Cool.

When I walked into my building just now, I said "Bonsoir" to a French Senator.

Another good word

pixilated (PIK-suh-layt-id) adjective

1. Mentally unbalanced; eccentric.

2. Whimsical.

[From pixie, a mischievous fairylike creature.]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=pixilated

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"Robert De Niro redeems himself after his disastrous work in 'The Fan' by
displaying a refreshing flair for screwball comedy as Bessie's pixilated
physician, Dr. Wally."
James Verniere; 'Marvin's Room' Hits Home; Boston Herald; Jan 10, 1997.

NYT comment

If voters had a sense of history, an appreciation of human variety expressed through culture, an acceptance and application of scientific truths, and dispositions to think critically, or at least insisted that their elected leaders have these qualities, then perhaps we wouldn’t be looking for optimism. We would be looking for wisdom. The two are not the same.

— Posted by dan stern

Favorite Quote of the Day (But way too optimistic)

Dirk Cheney would croak due to the pressue, but he's in line for jail time first.

We might be seeing Pelosi as the first female president which I consider an excellent opportunity.

Posted by: christofay | October 23, 2006 at 11:12 AM

Very sad

Such a sad story.

Great word.

pertinacious (pur-tin-AY-shuhs) adjective

1. Holding resolutely to a purpose, belief, or opinion.

2. Stubbornly unyielding.

[From Latin pertinac- pertinax, per- (thoroughly) + tenax (tenacious),
from tenere (to hold).]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=pertinacious

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"A man is pertinacious when he defends his folly and trusts too greatly
in his own wit."
Geoffrey Chaucer; Canterbury Tales: Explicit Secunda Pars Penitentie;
1387-1400 (Translation: Walter W. Skeat).

The Big Bang

"[T]he notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery. ...

"Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communication antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise--a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year, the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as 'white dielectrical material,' or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.

"Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough in space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang ..."

"Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized at once what the two young men had found. 'Well, boys, we've just been scooped,' he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone. ...

"Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation ... they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times."

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway, 2003, pp. 11-12.

Testing.... My iTunes "Party Shuffle"

From The Same Hill 3:00 Brian Eno Music For Films Electronic 14 20/10/06 11:39 AM
Night Fight 3:11 Tan Dun Crouching.Tiger.Hidden.Dragon. Soundtrack 2 20/10/06 11:42 AM
Joyful Sounds 3:45 S-WORD The Word Rock 2 20/10/06 11:45 AM
Ozone 1:39 Brian Eno [Textures] Electronic 2 20/10/06 11:47 AM
01 Aria 3:05 Composer: J.S.Bach; Pianist: Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations BWV 988 Classical 4 20/10/06 11:50 AM
Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber - Part II 5:08 Wu-Tang Clan Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) Hip-Hop
One Love 4:48 Massive Attack Blue Lines Trip-Hop
Hindsight 6:51 DJ Shadow Preemptive Strike (CD1) Electronic 11 25/4/06 2:16 PM
Octopus's_Garden 2:47 The Beatles Abbey Road Classic Rock
Willie 5:57 Cat Power The Greatest Indie 6 28/9/06 10:26 PM
Pueblo Nuevo 6:08 Buena Vista Social Club Unknown Jazz
Keyboard Concerto 0:30 RZA The Formula for the Cure Hip-Hop
Improvisation #2 6:39 Miles Davis The Cellar Door Sessions [Disc 2] Jazz 1 25/1/06 12:12 AM
Highway Chile 3:35 Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced? Classic Rock
The Fake Headlines 2:45 The New Pornographers Mass Romantic Indie
Suzy Lee 3:23 The White Stripes The White Stripes Indie 1 4/10/05 7:03 PM
Waltz No. 12 in F minor/A flat, Op. 70 No. 2 1:44 Chopin, Frederic The Piano Works Disc 8// Waltzes Classical
07 Led Zeppelin - [Complete Studio Recordings (CD 01)] - 07 - Communication Breakdown 2:28 Led Zeppelin [Complete Studio Recordings (CD 01)] Classic Rock
Way To Blue 3:11 Nick Drake Five Leaves Left Indie 4 12/10/06 8:29 PM
Yakuza Oren 1 0:20 RZA Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Soundtrack 3 16/8/06 10:32 PM
E lucevan le stelle 3:45 Giacomo Puccini Tosca (Disk 2 of 2) Classical

Wow

I am a bad blogger (and I think I may be starting over with a new blog), but this picture is just killing me.

How Sad.

Even the French have home remodeling shows.

Larry David

"Andy Breckman: I was there when Larry David wrote for Saturday Night Live. He was there for one season and he did not get one sketch on the air. Not one. And then he went on to do Seinfeld and be Mr. NBC. It was a Dick Ebersol year, and I'm sure that Larry has nothing good to say about Dick Ebersol, but of the sketches that Larry David didn't get on, some of them ... became the seeds of Seinfeld episodes. ... One sketch was about a guy who left a message on his girlfriend's answering machine that he regretted leaving, and he broke into his girlfriend's house to retrieve the answering machine tape. ...

"Elliot Wald: Larry would write pieces that, you know, we would just be falling on the floor over. Some of those became great Seinfeld episodes. The one about trying to get someone's apartment at a wake? Elaine did that in Seinfeld, but Larry wrote it first as a sketch. And we were falling down laughing. And Dick would say, 'That's not going on the air; that's not funny.' ...

"Larry David: It was the day before read-through around seven o'clock ... and I had been there maybe three weeks ... I had already written written maybe two or three sketches and maybe two news pieces for the update thing. So I was all set.

"So I'm waiting for the elevator to go home, and I remember Dick came out of the elevator, and I said, 'Good night,' and he said, 'What are you doing?!?' I said, 'Oh, I'm going home.' And he looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said, 'What do you mean, going home?' I said, 'Well, I've written three sketches and two news pieces and that's it, you know.' And he goes, 'But we stay up all night.' I go, 'What for?' He says, 'To write the show. That's when we write the show.' I said, 'But I've already written three pieces.' And he goes, 'Well, we stay here all night.' I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. And I said, 'I'm not staying up all night. For what? What am I going to do--just walk around? I'm all done.' So we kind of looked at each other and I said, you know, 'Good luck,' and I got on the elevator and left. I think that was the beginning of the end for me.' "

Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller, Live from New York, Little, Brown, 2002, pp. 269-272.

Sorry

I moved to a new flat in Paris, so I have been very busy.

I will update soon. But I will leave you with a picture. The building dates from the 17th century.