The French are Complaining
According to The Times, the French are complaining that the official Olympic brochure is not available in French.
But if you do put it into French, do you use French French, which I can read or Canadian French, which I can’t and a lot of French people from France have been known to laugh at in the same way we treat American English.
In my view there might be a more serious problem on the various Olympic sites. All sports with the exception of football, cricket and one or two others are performed with respect to metric units. Even rugby talks about 10 and 22 metre lines!
So do we put up the signs inside the Olympic park with yards or metres. As most of the competitors and spectators, think a yard is somewhere to keep your rubbish, we should use metres.
But I bet we don’t!
The only place I know in the UK, with metric signposts, is Liverpool University’s campus.
There is an e-petition on metrication here.
For those who are against this on account of it’s not the British thing to use metric units. I have never used Imperial units in business and don’t ever use them to measure anything. My eldest child will be 43 this year and he didn’t even learn about Imperial units at school.
So why do we keep them?
London Is Alive With the Sound of French
I don’t know why, but London this morning seemed to be full of the French. I thought it might have something to do with the rugby, but France play England in Paris on the 11th.
I was travelling to Westbourne Park station and back and both ways I had to sort out groups of French travellers, who had got lost. One thing that seems to have confused them, is that the Circle line, is no longer what it says on the tin. So experienced travellers to London, who want to get between say St. Pancras International and Victoria stations with heavy cases, get rather confused with having to change trains at Edgware Road station. The first group had been so confused they’d actually got on the westbound, rather than the eastbound they needed. I came back from Paddington and there it is more confusing, as all eastbound trains terminate at Edgware Road. The information leaves a lot to be desired.
I still haven’t found out why all the French were here, but something was up, as why would there have been a TV crew at St. Pancras.
TV Crews at St. Pancras
I think they could have been French!
Doesn’t DSK Ever Learn?
There are reports everywhere to say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been detained by French police investigating a prostitution ring.
As he supposedly had sex with several of the women, what else could he have thought? Perhaps, that they just felt sorry for him? Or they were giving him a free sex-education lesson?
Imagine if the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition had been involved in a similar enquiry! But it wouldn’t happen here would it? Not now maybe, but similar things have happened in the past.
Nuclear Dilemmas
The Times today reports that an independent Scotland under the SNP would want no part of the Trident nuclear missiles based at Faslane. So this would mean we’d need to build new facilities in England. The extra cost would mean that those arguing against Trident replacement be helped greatly.
I actually think that we should scrap Trident and if we needed to keep a nuclear deterrent, we should use cruise missiles fired from a vessel like an Astute class submarine.
But the bigger nuclear diemma is over nuclear power. It is being reported that today, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy will sign a wide ranging treaty which among other things enables new nuclear power stations in the UK.
But Francois Hollande has said, that if he wins the French Presidency, he’ll scrap nuclear power in France. Remember that Scotland will need nuclear power, when the wind doesn’t blow.
Let’s have some engineers in politics.
The French Prove They Shouldn’t Have Had the Olympics
The French were peeved that we got the Olympics for 2012, especially as they said they had all the stadia ready.
But when they built the Stade de France, they forgot one important thing; undersoil heating. In fact because of the design of the roof, they may have actually made things worse in cold weather. This is from Wikipedia.
The tinted glass in the center reduces the contrast and distributes natural light. It filters out red and infrared radiation, however, it allows blue and green lights, due to their necessity involving the health of the turf.
So perhaps their design actually made matters worse by stopping red and infrared radiation.
I suspect there will be small arguments going on all over Paris tonight. How many Irishmen for instance have come over for a long weekend with their wifes to give them a Valentine’s Day treat on Tuesday? And how many French are wanting to get back the South-West, where most of their rugby is placed?
It’s just been said on BBC Radio 5, that the reason the Stade de France has no undersoil heating , is that it was built on an old rubbish dump and methane rises out of the soil.
Who’s To Blame for the Eurocrisis?
I just found this rather deep and thorough approach on the BBC.
To summarise, it says that because France and Germany cooked the books, with Gordon Brown’s help, to get round the Maastrict rules, that it is now acceptable for anybody to overspend.
Will the French Presidential Election Throw a Big Spanner in the Eurodeal?
The front page article in The Times is all about how Francois Hollande will change the economic direction of France when he becomes President. I said when rather than if, as the polls are strongly in his favour. He also said he would rip-up the EU’s fiscal treaty.
The psaper gives a detsiled analysis of what his policies will mean and I suspect David Cameron, Angela Merkel and anybody in France, who earns more than the average wage won’t like it. A lot of his proposals would also be against the rules of the single market.
Having read what Hollande said, I think it will be good for Britain and especially London and the City, as his proposed rules will drive entrepreneurs from France. Not that they have had many since Mitterand.
One thing I suspect that he won’t like is foreigners, who keep a house in France. I suspect thery’ll be taxed heavily and a pleasure will suddenly have become a nightmare.
Un Petit Amusement de la France
A friend sent me this amusing clock from France.
Just click it and it changes from analogue to digital and vice-versa.
Don’t worry if your French is not up to the level that is acceptable for a Republican presidential candidate as any liguaphobe can understand it.
By the way, I haven’t found a similar nude women clock.
Only In The United States Could Speaking French be a Disadvantage
According to this account on the BBC’s web site, Mitt Romney is being denounced for being able to speak French and actually doing it in public.
I think we have a rather different attitude in Europe, as although we argue with the French many of our politicians have used French when talking publicly in France. Although, we do make a joke of it between us. As two old friends would. Apparently, the French version of Allo Allo deliberately used bad French as a joke, even more than the English version did with Officer Crabtree being a deliberate parody of Edward Heath.
Remember too, the Queen speaks reasonable French, as this article attests.
We now live in a world, where many more people are bilingual, as their parents were immigrants. So the US has a large proportion of Spanish speakers and we have quite a lot of speakers of many other languages.
But go back to 1900 and has anything changed. Yiddish and German would have been heard in many places in London and New York for a start.
But now, only in America would the ability to speak a foreign language be considered to be a handicap for a politician!
The Anonymous Widower 