My not-so-great hosting company having unilaterally decided to move the cluster my account resides on. This website, and all other websites on my account, as well as email and everything else, will be out of reach for about 8 hours starting at 10pm PST.
This sucks, unfortunately there isn’t much I can do (not like DH bothered offering any temporary hosting elsewhere: just a very helpful “going down tonight, deal with it” announcement).
Back in 24 hours.
Herd of bikes moving through Paris’ winter strike, Steph visiting,
Maya getting us drunk, Marc trying out vélib’…
Source: Journal Officiel de la République Française
Source: US Office of Management and Budget
I have never been short of criticisms on the way certain things worked (or didn’t) in France. So I figured I would take a different slant for once.
Reading about the new French budget for next year being voted in this month, inspired me to go fetch 2007 figures for both countries…
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You know those “time-capsules” you buried in your backyard as a kid? The ones you unearthed the following week, upon realizing it was your favourite GI Joe’s action figure you put in that box (and cynical, anti-imperialist, you-of-twenty-years-from-then would probably discard it with a sneer, anyway)…
Well, I got my time-capsule back two weeks ago. Seventy kilos of it, to be exact. It wasn’t buried in my parents garden (I’m pretty sure my mum wouldn’t had let me dig a hole that size), but sitting in a storage facility for the past 15 years, whence I was kindly asked to come pick it up for good, last month.
Half is stuff that I should have binned, long before I even embarked on my current regime of bi-yearly intercontinental moves. The other half, I probably cared for, but decided wouldn’t fit in with the furniture of a decrepit London warehouse. At any rate, I have already started working my way through, slimming it down to a box and half, which, according to current life principles, will also have to go before next Spring (OK, maybe I’ll keep some of the books).
But before I complete my last round of recycling/discarding, I felt I could document some of those memorabilia, if not for their historical value, at least for the sake of providing a few laughs at the expense of the hopelessly dorky 11-year old I was. Yes, I know this might come as a bit of a shock to you, dear reader, but I wasn’t always this shiny beacon of elegance and hipster good-taste that I have matured into over the years. To tell the truth, only one thing comes to mind when contemplating some of the evidence: how the hell didn’t I get beaten up more often as a kid?
Sure, I could just play it cute and show you all those wacky serious adult books I read back then and marvel with mock-disapproval at little young prodigy Dave’s precocious readings (yes, I read all those Nietzsche’s books when I was 12, no I didn’t understand half of it, but it sure pissed the hell out of my grandmother and that was good enough for me)…
But when I say dorky, trust me I mean it. And it is with no secret pride whatsoever that I present you with:
So I was wondering:
Is a sudden resurgent bout of infatuation for the lyrics of Syd Barrett and Roger Waters at an adult age, an early warning sign of dementia?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go play that Ummagumma album backwards again…
– a dozen French riot police keeping students in line nearby my house in the Latin Quarter (a few hundreds more, parked down the street).
– some truly weird beaver that you can apparently go see at Paris’ Jardin des Plantes.
– Christmas street decorations, not a day too early, on the 1st of November.
Quite a few pieces I wouldn’t mind on my own walls someday
Jam session at The Cavern, man-about-town Billy and longtime friend Abigail: whom I had not seen in 15 years.
Taken back when the sun still shone over our heads…
One of the [too] many evenings we spent there lately…
