Stale French bread, a/k/a concrete

A kind soul at school suggested that I might enjoy eating plain bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar as a meal. I tried this, and I liked it. I've made it an important part of my diet, because it's cheap, and because it is (hopefully) good for me (olive oil, vinegar, fresh bread—they are all supposed to be good for nutrition).

The only problem with this plan is that French bread has a shelf life of about 35 seconds. The standard French baguette is about one yard in length and an inch or two in diameter, and when fresh from the oven, it has a soft interior and a hard crust. About 60 minutes after leaving the oven, the interior mutates into reinforced concrete, and the crust mutates into tungsten steel, making the baguette inedible for anything smaller than a tyrannosaurus. An excellent way to break a tooth while visiting France is to make the mistake of biting into a three-hour-old baguette.

This isn't necessarily a problem for independently wealthy men and women of leisure, who can afford to trot off to the local boulangerie thrice daily to buy just enough bread for their next meal. For anyone who wishes to save time or money by buying bread in advance, however, it's extremely frustrating.

I've managed to work around this in a number of ways. First, not all French breads have a hard crust. Another type of French bread loaf, the parisienne, is fatter around the middle and has a much softer crust than the baguette, so often I try to buy one of these (they seem to go faster than the baguettes—I wonder why). There are also Italian panini-style breads in many bakeries, which are shorter, more rectangular, and quite soft, and sometimes I buy those. All of these breads have the same ingredients; only the way they are shaped and cooked seems to differ. They are all good fresh out of the oven, but the parisiennes and paninis survive a lot better than the baguettes.

I have also learned that bread keeps poorly in the fridge, but very well in the freezer, so I buy several parisiennes or panini loaves and stuff them into my tiny freezer. They will keep for days in the freezer. When it comes time to eat them, I put them into my tiny microwave and nuke them for about 2½ minutes, and they come out feeling and tasting as fresh as when I bought them. With the aforementioned olive oil and vinegar, they make an excellent little meal. (It helps that it is much easier to get top-quality olive oil and vinegar in France than it is in the U.S.)

I don't mean by this tirade to insult French bread generally. It's delicious when it's fresh. It's just that the traditional hard crust is difficult to chew, and it turns into porcelain so quickly that it's not very practical to keep French bread around for more than a few hours without eating it. And what really makes bread tasty is the freshness, not the Frenchness, so other fresh breads taste pretty good, too. Fresh breads of every description are extremely easy to find in Paris.

Stale baguettes are not completely useless. If you have a sledgehammer, you can use them to pierce holes for conduit in granite or marble walls and facades. With a suitable launching device, you can use them as armor-piercing ordnance (void where prohibited by law). You can attach two of them together with a length of cord and use them as nunchaku. You can bolt a few of them together, shape them with diamond-tipped tools, and use them as propellers for aircraft. And the lead-like density of the stale crust makes them useful for shielding against x rays or gamma rays. So they need never be wasted, even though they are dangerous to teeth after 180 minutes.

French censorship

Today, for reasons I can't recall (it's often that way when you're surfing the Web), I was searching Google for some audio of Hitler speaking “normally,” that is, audio when he was not yelling and screaming in a public speech, as he was wont to do. I clicked on the first link that came up, a YouTube video, and I got a message telling me that the video was not available in my country—that is to say, in France, where I live.  It seems that YouTube censors content by country, preferring cowardice to freedom. France, like a number of other European countries, engages in censorship of anything having to do with the Nazis, and apparently someone complained about this video (it's unlikely that YouTube noticed itself) and had it banned in France. So much for freedom of speech, eh? The same video does not show up in a direct search on YouTube, at least not from my location, so I would not have even known that it existed had it not shown up on Google (Google censors, too, but like YouTube, it acts mainly based on complaints). Based on what I saw in the link, it would not have been what I was looking for, anyway, since it again portrayed you-know-who yelling and screaming in a speech, but it was the first link, so I figured I'd check it out. But I guess that's only possible in countries that respect basic freedoms, not in France. Of course, to be fair, France is hardly the only country in the world that restricts freedom of speech. The United States does the same with materials it finds objectionable. While the French are scared of Nazis, Americans are scared of sex, and so many materials deemed tame in France are banned in the U.S.—while many materials deemed harmless in the U.S. are banned in France. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. It's unfortunate that no country really provides complete freedom of speech, despite strident claims to the contrary (both the U.S. and France like to crow about being free, but this is only true when you compare them to some of the basket cases in other parts of the world). Among the European tribes, the Germans are even worse than the French when it comes to censorship. In Nazi Germany, heavy censorship was a key tool of oppression. And today, heavy censorship is still a key tool of oppression. The more things change, the more they remain the same. The irony of this is entirely lost on the Germans (and on the French, and on others who rationalize their censorship in similar ways). Today French and German censors insist that their censorship is for the common good. But the Nazis insisted on the very same thing. When will people learn that censorship is never a good thing?

Cute puppy dog

On the way to school today, I saw a man walking with an adorable black labrador puppy. The puppy was very well behaved, staying close to his master, not trying to run around and sniff things as most puppies do. The puppy was wearing a little blue jacket that said “Future Chien Guide d’Aveugle” (“Future Guide Dog for the Blind”). He was already doing very well; I'm sure he'll be a good guide dog when he grows up. Being a puppy, there was still a substantial spring in his walk, which was cute to watch, even though he obeyed his master like a grown-up. I didn't have time to take a photo, but I did observe for a few seconds as the trainer taught him to wait at the stoplight and cross when it was safe.

Food on the rue Saint Antoine, and MSF

I managed to go for a walk recently in the excellent weather of the past few days (before it started to get hot), and I found myself on the rue de Rivoli, which runs roughly parallel to the Seine River from the place de la Concorde almost to the Bastille (it becomes the rue Saint-Antoine just prior to arriving there).

I took the Métro to Châtelet, right in the center of town. From there I walked east along the rue de Rivoli. I noted that the scaffolding that had hidden the Saint-Jacques Tower for years has finally been removed, revealing a nicely restored Gothic monument (the church to which the tower was attached is long gone, but the tower itself is still impressive, especially now that it has been restored).

From there I continued to the Hôtel de Ville—that is to say, City Hall. (Hôtel in French means any large building, not just a hotel, and ville means “city,” so a hôtel de ville is a city hall.) The ice rink was gone, now that warm weather has returned, but there was a small trailer and table from Médecins San Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) sitting in one corner of the plaza.

A lady in a MSF t-shirt walked up to me and asked if I wanted to know about MSF and how they were dealing with malnutrition. Actually, I did know: They use products like Plumpy'nut.® I told her so, and she seemed surprised (I suspect that hardly anyone she talks to has ever heard of Plumpy'nut, but I take an interest in such things).

Plumpy'nut is a remarkable product invented by a French scientist ten years ago to fight starvation in children. It is manufactured by Nutriset, a French company dedicated to products for humanitarian organizations. Plumpy'nut is interesting in that it can rescue a small child from death from starvation by providing all the nutrition a child needs to return to a fair state of health. It contains peanut paste, oil, milk, sugar, and a ton of vitamins and essential micronutrients, all in a sealed foil pack that has a shelf life of at least two years and requires no refrigeration. It's ready to eat right from the pack, and needs no added water or other ingredients. It's soft, like watery peanut butter, so that even a child too weak to chew can eat it. One pack contains 500 kcal of nutrition, and two packs a day for a month can save a starving child, for a cost of about €21 (around $25). Given the ingredients, it's incredibly fattening, but of course that's the whole idea when you're trying to keep a child from starving.

I was very intrigued to see that samples of Plumpy'nut were on a small table in front of the trailer. The manager of the exhibition came over to see me while I was looking at the Plumpy'nut, and we talked. I was able to taste a sample of Plumpy'nut … and it tasted great. Like the peanut butter in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, only softer and somewhat sweeter. Children are very willing to eat Plumpy'nut because of its pleasant taste, even when they are not starving, and children suffering from malnutrition adore it.

Somehow I talked myself into pledging a tiny amount to MSF. They wouldn't take one-time donations, so I signed a paper to give them €4.33 per month. That doesn't amount to much, but since my bank account is often empty or negative, I couldn't afford to pledge any more than that—I'm not even sure that I'll be able to cover that amount each month, but I'll see what I can do. It should work out to two people saved from starvation per year.

It occurred to me that the trillions of dollars that the United States is printing in order to allow certain rich people to avoid the consequences of their greed would be sufficient to save all starving children in the world many times over. In fact, one trillion dollars would buy enough food to feed all the starving children in the world from birth through their teens. I guess it's more important to use the money being printed to pay the bonuses of AIG and GM executives. But I digress.

Anyway, after spending some time watching a video inside the tiny trailer that described MSF's work during 2008, I continued walking along the rue de Rivoli. There was some sort of free cartoon expo going on at City Hall, but I'm not into stuff like that, and the line to get in was very long. There's almost always some sort of exposition taking place there, as there's an exhibition hall available for such things. The last exhibition I saw was a 1960s photo retrospective by a celebrity photographer, showing all sorts of (French) teen idols from those days.

There are lots of cool shops along the rue de Rivoli as you move east of City Hall, with all sorts of things on both sides, although the south side tends to have a lot of food shops and cafés whereas the north side is more clothing and other things. I walked on the south side because it's more charming and in the shade.

Of course, in France, we have no problems with starvation: you can get any kind of food you want here, and you can get the best quality, too. Just walking down the rue de Rivoli proves this. Today was a market day in the open market next to City Hall, so there was food there as well (even fresher and more expensive than the other stuff). There were also lots of flower shops … I'm not sure what Parisians do with all the flowers they buy, but they buy enough to keep many florists in business.

There are specialty shops that sell only produce or just fruits or only dairy products. And many butcher shops have large rotisseries out in front that cook chickens all day long—I think they put them outside because the delicious smell that wafts from them down the street brings in customers. By the time you buy the chicken, the tender meat just melts in your mouth, and the butcher will usually throw in some gravy and potatoes that have been soaking in it along with the chicken.

I had not eaten anything so this all made me quite hungry. Rather than actually buy something, which I can't afford (and I'm supposed to be trying to diet, anyway), I walked home to get some exercise, going through the Latin Quarter.

The tourist season is about to start, and I can already see an increase in the number of people in touristy areas. I have no problem with that; everyone likes Paris.

In the Latin Quarter, for some reason, you see endless concerts advertised on every available flat wall space. They are generally classical music concerts, sometimes of famous works but occasionally also of obscure works. Sometimes they are free, often you have to pay some sort of admission. There are so many posters for them, and they are scheduled in such profusion, that I wonder how the organizers keep track of which posters they've put up where—but sometimes they even manage to put stickers on the posters when they sell out a concert, so perhaps they have some vast computer back at the office that knows exactly where the posters are. The posters always seem to be in simple black lettering on white or brightly-colored paper, and occasionally there's a grainy picture of the composer whose work is being featured, or the venue. I wonder how many tickets they manage to sell to these things. I couldn't afford to attend even if I wanted to.

After going through the Latin Quarter and getting a huge cup of ice cream at my favorite ice-cream place therein, I walked the rest of the way home. The weather was excellent all the way. Spring is definitely on the way.

Spring is here, and the transformation of the Champs

The equinox has just passed, and the weather has started moving towards that nearly ideal combination of temperature, sun, fluffy clouds, humidity, and wind that makes spring in Paris justifiably famous. It's a pleasure to walk around the city at this time of year. The weather is wonderful, at least by my standards—some people might still find it a bit chilly for their tastes (daytime temperatures are around 12-15° C, or 54-59° F).

Recently I was walking around on the Champs and kept smelling some sort of perfume (and it must have been strong if I could smell it). I couldn't identify who was wearing it, and I started wondering if some wildly popular perfume had recently come onto the market. It finally dawned on me that the smell was coming from trees on the avenue. I don't know what kind of trees they are, but they looked like something was growing on them (can you tell that botany is not my specialty?), and apparently the part that was growing was also producing a fragrance. I only got whiffs of it intermittently, but it was pleasant.

Speaking of the Champs, multiple informed sources tell me that the avenue gets a bit dicey in the wee hours. In the old days, the avenue was busy 24 hours a day, and it still is, but the character of the crowds now changes by around 2 AM. By that time, various dregs from the suburbs have rolled in on the subways, and several species of low life, including drug dealers and the like, are frequenting the increasingly disreputable strip clubs that have been moving into side streets of the avenue. There are a lot of nightclubs just off the avenue, and some of the younger clubs attract a very rowdy clientele. Clubs staffed by entraîneuses (women dressed in underwear who will cheerfully talk to male patrons in close proximity as long as the latter buy overpriced bottles of cheap alcohol at regular intervals) have moved into the area, whereas one used to see them only in places like Pigalle. Sometimes fights break out on the street between drunken, angry young males, and occasionally gangs decide to fight each other on the avenue. I guess turning their own communities in the ’burbs into garbage heaps wasn't good enough for them, and now they want to effect the same transformation on Paris itself.

I rarely walk the streets in the wee hours these days (more out of simple disinclination than out of any feeling of insecurity), but it's still unfortunate to hear that there are so many troublemakers on the Champs. Paris is generally a safe city at any time of day in just about any neighborhood, but some areas are less recommendable than others, and now the Champs is moving onto the seedy list, at least between 2 AM and 5 AM or so.

If you can't get an Oscar, try a César

Yesterday the Césars ceremony was held in Paris. The Césars are cinema awards similar to the Academy Awards in the United States, except on a microscopic, specifically French scale. They are named after a sculptor who created the statuette for the awards, which looks very much like a washing machine that has been sent through a trash compactor.

The Césars are terribly famous in France, but essentially unknown everywhere else. Many of the awards go to people and films that will never be exported. It's interesting to see how people become fixated on something and give it tremendous importance, even as it is completely unknown and ignored elsewhere. It's a blend of the big-fish-small-pond syndrome and the local-celebrity syndrome. The Césars are front-page news in France.

It reminds me of the frequent (American) claim that a billion people watch the Super Bowl. Of course, that claim isn't true. In theory, a billion people could tune in to see the Super Bowl, but in fact nobody outside the U.S. actually does so, so the real audience is limited mainly to the United States (around 100 million viewers). But I still see American visitors in France asking what people thought of the game when Super Bowl season comes around, and they are surprised to learn that nobody here even knows what the game is.

If you want an audience of a billion, try World Cup soccer. But that event has virtually no viewers in the U.S. The world is a big place.

Anyway, the Césars are like a mini-Oscars, with a smaller budget, smaller attendance, smaller impact, and so on, but with big ambitions. I don't watch the Oscars, and so I'm certainly not going to watch the Césars. I've heard that Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture at the Oscars, but that's all I know, and that's more than I know about the new crop of Césars.

As for Fouquet's, where the stars come after the ceremony, it's a strange place, right on the fabulous Champs-Élysées. The name, with its apostrophe, is a deliberate anglicism. In front of the main entrance, there are brass plaques in the sidewalk listing winners of the César award. The place is said to be expensive and chichi; I've never been inside. Part of the café has been designated a historical monument. At the same time, back in 1994, the establishment was cited for multiple health regulation violations, with cockroaches in the kitchen and flies on the potatoes (the then-director claimed that every restaurant has flies on its potatoes, which is news to me). And in 1999 there was a bit of a scandal over the fact that the venue wouldn't admit unaccompanied women, because it considered them to be prostitutes—I don't know if that 18th-century policy is still in place, but for me it's reason enough to stay away. Right now, there are several parties suing and counter-suing each other in a dispute over who actually owns the building in which Fouquet's is located.

In any case, I won't set foot inside Fouquet's, ever since one of their rent-a-cops assaulted me on the sidewalk in front of the café some years ago.

But I digress … let's see, who actually won the Césars? Let me look this up … Okay, a movie called Séraphine won the Best Picture César, and an actress named Yolande Moreau won the Best Actress award. Now I know more about the Césars than I do about the Oscars. I'm not sure if that's good or bad; I think it's mainly unimportant.

So why do I write about the Césars at all? Well, mainly because the festivities interfere with traffic on the Champs, that's all.

Not that I don't like movies. I enjoy movies, even a few French films, although I tend to find American films more entertaining (and if I watch a movie, it's mainly because I wish to be entertained). And I'm not alone: if you walk around Paris, you see that seven out of ten films at the cinemas are American films (usually dubbed, sometimes subtitled), so it seems that even the French aren't fond of French films.

The world of French cinema is kind of complicated. Maybe I'll discuss it in a future blog post.

Paris Hilton sold out, Diana mostly forgotten, Vélib's disappearing

I was quite astonished to see recently that the Paris Hilton, a landmark hotel in Paris near the Eiffel Tower, has sold out to Pullman, a rebuilt up-market brand of the European Accor group of hotels. This had been a Hilton for nearly half a century, since 1966, and I hardly expected it to change hands, but it has.

The first time I noticed this, there was a film crew making a moving at the hotel, so I thought it was just a change for the movie, especially since the Pullman signs seemed stuck on as an afterthought. But no … the hotel has actually been sold, just this month. With their flagship hotel gone, Hilton now has only the smaller property near the Arc de Triomphe within the city limits; it's a nice hotel, but not as historically significant as the one near the Eiffel Tower. True, the Eiffel Tower property was showing its age—the 1960s architecture has dated badly—but it was still a nice place. I wonder where Bill Gates will stay during his trips to Paris now? (Supposedly the ex-CEO of Microsoft preferred this Hilton.) And this also ruins all sorts of Paris Hilton jokes (the Paris Hilton with big feet, not the landmark hotel).

Walking to school to save a Métro ticket (I had only 50 cent in my pocket, and no prospect of additional income until mid-March), I ran across no less than three different movie location shoots. There are about nine location shoots a day in Paris, and if you walk around on a weekday there's a reasonable chance that you'll run across one of them, but three in one morning was quite exceptional. One of them was at the aforementioned ex-Hilton. I don't know what any of them were for. You get used to seeing this sort of thing. It's like living in Los Angeles.

Passing the replica of the Statue of Liberty's flame on the Alma bridge, I noted that it was pretty clean, apart from a few graffiti and other junk still rambling on about Princess Diana. I suppose her groupies are all grown up now, and of course none have replaced them, since she is no longer with us (PBUH).

And strolling past one of the innumerable Vélib’ stations in the city, I was reminded of the recent complaints of JC Decaux (which has the contract for the bicycle system) that vandalism and theft are costing it huge amounts of money—supposedly nearly half of the inventory of bicycles has been stolen and has required replacement, at some $500 per bicycle. But JC Decaux has very juicy and exclusive deals with the city, so I take their complaints with a grain of salt. On the way home, by coincidence, I actually saw a Vélib’ boat carrying bicycles; perhaps that's an efficient way to redistribute them or something.

What else did I notice on my walk to work? Hmm … oh yes, there was the latest of Jean Nouvel's eyesores, the Musée du Quai Branly (there's something about that name that somehow seems appropriate for JN's masterpiece, but my desire to not nuire à la bienséance prevents me from going there). I tried to avert my gaze from the psychosis-inducing architecture of the museum itself, but I did take a look at the vegetation wall, to see how it was doing. This wall is an exterior wall that is designed to actually serve as a sort of vertical planter for all sorts of real, living plants. It still seems to be in fairly good shape, especially considering that this is wintertime. It's the only interesting and aesthetic part of the building, but it's not enough to compensate for the rest. Unfortunately, passing this building brought to mind depressing thoughts of Jean Nouvel designing a new eyesore to replace the Parc des Expositions on the south side of the city, a project that has been bandied about lately, but perhaps the current economic depression will stop that project (in which case at least something good will have come of the crisis).

I pass the Eiffel Tower quite often, and passing it today wasn't unusual in any way, but I did notice the “Eiffel Tower Rules” while passing beneath it, and I just had to take a picture. These rules are so typically French! There are about a thousand different rules, in type so tiny that you have to practically press your nose to the sign to read them, and they are chock full of interdits and non autorisés and Article 392 bis’s, and all those other frightening, absolute phrases that the French love to put in their overly-complicated and routinely-ignored rule collections. I doubt that anyone reads these rules, least of all the French. But complex rules are part of the ingenious system of selective enforcement upon which French society is based. Everyone knows that nobody can follow all the rules to the letter, so everyone is breaking a rule. However, breaking the rules is normally “tolerated,” so it doesn't matter. But when the French establishment wants to single someone out for punishment, it looks at all the rules, and finds a rule that the unlucky victim has broken, and then prosecutes. Thus, the illusion of equality and democracy is maintained, while the reality of inequality and favoritism is practiced. Of course, France isn't unique in this respect—it is quite common in Latin countries with their Napoleonic statutory laws.

Speaking of rules, I was looking at welfare programs for renters a few days ago, at someone else's suggestion (because I'm very poor, I have to try to find ways to save or make money at every opportunity). I did a calculation on the Web site of the CAF (the agency that handles many types of welfare), and sure enough, I theoretically would qualify for help with the rent, based on my meager income. There's just one problem, though: the law requires that any apartment for which this assistance is received be equipped with hot and cold running water in the “kitchen corner” (an alcove that serves as a kind of kitchen in apartments too modest to have the real thing) … and mine lacks the hot water. Oh well. You have to fill out a 2,458-page dossier with DNA samples from your great-grandparents and pay slips from the last Ice Age to apply, anyway, so I suppose it probably would have been refused on some other basis in any case.

Horses for courses

Paris regularly hosts at least one salon du cheval (horse show) and I keep meaning to attend one of them one of these days, but money and time constraints get in the way. I'm not a big fan of horses but I'm curious about many things and I'd be interested in seeing what it is about horses that creates fans.

Anyway, for what seems like quite a long time now, I've been seeing advertisements for a new video game, called Horse Life, which is unusual in that it actually seems to target girls. Most video games are created by teenage boys for other teenage boys, and thus never have much to them beyond what teenage boys like, and teenage boys don't have many interests beyond intense, repetitive action and violence. In practice, this means that the video game market is plagued by a permanent epidemic of first-person shooters, and very little with any intellectual content. So it's nice to see something targeting a different market. This title is unusual in that it seems to have been given quite an advertising budget. I've seen advertisements throughout the Métro and on sidewalk displays.

As I've said, I didn't go to the most recent Salon du Cheval, but informed sources tell me that this game had a booth and that there was quite a crowd of young girls playing with the game on display. So much the better. I'm so sick and tired of first-person shooters. Even games that claim not to be FPS typically really are. And that pretty much completely locks girls out of the picture, since few of them are interested in blowing up monsters for hours at a time.

In my own case, I tend to prefer simulation games, such as Flight Simulator, or The Sims 2, or Second Life. I did play Doom for a while long ago, although it gave me motion sickness and I soon exhausted the novelty of the game. Modern games are essentially the same thing with more eye candy.

Anyway, I think Horse Life (now in version 2, only months after the first version was released) comes from Germany or somewhere. The heavy advertising makes it exceptional. I visited the Web site and the trailers and screenshots looked okay, although apparently players are constrained to a single avatar that looks a lot like Ellen Whitaker, the celebrity endorser for the product. And little pink hearts (but no green clovers, thank goodness!) bubble out of your horse when you treat it well.

In contrast to this, I got Grand Theft Auto IV not long ago, at a discount price, and I almost installed it—until I discovered that Sony has its hands in the product and that it installs a rootkit. I don't like rootkits, so I skipped it. Too bad … it has a reputation so fabulous that I was willing to try it even though I don't like the angry-young-male style of FPS games.

What does all this have to do with Paris? Well, the ads for Horse Life are all over the town, or at least they were a few weeks ago, so I figured I'd comment on it.

A Stroll through Sin City

In halcyon days of yore, I had the money and time to take daily long walks (usually around three hours) through Paris. That's how I racked up no less than 50,000 kilometers of walking in the city over the years. Today I have neither money nor time, and so walking is a rare treat for me. Today I decided to take a modest stroll of about 2.5 hours in the city, for enjoyment and for health.

I took the Métro up to the place de Clichy. This is a large roundabout in the northwestern part of the city that is surrounded by restaurants and cinemas. It's fairly animated most of the time, and today was no exception, despite the chilly weather (temperatures around freezing).

Along the east side of the boulevard de Clichy, there are lots of restaurants. They range from McDonald's and KFC to standard Franco-French places like Charlot (well known for its shellfish—unfortunately I hate shellfish) and Wepler . It has a pleasant, not-too-chichi atmosphere.

As you move up the street, past the grim-looking Jules Ferry high school with its barred windows (all schools in Paris have barred windows—it makes me wonder what they do if the place catches fire), you enter infamous Pigalle, which Americans like to pronounce “pig alley,” although the correct pronunciation is “pee-gahl.” Pigalle was a French sculptor who would probably be horrified to learn what his name has become associated with. The name of this district has become synonymous with sex and naughty night life, although today it doesn't really offer anything that you wouldn't see in hundreds of Western cities. At one time it was quite unique and risqué.

I walked along the boulevard de Clichy, which is the main drag of Pigalle. On either side of the boulevard, you see mostly restaurants and sex shops (including the gigantic Sexodrome and an “erotic supermarket”). There are also a few live theaters, both legitimate (i.e., showing regular plays, nothing to do with sex) and “erotic” (sex shows). The restaurants are mostly simple places, and tend to blend in with pubs. There are quite a few Middle-Eastern places that serve sandwiches and other food to go.

Perhaps the best-known place in Pigalle is the Moulin Rouge (“Red Mill”) dinner theater, which has a very fancy stage show and also offers drinks and dinner. It's expensive but I'm told it's pretty good (I don't do dinner theaters myself). Today you can see the same or better in Las Vegas, but here again, when the Moulin Rouge first became popular, there was scarcely anything else like it; they were doing elaborate shows when Las Vegas was still filled with tumbleweeds. The place gets its name from the large red windmill that adorns it (the original burned down years ago, but it was replaced).

Another moderately famous place is Madame Arthur, a cabaret that features top female impersonators. I've never understood the attraction of female impersonation, given that real women are so much better looking and so much more female, but this venue has been around for ages. It has kind of a swirly orangish facade that's easy to spot, although it's on a side street off the boulevard. I've never been there.

Another place less known to tourists is the Musée de l'Érotisme (Erotica Museum). It's a museum dedicated to sex. Contrary to what you might think (and contrary to many other establishments on the boulevard), it is quite tastefully done, with seven floors of exhibits. I've been there once. I'm not interested in sex, so it wasn't very engrossing for me, but it's well organized, not the seedy sort of thing that you might expect.

In times past, one of my favorite spots in Pigalle was a little shop that sold all sorts of obsolete audio and video equipment. It was fascinating to look through their stuff and see how movies, video, audio, and photography have advanced in past decades. When you compare a U-Matic portable video set-up with a modern DV Handicam, you realize how far things have come in a relatively short time. Unfortunately, this little shop has disappeared. I guess it was hard to make money selling obsolete equipment. It was more of a museum than a shop, I think.

Further down the boulevard are some other stores that I like, which sell sound and music equipment. There's a guitar shop and a drum shop, too. Very cool stuff. I am interested in music, sound, and images. I bought a compact gadget at one of these shops once that combined a mixing table with a four-track cassette recorder. It was very cool, although I wasn't sure what to do with it (I used it once or twice). I can't even remember what happened to it. I must have sold it. That was in the days when I had money.

As you continue down the boulevard de Clichy and it becomes the boulevard de Rochechouart, the sex shops gradually disappear and are replaced by discount stores selling all kinds of junk. The atmosphere becomes a bit seedier after the rue de Steinkerque (which leads up to the Sacré-Cœur basilica on the Montmartre butte), and tourists are replaced by mostly Third-World immigrants (Africa, Middle East, some from Asia). It's usually very busy but not very glamorous. Eventually, you end up behind the Gare du Nord train station.

In my case, though, I turned south at the place Pigalle and walked down towards the Opéra district. There are some side streets here with shady bars that are filled with women in underwear who beckon to people outside. They have a habit of shafting customers who come in in search of female company, and sometimes they get nasty. I wonder why a woman would be willing to sit all day at a bar in her underwear; I guess it's a living, like anything else (a woman with this job is called an entraîneuse, which means “someone who drags (you in),” because her job is to entice people into the bar and then persuade them to buy a lot of overpriced liquor).

Lower down this street (the rue Frochot, if you must know), there's a place that has some gambling (permitted in certain ways and circumstances for private clubs). And at the bottom of the street, there's a private residence (I think it's a residence) next to a private drive that includes a beautiful stained-glass window. It's kind of incongruous, given what surrounds it. Stranger still, in the window I recognize what seems to be inspiration from The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, a woodblock print of a tsunami created by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai around 1820—quite an odd subject.

Below that, I eventually reached the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, which is lively as it approaches the boulevard Montmartre. On the latter I turned east, past the Max Linder cinema, one of a handful with giant screens still in business today (another is the Rex, which is just down the street). There are lots of shops on the boulevard, starting out chichi near the Opera, and then gradually transitioning into discount shops as you move east. There are also a great many restaurants of just about every type you might want.

When I reached the wicked rue Saint-Denis, I turned south. If you go north on this street, you pass all sorts of ethnic groceries, and it's pretty interesting, but that was out of my way, so I went south, down a street best known today for its prostitutes. The street has been greatly improved over the past few years, with new sidewalks, new cobblestones for the streets, and so on, and it looks very nice. The prostitutes are discreet, and there were few of them out on this cold evening. Most of them usually look exceedingly weatherbeaten, making me wonder how they avoid starvation, but I saw two on this evening who had cute faces, at least (the rest was hidden under fur coats).

Occasionally you see a group of men on the street standing across from a doorway. Often these are men waiting for very cheap sex with a prostitute who accommodates one client after another, usually under duress. The men want to have sex because they think it is necessary for their health (this is not a French belief, so most of the men are in fact not French), not because they are truly interested in it, so any sex will do for them. Not a pretty picture. I read a report once about a woman who had left a convent, trusted the wrong people, and ended up being one of these assembly-line prostitutes for several years until she found a way to sneak away and escape (actually, leaving was easy, but finding someplace else to go was hard).

Glancing into sidestreets, I saw a fair number of men standing alone near some buildings. They looked like—and probably were—either drug dealers or their clients. The USA has been exporting its obsession with drugs (and its drug dealers) to Europe for years, and every year it gets worse here in consequence.

As you move south on the rue Saint-Denis, the sex shops and prostitutes fade away, to be replaced by trendy clothing stores, restaurants, and bars. By the time you reach the Forum, the change is complete, and there are a lot more people around. Here you find yet another McDonald's and KFC (not to mention another Pizza Hut, another Starbucks, another Subway, and so on). I continued through this area and on down to the river.

I crossed the river onto the Île de la Cité, noted that the Sanisettes on the island had been turned off (more paranoia, I suppose), and continued past the big Christmas tree in front of Notre-Dame to the Left Bank. The Latin Quarter was especially crowded, as it always is, and the atmosphere was wonderful, as it always is. I stopped at the McDonald's here (yes, another one), ate dinner, and hopped on the Métro to go back home.

Score = zero

Well, the massive strike of Thursday is history now, and just about everyone has already forgotten about it. Looks like it wasn't nearly the megaevent that it was supposed to be. The country did not come to a standstill, and the trains still ran (albeit more slowly than usual in some cases). There was indeed a tremendous demonstration in Paris, but that was about it, and the government pretty much ignored the demonstrators.

With my luck running as it usually does, I had to walk through the tail end of this demonstration near the Opera after school. Lots of people had been brought in from the 'burbs and from the provinces in buses, mostly rabid union members who love to be in every demonstration, as far as I can tell. They seemed to be having a good old time, oblivious to the disruptions they were causing in the city and the futility of their actions.

It's still not clear what they were demanding. It probably doesn't matter. I think it was along the lines of more money, fewer working hours, more jobs, lower taxes, and the like. They might as well have demanded that golden toilet seats fall from the sky. But they were able to ditch a day of work, at least.

Around the Opera (the old Opéra Garnier), there were riot police (the CRS, part of the regular municipal police force) blocking the major avenues leading away from the Opera so that the demonstrators wouldn't get any ideas. The police wore their usually attired of body armor, shields, and mental screen barricades mounted on their trucks. Demonstrations rarely get out of hand in Paris, but the police remain prudently ready for anything, as once in a while angry young males at the bottom of the bell curve will start a disturbance. This crowd was tame, though. Most people seemed to be more interesting in laughing, chatting, and smoking cigarettes than in crashing through any barricades.

Of course, it took a long time to get past all this. Demonstrations always seem to happen right between me and the places I want to go. I had to cross this one twice as a result. The Métro was running, but too poorly to be worth using, so I just walked the entire way. The night was clear and chilly and I needed the exercise, although I could have done without the aggravation.

On the way home, seeing the clear sky, I looked for stars. That's usually a waste of time in a big city like Paris, and this night was no exception. I could see the Moon and a very brilliant Venus. All of the other lights that looked like stars turned out to be aircraft. Sometimes the roof of a building is darker than the sky in Paris, thanks to the frequent clouds and mistiness of the sky above the city and the brilliant lights on the ground below. The city itself is very pretty at night.