Common Sense and Whiskey

Postscript: de Villepin

From the Reuters article headlined Former PM de Villepin bows out of presidential race (via France 24):

"it would take a miracle for him to get the signatures of 500 official sponsors by tomorrow's deadline, without which he will not be able to take part in the contest.

"I'm still around 30 short," he told France 2 television in an interview."

De Villepin is a poet, literary critic and former Prime Minister of France, having been appointed by former President Jacques Chirac. He has never been elected to anything.

A partisan of French President Sarkozy is said to have said in a different context about Dominic de Villepin, "One can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose."

Now THAT'S Austerity

In an article about the pain of yesterday's rating downgrade, the New York Times reports that, "In Paris, for example, a sparkling light show that illuminated the Eiffel Tower for 10 minutes every hour after dark has been cut to 5 minutes."

Schadenfreude and the French

Everyone with a little secret schadenfreude (to use a French neighbors' term) about the French - and we all know who we are - should read this piece by Adam Gopnik on The New Yorker's blog. It makes an important point, and it's timely:

"... it would be fair to say that while no one in Paris would have been shocked to find him sleeping with a chambermaid, most, if not all, would be stunned if he has really assaulted and attempted to rape one. The notion that France takes these things more lightly is false; adultery has different meanings, and fidelity different rules, but rape is rape."

And speaking of France's neighbors,

"But for lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing not only in the apparent elimination of one of the more plausible alternatives, but by what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor, matched by an inability to renew the political scene with new faces."

(Photo from the Stravinsky Fountain at the Pompidou Center, Paris, in the France Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Big Boys Behaving Badly

You don't have to be King of the World do do anything you want. Just the King of France. Or Russia.

Sarkozy spends £250,000 of French EU budget on shower he did not use

The president's new yacht

 

The Visa Verdict from Belarus

Yesterday I suggested people are acting strangely, and what the world needs now is vacations for all. 

France will shortly be closing for the month of August, the way it does. This year they have a terrific political scandal to obsess on, involving cash-stuffed envelopes, an elderly heiress and French politicians, including one N. Sarkozy. If you haven't taken a few minutes to brief yourself, do, because you'll want to play along at home. Anne Applebaum has a nice primer.

(In the course of its own scandal primer, Sarkozy's Summer of Scandal, the Independent surveys the casualties and writes, as if it's a simple, plain fact that "... former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has started his own anti-Sarko party but tends to botch his projects." 

As Pierre Charon once said, "You can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose.")

*****

In arguing for vacations for all, I cited the heat.

We're off to Helsinki in a couple of weeks. On Tuesday southern Finland hit highs not seen in 76 years: 34.2 C, or 93-1/2 degrees.There's not a lot of air conditioning in Finland and retailers in the southern part of the country have run out of fans.

We remain sanguine. Our little cabin is about a third of the way up the country outside Varkaus, and just a few yards from the lake. Plus, last time Mirja and I visited in August it was downright chilly - too cold in fact - with rain and highs around 12 (55).

*****

We've built a trip comprising Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. The first four countries are happy for us to come by and leave a few Euros behind. As for Belarus, though: Not so fast.

In the cold war days you'd typically need an invitation to visit suspicious Communist countries. That's mostly a thing of the past, and the Belarussian Consulate General's web site tells us, that citizens of some countries, including the U.S., don't need an invitation for visits of a month or less. 

Except that they wouldn't approve our visa requests without an invitation.

The Belarussian officials in Washington provided a fax with seven suggested travel agencies that could help us. I emailed all seven. Four emails bounced back as undeliverable. One company never replied. The other two offered to help if I'd cancel our hotel reservation and rebook through them, and pay in full in advance. And pay their fees for handling the paperwork.

I called the hotel, the Crowne Plaza Minsk, and Julia in the tours department has apparently handled everything. I faxed her a photocopy of the front and back of my Visa card and our passport details. She sent the invitations to Washington and faxed a copy to me. They'll put 45 Euros each on our hotel bill.

Our passports, stamped with visas, are due out of the Belarussian embassy today. If this works out, we'll have our passports back next Tuesday. Stay tuned.

Ouch: Truth in Advertising

Pretty funny. Ad for a German car rental company:

Translation: Do like Madam Bruni. Choose a little French model.

Huge Panorama

Here's a really remarkable project: 2346 single photos stitched together to make a panorama of Paris that's 354159 by 75570 pixels. You can navigate around it and zoom all the way to the horizon. Enjoy it at the site Paris 26 Gigapixels.

A Post in Which We Begin with French Toilets and End on Lake Malawi

"Sarkozy spends £250,000 of French EU budget on shower he did not use"

Well this is fun. That headline, from the Guardian, comes from a story reporting that during the French EU presidency, the French president "sanctioned an elaborate upgrade of the Grand Palace in Paris for an EU-Mediterranean summit – one of his pet initiatives to mark his turn at the EU helm.

"Nearly £300,000 was spent building a conference podium, nearly £200,000 upgrading the gardens and grounds, and a total bill for the Sarkozy shower of almost £250,000.

"The audit report said the cost soared because of the complications of installing a state-of-the-art shower to the president's specifications in a listed building.

"The president never used it – instead going back to the Élysée palace during the three-day summit to freshen up. The shower has since been dismantled."

*****

But, um, the elaborate facility in the photo is NOT the French president's. It was ours, in the owner's suite, on a trip across Lake Malawi on the MV Ilala.

Not to give the wrong impression - the Ilala cruise was a great deal of fun, sailing across placid, inland Lake Malawi from Monkey Bay, Malawi for a couple of days alongside the Mozambican shoreline to Likoma Island, which is part of Malawi.

The Ilala was an authentic, agreeable experience and the trip was served up in inimitable African style. Here's the Ilala at anchor in Monkey Bay (left, on the left), and below, a man paddles his canoe toward Cobue village in Mozambique, a photo taken from the Ilala that was the EarthPhotos.com most popular photo for a while on our return from Malawi.

Read a story about our drive through Malawi, called Everlasting: Malawi here. And see more photos in the France Gallery and lots more of the MV Ilala, the Mozambican shoreline, Monkey Bay, Likoma Island and the Malawian capital Lilongwe in the Malawi Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Let's Be Very Clear, Here

The Clearstream trial in Paris just may live up to its billing as "trial of the decade."

According to Charles Bremner's blog here's Pierre Charon, one of President Sarkozy's advisers, reacting to Dominique de Villepin's opening day remarks for the cameras:

"You can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose."

Clearstream Trial Begins

The French "trial of the decade," centering on the so called Clearstream affair, begins tomorrow, pitting the president against the former prime minister and others. If found guilty, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin faces jail time and either a big fine or a much bigger fine.

The AP: "Villepin is accused of "complicity to slanderous denunciations" and "complicity in using forgeries" among other charges. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison and a fine of euro375,000 ($551,437.50)."

Agence France Presse: "Villepin faces up to five years in jail and a 45,000-euro (66,000-dollar) fine if convicted of 'complicity in slander, complicity in the use of forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust'."

The Town that Needs a Different Name

Cute story called Eu, the little French town that wants a longer name. Among other things, the town of 8,000 near La Manche (or the English Channel, depending on your perspective) isn't showing up on internet searches because its name is the same as the past participle of the verb "to have" in French. And, Eu is pronounced like "euh," which is "the delaying sound in French speech that corresponds to err or um in English," so that  the owner of the town's main newspaper shop, says: "When people ask my address, I hear them hesitate. They think that I have not finished my sentence."

And something else - The mayor is female. Her title is thus a bit of an embarrassment: La Maire d'Eu.