Kick the Can-Can: 10 Things To Do When in France

1. Arrive by the early flight, make your way under a grey sky from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle to dowtown Paris. Your room won’t be ready, you will drop your suitcase, head for the best-smelling bakery around, spot the cafe nearby. Inside, it will be empty and damp, it will reek of bleech, you will reek … Continue reading »

Wallace’s Favorite Poem

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Continue reading »

uPad and iDon’t

Won’t you donate 500 bucks so I too can get a freaggin’ iPad? Am I worthy of your generosity? Yes. And I have a 9 point argument to prove it. 1. Yes, I am iWilling to iStart every iWord iSay with a lowercase i. Frequency of letter i is to surpass the frequency of letter e in the English language by August 8, 2012, 11:15 am (rough … Continue reading »

France Elected New Leader. Time To Go.

In all fairness, we used to have quite a few alternatives to the tantalizing American lifestyle. Paris was once the greatest place on Earth (say, up until seventy years ago). Our thinkers and scientists were underwriting the future of civilization every morning for breakfast (up until a century ago) and our women defined style, wit … Continue reading »

Everybody Is Cramping My Style

I recently went through a profound identity crisis for which I blame the rest of the world. The very essence of my unique style were the Ray-Ban Wayfarer shades. I picked up my first pair in 1980 as a respectful nod to the Blues Brothers.  Back then, Wayfarers were already an artifact from the past (they were designed in 1952). … Continue reading »

Me So Wanna Be Freshly Pressed

 Oh, I so wanna be freshly pressed. Please Oh please press me Mrs. WordPress! I will be a good blogger, I swear. I’ll smile a lot, I’ll write answers to comments, I’ll comment on my comments on your comments, I’ll link back aplenty and send loads of likes to fellow bloggers, I will be so … Continue reading »

Hey, Le Monde, You Suck Too!

The French take proper spelling very seriously. It starts in school, with the traditional exercise of the dictation. You lose half a point out of 20 if you miss an accent, one point if you misspell a noun, and two points if you make a grammatical mistake. If spelling is really not your thing, you may literally collect an ego-crushing 0/20 … Continue reading »