[les étrangers] how the british and french really see one another

From the pre-blogging days comes this BBC gem and I’m not being ironic. The comments from readers which follow it are also revealing:

Two-hundred years to the day after France's defeat at Trafalgar many Brits still view their cross-channel neighbours with suspicion and antipathy. The French however, think we should just get over it.

France is the UK's top tourist destination, with 12 million British visitors each year, while the UK is the second most popular spot for French tourists with over three million visits a year. The air route from Paris to London is the busiest in the world, carrying some 3.3 million passengers a year... then there's the Channel Tunnel.

Such statistics might fool a person into thinking the British and the French actually like each other. But even though it is over 100 years since the Entente Cordiale was signed, pledging Britain and France to a lasting political friendship, relations on many fronts are decidedly frosty.

But the main problem seems to lie here. Stereotyped by the Brits as garlic-loving, snail-eating, skirt-chasing, shoulder-shrugging "Frogs", the French don't really care what the British think.

"Les Rosbifs" are not important to the average French person. Nobody is pretending that this is full blown racism, rather the inheritance of 'acceptable' attitudes of suspicion and isolationism," says Richard Kaye, organiser, Entente Cordiale exhibition

"Most of the French feel neither burning animosity nor deep affection towards the British," says Christian Roudaut, author of a book on Anglo-French relations, L'Entente Glaciale. "I'm sure the British would say this represents precisely the sort of arrogance for which the French are notorious in the UK.

And the age-old French stereotypes appear to show no signs of disappearing in the UK. 72 % of Britons questioned in a recent survey believed the French warranted their negative stereotype, while only 19% of French believe the Brits deserved their "Rosbifs" tag.

While Franco-British enmity stretches back centuries, many of the xenophobic stereotypes of the French in today's society stem from the post-war period, according to Professor David Walker, from the University of Sheffield.

"The French are a kind of sibling, cast in the same mould as us, but showing how the same genes can express themselves in alternative ways," says Dr Wendy Michallat, an expert in popular French culture.

Read more here …

[the ashes] death of cricket and of life as we know it

This series is the Ashes, commemorating the death of English cricket back in the dim, dark past. But now we have a dim, dark future and the death of cricket has become, first the erosion of all forms of enjoyment, then a flood of suppression, all in the name of security. Security?

Balderdash [there are ladies present]

Just what are the draconian security measures supposed to prove? What exactly do they prevent? Would they prevent an organized guerilla group dropping from the skies or lobbing grenades? There was an attempt at a Mexican wave and whereas it would have been good-naturedly tolerated earlier, this time it was ruthlessly suppressed and the culprits dragged from the ground. These were hooligans, that’s all. Hooligans with a skinful on a hot summer’s day. These were not terrorists – not in any way.

I resent this. I resent that the PTB created this whole political situation by misrepresenting it to the patriotic public, stirring up the muslim world then, by allowing known malcontents to slip past the screen, creaed 911 and 7/7 and right there and then was the pretext to rob the ordinary person of everything he had and to militarize the state. Oh it's on the way to being militarized all right and they don’t give a tinker’s cuss for any talk of 'rights'. They say that bodysearching cricket fans and over regulating a festival of pleasure, a cricket match [well, not pleasure from England’s point of view maybe] is a necessary counter-insurgency measure.

Bullsh-- [excuse my French]

And anyway, England will fight back on the field sooner or later, by the way.

[iraq] there are things which don't add up here

Happier moments in Iraq

The Reuters headline said it: Mosques torched after worst Iraq bombing. It doesn’t add up. There are too many anomalies here. For a start, it was done ‘untroubled by a curfew enforced in the capital by U.S. and Iraqi forces’. How so? Then there was the simple fact of Muslims burning down their mosques. Then this: One witness said 14 people were killed in his mosque during Friday prayers: "It was attacked by rocket-propelled grenades. That had to have been funded and the hardware had to actually have been brought in.

The original split between the sects came in the 7th Century over what was essentially a political dispute over who should lead Islam after the Prophet Mohammed. The Shiites wanted the leadership to pass through the prophet's family. When his cousin Ali was passed over for the job, his followers became known as the "Shiat Ali," or "partisans of Ali." Sunnis and Shiites live and work side-by-side, intermarry and, broadly speaking, follow the same core religious tenets. So how can they rocket attack and burn buildings dedicated to Allah? Torch each other – that’s possible.

In Algeria, there’s a clue: The GIA [Muslim guerillas] started coming up with new touches to keep the game interesting: burning people alive, bayoneting babies, raping and killing children in front of their parents. All in the name of God, you understand. Then came the GIA splinter group I read about - the Disciples of Satan. They started out as GIA fighters, but they got so messed up by what they'd seen and done that they decided there must not be a God at all. They turned into Islamic Satanists and went around trying to find newer and sicker ways to kill people as a way of making Satan happy. So they were doing the same sick stuff as ever, but in Satan's name instead of Allah's. He appears to be alive and well in Iraq as well. After all, the I—tar Gate is a national monument in Iraq and you know whom that’s dedicated to.

[animal lust] right old rogering in a christmas window

Time to lower the tone. Yesterday, in a Melbourne department store window Christmas display, a platypus appeared to be rogering a wombat.

A malfunction caused the “accidental and unfortunate positioning of the two characters in this year's Christmas windows titled Wombat Devine,” the store apparently explained.

"I don't know what to think," said a mother of four. "They look like they are ... involved."

Morning radio programs were flooded with upset callers who thought what they had seen in the particular window was in bad taste. But some people weren't at all upset by the graphic scenes. "It's for kids and they don't think like we [adults] do so I'm sure they wouldn't even notice it," said one woman with her grandchildren. In another scene, two koalas appeared to be intimately involved and this was posted on youtube.com. Looks a little more than a 'malfunction' to me but I might be much mistaken.

[christopher beale] 6 year old's book launch tomorrow

This and Last Seasons' Excursions by Christopher Beale

Do you remember the recent post about six year old Christopher Beale’s new book and how he is in the Guiness Book of Records now?

His book launch is tomorrow, Saturday, November 25th, at 14:30, at the Borders, Oxford Street. If you are in London and can possibly spare a few minutes and maybe snap up a copy – I’d greatly appreciate it. I’m going to see how I can buy one too from over here. [Not being on the grid 'n all, I can’t use the net.]

[nagging] how can it ever achieve the desired result

Picture which some ladies find offensive and which I think is fundamentally flawed - girls are a lot more subtle than that.

Men nag about sex. Yes they do and it drives women mad.

Now, having done my bit on behalf of the ladies, we need to look at the other side of the coin. A short time ago, there was a most unpleasant scene next door and it’s rare for this particular couple. He was shouting at the top of his voice and from what I could make out, was indicating that she was dragging him to an early grave etc. She could not be heard. I often hear this sort of thing from neighbours above, below, left and right.

What does it indicate – that men are nervous creatures? Or that they’ve reached the end of their tether? The carefully placed female word can carry a lot of power when it wants but I do wonder what they are trying to achieve? I asked some girls why they harp on about things and they said, ‘So that it will finally sink in.’ By which generally accepted, efficacious psychological theory does this method work? I would have thought you’d get what you want by the opposite – building up his ego.

Sam Brett ran a post on this issue sometime back and I did as well.