My religion: Every morning, think of the tie I want to wear, reach into a dark closet to the rack of fifty(-ish) ties, and pull one out. If it's the one I wanted, it is an Awesome Day and I am the Chosen One. Today is an Awesome Day. Black with gray flowers. Amen.

I've mentioned before that, even though my French isn't great, when I'm hanging out with our rabbits at home all day, I speak to them exclusively in French. Speaking English with them feels absurd to me, which, of course, is absurd in itself. But thinking about this stuff all the time makes me want to go knock on the door of our tri-lingual Norwegian nextdoor neighbor and ask him what language he talks to his dog in.

Hey, the half torn-down building with the graffiti saying "NO FUN - FUCK YOU - SHITT" on the door is currently being fixed up and turned into a bakery! I walk by that spot every day, and I will forever pretend in my head that the place is called the No Fun Fuck You Shitt Bakery, or Boulangerie No Fun Fahck You Sheeett.

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.

Maybe it's really small?

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?

Okay, now that all my La Réunion updates are out of the way, it's back to business as usual in Paris. I've lived in my "new" neighborhood here (the 3rd arrondissement) for over six months now, but it's so full of tiny, winding streets I feel like I'll never get acquainted with all of them no matter how long I live here. Whenever I'm out for a walk I try to find new streets I've never seen before, thereby lighting up squares in the Legend of Zelda map in my mind. This morning I was out and about, trying to get lost, and noticed a statue I'd never seen before! I approached to investigate...



The Turenne Enfant! I've never heard of that! This bright sunlight isn't ideal for pictures on this shady street, so let's get a little closer...




Hmm. I wasn't able to find much about this guy online; not even a Wikipedia entry! Maybe I should get that going...

---

Turenne Enfant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Turenne Enfant loves vodka.^[1] He is gay.^[2]

This Turenne Enfant article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

I was just walking through a swanky neighborhood in central Paris, fighting through the crowds of rich people on their lunch breaks, and I spotted a guy whom I figured for homeless at first, but then I figured he was just doing the rich-guy-dressed-like-shit thing — jogging pants, oversized hoodie, wool cap, unshaven, etc. Then I thought I recognized something about his jawline, his nose, and the bags under his eyes, and I thought, holy shit, I think it's Eddie Izzard! He hangs out in France a lot, right? I think he lived here or lives here! And then the guy started digging through trashcans looking for food, and I thought, man, I hope that's not Eddie Izzard.

I've been going running a couple times a week recently. I experiment with different running music in my iPod all the time; the stuff that works the best for me is Iggy Pop, Marliyn Manson, Stray Cats, Reverend Horton Heat, The Dead Sexy Inc, et cetera. But recently I discovered the best running music of all: the invincible music from the original Super Mario Bros.

I don't have an mp3 of it; I just sing it in my head and pretend I'm blinking. As I jog through the crowded streets of Paris with this soundtrack in my head, you have no idea how difficult it is for me to not just plow through people and make them fall offscreen.

Anyway, the best part is that it motivates me to run faster — that shit doesn't last forever!

You know how a guy in a cheesy action movie might say, "It's time to take out the trash"? I say that in my head every time I'm going to take out the trash.

My eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Blair, is my favorite teacher of all time and the one teacher I've stayed in pretty good contact with over the years. I used to draw stuff for his science class all the time, usually combining topics we were currently studying with my obsession at the time, comic books and superheroes. He just e-mailed me this hilariously silly drawing I did for his class, probably in 1990:



Sheesh, eighteen years later and I still draw almost exactly the same.

calamityjon is meme-ing it up again, and this time there are no hot dogs involved (probably). No, this time it's splendid idea for generating completely stupid Batman villains. Here's how it works:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Select your language and choose the Random Article link.
3. Use the topic on the resulting page as the basis for a thematically-obsessed Batman villain.

Here's mine:


Pretty lame, but that's the idea, right? Jon's came out much more funnier. You can use this template image Jon whipped up to make your own. He adds, "PS, I'm using Letter-O-Matic from Blambot fonts. Please don't use Comic Sans, it is awful." I could not agree more.

I encourage you to add your villains to Jon's post! And/or here, if you prefer!

I'm very late to get in on calamityjon's delightful hot dog meme action, but here goes my lame Parisian version in any case...


Take a picture of yourself right now.
Get a hot dog. Be nonplussed. Just take a picture.
Post that picture with you looking nonplussed with a hot dog.
Don't go posting an eight megapixel hot dog.
Include these instructions.

I'm back from a week in Wildwood NJ with a dozen of my best friends. jenniferrodgers and gainsclockwork and I accidentally got an old timey photo taken. Hey, it could happen to anybody.


More Wildwood stories and pictures soon.

The other night I had some time to kill while waiting for Marjorie, so on a lark I decided to change the language on my cellphone. When I arrived in France back in September of last year, I bought this phone and set it to English. About a month later I found the courage to set it to French, and it's been that way ever since. Checking out my other language options in the phone, there were Italian, German, Spanish, and Turkish. I decided to choose the only one of those languages in which I cannot speak (or even recognize) a single word, Turkish. Now, thanks to all those crazy Turkish special characters, every single time I go to make a call or receive a text message or check the time, for a second I think my phone is severely broken; I wonder when I dropped it, when I spilled a drink on it, et cetera. My brain has gone through this process several times each day for about three days now. Lesson learned: it turns out if you're stupid enough you can play practical jokes on yourself.

Iggy Pop on French television in 1977...

• speaks some German for some reason
  
• talks about David Bowie a little bit
  
• is insane

P.S. A bunch of you newer friends probably haven't known me long enough to have seen this ridiculous Iggy Pop comic I illustrated a couple years ago based on a chat log/LJ post by my crazy friend Abe and his/my crazy friend Mickey. It's probably the greatest thing I've ever worked on in my life.

I received this deeply moving postcard from calamityjon today.



Jon does not live in New York and to my knowledge has not visited New York recently. He does cry stoically all the time, however.

My procedure for buying a new toothbrush:

1. Go to the supermarket and look at the toothbrushes.
   
   
2. Find all the orange ones.
   
   
3. Buy the most expensive orange one.