The week in pictures (by Manning, 4:58pm)

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.

Croatian one-man band (by Manning, 10:28am)

I AM GOING TO WATCH/LISTEN TO THIS ALL DAY. DON'T CALL ME, I AM BUSY.

There's something going on outside my living room window... (by Manning, 6:25pm)

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.

Gym milestone: benched my weight (by Manning, 1:36pm)

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.

Incidentally, the most I ever bench-pressed in my life was 150 lbs, back when I was about 20 years old. I only weighed about 125 lbs back then, and I only benched 150 once or twice, basically as a stunt. Being younger meant being more injury-proof, and I could push myself like that and not hurt anything. Nowadays if I tried to suddenly lift a few dozens pounds more than where I'm comfortable, I'd almost certainly strain (or even tear) something, probably a rotator cuff, like I did in my mid-twenties in yet another gym-obsessed phase of my life. I really learned my lesson that time; I wasn't able to do any upper body exercise for a few months, and even driving my car and playing guitar hurt for a few weeks. But now that I'm taking this safer, healthier, more patient approach, and also due to the fact that I'm eating better and have gained a little weight, I'm suddenly wondering if I might be able to slowly, gradually get myself back up to the point of being able to bench press 150 lbs again. I bet I could do it in another month. See how this stuff is habit-forming?

The Pogues — The Body of an American (by Manning, 8:49pm)

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.

Wildwood, NJ, 1994 (by Manning, 12:21pm)

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."

Landmark (by Manning, 10:52am)

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.

Gym progress, with pictures (by Manning, 2:43pm)

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...

( Still blindingly white and relatively skeletal... )

It says the Eiffel something is around here. (by Manning, 1:42am)

Maybe it's really small?

Sometimes Paris is a tiny village (by Manning, 12:53pm)

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?!

The Simple Things (by Manning, 2:32pm)

Text message from Alexis last night:

"Want to be in the video for The Dead Sexy Inc. - The Simple Things - tomorrow night? You must look dandy rock. Let me know."

Is this a rhetorical question?! I'm bleaching my roots and picking out clothes now.

Word Nerds (by Manning, 9:19am)

I've known Ben (schtune) since we were about sixteen. The guy has been obsessed with languages and word origins as long as I've known him, even back then, and nowadays he's a grown-ass linguist and ESL teacher. I've always been fascinated by language too, but I never considered it as a career; most of my interest in languages came from my fixation with French in highschool, and then my life in France and travels around Europe have exposed me to tons of neat linguistic stuff (mostly French, of course, but I've also got a handful of useful words for each of half a dozen or so other countries), and Ben and I compare notes fairly often when one of us makes an intersting discovery. The following is an e-mail exchange we had the other day, one of many we've had like this, and I wish I'd thought to keep and post all of them...

---

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:

• WEBH - [Common Germanic (a descendant of Indo-European)] - to WEAVE, whence WEB (of course), WAFFLE, and WAFER. Also, because the original root had a secondary meaning of moving quickly and deftly as a weaver's hands do, we get WOBBLE, WEEVIL, and possibly WAVE. Apparently that B to F shift from Common Germanic to Latin is very common, but I think it's a shift in the sense of both being descendants of I-E, not a direct parent-offspring shift over time.
  
• Nothing for TABLE/TABLET. I don't know why.
  
• WERS - [I-E] - to confuse, mix up, whence WORSE/WORST (I never stopped to wonder why those were different from "bad"), WURST (mixed-up meat), and WAR.
  
• Nothing related to WASP, except that the root is WOPSO/WOPSA and that, according to the book anyway, in some British dialects they are still called "wopses". I think that's awesome.
  
• WEN - [I-E] - to wish, desire, or strive for, whence WIN, The latest of those definitions went into Latin and gave us venari - "to hunt", whence VENISON and the "desire" definition gave us venus - "love", whence of course VENUS, VENEREAL diease, and strangely VENOM - originally a love potion. Also, if we love something, we may VENERATE it.

I know you weren't looking for deeper explanations of other language shifts, but I thought that if you found those other ones interesting, these might also do something for you. Oh, and to go back to "vanilla", it comes from WAG - sheath, which is of course where we get "vagina". Kinda funny that current slang, "vag", is actually moving it back to its Indo-European root.

- 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.

DRUNK JUNGLE ANIMALS! (by Manning, 8:54pm)

DRUNK JUNGLE ANIMALS!

DRUNK JUNGLE ANIMALS!

Pont d'Arcole (by Manning, 2:55pm)

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.

I usually cross the river on the same bridge both going and coming, a bridge I just now learned is called the Pont d'Arcole, just South of l'Hôtel de Ville, aka city hall. There's nothing particularly beautiful about the bridge, as bridges go, but I always notice that it puts me right in the middle of a lot of really beautiful views. So the other day when I was out and about with my camera (and not out for a run) I decided to put myself in the middle of the bridge and take four photos facing North, South, East, and West.

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! )

A typical afternoon in Paris (by Manning, 4:40pm)

I just had one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I swear this wasn't a dream...

Just now, walking through my neighborhood, it was sunny and raining at the same time, and I stopped at a crosswalk to wait for the light to change. Next to me was a short, very well-dressed, very pretty young Asian woman. A garbage truck passed by slowly and the driver leered at the Asian woman and said something gross to her (I didn't quite catch it, but it was obviously gross). I shot the driver a dirty look and then glanced at the woman to see her reaction. She had none; either she didn't hear/understand, or pretended not to. The garbage truck now gone, the woman suddenly belched extremely loudly and abruptly, startling herself (and me!), and she quickly put her hand over her mouth and looked mortified. At the same time, a bicycle chained up next to us fell down with clang. And immediately after, an approaching tourist dropped his digital camera and chased it as it bounced down the street.

Acide n'est pas bien caché. (by Manning, 11:06pm)

Acide is not well-hidden.

Gym progress update (by Manning, 2:26pm)

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... )

Café Panis (by Manning, 1:17pm)

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?

Homes (by Manning, 5:09pm)

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?
Get off me, homes.

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.

PINK OUIJA BOARD! (by Manning, 9:55pm)

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.)