paris

Innovating New Accents to Annoy Parisians

B R

B R

— 4 min read
Innovating New Accents to Annoy Parisians
Sorry about the NewTrek lenseflare. This is a joke for, like, two very specific readers.

FrenchBee is a funny name for a company. I prefer it over the original name, FrenchBlue, that they were called before JetBlue complained to the FAA. Both are sadly inferior to the temporary name the chose in the interregnum - just “French”.

Anyway a huge amount of the branding persists because that stuff is expensive. Unfortunately some relatively uncomfortable seating does as well, and we didn’t get a ton of sleep on a red-eye to Paris.

Hey, but before we get to that, there was a whole-ass Canadian election a minute ago.

Local New Democratic Party candidate who sadly did not win. Most of the signs with the winning Liberal candidate had some variation of red paint or the term Genocidaire written on it.

As you might have heard, and keeping with virtually every party on the Right suffering massive Trump-inspired blowback, the Liberal party won.

One of the folks that recently bought a local bar where we were watching the results, a couple of minutes after doing an interview for a local TV station.

The triumph of the Liberal party of Canada mostly came at the expense of the further left New Democratic Party (sadly) and the Bloc Quebecois (whatever). Further, they didn’t gain a majority of seats, so their formation of a government relies on toleration [[1]] by those minority parties. Given both of them fucking despise the Conservatives, the Liberals have professed they do not feel the need to actually form an agreement with either (whom would demand concessions of some kind for voting in a bloc).

The short answer is that it’s stable until it isn’t. [[2]]

Anyway, I’m traveling again.

Where could he be?

Despite having traveled a bunch recently and having been to Europe a couple of times before, I have until now spent zero time in Paris. I couldn’t obviously tell you why (I haven’t been to London or Madrid either), but it became a trivial choice to visit right now given:

  1. My partner has a work conference in this fair city, so free hotel room
  2. I actually can speak and understand a lot of French

On that latter point I have routinely joked about intentionally annoying Parisians with a possibly uniquely bad American/Quebecois accent and I can faithfully report this has already happened based on some looks I have received. [[3]]

As is my habit in traveling to a new place, (1) the first day is slow and largely acclimating to the time-zone shift and (2) I find the biggest tower I can find and ascend it.[[4]] They have a pretty famous one here.

The view from up there is pretty good and shows off the very distinctive buildings and block structure that I’m going to really go into later when I talk about everyone’s favorite fail-nephew-turned-dictator-of-France, Louis Napoleon.

[[1]]: They’ll vote with you if they feel like it and also choose not to force an election unless they feel like it. Notably, the NDP basically got wiped out but the BQ retained a bunch of seats despite getting a nearly equal number of votes because it’s still a dogshit voting system built for trash incumbents

[[2]]: They don’t have to hold another election for six years. That’s a long time. In that time, maybe the Conservatives are able to woo the Bloc Quebecois into a vote of no confidence (doubt) or one of the minority parties starts polling like they can force a coalition government with the Liberals with a new election

[[3]]: But hey, they (mostly) understand me and I (mostly) understood them and I’m calling that a win. Even though it is 100% clear they would rather I speak English

[[4]]: I do not know why I do this, but I have now in Seoul, Osaka, Sydney, etc

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