a blind flaneur

If Brigitte Bardot, chocolate éclairs, and the poetry of Jacques Prévert are not reasons enough to love the French, here is another. Le Monde reports that fewer than 7% of the French “of all social classes and political inclinations” would cast ballots for John McCain if they could vote in the U.S. election. My thanks [...]

Joe Wurzelbacher spoke to Senator Barack Obama about taxes while the candidate campaigned near Toledo, Ohio, last week. [Photo: Jim Young/Reuters/NYT]
Something may have been lost in translation. Maybe there is a French idiom about orality that Americans really need to know. I love how Dominique Dhombres wrote in Le Monde that Joe the Plumber didn’t [...]

“And Now, the Hidden Son of Sarah Palina,” a cartoon from the Belgian newspaper Le Soir: “I told you.,” Palin says to what looks like a moose in drag, “to stay in your room.” [text translated by Daniel B. Suits]
The nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for vice president launched a thousand ballistic [...]

Amy Winehouse led the finale at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration in London with the anti-apartheid anthem Free Nelson Mandela. The concert raised funds for Mandela’s HIV/Aids charity 46664, which was named after his prison number during the 27 years he spent behind bars for resisting South African apartheid.
As the Seattle Times described [...]

Rupa is a doctor in San Francisco as well as a singer-songwriter. Born in SF, she was raised in India and France. As the title of her new CD, eXtraordinary Rendition, suggests, she is a citizen of the world with global concerns. She tells the back story of Une Americaine À Paris in a recent [...]

Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics, spoke on NPR’s Talk of the Nation this afternoon about Internet projects intended to engage citizens more fully in participatory democracy. According to the NPR blurb, “He says the Internet can make government more open, participatory and efficient — and maybe even smaller and cheaper, too.”
Tapscott mentioned a collaboration with [...]

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe marked the anniversary of his nation’s independence with a speech to 60,000 supporters in a sports stadium near Harare. ‘Zimbabwe will never be a colony again — never, ever, ever,” he said. ”We will not compromise our principles of freedom and national sovereignty, no matter who gets upset.” Mugabe didn’t [...]

Police officers apprehend a pro-Tibet demonstrator waving a Tibetan flag (right) as he tries to interrupt the Olympic torch parade while Chinese athlete Jin Jing (left, in wheelchair) guards the torch April 7, 2008, near the Eiffel tower in Paris. [Photo by Thibault Camus/AP/NPR]
I don’t have a fast or easy opinion about this image. Those [...]

A German runner carries the Olympic flame into Berlin’s swastika-draped stadium in 1936. [Source: Wikipedia]
The notion that the Olympic “movement” is about individual athleticism is a myth. The Olympics have long been devoted to nationalism and the manipulation of individual aspirations for the glorification of nation-states. This haunting image is a reminder that the tradition [...]

F
[Source: tianya.cn/publicforum]
Nationalism notwithstanding, the Beijing Olympics are becoming ever more problematic as a “branding” opportunity for multi-national corporate sponsors. This Coca-cola ad on the Berlin subway — featuring exultant Tibetan monks on a roller coaster with the Coke slogan, “Make It Real” — didn’t stay in Berlin. Chinese bloggers have organized a boycott to [...]