French presidential face book

Everybody on the planet Earth (and maybe beyond) knows what a face book is. Did you know that this kind of document (a collection of face portraits of class students or business colleagues) is referred to in French as a trombinoscope ? That word comes from trombine, a modification of bobine, meaning a human face. Click here to access the trombinoscope of all the 82 current candidates for next year’s French presidential election.

It's a little too early to print out and frame this beautiful array of splendid heads. It's more than likely that I'll soon be publishing a revised version, both bigger and better.

Nice French political people

Patrick Balkany and his wife Isabelle. You can see from their smiles that they’re contented. They have a son, Alexandre Balkany, who also has a childish variant of his dad's smile. God only knows why...

Alexandre has just had his passport confiscated, for an affair about helping his parents hide a luxurious villa in Morocco from taxation authorities. Smart smiling family.

When will they drone the big bastard?

The removal by drone of Abou Mohammad al-Adnani is great news.

Abou Mohammad al-Adnani

Over a period of five months, he was the third Daesh boss to be zapped. I often wonder if people in either the US or Russia will be rewarded the cash that has been placed upon the heads of such guys. Amazingly, the biggest bastard, Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still at large.

Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi

I would imagine that drone pilots are surely looking around for him day and night, and that he has to be most careful about the life he now leads. But it's mathematical that he’ll be located and drone-zapped in the near future.

What a privilege to be a French citizen in France today!

It's a privilege to be a French citizen living in this splendid country. Those words came into my mind spontaneously as I watched, on my Macintosh, the news from France's new TV channel. It's not that event in particular that prompted my patriotic thoughts, but rather a whole series of reasons. I'm tremendously proud to have a French passport, to own a French house, and to be living in France. For the moment, the only negative affair is the current plague of disgusting moths! But I have faith in French science and technology to find a solution.

New French news channel

 

You might be interested in clicking here to see if you can pick up this new TV channel. It's rather buggy for the moment, but it should be a powerful broadcasting vector when it works smoothly and correctly. You might be wondering why I don't try to insert the channel directly into my blog. Don't be bloody stupid!

This anchor fellow, Louis Laforge, is a TV celebrity in France:

For the moment, he's reappearing regularly to explain that there's a slight technical hitch. (We could have worked that out all on our own.) In fact, the quality of this inaugural demonstration (it goes into operation tomorrow) is very good indeed.

Their brains might teach us a few tricks

An article by Nathaniel Herzberg in Le Monde says that dogs capt the sense of human words and tones of speech. I've just told my friend Fitzroy that he should take a glance at this article.

« Les travaux récents ont montré que les bases de l’empathie, de la coopération, de la cognition, du maniement des nombres existent bien au-delà de l’espèce humaine. Nous nous inscrivons dans un arbre évolutif qui nous dépasse très largement et qui impose des contraintes. Une sorte de naturalisation de la culture. » Le chien, assistant du philosophe ?

Lionel Naccache, neurologue à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière