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Monday, July 20th, 2009
![]() This is me and my friend Gaétane, whom I pretend is my sister, because we're both (fake) blond and (real) adorable. Incidentally, my real-ass sister Amanda is coming to Paris tomorrow! She's staying with me and Marjorie for a whole week. She doesn't look much like me, or much like Gaétane, for that matter. ![]() This is one of my favorite pieces of crappy graffiti I've ever seen in Paris. The somewhat awkward attempt at swearing in English is charming enough, but it's even more great if you sing it to the tune of No Fun by Iggy and the Stooges. Why, that's the opposite of no fun! ![]() The other night Marjorie and I were awoken by thousands of penny-sized hailstones crashing into our windows! The sudden hail and intense wind and rain blew open our front windows, and within seconds the living room carpet was covered in chunks of ice (seen in the background of this crummy photo). They did a real number on my poor geraniums out on the window sills, too. Fortunately the whole thing only lasted about five minutes. We actually watched an insane neighbor across the street run out into the hailstorm and dance around while someone hung back in the doorway and took pictures; she's lucky she wasn't killed, or at least concussed! Anyway, the hailstones I posted about a couple months ago were, at the time, the biggest I'd ever seen, but these were easily three or four times the size. This was like some end times shit, here. ![]() This is not one of the more aerodynamic planes I've seen, but it looks nice and sturdy. 5 Comments | Comment on this
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
I AM GOING TO WATCH/LISTEN TO THIS ALL DAY. DON'T CALL ME, I AM BUSY.
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
There's something going on outside my living room window right now... ![]() (Click to be confused) ... And I have absolutely no idea what it is.
Friday, July 10th, 2009
It's been a little over two months at the gym, and I just hit a good milestone. After starting with very low weights and slowly working my way up week by week, I bench-pressed more than my weight! I currently weigh about 61 kg (134.58 lbs), and today I benched 62.5 kg (137.79 lbs), and did 5 reps at that weight. Back when I first got this gym membership, I made myself start with extremely low weights, significantly lower than I knew I could do, because I really wanted to avoid injuring myself and I wanted to take a nice long time to let my muscles go from very atrophied to good and sturdy before I started adding much heavier weights. So two months ago I was only letting myself bench 25 kg (55.116 lbs), which even for a scrawny runt like me is pretty easy. But I'll admit, after being so rusty, even that small amount of weight gave me a real burn after a couple sets. So anyway, I'm extremely pleased to more than double that in a couple months, although I'm pretty sure this current amount will be a real plateau for me; I'm definitely in diminishing-returns territory now, and I don't think I'm interested in putting in the time and effort it would take to push my strength to a level much higher than it is now. Besides, I mostly work out in order to look good, not be strong, so I'm definitely okay where I am right now. But it was a good symbolic landmark to bench my weight today in any case.
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
Here is a song I love dearly which is more or less about America. Well, sort of not really, but they say "USA" a couple times in it, anyway. Happy birthday, America! You are getting so many birthday punches.
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
As many of you know, I grew up in New Jersey. A tremendous amount of folks in NJ make it a priority to spend at least part of every summer at the shore, and most of us have our favorite shore towns we visit more often than others. I spent a huge amount of time during my teens and twenties in Wildwood, which is by far the trashiest of the south Jersey shore towns, and definitely my favorite. I still try to go every summer whenever I'm in the States. Anyway, I just ran across this delightful compilation of clips from a 1994 documentary about Wildwood, shot on my beloved boardwalk the year I graduated highschool... Man, Marjorie and I can't wait for our trip to the States next month! I just spent the last couple days teaching her about the words "douchebag" and "guido."
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
My friend Laura is in town for a few weeks, and there was a small outdoor get-together for her birthday last night. She told everyone to meet up at the Canal Saint Martin (where Amélie liked to skip stones), the banks of which are completely mobbed with young people every night of the summer, hanging out, drinking, flirting, playing guitars, etc. It's a very pleasant scene, but the crowd makes it difficult to find your friends; at any given moment half the people you see are sitting and relaxing and the other half are pacing, talking into their cellphones, and craning their necks to look for their friends. I arrived a bit early and Laura was running a bit late. A guy I'd never seen before came up to me and asked me in accented French if I was Manning. I said yeah, and he switched to English, hearing I was American like him, and explained that Laura had told him to look for the guy with the crazy blond hair. Ha! Other people were showing up, but still no Laura, and a few minutes later a young woman came up to me and asked me if I was Manning same thing; she was told to look for my hair. I am a walking Parisian landmark.
Monday, June 29th, 2009
It's been about seven weeks at the gym now, and everything's going great. I'm still going three times a week, running a little a few times a week, and still eating as much protein as I can get my hands on. I'm still really skinny, but I've definitely added a little bit of muscle mass in the areas I wanted to; mostly my shoulders, arms, and back, but my chest just won't cooperate much, as usual. Anyway, I decided to take some pictures of my progress, and I dug up some old pre-gym pictures as well...
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
While I was half asleep in bed this morning around 8 or 9am, I heard a weird sound of bells ringing, coming all the way from across my apartment over on the street side. It wasn't the usual clanging church bells that I'm used to hearing all over Paris, but a lighter, jingling sound. I asked Marjorie if she knew what it was, and she told me it was probably just some cows heading out to pasture (haha). I got out of bed and went to look out the living room window, and I saw an old guy pulling a small cart with one hand and swinging a handbell with the other as he slowly made his way down my street. I had no idea what he was up to, until another man and his young son came out of the building across the street and waved to the old man as they approached him. The father had something in his hands... a bunch of old knives! The old guy is the local knife sharpener! ![]() Man, so cool! What century do I live in?!
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Text message from Alexis last night:
Monday, June 15th, 2009
I've known Ben ( To: Ben From: Manning Hey, you know I love figuring out word relationships and stuff, particularly when I learn things about the English language by way of my ongoing education in French. So this here is exactly my favorite kind of thing. I never realized the words waffle and wafer were related, but check this out. I'm sure I've told you about how the W in Old French got changed to a G in modern French (William/Guillaume, war/guerre, wasp/guêpe, to win/gagner, etc). So, waffle in French is gaufre; I been knowin' this, of course. The other day M and I bought some cheap little cookies, like those wafer things with creme inside. They're called gaufrettes, i.e. mini gaufres. So a wafer is a mini waffle. Fascinating. To me, anyway. In the following seconds, I then noticed the relationship between table and tablet, or in French la table and la tablette. Amazing. The ette really does simply turn things smaller. I'm gonna see if I can figure out more of these... - Manning To: Manning From: Ben Hey - A few months ago I picked up a book - The Roots of English - that lists, dictionary-like, the Indo-European roots of English words. You probably know, of course, that we don't know really what I-E was like as a language; all linguists can do is compare things like you just did, figure out what vowels and consonants shifted in a consistent way and which other languages (along with their own vocabularies and sound systems) were introduced when, and back-form the language. Well, really only the vocabulary. We're fooked with the grammar. Anyway, the book is a little dry to read because it's listed by root word, not English word, so instead of reading where we got "vanilla" or "woe", you're reading which English words come from WAG-, WAI, and WAK. Actually, that last one is interesting because it gave us, of course, vacca - "cow" in Spanish (and close in French though I won't try to spell it) and vaccinia - "cowpox", whence the English VACCINE. So your French word for cow is distantly related to the English word for vaccine. Here are the roots for some you mentioned:
- Ben To: Ben From: Manning Man, fucking awesome! I was gonna mention to you the particular things in your e-mail that I found the most fascinating, but then I realized it's basically every fucking thing! The cow/vaccine thing (it's vache in French, which I know you know), weave/web/waffle (jesus!), win/venus/VENOM(!), vag(!), etc. A semi-related thing, since I mentioned tablette: Did I ever mention to you that the French call six-pack abs "the tablet of chocolate"? (Chocolate bars here are always molded in that blocky 2x4 tablet shape.) I like the cultural inference you can make from that: where Americans see beer, the French see chocolate. Another unrelated thing. I realized today that while the French don't have one single word for "to drop," they have separate expressions for dropping something on purpose or by accident! I never realized we use the same word for both in English! The French versions translate as "to allow to fall" ("laisser tomber", unintentional, like a glass), and "to make/cause to fall" ("faire tomber," intentional, like dropping a franc off the Eiffel Tower). Tomber is to fall, obviously, and I also learned recently that the common expression for when someone faints is "He fell in the apples." (?!?!?) I think that's all I got! See ya, - Manning To: Manning From: Ben Whenever I try reading that book, I'm blown away by everything, but then I read a few more and realize I'm not learning anything. If I were to read just one or two, I could maybe internalize them better, but I guess it's meant to be a reference, not a vocabulary textbook. I think it's neat that in English, "six-pack abs" and "beer belly" are opposite idioms, but very close in literal translation. I'm sure an English-language learner has messed that up on occasion. I may need to keep this in mind since I might be teaching an idiom class over the summer. So I guess the French don't offer to "drop someone" as a threat? "I will allow/cause you to fall! Perhaps into some apples!" To: Ben From: Manning six-pack/beer belly MIND: BLOWN The end... FOR NOW.
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
It's unusually cold and rainy in Paris today, so I'll post some pictures from a really beautiful day last week. A little background: I live in the Marais, in central Paris, on the North side of the river; just North of the Centre Pompidou to be exact. When I go running, I usually run straight down to the river, cross over to l'Île de la Cité (the larger of two small islands in the middle of the Seine, with Notre Dame on it), run all the way around the perimeter of the island, then cross back over and head home. That makes about three or three and a half miles total. ![]() This is the North(-ish) view from the Pont d'Arcole. That big building is l'Hôtel de Ville, and you can see a tiny bit of the Centre Pompidou (modern art museum) on the left between the trees; those little red boxes are the external elevators. I live just beyond this museum on a tiny residential street. ( The rest of the pics are here, along with some bonus stuff! )
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I just had one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I swear this wasn't a dream...
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
I'm in my fourth week at the gym and everything is going great! Here's my routine for anyone who's interested, and mostly just so I can keep a record of it and compare with my progress later. ( Read more... )
![]() I think this is French for "Penis Coffee." (Not really!) ![]() Of course I see a lot of innocent butchering of the English language in France and in my travels around Europe, and usually you can see where they went wrong, but sometimes it's just downright baffling. How many S's can you cram into two words?
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
What did the guy say when this store fell on him? ![]() Longtime readers of my LJ might remember that my favorite dumb joke of all time, told to me by a very funny and not very bright back kid in my highschool theater arts class, is: What did the guy say when two houses fell on him? I've cited this as my favorite joke every chance I've had over the years, it's gotten retold a lot, and at least two of my standup comedian friends have used some form of it in their acts. This joke comes up surprisingly often in my life. So you can perhaps imagine my delight when I ran across this store in central Paris the other day.
Monday, June 1st, 2009
PINK OUIJA BOARD! ![]() PINK OUIJA BOARD! I'm buying this next time I'm in America. And then I'm gonna talk to the fabulous-est ghosts on it. (Actually, I'll probably buy it and hang it on my wall.)
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