The Ninth Reason I Came To France

After a long hiatus due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and a visit to my son in Madrid, I am back in the saddle again, to mix an old metaphor, and ready to continue my countdown to the reasons I came to France.

Right, so, reason number 9: The Patrimony.

The French are very proud of what they call “Le Patrimoine” and what we in the New World would call “a mountain of old rocks”.

Now, I don't mean this to sound disparaging. The fact of the matter is that those old stones are piled together in very interesting ways: castles, public buildings, churches, uh, castles, bridges, and, uh, castles.

Here in southern France, you can find more old castles than new buildings, and they are amply supplemented by old mansions, and even old private homes.

It seems that every Thomas, Richard, et Herold (Tom, Dick, and Harry to the rest of us) who had a “titre de noblesse” found it compulsory to build a castle, and everyone who came into wealth, be it by his or her wits or, most commonly, by inheritance, found it necessary to build a HUGE house of 50 rooms of which only 10 were lived in.

All of these wealthy people and nobles rapidly found they could not keep up the maintenance of their follies, so they gave them up to the state. This is how the French came to own so much patrimony.

Of course, the state—notably cities such as Paris—have found that said piles of rocks can be turned into gold by the machinery of tourism. The french quickly discovered that people who have much less patrimony in their own countries, or who have a different kind of patrimony, love to come here and take pictures of french patrimony. Witness the mobs of the latest “nouveaux riches” of the world, the Chinese, who come to take photos of everything that even hints at being old: buildings, paintings, people. It's as if they have forgotten they have their own pile of old stones, the Great Wall. Or maybe they have tired of taking pictures of that.

In our neck of the woods, we have oodles of patrimony, mainly of the graceless castle and huge mansion variety. My wife has dragged me to two notable examples of each: the Chateau d'Uturbie,

and the house (if you can call it that) where Edmond Rostand lived, he of Cyrano de Bergerac fame.

The first is an old castle owned by the same family since the 14th Century, according to the slick website of the place.

http://www.chateaudurtubie.fr/urtubie/

It has had to suffer the indignity of hundreds of tourist tramping through its wooden floors as well as it being decked out with a pool and other “fun facilities” so that people can stay there and say they have stayed in a castle rather than in an old run-down hotel. Most of these old places are turned into reception halls for weddings and for business men to pretend to have meetings but who are really there to get drunk and have a good time.

We visited the castle on a summer day and we tramped through it following the woman who is a descendant of the family but who does not live there. She is smart enough to live in Biarritz in a comfortable apartment with all the modern facilities.

The mansion where Edmond Rostand lived has also followed suit. Although he made a pile of money from the play that depicted the long-nosed cavalier, he did not make enough to allow his heirs to keep up the place.

We dutifully tramped through those wooden staircases and teak-wood floors, my wife wondering what it must have been like to live in such a marvelous house and I wondering how in the hell they had kept the place warm in winter—answer: they didn't. The house was eventually “donated” to the city and is kept up by (you guessed it) paid visits by tourist and renting it out as a hotel and meeting place.

France, like the rest of Europe, has days when it celebrates its Patrimony, but even as the Minister of Culture admits, it is a hard sale: “Patrimoine : le mot renvoie vers l'immobilité apparente, l'hiératisme des vieilles pierres.” (Patrimony: the word refers to the apparent immobility, the hieratic of old stones.) In other words, when they talk about patrimony, what comes to mind is old stones: my feeling exactly.

The problem is, Patrimony is a good thing but when there is too much of it, it can become a problem. The French government has been quietly dumping some of the old castles and buildings mainly by selling them off to hotel chains. There is just so many old buildings you can turn into governmental offices. Just think of the cost of putting in central heating! Not to mention building maintenance.

But, if castles and old mansions are a problem, so is the patrimony on the other end of the scale: private houses. Here in France, few new houses are built. Most people live in homes that are passed on from generation to generation. Refurbished and repurposed but they are still old and frail.

The house we live in, for example, is 150 years old. The wooden timbers that make up the roof structure were being eaten into sawdust by wood worms. The town has a department that helps you economically to care for such buildings. They subsidised the treatment and reflooring of the upper stage of the house. Across the street, the children of an old lady inherited their mother's house. Instead of knocking it down and building something new (which is what would have happened in the US or in Mexico), they have gutted the inside to modernize it, but have kept the shell of the house they remember living in as kids. There is something to be said for keeping the traces of tradition and the memory of what was, but one wonders if everything and everyone should do it.

Anyway, that sense of history and love of the traditional is one reason one comes to France. If you come here, be sure to take plenty of pictures because with this crisis who know how much longer things will be around.

The biased film critic

I have to admit that I would rather see "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" for the umpteenth time rather than any of the modern "masterpieces" that rely on ever more numerous car crashes, explosions, and bloody violent deaths for content than any sort of interesting dialog or story line.

Computer generated wizardry such as "The Lord of the Rings" the Harry Potter series, Star Wars, etc. leave me cold because instead of Charlton Heston urging literally a cast of thousands to cross with him the parted waters, we have a cast of millions generated by computer which look so fakey that make me laugh. (It must be hard for a modern actor to look into a green wall and pretend he is seeing an army of invaders or something!)

But the worst purveyors of nonsense in modern films are those directors and writers that try to jerk a tear from our eye (hence, tear-jerkers). These are the type of films that try to evoke or provoke emotion by having a (child, dog, aged mother, favorite pet monkey, or lovable old coot) die of (an incurable disease, a car accident, medical negligence, a meteor shower or other ridiculous circumstance).

Now, I do confess that I have never been very susceptible to horror films, suspense flicks, or tear-jerkers. I was once escorted out of a movie theater because I couldn't stop laughing at Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". I thought that those birds pecking at the running kids was the most hilarious thing I had ever seen and people got annoyed at my loud laughter (of course I was 14 and I was a rowdy teenager).

And, I was also asked to leave (this time by my own friends) when I cheered for the monsters and skeletons in that marvelous classic "Jason and the Argonauts".

Nevertheless, when a tear-jerker is well written, the acting good, and the direction impeccable, I find it hard to keep the waterworks from starting to drip. (I often wonder at why some of these women who go to see these movies and who go through a box of tissues in the theater do not succumb to dehydration.)

My favorite tear-jerker of all time is "An Affair to Remember" with Cary Grant and Doborah Kerr.

How can one avoid a tear when Cary Grant finally figures out that Deborah did not show up for their rendezvous because she was crippled in an accident? Oh, I get misty just thinking about it.

All of this is to comment that we went to see a modern tear-jerker last night. It tried valiantly to combine all of the elements of old films, including the fact that it was in black and white and there was no dialog (except at the end). I am talking about "The Artist", a french film that has been getting rave reviews even from crusty old film critics such as Anthony Lane in "The New Yorker".

The film had all of the elements in place: good acting (Dujardin got a best actor award in Cannes), great music, a sentimental plot line, a love story, very good direction, excellent photography, and even a cute, intelligent dog! Yet, it moved me not! What is worse, my wife was as dried eyed as a Tuareg in the Sahara.

As we left the theater we had this conversation:

Me: So, how did you like the film?

My wife: Oh, it was OK. Entertaining but a bit sentimental. (This from a woman who will burst into tears at the sight of a limping dog.)

Me: (Surprised) Well, yes I found it entertaining too but strangely lacking in real emotion. Although I did feel sorry for the dog who seems to have had to carry the whole picture on its miniscule legs.

My wife: Yes, he was very cute and so smart.

Me: That proves the old adage attributed to W. C. Fields, "Never work with dogs or children." They steal the show.

My wife: Yes, but I find the movie a bit too, uh, sweet.

Me: Wow! You finding a movie too sweet is like Martin Scorsese saying he finds a scene a bit too violent.

My wife: What does that mean?

Me: I don't know but I am sure it means something.

I think that the problem with this and most present day movies is that actors have forgotten or have not learned how to evoke true emotion, not only in the public but in themselves. I can't recall what actor it was who said that when he needed to cry in a scene, he always remembered his mother dying! Well, that is a bit much but "chacun son métier".

In "The Artist", a young actress criticizes the older, silent movie actors for grimacing and gesturing too much in order to convey emotion. Well, that might be but at least they knew their "métier". Some of the present day actors have the emotional range of a telephone post. It they are killing someone or making love, they put on the same face: that is, stiff and dull.

Humphrey Bogart's face could cycle through ten emotions (convincingly) in a twenty second scene. Just download "The Petrified Forrest" and you'll see what I mean.

The other day I had the displeasure of seeing something about Alexander the Great, as portrayed by one of these present day wonders; that was an insult to history, to Alexander, to movie making, and even to old-fashioned costume dramas. Worse was that stupid "adaptation" of the Iliad called "Troy".

I wish Achilles was still around. He'd take his sword to the lot of them.

I guess it is the privilege, when reaching a certain age, of older folk to consider the things of yesteryear better than those of the present day. But, I can't really reconcile myself to thinking that only because I am older I do not understand that putting a shark into a tank of formaldehyde is great art, or that clothes that have tears and look like old rags are beautiful fashions, or that a mannequin dressed like the Pope and which has a rock on top of it is a great sculpture, or that having every car on our block painted the same gray color is a step forward in car design. And I just can't convince myself that second rate actors like that Brad Pitt who John Huston would have doubts about casting him as a shoeshine boy in one of his movies, is anywhere near in acting ability of say James Cagney in "White Heat".

No, if movies such as "The Artist" want to make me cry, they have to have something more than just a gimmick and a cute dog saving his master. Although I do have to admit that "Troy" made me cry but for a different reason.

The Inferiority of French Superiority

I guess that if you are a country that has gotten trounced in every war you've been in during the last three or four hundred years, and if you are the proud inventor of such bizarre "advances" as the MiniTel, and you have managed to be named the "Wrongway Feldman" of the community of nations, you have the right to feel superior.

(Who is Wrongway Feldman, you ask? Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongway_Feldman).

As both of you who read my blogs know, I am often corrected by French people, not the least of which is a person living here at home, by their saying to me, "We in France..."

The "we", of course, is used in the royal sense, much like that other useless monarch, the queen of England, uses the word "we", as in "WE believe that young boys should take cold baths in winter to temper their spirits."

The subject of this rant comes to mind because every time I hear this "We in France..." thing, it rubs me wrong. It seems to me that there is an implied "We know better than the rest of the world how to...." (fill in the blank with any activity known to man).

Here is the dialog from a recent conversation I had with a French university professor during the meeting of a book club to which I was invited. The subject was Latin American literature and in particular the books of young Mexican authors who disregard the cannons of "good grammar" and "correct punctuation":

The professor: The fact of the matter is that I don't consider that literature.

Me: The fact of the matter is that those young authors don't care what you consider literature.

The professor: Well, that might be, but the Real Academia Española has strict rules concerning...

Me: Well, we Latin Americans don't give a hoot for what that stuffy body of old geezers think is the right usage of language, especially as it is spoken in Latin American countries.

The professor: That might be but having conducted research into Latin American literature for the last 20 years, we in France...

Me: You in France always seem to be 20 years behind everything. And, you have not produced anything new for the last 50 years. You are still dragging out the impressionist for exhibitions, while the rest of the world has gone on to installations, minimalist art, and whatnot (not that I like the stuff, but that's what's happening); you keep reviving rock starts from the 50s and 60s 'cause you haven't had a figure of note since Brel or Piaff. My God, the best you've got is that ridiculous Johnny Halliday who has to be taken on stage in a wheel chair. You still have millions of MiniTel users while the rest of the world has moved on the the World Wide Web! And as far as literature is concerned, you have to import Russians and Englishmen because the best that the Prix Goncourt can do is come up with a high-school biology teacher who considers himself a "Sunday writer". As far as Latin American literature is concerned, you probably think that the "happening thing" are the authors of the Boom, most of which are in the 70s and 80s.

The moderator: Please gentlemen, we won't fight about this...

Me: No fight,no fight...just letting the gentleman know that WE in Latin America don't need anyone to tell us what is literature and what is not.

I made trips to France in the late 70s and early 80s, and I have been here on a more or less permanent basis for eight years now. Yet, I hardly consider myself an expert of French culture, politics, manners, or any other specific manifestation of the Gallic way of life. Yet, it seems that all the locals need is a few vacations abroad spent mostly in luxury hotels and exclusive beaches to become experts in, say, Spain, Morocco, or even Mexico. (Oui, je connais Mexique. J'ai été à Cancun!).

Here is a member of our household (who shall remain nameless) on a point of language (the use of a colloquial phrase) that we were discussing:

Me: No, the phrase should be...

Household member: But, that is the way the Spanish use it.

Me: No, that is not the way they use it; in fact...

Household member: But, I know it is. I have been to Spain on vacation with my parents several times and that is the way they use it.

Me: That last time you were on vacation with your parents in Spain, Franco was still in power and the trains ran on steam. I think you misremember.

Household member: I do not misremember. We in France know Spain very well, and...

Me: We in Mexico have been speaking Spanish for 500 years, and I have been speaking the same for 60, not to mention that I have studied Spanish Literature, frequently read Spanish newspapers, listen to the Spanish news, and on occasion go to Spain, so I guess WE have a bit more knowledge of the language, formal and otherwise, than a French vacationer might have.

Household member: Nevertheless, I will ask my friend, who is a teacher of Spanish and whose parents are Spanish.

The Gallic spirit, fueled by Gallic pride, does not give up easily.

I was having a cup of wine at a local spot in downtown Biarritz when the man standing next to me asked if I was English (something that often happens). I said I was not and told him I was in fact Mexican. He smiled in surprise and said:

"You must find it very different here, especially the people."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Well, the Mexican people are so warm and gregarious; we French are cold and arrogant, not too friendly."

"I don't know about cold and unfriendly. Most people have treated me very decently; but, I would agree on the arrogance. But, I think that is mainly taught, not a part of your character."

"Why do you think it is taught?"

"I think, although I am not an expert, that it has to do with the difficult history this country has had. Wars and revolutions have created a need for self-assertion, that no matter how bad things got, France would survive because of the many things good it has, among them its people. It is no surprise that in school you are told that French is the most beautiful language, and the food is the best, and so on. Although, I have to admit, the countryside is the most beautiful I have every seen."

"Well," he said, "we do think that we have the best of everything: food, country, language...but, when we travel, we find out that there are many other places with good things, too. And that some things here are very good, but not the best."

"You know what they say: travel educates. But, one thing is sure: your wine is still the best."

We clicked our glasses to that and ordered another round.

A List of Reasons Why I Dislike Lists

In 18th Century France, a bunch of intellectuals got together and decided to compile an "encyclopedia". They called themselves, of cours, encyclopédistes. The editor in chief was the great Denis Diderot and his second in command was Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

The first order of business for these folks was to compile (what else?) a list of the folks who were contributors to the encyclopedia! Ever since, the French have refined and developed this mania for lists.

Lists are everywhere you turn: you go to a government office and ask a question (Can you please tell me how I can apply for a...) and no matter what you fill in the blank with, the bureaucrat, without uttering a word, opens a drawer, and pulls out a list. "Voila!" she or he says in triumph before looking over your shoulder and yelling out "Next!"; in the supermarket, the doors are covered with lists of approved products for x, y or z, products that will not be sold to minors, the day's specials, things found and that can be claimed at the lost and found, and so on.

But the most annoying place I encounter lists (or at least annoying to me) is in speech. The French have a penchant for listing things in support of an argument, as way of explaining or exemplifying something. And, most maddening, as a way of going into rapture about a thing or event.

"Ah, c'est un jour merveilleux, aujourd'hui. Le soleil, les nuages, l'air, l'arôme des fleurs ..." and the person will go on and on for about a half hour listing all the things that make the day a marvelous day.

The gentleman pictured above wrote 17,288 entries into the encyclopedia. This guy did nothing but whip out articles and list of articles and list of list of articles. I can just imagine what it must have been like to talk to this guy:

Uh, Count Louie, I hear you write for the encyclopedia.

Oui, I write articles on physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, political history...

Yeah, yeah, your countship, but it's probably a lot of work. I hear your up to 15,000 articles already. How do you do it?

I hired secretaries, accountants, transcribers, copyists, researchers, invest...

Right, right, you must have spent a fortune 'cause I hear you do this out of your own pocket.

Yes, but I have investments, businesses, inherited money, my medical practice...

I bet no one could get a simple sentence out of the guy.

At a dinner party at home, one of our guests was a very contentious person. As is the case in most dinner parties, the guests were seated, man, woman, man, woman, and so on. He was seated next to a no less contentious woman. Somehow the conversation got on to a documentary that had been recently shown on French television about how France had difficulty facing its past, and particularly its past as a colonial power and the injustices committed in those times. The woman was all for France facing up to its past, and the man argued France had nothing to apologize for. I will spare you the French and transcribe in English the gist of the conversation:

The woman: But, look at the crimes and atrocities committed in Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia...

The man: Mais oui, but we gave them education, the French language, culture, a country, a name...

The woman: But, they paid for it with exploitation, submission, loss of identity...

The man: Not at all, they kept their language, customs, ideas, religion...

These two persons fired lists at one another for a good 45 minutes. It was very amusing to one and all sitting around the dinner table, except to me because I found it as amusing as reading a dictionary for fun, enjoyment, pleasure...(Ah, damn it! Now they got me doing it!)

We at home are no strangers to this sort of thing, especially as it concerns the French side of the equation. In fact, this blog was prompted when I remembered a conversation we had last summer. We were sitting outside (The French rush to their garden to eat outside if the weather is anywhere reasonably good. It's funny to see a family of 10 sitting around a small table in their two square meters of garden when the sun is out. But that is a theme for another blog.) Anyway, we were sitting outside, enjoying the sun, the warmth, the cloudless sky, the...you get the picture.

The first course of our meal was a soup. If you are one of the four persons who has read most of my blogs you will recall that my wife gets her dander up when I don't go into raptures about her soups. This occasion was no exception: I was happily munching away at my bread and slurping up my bowl of soup when a harrumph interceded between my bliss and my serene state of mind.

My wife: Harrumph, harrumph...

Me: (thinking) Oh,oh...what have I done now?

My wife: You have not said anything about my soup.

Me: (Quickly going over my options of answers and calculating the consequences of each. I decided to go with a pleasant but uncommitted answer.) Oh, its very nice.

My wife: Very nice? You don't say anything about the flavor, the consistency, the way the duck fat enhances the spices...

Me: (Trying to figure out where all of this is going and how I will come to grief over a still unnamed fault I have committed.) Well, all of the above are very good, I...

My wife: You say nothing, not a word, not a compliment, not an opinion, not a...

Me: (Setting up a barricade of annoyance to see if that will stop the onrushing hordes of lists coming at me.) Look, stop throwing lists at me. Ask me one thing at a time!

My wife: Augh! Really! I expect rapture, delight, compliments, from you, and all I get is OK, it's fine, real good.

Me: Well, if you don't stop, desist, arrest your nagging, discontinue your badgering, I will leave, go elsewhere to have my soup, decamp the table, slurp soup somewhere else, break bread with a stranger in another place, take my watery item and ingest it in another planet!

Needless to say that my barrage did not help and the meal went south from there. In spite of the lovely weather, we created our own little storm in a glass of water.

What annoys me is that people here use these lists like a battering ram, trying to daze you into submission by the shear amount of words thrown at you. I am not a multitasking sort of guy. I like to do things one at a time, each until completion. If something has not been finished, I do not start something else. So, when someone says to me: "This is not right, not complete, not finished." I take umbrage because each one of these things means something different and should be considered separately.

But, people are careless and want to throw everything at you all at once, without thinking that these lists may contain contradictory elements. Take that fellow at our dinner party. When he said that France had given its colonies "education, culture, a language". Firstly, all of the people in the colonies already had a language, a culture, and educating someone does not necessarily mean you improve them. I can educate someone on how to use a gun to kill; that's hardly and improvement of the person.

By lumping all of those terms, there is no opportunity for discussing each. Perhaps that is the intention of these list makers.

Whatever the cultural, educational, personal reasons, the French have this annoying habit, I will have to abide by it, tolerate it, listen to it stoically, and accept it, although I am learning to ignore it, shut my ears to it, think of something else, and just plain tune it out when it happens.

How to never recognize that you have lost an argument

There are many things I like about people and some I dislike. Strangely enough, they are the same things I like and dislike about myself. If I were asked to compile a list of the later, I think that my all-time, number one would be that I hate when people do not concede that they are on the losing side of an argument. But then, I hate the idea of conceding myself.

For example, my wife and I argue about a lot of things: cooking, routes to take any place we are going, politics, dress codes, books, films, even the color of the sky:

Me: Wow! The sky sure is blue today.

My wife: Well, it's not really blue more like a light blue.

Me: Blue is blue, light or otherwise.

My wife: Yes, but one should distinguish between a light blue and just plain blue.

Me: Why? Is there a color-of-the-sky police that will come and arrest me for not describing the sky's color correctly? All I said is that the sky is blue.

My wife: Yes, but you see, we in France...

Me: Oh, no, no, no. Let's not start this WE IN FRANCE thing. Next thing you'll say is that the ten commandments were written in French and the guy carrying the tablets was really named Jean-Jaques Rochefort, or something...

And it goes on like that for half an hour. As you can see, the argument is not about anything important or about a point of fact. It is really about winning, or rather, not losing an argument. My wife has taught me quite a lot about how not to lose an argument. She has wonderful technique. For instance, the other day she cooked a couple of hamburger patties without taking the plastic separators off.

Me: Hey! You left the plastic on the patties!

My wife (without missing a beat): Yes.

Me: But, but...that's dangerous, not to mention unhealthy!

My wife (cooly taking the plastic off of my hamburger patty): No, not at all. In fact some people recommend that one leave it on. It keeps the meat from drying out, you see!

Me (rapidly approaching the point of hysterics): What? Who would say such an insane thing?

My wife (starting to munch of her plastic condimented meat): We in France always leave the plastic on because...

There is no need to say where that argument went. Nor need I explain that my wife did not concede that she simply had failed to see the plastic and therefore did not remove it from the meat. Health issues and the possibility of choking on a piece of plastic were not important. What was important was not losing the argument and conceding a mistake.

I am not immune to the same vice. BUT, I use far more sophisticated methods of stonewalling such as quoting from non-existent books, or citing fantastical physical laws, equations, and formulas. I also have, on occasion, made up "old sayings" and folk wisdom in order to drive in the last nail of my opponent's (usually my wife)argument's coffin, as it were. Take that argument about the "blueness" of the sky. I could have easily trumped her "We in France" thing with my unbounded knowledge of invented physical law.

To my wife's "...it's not really blue but a light blue" I could have answered:

"Oh, my dear. I can see you are not familiar with the text, "Optical Phenomena and Atmospheric Gradation of Colors". In that marvelous book, Dr.Savaranthra Dasgupta, the Nobel Prize winner, states that there is really only one color of blue in the sky but it is the deformation of a persons retina that "fools the brain into believing there are gradations in the color of the atmosphere."

My wife would have been dumbfounded at this wondrous and copious display of my (faux) learning, although I sometimes think she is not so much astounded by my fake erudition as by my ability at invention.

Of course, neither my wife or I have cornered the market for devious methods of winning arguments. I have learned quite a lot from the masters of this sort of shenanigans: politicians.

Mexican politicians win arguments by never admitting there is a point to be argued in the first place:

Interviewer: It is a tragedy that nearly two million children will be attending school in ramshackle, totally inadequate facilities because of a lack of funding for school construction.

Politician: Yes, one of the cornerstones of our constitution is that education is mandatory and free.

Interviewer: But, that's not the point. The point is that the Senate voted a huge raise in your monthly salaries yet not a penny for school buildings.

Politician: We've also done wonders in providing every child with free books.

Interviewer (exasperated): Sir, I am referring also to the fact that you gave yourselves in the Senate, a %3,000 dollar Rolex watch for each senator, as a Christmas present, and yet you...

Politician: Yes, and we have increased the amount of free breakfasts given the children. Now they get a cup of milk instead of just plain water.

And on and on it goes. Its as if politicians live in a different universe from the rest of us. In France, the people in power have made an art of their tactics for not losing an argument, especially in public.

Take the undersecretary who got caught spending 12,000 euros of public money on fine cigars. On television, he had the gall to argue that he did it to uphold the prestige of the French Republic, after all he was not going to offer cheap cigars to the people who visited his office. What would they think of the country if he did?

Or how about the bureaucrat who recently appeared on television to explain why France was falling behind in developing "green" power generation:

Interviewer: According to the numbers recently published in a national newspaper, France if falling behind other European countries in developing "green" electricity.

Bureaucrat: Not really. We are spending 10 billion euros on developing wind farms.

Interviewer: Yes, but the report says that that will be spent on five wind farms which, if and when they become operational, will only produce about 2 percent of the electricity needed. Denmark, on the other hand, will be producing around 20 percent of their needs via wind farms by the year...

Bureaucrat: Yes, but they are a smaller country.

Interviewer: Precisely! They are smaller, have less resources, yet...

Bureaucrat: You can't compare smaller countries with larger countries...

Interviewer: That's not the point. The point is...

Bureaucrat: We are shutting down three nuclear plants...

And off he went on a tangent, which is a clever way of not losing an argument, or rather of avoiding one by completely ignoring the issue.

If in politicians this refusal to "face the facts" and admit one is wrong is an occupational tool, in most other people it seems to be a defense mechanism that has been hard-wired into our brains by nature for some obscure biological reason. It might even be a bad mutation of which we have not been able to rid ourselves in spite of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

I can imagine Pierre the cave man making a spear and using animal fat instead of tar to bind it to the spear shaft. Bill, the cave guy from another valley says to him:

Bill: Hey, Pierre, you got it wrong. You put fat on the spear point so it slides into the flesh of the mammoth easily and tar on the shaft to bind the point to it firmly...

Pierre: Per'aps in your valley you do it zat way but in Gaul we put zee fat 'ere, alors!

So, they go out hunting and when a saber tooth tiger jumps out of the grass, Pierre readies his lance but the stone spear point falls off.

Pierre: Oh, oh...

Tiger: Arrrrrrgh!

Bill: I toooold you soooo!

Pierre ended up on the tiger's dinner menu but nevertheless, it seems that the I-never-concede-I-am-wrong genes persisted because I have a friend who would rather walk over hot coals than admit he is wrong about ANYTHING!

We were having a drink in his house, listening to music and my friend says:

My friend: Ah, I love that Count Basie music.

Me: Actually, I think it's Duke Ellington.

My friend: No, that's the ol'Count, my friend.

Me: Uh, well, here is the disc jacket and it says "Duke Ellington in a Sentimental Mood"

My friend: Well, I think I put the CD in the wrong jacket...

Me: Hmmm, I could have sworn (I got up and looked at the CD itself). Uh, it says Duke Ellington and his orchestra on the CD itself.

My friend: Yeah, well, I think its labeled wrong. In fact, that's what makes it so valuable. Its a rare thing, you know.

The piece being played was over, and the recording having been made live in the Stardust ballroom or something, an announcer comes on and says, "You are listening to Duke Ellington and his Orchestra coming to you over NBC radio from the ballroom of the...

Me: Uh, the announcer said it was the Duke and his orchestra...

My fried: Ahhh, he got it wrong. It's definitely the Count.

I don't know who was more stubborn that night: He for not conceding he was wrong or me for trying to prove him so. I think we both have that gene.

A View of Bayonne

For those of you who have never visited the places I mention in my blog entries, I will start posting some live views of said places. Here is a page with three webcams that offer a look at Bayonne.

Click here to view Bayonne Center

Abur, as they say in Basque

Rodolfo

On getting lost and other Sunday outings

It seems to me that most French people, among them my wife, consider that street names are there for decorative purposes, not to serve as indications of where you are in a city.

I have come to this conclusion because of last Sunday's outing, if one can call driving around the twisted streets of Bayonne for more than an hour, an "outing". The occasion was the celebrated "Mexican" shared feast put on by the association to which we belong--AFLACOBA, a jolly group of Latin Americans living in the Pays Basque.

The invitation said we were to bring something to eat and drink and to be shared with others. There was to be sundry activities: singing Mexican songs, a theater group, etc. We were asked to get ourselves up in Mexican items of clothing, so I put on my hat and my wife took a long a blouse that looked like a baby-doll nightgown but to her was very "Mexican". And, she cooked up a tomato tart (don't ask). I took along a jar of my wickedly hot Mexican sauce.

So, off we went.

Me: Oh, we should have looked at the email to see where this place is and...

My wife: I know where it is: the maison for the associations in Bayonne.

Me: Are you sure? It seems to me that there was something about a Belichone or Balichon, or something like that.

My wife: Its the same thing, the same thing. On you go, come on!

And off we went, driving merrily into disaster. We arrived at the place in Bayonne that, reputedly, is meant to house the activities of various associations. There was an eery silence in the place which gave me a bad feeling but not my chirpy wife who sauntered up to the only open room where there was a bored young man sitting behind a reception desk.

My wife (in French): Ah, can you tell us where the AFLACOBA people are meeting?

Young man: The what?

Me: Oh, oh...

My wife: The AFLACOBA, the AFLACOBA...you know that Latin American...

Young man: Not here. There are no meetings of any kind being held here today.

Me: (Panicking) Oh, oh...

My wife: But, surely you are wrong. We got an email saying that this Balichon thing...

Young man: Ah, the Balichon! Well, that is not here.

Me: Oh, oh...

My wife: Well, where is that Balichon thing...

The young man went into a lengthy and complicated description of the trek we would have to make to reach that golden fleece otherwise known as the MVC Balichon. Now you might be asking yourself, what the MVC stands for. Well, that, as you will see later, is the crux of the mystery.

Off we went, to follow directions we did not fully understand, to look for a place we did not really know where or what it was.

Me: (Starting to loose my temper because of hunger) But, you said that you were sure it was at this Association place...

My wife: And, I am. That's what it said in the email.

Me: I don't remember any mention of any association...

My wife: Never mind. The young man said to look for the Galleries Lafayette and to continue up from there.

Me: That's pretty vague. Are you sure he said...

And on we went driving around, getting into wrong way streets, circling for an hour, asking "locals" about a place called Balichon. We saw a man putting things into the boot of his car so we assumed he was a "local". My wife jumped out of the car, while I, motor idling, stayed ready to drive off in whatever misdirection the man would send us. I started to think the man was NOT a local when he produced a huge map, unfolded it and started to trace circles on it with his finger. Much like when one says, "I think its around here."

After a fifteen minute consultation, that seemed as complicated as the planning of the Normandy invasion from the way the man moved his hand over the map and gestured, my wife ran back, got into the car, and said the man had no clue to where the fabled Balichon place was but that he thought it might be...

Off we went, following these new, obscure, and vague instructions of the map guy.

Me: Didn't he mention the name of the street? I mean, did he say where...

My wife: Augh! What for? Anyone knows where this Balichon place is...

Of course, we not only did not find it, we got lost in a very complicated tangle of streets with no names. We asked a half dozen people, all of which gave different directions or gestured wildly, but made no mention of the street where this Balichon place might be. After a half hour of muddling about in that maze of narrow and crooked streets, we gave up and decided to go home.

At home, I took off my hat and Paseo shirt (which had, appropriately, three bullfighters stitched on the back)and sat down to eat our now cold tomato tart. I grumbled and my wife kept insisting that the people who had sent the email should not have mentioned the Association place where we had first gone. "That," she said, "has misled us."

I didn't recall any mention of that Association place so I went to have a look at the email.

Me: Look! There is no mention of any Masion des Associations! It says "MVC Balichon" and it gives the name of the street it is on! We should have looked for that street!

My wife: And, what do I care what street it is on? Do you think I know the name of the street where I do my nails? Of course not! I don't need to know it; I know where the place is!

Me: But what does that have to do with anything? They have established streets names and houses numbers so people can find their way around, so you don't have to say: Oh, my house is near the butcher with the large window and next to the tree with lots of leaves, or something like that.

My wife: But, I have no use for the names of streets. I know where places are.

Me: Not this place! We spent an hour driving around like lost tourists. We could have just asked for directions to the street, not the Maison des whatever!

My wife: Well, it was that MVC thing that misled us. They should not have put that in because it leads one to think that it is the Maison des Associations.

How in the world one goes from an acronym MVC to Maison des Associations is something only the strange and bizarre workings of a Gallic female mind can achieve. Of course, I should have known better, but I didn't, so I asked the question:

Me: How in the world can you say that MVC led you to think that it was the Maison des...

My wife: Ah, but don't you know what it means? Here it is right here, on my screen (she said looking at the Google page). It means "Maison de la Vie Citoyenne", no wonder one confuses it with the "Maison des Associations".

I was speechless.