have a better idea of what to do. If you sit it out, then I think we all know what we are left with.

Jason Kottke wonders about Bilingual conversations. The comments thread after his post is worth reading. Here is my take at his questions.

- Does the subject matter, um, matter? Are sports more "English" and politics more "Spanish"?

No, politics is more French, as is cursing apparently :-). In my technical field, I tend to use English, but I could use French although with some conscious effort and not for everything -- e.g. I dislike the French "toile" which I never use for "web".

- How much of language switching is about brevity? Maybe people base word/phrase choice on how quickly they can speak a particular phrase in a particular language.

Nothing. Unless you are referring to the ability to express yourself faster in one particular language, which then would be (for me) in a particular context or subject matter (see previous question).

- Or is it expressiveness? The "perfect phrase" for what a speaker is trying to convey to their partner might exist in only one of the two languages.

Yes, it can be. Truer with expressions.

- How do the grammars mix...if at all? Would a French speaker use English syntax when speaking French (or vice versa)?

No, that would be franglish or franglais. Syntax do not mix well. Codeswitching vocabulary is probably more frequent.

- Does code switching happen in writing as well, or is it strictly non-verbal?

Less likely, because you can afford more thinking time while writing, and can re-read and correct. I believe that codeswtiching happens mostly in verbal form because you cannot dedicate a lot of brain power to monitor your speech while expressing your thoughts.

- How fluent does a speaker have to be in both languages in order to codeswitch fluidly?

I guess the more fluent, the most fluid (ahem, I hope that is the correct form ;-).

- How much does a speaker's primary language determine language choice? Does their ability to codeswitch improve if they were bilingual from birth?

I don't know. It seems related to the previous question (being fluent), and the next one.

- Will a strong codeswitcher speak to his partner's stronger language?

The question I'm then tempted to ask, is how much codeswitching comes from a deliberate choice vs. an unconscious one?

- If one person finishes a remark in English, will her partner start her remark in English? What would prompt them to go back to the other language?

That probably cannot be generalized. I discussions with bilingual colleagues, we tend to follow a switch, but not always.

- Are some combinations of languages not amenable to codeswitching? Is Italian/Japanese codeswitching possible?

Not a clue. But I'm amazed at the huge amount of fast, almost natural codeswitching I can hear everyday in Paris between French and Arabic or African languages. That is fascinating, sometimes I can almost follow a conversation when the switching is near 50% or more French (I know this is impolite, but what can I do when two people speak out loud next to me in the subway? Get an iPod? May be.)

I'd like to add that switching between languages, for me, requires some time and energy to properly switch my thinking first. When I've successfully switched my thinking to the language I want to speak or write, I don't have to dedicate too much energy into monitoring clashes. When I'm tired, this process gets difficult or sometimes fails -- i.e. I think in French but speak in English, the worst situation (the opposite can be true) -- which then requires a significant amount of energy to correct the resulting frenglish. Additionally, and I think this is related to the power of English vs. my mother language, I have the feeling that it now takes me more efforts to avoid using English words in French than the other way around (this is related to my professional field). But I'm consciously keeping codeswitching as low or inexistent as possible, an effort that -- I hope -- is visible to the bilingual readers of my two weblogs.

Oh, and now I curse in English ;-)

September 11.

• 1973: let's not forget Chili
• 2001: left me breathless, keeps me speechless
• 2003: death of Anna Lindh, Foreign Affairs Minister of Sweden, stabbed by an unknown man yesterday in a department store in Stockholm
• 1989: coup de foudre

14 years ago, I fell in love in the blink of an eye and left my heart in the hands of my better half. 9/11 remains the best day of my personal history.

George Hotelling documents his successful attempt to resell a song bought on the iTunes Music Store. He acknowledges the difficulty of the task and found out that you cannot transfer a song but your entire iTMS account, which means you have to sell your entire music collection (although you can open several accounts and split your collection between them).

There is a significant used-CD market, why wouldn't we see an electronic equivalent? This is clearly an opportunity for Apple to include a flexible transfer function between accounts, which would further differentiate it from competitors. It seems easy from a technical standpoint, most of the work is on the legal side, as one objection to reselling an electronic song is that you are making a copy of the good, something that the first sale doctrine did not address. But a well designed transfer function of DRM rights would prevent illegal copies, as DRM already controls what you can do with a file.

InfoWorld CTO moves to a Mac and dispels some of his misconceptions about Mac OS X. His conclusion is pragmatic and non religious:

Of course, a small, successful integration project on a small network in one CTO’s home hardly merits a mass OS migration at a Fortune 500 company, but my experience with the Mac at home forced me to re-examine my preconceptions. I’m grounded in reality, so I’m not expecting to replace all the Windows XP desktops and the Windows 2000 file/print servers at InfoWorld any time soon. Still, the next time I’m facing a mass desktop and network OS migration decision, Mac OS X will be on the list.

This will surely please Apple. But there is still no trace of Mac OS X in all those studies that complain about Microsoft Windows monopoly and merely cite Linux as the only alternative. Apple should donate a bunch of PowerBooks to those consultants at Forrester and alike.

If you rushed on CC licenses because they're cool, did you take the time to read them before choosing one?

Dave Shea, who launched the CSS Zen Garden, released the CSS files under an Attribution-ShareAlike license from Creative Commons. But now Dave complains that someone wants to use them as is in an open source CMS.

The comments attached to Dave's post are enlightening of the misconceptions regarding CC licenses. It's only at #7 that someone hints that picking the by-sa license may not have been a good idea, at #8 that nothing illegal was done, #8 and #12 that you cannot override CC licenses with your own terms, and only at #17 that the CC licenses are irrevocable!

I think many people have overlooked the fact that there is no legal way to revoke a CC license. Apply one to something once, it will stick forever. This is actually a good protection, for those licenses are to foster creative reuse and nobody wants to receive a cease and desist letter for something that was once published in this spirit.

CC licenses are legal contracts, you should read the fine-prints carefully.

Wether you are interested in the fate of Sun Microsystems or not, hold on.

Both The Register and Slashdot report that Bill Joy is leaving Sun Microsystems which he co-founded with McNealy in 1982 and where he last served as chief scientist.

In April 2000, Bill Joy published Why the future doesn't need us, a controversial article in Wired subtitled "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species."

He described there the "gray goo problem", where a simple accident with self-replicating nano-machines could mean the end of life on earth in a matter of days:

"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. Oops.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but even the engineer, the convinced scientist in me has this feeling that we are sometimes playing with fire, only with much, much bigger flames.

Don't get me wrong, doing nothing is not an option -- fearing the unknown is a direct path to obscurantism. Scientists have a sheer fascination for the unknown, which they will relentlessly observe, examine, explore, to eventually understand and explain. Observe, theorize, explain. Move from the unknown to knowledge.

Blaming the scientists for their discoveries is futile. Asking them to take responsibilities of their acts is only one part of the journey. The responsibility is collective. As is ethic. We are all in charge here. I strongly believe in the vital importance of public research as a balance (not a replacement nor a competitor) to the free-market patented knowledge. Uncontrolled capitalistic research, in my worst nightmares, can only lead to knowledge scarcity, a form of organized obscurantism.

If knowledge is power, science must remain in the democratic sphere. Watch your country politics regarding science, it is as important as education, justice and other fundamental pillars of democracy.

Apple has sold 10 million songs since the launch of its iTunes Music Store, and partially answers the question of reselling iTunes songs on a "first sale" basis.

"Apple's position is that it is impractical, though perhaps within someone's rights, to sell music purchased online," Peter Lowe, Apple's director of marketing for applications and services

Impractical because of the DRM barrier, since Apple does not provide any mean to transfer the song from one account to another, and because of the low price tag (would you work out a legal way to lift all the technical barriers for 50 cents?)

This leaves a few questions unanswered. We still don't know if this would be against Apple's Terms of Use (which, I guess, have been negotiated with the majors and artists). And, if we suppose that this is how we will access music once the CD has disappeared, how are we supposed to lend on favorite songs and albums to friends, like we can legally do with CDs today? Can I burn a compilation and lend it? Will I have to lend my iPod?

What to write on a nightmarish Monday full of web servers hiccups? May be you can dig a content mine, such as Paul Ford's late night thoughts. Some nuggets extracted for your reading pleasure, though not to be discussed "in polite or easily bored company":

Why is emph better than i? When I'm publishing content from 1901 and it's in italics, it's in italics, not emphasized. Typography has a semantics that is subtle, changing, and deeply informed by history. The current state of web ignores this more or less completely, and repeatedly seeks to encode typographic standards and ideas into tree-based data structures, like in a (quote) tag.

I know at least one or two persons who will like this, one arguing that the web is not here to perpetuate print typography, the other who cares about typographic purity regardless of the medium.

Why are some semantic constructs more privileged than others? Why are the blockquote, emph, strong, and q tags more essential than the non-existent event, note, footnote, or fact tags? Because HTML tried to inherit the implied semantics of typography, that's why! And those semantics are far more subtle and complex than most people (outside of the TEI folks, and their text-aware kind) will acknowledge. But sticking with them means we have a typographically and semantically immature web...oh, it is madness, madness.

If links are to be given semantics, so that you don't just say, "link to this page," but "this page is a broadening of page," or "the author of this page is a resource named X," what do we do with that? I mean, what does that actually get us, really?

Better PageRank in Google!

Paul wants the web to be elegant:

I care about all this because, you know, it can be beautiful. It isn't, right now. After countless hours setting up databases, tweaking CSS, and defining schemas, learning RDF so that I can borrow ideas from it, and thinking about what a link actually is, I can say with confidence that the web is not beautiful. In terms of the maturity of a technology, which can be measured as being a technology's ability to reflect the actual skills and awareness of the individuals it seeks to serve, the web is about equivalent to a IBM PC Jr.

Although it is a long way to go:

That is what is most painful about a new medium, is how much the work is about the medium itself. Weblogs are a pure example: there is a significant percentage of weblogging that is about weblogging, as people figure out what to do with the new forms, much as when people, faced with a microphone, will say “I am talking into the microphone, hello, on the microphone, me, hey, microphone. Microphone. Hey. Me. I'm here. Talking. Hi there, on the microphone. That's me, talking. Please check out my blog.” As any toddler's parents will tell you, narcissistic self-consciousness is a part of early growth, and it will take years before we get it out of our collective systems, but eventually people will realize the value of saying something besides saying “I am saying something,” and we can go from there. The medium may be the message, but the message is also the message.

[via Frownland]

Radio Frequency ID are micro chips that can be identified and possibly located remotely by a radio frequency scan. Rolland Piquepaille has a good article with striking photos that explain by themselves why we will see RFID chips everywhere. RFID is the kind of technology that gives as many ideas as it raises questions. An example? For one thief defeated, how many big brothers?

Please excuse the easy geeky joke, but seeing SAP showing off RFID potential is deeply ironical once you know that the world's most famous (and expensive) ERP software has long ignored something as useful as a serial number! There are people who, when they innovate, just don't bother about the small steps.

Netcraft issues it monthly report for September 2003, always a webmaster's pleasure. Geeky Web info for the week-end.

With 67.28% of market share in September 2003, this is the first time that Apache runs over 2/3 of the world's web servers. Microsoft IIS is second at 24.44%, close to only a third of Apache's share. Both represent 91.78% of the total web servers market share.

Still according to Netcraft, Windows 2003 overtakes Solaris 9, "in spite of the fact that Windows Server 2003 does not launch until later on this month." We paid close to 10,000€ for a 3-year Sun Gold support contract for one server. Despite several phone calls and faxes, I have never received a single upgrade of Solaris in three years.

As of today, our web servers run on Linux and HP servers. Any link to the previous story is coincidental.

Microsoft.com also runs on Linux! Check it for yourself. Microsoft, once an initial investor in Akamai and recently a customer of Speedera, has got back to Akamai in order to shield itself from DoS attacks. Akamai and Speedera are Content Delivery Networks, operating hundreds to thousands of "edge servers" that sit close to visitors and cache content for faster delivery.

Ironically, Linux World serves its web site with Microsoft's IIS. Nature loves balance.

And where would SCO host its investors relation web site, if not at IBM? Bwahahaha! May be SCO should use Akamai's unlicensed Linux servers to fight against its own DoS attacks.

More web server scramble: inventor of SX, VMS, and Ultrix, Digital now runs on HPUX. Netscape.com from the inventor of Netscape Enterprise Server now runs on AOL Server. Apple Knowledge Base moved from Mac OS X to Solaris.

I have been following this attempt to re-sell a song bought on Apple Music Store through an amazing auction on eBay, but eBay played it safe by removing the auction (another report at Business Week).

So the question remains on the 'first sale' right while comparing what you can do with a physical CD to a dematerialized song:

The consensus among Reg readers is that the purchasing a physical medium is not the same as buying a download. In the first case you're buying the physical disc, in the second, you're actually buying the song, so the US' 'first sale' right doesn't apply.

We think the point's still moot, however. If 'first sale' rights are granted when you by a CD, because you're actually buying the disc not the song, you could argue that the same applies to a file. A file can be defined as a data carrier as much as a disc, particularly when it's essentially an authorised copy of a 'master' file.

With music going purely digital through electronic sale delivery, this question is legitimate.

A few months ago we heard that two consumers-defense organizations sued four music majors on the basis that anti-copy protections on CDs are abusive.

This Tuesday, EMI was condemned and mandated to refund a protected CD or provide an unprotected copy to a woman who couldn't play it in her car CD player. The court deemed the protected CD as defective. The shop which sold the CD was also sued for lack of information but not condemned, apparently because of a "broken" proof of purchase. Shops in France are now likely to affix stickers on protected CDs to warn customers about their limitations, and therefore lift their liability. Further cases involving Warner Music France and Universal Pictures are in progress.

These actions are pursued to halt the new habit of the majors to put copy protection technologies on their CDs. Those technologies are considered ineffective because they do not stop pirates and abusive because they limit the fair use rights of the legitimate consumers.

Article in English by News.com.au.
Article en français par France 2.

While browsing my egorati, I found a post from François Granger who was digging yesterday into the Google Rank for François. He notes that I appear in the 7th position for a search for françois on Google France. Today, a search for françois on Google.com lists my weblog as the first result.

Me, François 1er of about 2,880,000 results for Google (and 1er out of 3,060,000 for Yahoo)! I just don't believe it (but I'll keep this screenshot for memory). It's not me, I didn't do it, it's not my fault! Considering that I was about nowhere in Google a year ago, I guess this is some sort of achievement.

Same for a search on padawan. That, I understand it better, as the domain name certainly plays a role in the ranking. Ironically, I top all the other apprentices who are the true relayers of the Star Wars culture. I assume the shame and wonder how long it will stay that way until I receive a letter from LucasFilm. Sorry guys, the Google Force is with me, I'm a master now. Thanks for visiting and be assured that I'm a big fan of the movie!

I'm also first on a search on francois (no cedilla), but the results are very different if you strip out the UTF-8 encoding (here, screenshot.)

Note that the second choice for Google has all the appearance of a cybersquat on François Delecour's name. Absolutely nowhere in that dummy page is the word François to be found. Add this to the mysteries of Google's Page Rank, along with the fact I'm first again for Joi Ito Parody while I was merely linking to one and referring to googlewashing. Irony must be a factor in Page Rank.

I'm probably stating the obvious, but here are a few "on the field" observations about what influences the Google rank (in addition to having the searched keywords prominent within the content, and other sites linking to the same destination of course):

• domain name
• link text. I can't resist quoting Mark Pilgrim on this: "Anyone who believes that link text doesn’t influence Google results should click here. Or exit. (And if you understand that, shame on you.)"
• frequency of publication. This one, I've followed live in my statistics in the past 10 months. I reckon it is one of the factors that favor weblogs over other, less frequently updated sites.
• [Update] a language bias, or which Google index you search. E.g. the "web" index of Google France is obviously different from the index of Google.com. This is a mystery to me, as I would expect a "web" search on google.fr (or any localized variant) to give me the same results as the main index on google.com

Startup idea of the week: create a reverse-Google page rank that would give the list of search keywords/phrases for which a given URL appears as the first result.

Startup idea for next week: create a search engine that would give you the list of keywords/phrases for which there are no results. Target it to clueless, uninspired marketing managers.

Feel free to add your own observations.

Dan Benjamin teases us with a forthcoming version of his Anti-Spam Email Address Enkoder, due later this week. I'm thrilled by an option I dreamed of months ago when I discovered Enkoder:

A shareware version for use on a server or at the command-line for automated, on-the-fly address encoding and more.

Yes! I will be able to continue providing simple email links to real people on my sites without the inconvenience due to spammers harvesting those addresses. I find that publishing names and clickable email addresses is far better than shielding them behind impersonal contact forms, it gives a human face to a corporate site. All I need now is a good server-side script that will encode those addresses on the fly.

Thanks Dan!

If you cannot stand Wikis because they are ugly, fear no more. Matt Haughey has the formula: CSS Zen Garden + PhpWiki = CSS Wiki Zen Garden. You can see his work here, a joli Wiki indeed!

I previously tightened the comment system to prevent the zipcode troll to spam comments on this site. Now, I've taken care of the troll who insists on selling me various things to improve the size and operation of one part of my body which quite frankly doesn't need anything of that sort, thank you very much.

Feature request to weblogs developers: I'd love a comment system that is less prone to spamming. I have no secret recipe though. And I know that if you make it more spam-fool, nature will grow a better spammer, but that's not a reason for not doing anything.

As far as Adrian Holovaty is concerned, "people who do Web development for a living yet don't use a custom-built weblogging system shouldn't be trusted."

You have been warned.

Pfouh! I'm lucky I don't do much Web development those days. The Trotts are safe.

Tom Coates disagrees, so does Christian Crumlish. [Update] Paul Hammond nails down that the truth is, of course, in between the extremes.

Note that Adrian's site is in my list of best designed, original, usable web sites. He has a good plume too. He is a demanding journalist who has raised the bar far higher than we, simple mortals, do. The code to open external links in new windows comes from his site, with permission. He's a source of inspiration and I guess that his own inspiration sources are even more demanding. That's how I interpret his apparent contempt for ready-made blogging software.

And I cannot disagree with good humor when I see it: "I’ve never liked Macs, although I’d be happy to use one if you pointed a gun to my head."

Now get back to your templates and plug-ins, and revamp me that yet-another-cloned-blog, will you?

The EU parliament postponed until September 22 a vote on software patents that was supposed to happen today. A physical demonstration in Brussels, hundreds of online protests and criticism by computer scientists and economists helped raise opposition to this controversial proposition from MEP McCarthy. This is the second time a vote on this proposition is postponed, the first one was in June.

To whoever think that political agenda cannot be changed by peaceful but determined civil action, think again.

While thinking about the relevance of anonymous comments on my weblogs, I had an idea on a way to authenticate comments, much simpler than the previous discussions on the subject.

People who would like to claim their comments would simply receive an email sent by my weblog to the email address they provided. All they would have to do is click on the confirmation link in that email. Once my server has received the confirmation, it would mark the comment as authenticated. Various scenarios are possible, from simply marking the comment when the confirmation is received to not displaying it at all until it is validated, from letting people choose wether they want to confirm their address to mandating them to do so.

To be honest, as I'm thinking about digging into some more thought-provoking subjects than the web, I am concerned about the arrival of a certain type of people, who are attracted where they smell potential polemic like flies on shit. So, for certain posts, I am tempted to reserve the comments only to people who give me a valid email address. After all, I am not an anonymous blogger, why should I accept the "wisdom" of people who do not dare to sign their comments? Note that I would not publish commenters' email address, only the URL if they provide one.

And something tells me that would also slow the comments spamming down, as spammers are usually very tacky about their own email address (I wonder why).

The New Yorker has published an article by Adam Gopnik titled The anti-anti-Americans, a point of view of an American about France and Paris.

Before I tell you how great this article is, there are few things I need to complain about. This is just because I’m French, so I’m expected to complain.

First, Bertrand Delanoë is pictured as the “green and gay mayor of Paris”. He is socialist, not green. So, let’s say he’s the socialist and gay mayor of Paris. Although this is as relevant as depicting Chirac as the right-wing and heterosexual President. Oh, sorry! I’m a little ahead of my time in that thinking, we’re just not there yet (but that the head of the capital city and one of the most prominent and popular political figures in France is overtly gay will help a great deal).

Secondly, and I’m starting to believe that our social system is so far away from anything conceivable for an American that it must be pure science-fiction, Gopnik makes two misleading shortcuts about the recent conflict raised by the “intermittents du spectacle” (part-time workers in show business, as he translates it).

Basically, for thirty years or so part-time actors and night-club bouncers and musicians in France have had a ridiculously generous unemployment-insurance deal, which, owing to the “precariousness” of their situation, lets them work for about three months to collect a year’s worth of unemployment insurance.

The span of the insurance is long indeed but it is only a fraction of their salary, which is not known to be particularly high (I don’t know of a high profile actor in France who benefits from this system). But the main point, which Gopnik completely misses, is that those who benefit the most from this system are the show business companies and the State. It helps companies save about 25% on employment taxes compared to the normal social system and they profited from it as much as they could, bringing all their personnel, including the switchboard operator, under this “intermittents du spectacle” regime. It also helps the State (as well as regions and cities) diminish cultural spending by forcing troupes to organize themselves as companies or non-profit organizations and hire themselves as part-time workers (it’s technical, but the point is that it is cheaper for a public body to pay a bill than to subsidize a theater.) If you miss the factual evidence that those who benefit the most from this system are those who are at the top of the food chain, you are missing the root cause of the conflict. I don’t think that the switchboard operators who get fired every three months so that their employer can save on their social costs would qualify this system as “ridiculously generous”!

When the country and its joys can be shut down by part-time trombonists, however, something is wrong, or at least ridiculous.

Considering his colorful and accurate description of French strikes and protests, I’m sure Gopnik knows better. Those strikes did cause problems to many festivals this summer, but they did not even come close to shutting the country down. Watch France during September, that’s usually when the serious “shut down the country” business happens.

End of the compulsory complaint, resuming normal report.

I liked the article a lot, actually. I have not read the books he mentions except Emmanuel Todd’s “Après l’Empire” (“After the Empire”). I would certainly not rate Todd’s book as anti-American, unless you are using Bush’s scale (if you don’t agree with me, you are anti-American). This is a must-read book to me, but I don’t know if it has been translated in English.

What is striking, and a little scary, in Paris this year is the absence of anti-Americanism—of a lucid, coherent, tightly argued alternative to American unilateralism that is neither emptily rhetorical nor mere daydreaming. (In fact, it is easier to find this kind of argument in Britain than in France.)

We took five days to (re)visit Paris along with two American friends, and I’m happy to report they are still alive. Actually, I think they loved it :-).

“For the first time, French people care about their houses,” a leading French journalist complains in shock. “That was always a little England thing—and now you find intelligent Parisians talking all the time about home improvements.” This narrowing of expectations and horizons is evident already in the French enthusiasm for cartoon versions of French life, as in “Amélie,” of a kind the French would once have thought fit only for tourists. It has a name, “the Venetian alternative”—meaning a readiness to turn one’s back on history and retreat into a perfect simulacrum of the past, not to reject modernity but to pretend it isn’t happening.

This is, to me, the most thought-provoking part of this article. It should be noted that Amélie (the movie) did get this critic when it was released — a film depicting a clean and nostalgic vision of a France that do not exist anymore (provided it ever existed in the first place). I also heard the same exact critique of Lartigue’s vision (as being nihilistic).

But is this exercise of shielding ourselves from an unwanted reality only a Parisian, or even French trait? And isn’t the fact that we are aware of it, and feeling uncomfortable about it, a positive sign? Don’t give up hope on France, we’re not ready to stop complaining about our friends and everything anytime soon!

[Thanks Edouard for the link]