I never did the rainbow one either. Clearly I am a moral monster. (At least one of Les Tricouleurs in my FB feed was ranting about freedom fries 12 years ago.)
I thought the colors worked with the pic I already had. As I said to some grump or other about those equality bars way back when, there's nothing wrong with wearing team colors on game day.
For me the problem with changing a profile pic for a cause boils down to, when can I change it back without seeming like a moral monster?
Have been avoiding news mostly and luckily everyone we know in Paris is safe, still getting updates re friends and family of friends. Kid old enough now he and his friends are understandably doing their own check ins, that is a new and uncomfortable feeling. Have decidedly mixed feelings about the email from the head of school last night that they are coordinating with the local police. Think this is absurd overreaction but with so many families very closely affected understand the reassuring function of some hopefully mild security theatre. Am not on fb so don't have to deal with that irritation. We watched Yoyo last night in act of conscious solidarité.
4.last Time to break out the Tati?
Yes, but may go for the hilarious Quai d'Orsay tonight!
Kid just put on Chants d'Auvergne, and this afternoon we are going to visit a month-old friend and start teaching him La Marseillaise & L'Internationale. We've got this covered.
I might change mine to a Lebanese flag. Because it has a Christmas tree on it so it won't get me in trouble with the American fundies.
In my own Facebook feed, there's a split between Paris residents telling everyone they're OK and stories of neighbors taking in people off the streets, normal people expressing normal solidarity, normal people just going on with their normal lives, and completely insufferable American liberals doing what completely insufferable American liberals do best, which is to project moral superiority through smug tut-tutting of others for failing to, inter alia, be exactly as identically emotional about when an Afghan life is lost in Afghanistan, putting aside the numerous for-real personal cultural and emotional ties many of us have with Paris. God I hate these smug (I mean well intentioned but still) fucks and can't look anymore.
9: I was about to punch a wall and decided I couldn't look at FB anymore. Punch a wall that is a smug person's face.
Let's not lose sight of Étaix! Not well enough known, and Yoyo is magnificent.
9. I've noticed a fair number of Muslims saying that very same thing. Does that piss you off as much?
and completely insufferable American liberals doing what completely insufferable American liberals do best, which is to project moral superiority through smug tut-tutting of others for failing to, inter alia, be exactly as identically emotional about when an Afghan life is lost in Afghanistan, putting aside the numerous for-real personal cultural and emotional ties many of us have with Paris. God I hate these smug (I mean well intentioned but still) fucks and can't look anymore.
I live in the Middle East (Sinai) and the people on *my* wall who've posted the "tut-tutting" are, I believe, sincerely frustrated by the fact that virtually nobody rushes to publicly perform their sympathy/angst/whatever when shit goes down in a region that they care about. Even though a life is a life is a life, supposedly.
(And some of those folks have their own blind spots. In my community, it seems like the Metrojet crash was a tragedy because of what it means for Egyptian tourism, not because 224 people DIED.)
13 -- not as much, no, though it does seem at a minimum spectacularly dickish to launch into that kind of thing while they're still cleaning up the blood in the theater.
Also I'm not only a fan of the band, and probably would have been at the show if I were in Paris, but one of the members of the band is a former client, which led to some musing in the office as to whether we should check in with his manager or whether a call from former litigators would be unbearable (we decided on the latter). Turns out he wasn't touring with them on this tour anyway so our angst about music industry protocol was for naught. God only knows what the band is going through. Apparently the Bataclan had long been a target of Islamist nutjobs because its owners are Jewish. In addition to everything else, it's a direct attack on music.
I've read a lot of grief horror and solidarity expressed by folks in the Maghreb who have no problem simultaneously expressing very complicated and mixed feelings about France - humans do complicated just as well as simple minded.
13: It is harder to believe that bien-pensant U.S. liberals are as sincere on this particular point as people with closer ties to Afghanistan and other areas under U.S. attack. I'd bet that between 0 and 1 of the folks Roberto is calling out here have been filling up his news feed for years mourning every single Afghan death reported in the media or turning their profile pictures to "I Stand with the Afghan People". The general point -- "all this ostentatious public mourning is annoying, don't do it at all" -- seems more justified but must feel more callous.
7: I wonder if it's also possible to convince the fundies that the flag depicts the first Christmas tree, symbol of the (naturally) persecuted Christian minority. And from there any number of lies about Christmas not having pagan origins. Fun!
Memories of hilariously aggressive gropings at bataclan shows of my youth, also the west African nightclubs of the 10th & 11th where all the guys gripped one waaaay too tightly. Walking home at 2 am well sozzled with lovely sore feet, occasionally stopping for some lighthearted messing about with a near stranger. Ah paris!
Not to be overly flippant. A Lebanese flag is a perfectly good choice.
I sure did notice that the only people who posted about Beirut were people who had actually lived in Lebanon, and not so much with Paris.
9: There are certain regions of the progressive intertubes that I've carefully avoided today, precisely because there's no point in raising my blood pressure by reading the sort of thing you describe.
Also, I agree with 17.1.
Policing what other people do -- when they're not actually harming anyone -- is such a waste of everyone's time, I can't imagine why anyone would (a) bother or (b) pay attention to other people doing it. Lots of people do things I can't imagine, of course.
I'm also extremely worried about an actually neo-fascist response in Europe, including new President of France Marine LePen. I think if there's not strong action against ISIS by Europe as a whole and a unity government of center-right and center-left in France this is a very very real risk. Already the assholish new right wing government in Poland has said they won't take in their EU mandated quota of Syrian refugees because of the Paris attacks (of course the refugees are fleeing the same assholes who did the attacks but still).
Another thing I noticed on my Facebook feed is the French national, FN-curious LA cheese vendor whom I've long been following on Facebook has been endorsing posts from people in France saying things like "finally, the state of emergency we've needed for years" and "Vive la revolution francaise de 2015" which looks very much like a revolution you do not at all want to have happen.
What is the crowd chanting as it advances?
Pwned with less value added. Damn.
My unspoken argument once I was feeling properly defensive about not having commemorated all today's atrocities was "I've been to Paris, I have friends in Paris, I speak the language however badly, so yes. It's a little more real to me." Then a friend posted something by some creature of moral perfection saying yeah you're all just posting about France because you went backpacking there. And then I decided just to accept that I am a monster.
You know what? Having gone backpacking there seems like a decent reason to post something about France.
I personally can't wait for a moral saint to get up in a grieving parent's business on similar grounds.
The people posting the "why don't you care when brown people die?" stuff in my feed are mostly brown people. This thing, in particular: https://instagram.com/p/-DmUOwJ0tC/
Yeah I saw that one twice. I don't pray so I was all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I wonder if that will post. It's the shruggy emoticon. I am fond of it.
I mean, it was really really noticeable that two bombs go off in Beirut, 40 people die, and literally none of my American friends posted a thing about it. (Neither did I, but whatevs.) Then the VERY NEXT DAY this thing in Paris and everyone is all "nous sommes tous France" or whatever and posting cute cartoons of the statue of liberty laying flowers in front of the Eiffel Tower. (I have carefully cultivated my echo chamber and didn't see anything really awful there, just the grieving.) It's a very vivid expression of how much people care about some things and how little about others. And it is actually painful.
(I am obviously as much a sinner about this as anyone else; I only know that 500 people have died in political violence in Burundi in the last 6 months, the Belgians are pulling their diplomatic staff, and there's every possibility things go genocide-shaped there in the immediate future because I looked it up for the purpose of this parenthetical.)
And I actually did appreciate it when one of those American friends posted a belated "hey why have we forgotten Beirut" thing.
As annoying and/or pointedly accurate the "yeah but why didn't you react this way about..." responses are, there are worse ones. (And the winner of the 'First Candidate To Bring Up Gun Control" is.... exactly who you'd expect it to be.)
A guy I went to high school with did the gun control thing on Facebook yesterday. He called the president "Barry" while doing so. He's in the armed forces.
This one is good on the Beirut/Paris dichotomy: http://stateofmind13.com/2015/11/14/from-beirut-this-is-paris-in-a-world-that-doesnt-care-about-arab-lives/
One of my FB friends (who lives in Uganda) has been pushing for more awareness of the Burundi situation lately, so I did at least know about that one. On the Paris thing, my feed seems to be a mix of people reacting in the ways you'd expect, including both expressions of support and critiques of the amount of attention this is getting versus the Beirut bombing. I haven't been paying very close attention to these discussions but I haven't seen anyone so far (except dagger aleph in this thread*) bring up the Metrojet crash, which killed more people than the Paris and Beirut attacks combined but also didn't get this sort of outpouring of support for Russia. I dunno. I guess we've all got our blind spots and the least we can do is acknowledge them. (In some cases that might also be the most we should do, admittedly.)
*Hi da! Glad to see you around.
31: Alternatively, I have a Russian posting about why we aren't caring about Russian people. It's sad the previous, previous major terror attack was only two weeks ago.
I did see the fellow who warns against becoming a tragedy hipster: Bro, I care about suffering and death you've never even heard of.
In the interest of consistency I've decided to become completely indifferent to all human suffering.
In any case, the primary reason for the greater reaction to the Paris incident over the Beirut incident (or any of the other recent terror events mentioned) isn't that Americans care more about French people. It's fear.
And then there were the 100 people killed by ISIS suicide bombers at the peace rally in Ankara just last month.
Really, the appropriate reaction is to say nothing in public, then talk about sports.
I found myself annoyed in so many different ways, reasonable and not. But I have a FB feed full of people scolding people for not talking about Lebanon -- WHO HAVE NEVER MENTIONED LEBANON UNTIL TODAY. So, cool flag, bro. But ugh. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. Om shanti. Relax. Float downstream.
That doesn't work, that sentence. But you are all smart/little bitches who will sort it. xo!
I lost my virginity in Paris, which I hadn't thought of for some time before today.
46: That's a bit overwrought for a presidential pseud. Don't worry. Your old French teacher doesn't lurk here.
But I have a FB feed full of people scolding people for not talking about Lebanon -- WHO HAVE NEVER MENTIONED LEBANON UNTIL TODAY.
I know! My FB feed is like that too. And I find myself getting really annoyed, and then I'm annoyed with myself for letting it get to me.
If it weren't for a complex set of interlocking historical, economic, cultural, linguistic and political reasons, any of which could have been both a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent such an occurrence, we'd all be speaking French right now.
If you're a junior diplomat, is there any kind of ceremony or acknowledgement of the change in your status upon the occasion of your first invitation to stand in the third row behind some minor foreign VIPs at a public function or televised event to make things look more substantial and momentous?
Further to 51, you're probably just expected to eat the extra dry-cleaner's bill, right?
They train you in how to eat without spoiling your suit.
Man, I just don't get it: Patriotism. To kill or die for an accident of birth. I mean, if you go up to the average person on the street in Tulsa or Hong Kong or Cairo and ask them "Should someone from (Romania/Australia/Peru) be killed just because they're (Romanian/Australian/Peruvian), they'd say "no," right? We don't actually live among a species of werewolves (as Vanzetti would have had it) do we? If we all actually want to kill everyone else, why don't we just do it and leave the world for the beetles and nematodes? They're never going to be as fucked up and immoral as we are.
If it weren't for a complex set of interlocking historical, economic, cultural, linguistic and political reasons, any of which could have been both a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent such an occurrence, we'd all be speaking French right now.
For example! The outcome of the French and Indian War, which brought an end to France's imperial ambitions in North America. And even today, you're forced to contend with the remnants of that French empire, with Minnesota placenames like Cloquet, Duluth, St. Cloud, and so on.
(Yes, I'm being a bit facetious. But it really is true that France once held sway over vast territories in North America. And it's also true that this earlier French presence has been all but erased from official accounts of the history of colonial America).
If it weren't for a complex set of interlocking historical, economic, cultural, linguistic and political reasons, any of which could have been both a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent such an occurrence, we'd all be speaking French right now.
For example! The outcome of the French and Indian War, which brought an end to France's imperial ambitions in North America. And even today, you're forced to contend with the remnants of that French empire, with Minnesota placenames like Cloquet, Duluth, St. Cloud, and so on.
(Yes, I'm being a bit facetious. But it really is true that France once held sway over vast territories in North America. And it's also true that this earlier French presence has been all but erased from official accounts of the history of colonial America).
I demand that you read my comment about New France!
(Er, sorry: didn't meant to post that twice).
Ah yes, Clowe-kay, Dull-looth, and Saynt Clowd. Plus Hen-uh-pin, Nickle-ut, and Saynt Croy.
If you were the mayor of Duluth you could start a city beautification campaign called "Sharpen Up Duluth!" It could have a mod theme and you could bring The Who in to play the kickoff ceremony.
Tati update: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday not as good as Play Time.
Ah yes, Clowe-kay
I've been pronouncing it all wrong. Thanks!
(A branch of my family emigrated to Cloquet in the early 1890s, where the men took up jobs in the lumber trade. Which is why I've even heard of Cloquet, I guess).
I had no idea "Duluth" was a French name. Du Luth?
Wikipedia reports that it's named for the "Du Lhut" family. That's even weirder.
Apparently Duluth was named after Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, a career soldier, explorer, and adventurer. The anglicisation (or semi-anglicisation) of French surnames and placenames is often a bit weird.
So I wandered to the French embassy here intending vaguely to lay flowers or something. And found the embassy is not a building but an office on like the tenth floor of a skyscraper with dickish security. So I wandered away again, feeling ineffectual.
One of the sons of my Canada-to-Cloquet family was a ne'er-do-well who spent about twenty years in and out of Minnesota reformatories and state prisons. In 1913, at the age of 22, he spent 30 days in jail after pleading guilty to stealing a violin from a Finnish saloonkeeper. From the Duluth News Tribune: "Michael [F.] admitted that he had taken the violin, but said that he was intoxicated at the time and meant to return it."
Ciné update: Quai d'Orsay just as hilarious as before!
You were all waiting for an update on the Rousey fight, right? Rousey just got knocked out.
I suppose this is a good time to gesture again toward my Quebecois heritage, which in the context of my everyday life consists of little more than my last name and its pronunciation. My family has been in the US at least since the 1870s, and there is really nothing else left except the name, but, for the record, names are important and mine is French.
Heh. Exactly what I typed to a friend.
I suppose this is a good time to gesture again toward my Quebecois heritage
Eh, I had no idea that you had any Quebecois heritage. But wait: don't you also have some ancestors from County Mayo, or some Irish place like that? You might be more authentically Canadian than I am! Anyway, Vive le Québec libre! or something like that.
50: soyez la change que vous aimeriez voir, Natilo.
I am puzzled by 57: what, Canadians don't learn about Wolfe and Montcalm and the battle of Quebec and the fighting on Lake Champlain and the Metis and so on any more? The French presence in colonial America is pretty fundamental to Canada, isn't it?
I feel like the people who make the point that we prioritize some lives over others do indeed have a point, and yet I hate them so much. So I can't even have the catharsis of arguing with them.
The Ankara bombings bug me in particular. A pro-gay-rights party in Turkey managed to prevent the Marine le Pen of Turkey from getting a majority (and possibly amending the constitution to make himself dictator). Did these fuckers even notice? And then Turkey's le Pen was able to leverage ISIL terror bombings into getting a new majority. Did they notice that? Plus bonus police violence at Istanbul's gay pride parade that they also didn't notice.
76 We call the Seven Years War the French & Indian War.
Know who else has Quebecois roots? Hillary Clinton. There's a page at nosorigines you can use to calculate your exact relationship to Sec. Clinton, Celine Dion, Angelina Jolie, and other famous people with Canadian ancestry. You just have to get back from yourself to someone in the database . . .
I had no idea that you had any Quebecois heritage.
Very little, but it's in the male line, so it comes up disproportionately often. And I have mentioned it before, but admittedly not in a context where it would have been very memorable.
don't you also have some ancestors from County Mayo, or some Irish place like that?
Yes, but those ancestors came directly to the US from Ireland much later, so no Canadian cred on that account. I do have another line of ancestry that came to the Ottawa area from somewhere in Northern Ireland around the time of the Famine, though. My great-great grandfather on that side was born in Canada but made a beeline for Chicago as soon as he possibly could, and continued from there to the Colorado gold fields, where he made out nicely and ended up moving south into New Mexico and becoming one of the early settlers in the Farmington area when it was opened for settlement. Meanwhile my Quebecois great-great grandfather emigrated, for reasons that remain obscure, to a smallish town in Pennsylvania from which my great-grandfather came out west, also ending up in Farmington after bouncing around for a while. And that sums up my limited but meaningful Canadian heritage.
77. I think mass social media reaction to atrocities mainly reflects atrocities that are committed outside a war zone. For better or worse (well, no, for worse) we are numbed by atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, because it's a constant drumbeat. But Paris, and Beirut recently have been at peace, so it still has power to shock.
I don't know why there was no international outrage over the bomb in Turkey, which seems to tell against my hypothesis. I suspect because nobody claimed it (I think). It's harder to rage against anomymity.
80: Maybe it's covered by the anonymity issue as well, but the Metrojet crash/bombing is again an exception. Egypt and Russia are both at peace(ish), and yet not much in the way of international outrage.
81. That, plus the long period of uncertainty over whether it was a terrorist attack or just a system failure.
The signs French presence in colonial North America are all around here. It's even there when you pay the electric bill.
You make the check out to Duquesne.
Which Bob Dylan pronounces Dew-kane, but everybody I've met by that name who is a native English speaker pronounces Doo-kenny. Riddle me that.
I pronounce it like Bob does unless I'm writing the check. Then I use "Duke-ques-ne" so I can spell it
I've always thought it was Dew-kane, but I think I've heard Dew-shane too.
I am puzzled by 57: what, Canadians don't learn about Wolfe and Montcalm and the battle of Quebec and the fighting on Lake Champlain and the Metis and so on any more? The French presence in colonial America is pretty fundamental to Canada, isn't it?
You're misreading her point: it's on the curriculum in both countries and the signs of it are everywhere in the northern half of the country away from the eastern seaboard.
The kind of people who comment here will have learned it in school and connect it to place names, not just towns but such things as the financial street of Chicago, LaSalle or GM's luxury car, Cadillac.
The traditional curriculum made more of this, and the relevance of history in general than contemporary practice, I think.
Even though lots of people learned and know the history, or any history, it's seldom acknowledged or thought relevant to everyday life or public policy or society. Bernie Sanders' reference to the tax rate under Eisenhower, in last night's debate is about as far as you can go, aside from a mythical notion of WWII.
I think its roots are from the same family name as Duchesne (several places in the western US have that name).
A beer, a university, an electric company, and places in the west. Not bad for somebody I never heard of otherwise.
What's the use of having the incline if you don't have the time.
75: ajay I feel as though you can tutoyer natilo after knowing him all this time.
90: what JPJ said was "And it's also true that this earlier French presence has been all but erased from official accounts of the history of colonial America)" and that's what I was puzzled about because surely even the basic school version of the history of colonial America must mention it?
You mean like calling the Seven Years War the French and Indian War?
96: Yes, the basic school version does mention it, but just barely. I'm talking about the American (as in United States of American), not Canadian, version, of course. The Canadian version has a lot more to say about the French presence, for obvious reasons.
I believe that in elementary school we covered most of the big name French explorers right after we finished with the conquistadors. I'm not sure the French were mentioned at all after that until Lafayette showed up.
Frenchness has a little different spin out this way, what with our neighbors from the Pend d'Oreille and the Nez Perce nations. And our congressional candidate Denise Juneau. In Jeremiah Johnson, trappers speak to the "Flatheads" in French.
I remember from my HS history basically "there were French in Quebec, and trappers pioneering all around", and anything else mentioning them is focused on direct interactions - Quebec Act, various wars, the Purchase. Downplayed in general.
It's not that either the Qlispe or Nimipoo people were Francophones, just that there were enough around to give them French names, which have mostly stuck. A big dam on the CSKT just north of here was just turned over to the Tribes -- it was originally renamed Salish Kootenai Dam, but the Pend d'Oreille people seem to have gotten tired of being a footnote, and so the dam was renamed again like a month later: Selis, Ksanka, and Qlispe Dam.
(There was a desperate last minute wingnut effort to stop the turnover, which included a lawsuit filed in DC alleging that tribal control might open the way for ISIS commandos or something. When the history of our time is written, we're going to look really really ridiculous.)
Sitting in an airport, so CNN is on. The bottom half of the screen says "Breaking News: Democrats unwilling to say radical Islamic terrorism."
As I've said here before, I've been listening to the french-canadian news on satellite radio in my car to improve my French. It's great for many reasons, including that the listening to the (ordinary, daily) news is much more tolerable and interesting and fun when you only understand about 80% of it, can use it for vocabulary building, and don't come to it with years of deeply rooted knowledge of particular biases of the journalists. Anyhow, since I have way more knowledge about eg major construction projects in Montreal than I could possibly use, I'm going to declare myself in the top tier of anglophone US-ians in terms of knowledge of French North America.
Even so it's just so weird that there is this whole civilization north of Vermont that speaks French. And sometimes the American-ness is surprising -- there was a whole segment I was listening to about the food revolution in Quebec and how until the 1980s no one knew anything about different kinds of cheeses and just ate bland whatever, which definitely was a surprising set of comments to hear from native French speakers.
Your knowledge of Montreal construction projects definitely puts you in the top tier!
I've been avoiding FB for this reason. If I don't post something sympathetic in French, I'll feel like a jackass to my French friends, whom I know are probably taking this pretty hard. If I do, I'm worried about pissing off my liberal asshole friends, who probably all have Lebanese flags up. I'm leaning towards posting something sympathetic, because after Sept 11 I got a very nice note from my French host family telling me, "nous sommes tous les Americains," and reciprocity is a good reason to post something. One good response to "why don't you care about brown people?" is, "why are you assuming all French people are white, you racist?" which immediately wins you the moral superiority one-upsmanship contest.
Being a bit of a sanctimonious liberal asshole myself, I do feel guilty about feeling bad about France in a way I didn't about Turkey or wherever else terrorism it totally endemic, and I think this is a valid thing to talk about, even if now isn't the time. Also, as a kid was really into Afghanistan and wanted to learn Pashto and move there as an adult, and was super excited to have an Afghan daycare provider, to the point that when I would play dress up I would wear a headscarf and "pray" to Allah on a Turkish prayer rug. I'm really sad about Afghanistan in general, but I don't have the same sort of negative affective reaction to bad stuff there that I do to Paris. Claiming it's because I've been to Paris but not Kabul, or speak mediocre French but not Pashto just seems like a cheap cop-out.*
*OTOH, I did write my BA thesis on Muslim immigration to France and spent a very short amount of time doing ethnographic research in the Muslim areas of Paris, which made me severely depressed about the state of Muslim integration into French society, and recognize that it is a sort of complex problem that doesn't have a really easy solution, especially since it involves two larger forces, French racism and global Islamic terrorism/"Radical Islam," which are not really solvable by the parties most interested in solving the issues. (I.e. most French Muslims and French anti-racist leftists).**
**e.g. the French Muslim groups I interviewed were for the headscarf ban in schools, because at that exact moment (fall 2004), they saw women being raped and murdered for not covering to be a bigger issue than the right to wear a scarf, and interpreted the ban as a clumsy attempt to address violence against women. they were also annoyed that wearing a scarf led to noticeably worse treatment by white French society at large. They felt that the second and third generation were caught between poverty and racial discrimination vs. radical Islam, peddled by "dealers de paradis" (paradise dealers), which existed in a reinforcing negative feedback cycle.
104. How similar is Quebecois French to Parisian? Is it, by analogy, more like Standard American, which any Londoner understands without difficulty, or like Jamaican, which can require subtitles in a movie?
107 -- probably others here know more than me. The radio announcers and most guests are all speaking completely standard French, with a noticeable (to me) but slight (to me) accent, and some not very important vocabulary changes. Sometimes they'll interview (I think mostly older) guests whom I can't understand at all and have a truly bizarre (to me) accent.
106. As a liberal asshole with a Lebanese flag up*, I can't see anything wrong with posting in sympathy with Paris, particularly if you feel a personal connection with the place or have friends there. Probably you should do it.
*Somebody who posts to a group I'm in has changed her pic to a mash-up of the two flags, which seems right if you're going to do it at all, but I've no idea where she got it.
The real question is: do they say the obviously correct "huitante" or the obviously garbage "quatre-vingts"?
This thread is reminding me why I lurk here, because fb has had me in a funk all day, exactly for the reasons discussed here. The smug liberals in my timeline can kiss my ass - in fact, after reading one too many "pray for everyone" and "France has had bad policies, don't muck up my feed with their flag" I got fed up and joined the bleu blanc rouge bandwagon.
I know this is very ineloquently phrased, but there's something about fb that encourages both this kind of smugness and unending outrage. The people berating everyone for caring about Paris and not everywhere else are the same ones who were mocking those upset by red cups last week and the cause of the day the week before. It's hard to care.
Québécois French is no more uniform than American English (actually that's certainly an overstatement, America is bigger and more diverse, but it sounded better that way), by which I mean that standard Quebec French would certainly be easily mutually intelligible to a standard speaker of Parisian French (think standard American and standard British English) but there are extremes such that that would not be true (consider hard core Boston and cockney).
I've been watching Les Revenants, which despite my awful french, I can occasionally understand without the subtitles, but then I watched Un Prophete, and just nada. I can understand the Corsican better than the French in that movie. What kind of accent do these people have? (Incredible movie, good tv show)
Any country with a remotely complicated relationship to the U.S. since alliances were reset after WWII does not get a flag on Facebook. The mildly defensible reason for this is that Americans are (probably) willing to believe that all those countries are too complicated to justify emotional involvement. The less defensible reasons are well known and not worth rehearsing here.
there's something about fb that encourages both this kind of smugness and unending outrage.
It encourages everyone being in everyone else's business 24/7. OTOH someone must by now have put up a French flag over the slogan "L'enfer, c'est les autres," which is just slightly too edgy for me but I'd be happy to know some other asshole was taking the offensiveness hit.
109.2 Found one! I have reliably helpful fb friends.
Then I use "Duke-ques-ne" so I can spell it
Yesterday I was out with Kai, who saw a sign with Duquesne Light Co on it, and used roughly your pronunciation as he tried to sound it out.
81. That, plus the long period of uncertainty over whether it was a terrorist attack or just a system failure.
Yeah, it was several days after that I read a pretty good piece discussing who the various parties were and what their motivations would likely be for pushing one explanation or another. It was alarming, but I think there was an appropriate reluctance to immediately put on a show of outrage.
Plus, of course, Putin.
Quatre-vingt is not 80? Walt can always puzzle me. Some french apparently say, "Le weekend". What's wrong with "fin de semaine"?
Anyways, the first ethnic cleansing for non-indigenous people on this continent was the English kicking the French out of Acadia. That's my ancestry on my father's side. My great-grandfather wouldn't let my grandmother watch English parades. My father says that's because of family stories about that expulsion.
People are always doing evil to others.
My experience is that Quebecois are perfectly understandable until they start speaking to each other and then they become unintelligible very quickly. I just finished Sous les vents de Neptune and am curious how the Quebecois dialogue would be translated into English.
The kid and I use French a lot with each other particularly when the better half isn't around - wasn't thinking about it at all but a discussion of the school lunch options while shopping yesterday led to expressions of sympathy at the butchers, that was a bit awkward. (he went for liverwurst)
My privileged grandmother lived in Paris as a teenager and summered in French Canada. I'm sure that her Paridian French was perfect, but I know that in the 50's - when he mother still owned the house in Murray Bay/ Charlevoix - she spoke to the gardener in
Québécois.
The best English import into French is le shampooing which I adore. It's so much fun to say! And it's completely asinine sounding to English speaking ears!
118: In standard French, it is 80. The Swiss French say "huitante", which is objectively superior.
(he went for liverwurst)
Ugh, my sympathies.
How do the Swiss say 90? Neufante?
My Italian boyfriend tells time in the most backwards way possible, where you'll ask what time it is, and he'll say, "five til" and you'll be like, "five til the hour?" and he'll say, "no, five til 3:30" or 8:47 whatever time it is.
(I'm sure there's an econ paper in there about time telling practices about why the Italian economy is so much worse than the German economy.)
Rousey just got knocked out.
Finally, something interesting to talk about. People counting Holm out were idiots and Dana White might be a genius. Rousey's ability to physically dominate previous opponents had people totally overlooking the fact that she's not used to getting hit and shit at protecting her chin. Holm is every bit as strong as Rousey and Rousey was clearly totally flummoxed by her inability to overpower Holm. The knockout was great but far and away the greatest moment of that fight is about 30 seconds prior when Holm ducks and slips out of Rousey's hook and Rousey drops to her knee. Just blinding at that point that Holm has Rousey's number and that it's going to end badly.
What's extra great is that Rousey totally knew that strategy was coming and still was unable to do anything about it. The first minute of her Fallon interview is like she's been looking into a godamn crystal ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hmfzFh56Vo
122, 124 -- at least IME, in Geneva they use "septante" for 70 and "nonante" for 90 but "quatre-vingts" for 80. Maybe it's different in other cantons (probably) but I don't think I ever heard "huitante."
124 They say "nonante", like the Belgians (and "septante" for 70). Those two are used in all of French-speaking Switzerland. But huitante is only used in certain areas, and notably not in Geneva (it seems common in Vaud and Valais, but of course people in Geneva make fun of those from those cantons because of their accents).
And I'd like any anglophone who complains about French numbers requiring math to tell me how much they think about orthography when they spell something with double-u.
Of course my grumbling gets me pawned.
I've never heard an anglophone complain about French numbers, possibly because I know so very few of them who speak any French. It was all Spanish in school I went to.
128.2: I don't understand the analogy here. But I do feel confident someone who would defend "quatre-vingts" would also defend Hitler.
I've heard Swiss people use "huitante". (I never suspected it existed until I heard somebody say it.)
BORING.
Go watch the fight. It's (for now) on a public FB page thanks to the good people of the Tijuana boxing scene.
https://www.facebook.com/BoxeoTijuana/videos/561705457314635/
Re: 132
Always struck by how raw a lot of MMA stand-up looks. I have friends who insist it's not and just looks that way because people are guarding against takedowns, and can't use pure boxing head movement because of elbows. But it does seem that a lot of otherwise excellent fighters have no head movement, poor footwork (for striking/avoiding being struck), and very open guards.
I don't know what kind of tragic media desert you live in, but I've heard so much about the fight I'm sick of it.
"USA bantamweight championship of the world"?
People counting Holm out were idiots
Well, I had noticed that Rousey was very sloppy in the stand-up game, and so I was intrigued by the match-up, but it's not like I was betting against Rousey. In retrospect, she shouldn't have tried to box at all, and it was really interesting to see such a huge difference in boxing skill manifest so clearly. Here, eat another straight left. Here's another. And another. And that kick really was an elite athlete moment; it was a natural moment to get oriented as Rousey kind of tumbled into her, but Holm, without even thinking, saw the opportunity for the kick and landed it perfectly. It was impressive.
and can't use pure boxing head movement because of elbows
And knees. The old bob and weave can go really, really wrong if a knee comes up.
137: I think people weren't paying enough attention to Holm's last fight against Reneau and how much it showed she could be a problem for a fighter like Rousey. Go to 12:15 and then 18:00 in that fight. It's not just her striking ability, Holm is crazily strong against the clinch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uwHbn59oOE
I remember hearing a radio station in France in the late 90s where the announcers used both "weekend" and "top ten", as in "Le CherieFM Top Ten Weekend".
I've been really enjoying some of the boxing matches under this new Premier Boxing Champions label. Hey, what a concept: take some of the 50 or so boxing cards every year that actually have an excited crowd atmosphere, and put them on normal TV instead of $60 pay-per-view, so some people who aren't already boxing fans (in the US, non-Mexican people under 60) can be exposed to them. Instead of the stultifying parade of no-names in half-empty auditoriums that has been ESPN's "Friday Night Fights" for the last 30 years.
That fight between Deontay Wilder and the French Chuck Wepner was gripping stuff.
"tubes" is another truly wonderful french word. Les top tubes du weekend!
Le weekend & fin de semaine are useful for fine tuning registers of speech.
"*Somebody who posts to a group I'm in has changed her pic to a mash-up of the two flags, which seems right if you're going to do it at all, but I've no idea where she got it."
Except that mash-up, if it's the one I've been seeing (tricolor with the cedar in the center), was also the flag of French Mandate Syria & Lebanon, and therefore a rather historically tone-deaf way to display what I realize are good intentions.
sorry, the flag for Mandate *Lebanon*, that is, not all Mandate territories
re: 138
Yeah, i should have written 'elbows and knees'. What stands out, though, when I've seen MMA trainers working through training sessions, on Youtube, is that they way they train wrestling and BJJ is like the way I've seen savate trainers train stand-up. Lots of emphasis on flow -- the savate term is enchainment -- and the way that very small changes in footwork or body position allow you to chain strikes together, or take advantage of openings, while using angles and small changes of distance to work openings. Or open up opportunities for position, advantage, submissions, and so on, if grappling. Very technical. Very precise about body mechanics. And when they train stand-up, it seems much more in the way that Muay Thai guys seem to work. Great techniques, great power, but much less about movement and flow, and combinations. Much more, just get toe to toe and 'bang'. Power and endurance wins.
It always seems like there's space for the kind of stuff that elite standup fighters can do, in an MMA context. Perhaps that's just wrong, and there's good reasons that won't work, but sometimes it seems like path-dependency. If your standup is very Thai based, it ends up lacking that kind of flow. Which is fine if that's about opening up opportunities for a sophisticated grappling game, or getting lucky with one big hit, but still ...
(My FB feed right now has a bunch of Afghans complaining about a Pakistani woman who did the flag thing with the Pakistani flag.)
142 last. No, the one I was looking at was a current Lebanese flag with a transparent tricouleur superimposed.
131. Swiss French uses octante/huitante (varies by region) and nonante; Belgian uses quatre-vingts and nonante. Forget it, Jake...
I suspect Rousey had never had to deal with the superhuman hand speed a truly elite level boxer brings to the ring.
Also Holm says "huitante," the 80 of champions.
a huge difference in boxing skill manifest so clearly. Here, eat another straight left. Here's another. And another.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a top-ranked fighter eat that many left crosses in such a short period. Holm didn't even bother to set them up with a jab either, which indicates a complete lack of respect for Rousey's defense.
"From a technical standpoint it's the worst defense I've ever seen in a boxing match.."
I feel like more should've been done to warn people who came to the sport because of Rousey that sooner or later they will see their favorites lose brutally.
Holm is crazily strong against the clinch
Also, really well prepared. Also helped by Rousey getting concussed and going in to desperation mode.
Thanks you so much for 151. I'm in tears.
Also, really well prepared.
Exactly. God I'm glad the fight went that way because I was starting to wonder if I was the crazy one. Holm is a godamn sniper with those hands and after the Reneau fight I couldn't see why the hell it wasn't more obvious that Holm was a stylistic nightmare for Rousey.
Decent chance we'll see a coaching change for Rousey, since her current one seems determined to get himself fired.
"I wouldn't say in the striking game she was getting the best of Ronda, you know, but I have to watch it again. But we know this was not a striking match...
What a shithead. "She apologized to me." Hopefully Rousey's mom and friends like the Nick Diaz get through to her and she finds a better training camp.
Along with her left kick, Holm used some really sneaky oblique kicks better than I've ever seen (although I haven't been following MMA closely the past few years) to halt Rousey's advance. I wonder if a resulting injury contributed to her difficulties later in the fight. That drop after Holm's made her whiff made me think knee injury.
Might just have been exhaustion plus punch drunk. Rousey has never had good footwork and she came into the second round already gassed out and then proceeded to eat some more of those lefts plus a side kick to the face. Hard to know though, because those kicks were great.
Might just have been exhaustion plus punch drunk. Rousey has never had good footwork and she came into the second round already gassed out and then proceeded to eat some more of those lefts plus a side kick to the face. Hard to know though, because those kicks were great.