Electric Ladyland

Boomer speaketh

"My personal life, anything I do, is none of anyone else's business unless something off the wall happens and you guys are curious."

And so begins his tenure with the Red Sox.  This is going to be one interesting year.

Tailgating

I'm a baseball woman through and through but today is all about football.  Yeah.  Strategy and big dudes crashing into each other. In baseball the latter part generally only occurs aat home plate (Ty Cobb was said to have slid into the catcher with his cleats pointing outward) or on one of the bases if esomebody's got an axe to grind. But as a regular feature of the game, nope, there's not much of the slamming into people in baseball.

Of course I would be remiss in making this commentary without mentioning my favorite baseball contact moment of 2004:

Which reminds me. Oh yes. I have the Red Sox postseason on DVD. Why MLB hasn't gotten its act together and put one out is beyond me, but there will be no more suffering for lack of opportunities to replay, over and over, Dave Roberts sliding into second base. Or Foulke tossing the ball to Mientkiewicz. Or any of the hundreds of magical moments that made 2004 our year.

Tonight, however, it's the Super Bowl.  Go Pats!

Who's out there? (Introduction)

Welcome. I've been surfing the net in search of online Franco-American communities since 1994 and have found precious little in terms of real, living interactive fora out there. Genealogy discussions are great and so are francophile "let's plan our trip to Paris" web pages -- I've got nothing against those at all -- but my family has worked out most of its tree and I've already been to Paris. What I'm looking for is an opportunity to communicate with other people of French descent.

Several months back a good friend told me that if I didn't find what I was looking for, I should go ahead and make something myself. In other words, do something about it if you don't like the fact that it's not there...

Just now with the help of my friend Google I tried to see if there were even other Franco blogs out there. Couldn't find any to speak of. I did find this blog posting called Francophobia/Francophilia which had some cute commentary on last year's sudden eruption of anti-French sentiment in the United States. At that time I was thinking "does this make me a Freedom-American? Hey, that sounds kind of redundant..." Along those lines, I read a funny posting somewhere claiming that France responded to the Freedom Fries incident by refusing to rename American cheese. Cute. But the whole episode did make me wonder about underlying antipathy about the French in the United States. And where does that put us, Freedom-Americans or otherwise?

Being female, I'm not super wild about the comment in the blog that I found that the U.S. pressuring France to hop aboard the war bandwagon amounted to international date rape. That aside, I did agree with his reaction to the banning of Muslim headscarves in France. I imagine ours is a particularly American viewpoint on the situation but we are Franco-Americans after all and such prohibitions run counter to our conceptions of what an open, free and civil society should be. I would be really interested to hear how ordinary French people feel about the ban and its implications for freedom of religion, freedom of expression, etc.

This discussion is so far all I've found in my search for a Franco-American dialogue. He has some links in there to other Franco-American/French bloggers, but they don't seem to be posting much that's demonstrably Franco-American right now (one exception is Emmanuelle, who's commenting on the story of abducted French journalists, but that's more French-French). S'okay. I know I'll locate these underground Franco-fries yet. :-) And in the meantime, it's most heartening to see there are plenty of lefty Francos out there like myself.

One link I missed the first time around:  Marc Saint-Aubin du Cormier's Miquelon has a lot to say about Franco-Americans.  Wow.  Alice Cooper's French and a Huguenot! Who knew? And Oliver Stone, with a French mother, grew up speaking French before he even picked up English. Double surprise. As I'm reading Miquelon's content on the issue of French-bashing it occurs to me that especially in the case of America, no matter who you're bashing you're going to alienate and negate a corresponding group of that ethnicity in the United States. Who hasn't immigrated here? How can anyone call someone of French, Egyptian, etc., blood un-American when they are in fact American as we all are? Faulty logic, but then again their appeals are not about logic.

Before I go, one more thing:  Gary Trudeau expressed himself in Doonesbury about the whole anti-French brouhaha.  He got pretty incensed.  Good to see someone of note addressing the issue.

the deli of heaven

Went out to K-town for a lunchtime break with a coworker who's got a really interesting perspective on life.  She took me to Woorijip for a departure from the routine of fluorescent lighting and desk-side lunches we've all become accustomed to. (Ok, so I ate my lunch at my desk but it wasn't the usual lunch.) There were rows upon rows of tantalizing Korean dishes, many of which I wasn't familiar with, and it was nice simply to be around the variety and experience a change of scenery. Sunlight wasn't bad either. As I was picking rolls and fried vegetables from the bar, she said "This is the deli of heaven!" Had to agree. Was heavenly to be trying something new. They even had 25 cent plum tea we enjoyed on our way out. In return I'm going to introduce her to Cafe Zaiya, a similar outfit (excellent, reasonably priced food for takeout with limited seating also available) that's Japanese rather than Korean. That would be another "deli of heaven."