Fun with French Systems, or the All-Powerful Telecommande

While American remote controls just perform banal tasks like turning the tv on and off and changing the channel, apparently their French counterparts can pilot the space shuttle.

After borrowing a tv and carrying it home on the bus, I discovered that it gets one channel which seems to show nothing but military or prison dramas interspersed with Euroshopping (QVC with an EU flag), occasional blocks of Friends and a film starring Michael J. Fox in which he has the power to talk to ghosts.

Enlightening as this quality programming sounds, I long for news, the channel arte, un diner presque parfait and les guignols. When I complain to French people about my one crap channel, they all ask if I have a remote. By now, few instances of French surrealist logic suprise me, but this was a new entree on the menu, or should I say, carte.

When I say no, I don't have a remote, they sagely nod and say, ah, that's the problem. Apparently, French remote controls identify all the channels your tv gets and then automatically memorize them and allow you to access them easily.

You don't think it would help if I got an antenna, I ask, and then I'd get more channels? Mais non, they say bemusedly, that wouldn't help at all. Since the nuances of setting up the French television clearly escape me, they explain that if you have a cable plugged into the tv and the wall (which I do, but only after a French person came to my house and identified the right outlet for me), that's the antenna and possibly means you get cable.

I guess rabbit ears are a thing of the past and telecommandes are the way of the future. France is no technological slouch, you know. They did, after all, invent credit cards with microchips in them.

One of my favorite songs

This song captures the constant love-hate relationship that all parisians have with their city:

It's called J'aime Plus Paris by Thomas Dutroc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X3BWdOt8F0&feature=fvw

Of Squirrels and Men

I recently did an English lesson on giving your opinion and we started by reading a text from a Parisian blog about how Parisians not only have opinions about everything on earth but they elevate them to pretentious new heights. How do you take an opinion to the next level? It evolves into a Theory.

So I Have a Theory about squirrels and men with long beautiful curly hair.

The squirrel has a big beautiful tail, it seems fair to say that all this animal's evolutionary focus thus far has been on making its tail big and attractive and effective for keeping its balance when it leaps from tree to tree. The squirrel brain remains largely undeveloped, a sacrifice left on the altar of maximum tail volume . Perhaps they would gladly trade bushy tailed-ness for the ability to read or do the crossword, but as things stand now, squirrels have little going on upstairs. They regularly throw themselves in front of cars, hoard nuts and then forget where they put them (in their mouths) and sometimes even fall out of trees.

The squirrel principle also applies to men with long beautiful curly hair. It's like all their sex appeal is so firmly located in their hair, they haven't even remotely considered the possiblity of developing anything else or learning some rudimentary basics about other ways to please women besides deep conditioning their flowing tresses on a regular basis.

Such wasted potential in both species.