Hello and welcome to the zillion new readers I seem to have acquired over the weekend (Thank you, New York Times!) Thank you for your comments, and your emails. Some of you are nice, some of you are cheeky, and all of you are welcome.
And some food for thought on the upcoming French presidential contest between Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, from the Wall Street Journal:
"Sarko is an anti-anti-American, Ségo at least agnostic, but both are also self-avowedly "pragmatic," ...Polls also show that voters by wide margins want their leaders to "take care of them," not the world beyond, which is a big shift in the last decade.
So are the French turning -- dare one utter this word
-- "pro-American"? Not exactly....
Yet the options on offer give the imagination pause.
Freed of its hatred for the U.S. and other postwar illusions, this
country may be usefully constructive for a change in dealing with Iran,
Russia, the Arab world, China, and so on. This France would finally
bury the ghosts of its awful 20th century. And de Gaulle could at last
rest in peace."
In the spirit of the possibility of a newfound amity, and in the spirit of the fantastic weekend I just spent in Paris (it really is very beautiful and everyone seems nice, for the most part), from this day forth, the joke below will be the last joke about France I ever write on this blog:
Q. Have you heard about the French army's new tanks?
A. Mais oui! They go very slowly forward, and have four speeds of reverse.
But even though that was my last French joke, don't worry, I'll still make jokes about other things. Like this:
Q. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. That's not funny!
Comments