My mum always told me that when you have nothing nice to say, you should keep your mouth shut.

Obviously my mum has never heard of blogging.

I was really looking forward to hearing Bumcello live. I have loved many of their electro-loungy-hip-hop productions of the past few years.

Seeing the ‘acoustic’ mention on the bill when we got there was a big tip-off: when your band is a two-people act and so much of your music relies on sampling and overdubbing, pulling a proper live show would already be enough of a challenge. But choosing to strip it down to a couple drums, a cello and two lo-tech samplers while mostly improvising outside of your usual repertoire… is taking a huge leap of faith in your own live performer abilities.

Something they did, unfortunately to very mitigated results.

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Nevermind the fact he couldn’t mix his way out of a wet paper bag… Felix da Housecat’s old House Excursions mix is still to this day one of the bounciest, most badassest, piece of electro ever put together.

Traveling by train is a nice perk of European trips. Not the trains in themselves, least of all the companies that run them, but being able to hop from from one city’s downtown to the next, read a book, sleep, enjoy the landscape… all that on a budget blissfully unaffected by US imperators’ occasional fantasies of Persian campaigns and ensuing kerosene price variations…

France’s very own TGV, strikes non-withstanding, will take you from the center of Paris, to within sight of the Spanish border, in less than 5 hours.

Following advice from my therapist at the Internet Rehab Center, I opted for the old-school, not-so-high-speed, version of railroad travels, and crawled my way down the bucolic French countryside in about twice that time. Before departure, it took 20 minutes to the announcer, merely to recite the full list of stops along the way: a poem in its own right.

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It may be the “most famous avenue in the world” (at least outside of the single-digit-as-name category), but trust me: whether visiting or residing, you have no business venturing anywhere near the Champs Elysées.

Of my previous residing years, I don’t remember ever setting a foot there in broad daylight. Even our recurrent late-night excursions to some of the ridiculously haughty Parisian nightclubs that seemed to flourish in the area were never an excuse to dally around. And neither should they be to you, unless you are a bored teenager making it your ambition to crash through as many bitchy door policies and crappy discopop tunes as humanly bearable in one night.

By day, it is an endless sea of tourists walking the avenue in either direction, past the alignment of prominent international luxury brand boutiques and much-less-prominent but no less expensive greasy food stalls. Shopping-wise, nothing you won’t get in a dozen other neighbourhoods or department stores in the city, and about as typically Parisian a sight as the Ku’damm, Omotesando or a dozen other similarly lined high-end avenues in the world. In fact, I am quite positive you will see less Japanese walking down Tokyo’s version of the Champs Elysées.

But it’s not all tourists and tourist traps.

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The circling is getting tighter, occasionally it plunges toward me and takes little jabs at my arm with its nose…

Is the cat trying to tell me something?

A new minor Japanese deity is born and she specializes in keitais (Japanese cellphones)…

You may remember Tracey from her previous moblogging contributions to this blog. She is now flying her own colors and has started blogging about her cosmopolitan life in Tokyo and around, at keitaigoddess.com (on a theme beautifully designed by MJ)…

Go check it out now!

What better occasion than a charmingly rainy Spring Sunday afternoon to take care of a long due tidying-up of my blogroll (that list of blogs found under the Links tab above)…

In fact, it was mostly an occasion to crash on the couch, procrastinate all day and do some reading while nibbling on the relics of yesterday’s food orgy, but having accomplished one tangible task, no matter how trivial, gives me a faint sense of accomplishment and somewhat helps relieve the guilt.

First off, I finally ditched the “linkroll”, as you are all probably subscribed to the same dozen blogs I and everybody on the net goes to, to get their fix in “quirky” humorous pieces of web lore. Real links of interest will make it into posts of their own from now on. But anyway, I do suspect your first motive for visiting this blog is not to find the latest in kung-fu-fighting cat movies or dorky teenagers lip-syncing to cheesy eurodance.

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Wherein the author enumerates much meaningless data and uses them as springboard for some slightly more topical meandering…

• 1,059 WordPress plugins currently sit on wp-plugins.net. Not bad for a project that was half-shunned by the official WP pubah(s) from the very beginning. Kinda getting worried by the amount of bandwidth this is eating off my quota right now (read: somewhere in the 200% vicinity). But we’ll cross that bridge when it starts falling.
• 11,232 SK2 downloads for the year 2006 so far. There again, not bad for a plugin that doesn’t happen to be the one packaged by default in WordPress 2.0.
• 968 comments (mostly Trackbacks and Pingbacks, as I closed comments on this page a while back) on SK2’s homepage. Can’t help but notice an uncannily high percentage of posts from Germany. Is SK2 like, the David Hasselhoff of anti-spam plugins?

As you can tell, despite being on cruise-control mode, the Deliverables Department of UnknownGenius Corp. is doing nicely. As for where it’s heading, I suppose I may use the occasion to offer a quick update:

The short answer is that it is going nowhere.

The longer answer is that, ultimately, I will be phasing out all WordPress development (and most web coding, actually) from my activities.

For those who care about the Why, I will try to provide some elements without delving too deep into the multiple layers of frustration and unrelated motives for my general disinterest toward WordPress at the moment:

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At last the long-awaited solutions to last week’s spot-the-sample quizz. In the end, you guys did pretty good collectively: I sure didn’t expect that many to be found.

Let’s start with those you found:

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… that I haven’t had a proper BLT sandwich.

Where do they hide the bacon in this damn country?

Do I have to start raising pigs in the courtyard of my building?

Oh boy. What did I get myself into…
Gotta stop taking on huge epics that bore even myself to tears, halfway through realization.
Not only am I no longer finding the motivation to write the (otherwise entirely planned out) remaining paragraphs of this post, but it will be poisoning my every thought and inspiration until I get done with it.
Here goes: the second of three parts in our increasingly-inaccurately-named diptych on French society, laws and politics:

Freedom of Expression in France (cont.)

As seen previously, you are free to express yourself in France, as long as you are neither a holocaust-denier nor advocating antisemitism, racial hatred or homophobic positions. Incidentally, a separate text also restricts your right to openly question recreational drugs laws (”presenting drugs under a positive light”). These are a lot of restrictions on what some think should be the unfettered right of people to freely express their views. The more 1st amendment-conscious US readers among you might even be appalled by the practice. Although you better make sure beforehand that you do not live in a country where many have once dubbed it “unpatriotic”, “treacherous” and therefore a crime, not to stand behind their leader… Dissent in times of “war” is just as much a part of freedom of speech as the right to express your twisted hatred for one group of people or another.

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