France Gall ~ Lovely French Yé-Yé Singer!

See and hear the lovely France Gall!

The Visual Element ~ Moebius, Mezieres, Besson!

The backstory of art and conceptualization for The Fifth Element!

Green Man ~ WSJ Spots Blanc's Garden Walls!

He's The Green Man Whose Gardens Defy Gravity writes WSJ's Julia Flynn Siler about French botanist-designer Patrick Blanc...

"...the inventor of the vertical garden, also known as the living (or green) wall. [...] Among the more than 250 [garden walls] he has installed around the world, his most famous are at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Caixa Forum Museum in Madrid and the French embassy in New Delhi. [...] "My inspiration is nature," he said. Mr. Blanc himself resembles a tropical wood sprite. Nicknamed "The Green Man," he favors green shirts with bold botanical prints, green shoes and for the past 25 years has dyed his hair green because he likes the color. [...] In 1986, he created his first public vertical garden. His big breakthrough came eight years later, with his installation at France's prestigious Chaumont-Sur-Loire garden festival -- he had trekked to Chile to find plants there that might adapt to the Chaumont's climate."

Canal du Midi ~ Fighting Ecological Trauma...

The Guardian's Angelique Chrisafis writes French to say au revoir to canalside trees. They must chop down thousands of trees alongside the Canal du Midi as...

"An unstoppable fungal disease has left the French state no choice but to reach for the chainsaw, bringing down the ceiling of leaves covering the nation's most romantic waterway. The felling of these 200-year-old trees is seen as a national tragedy. Cyclists, walkers and canal-boat owners are gutted, and local politicians are panicked that the canal's Unesco heritage status will be revoked, wrecking tourism."

The Canal du Midi is a centuries-old, 240 km long southern French transport route helping link Atlantic and Mediterranean. An epic infrastructure and logistics "gigaproject" in the 17th century, today the canal is a beautiful and much-loved waterway for vacationers.

Criminalizing Accidents ~ French Foolishness...

Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor write in the WSJournal that In Wake of Concorde Verdict, a Fiery Debate about French persecution and...

"...heightening concerns among air-safety experts that the "criminalization" of accidents will hurt efforts to address flight hazards. [...] The trial is the latest example of a world-wide trend to pursue criminal charges in airliner accidents, which many aviation experts worry threatens to erode safety by chilling early, open discussion of hazards. The fear is that the prospect of criminal liability discourages employees of airlines and aircraft makers from speaking out about dangerous incidents. Safety experts and organizations, including the International Civil Aviation Organization, several months ago began a counterattack emphasizing the negative fallout from criminal prosecutions. The ICAO, an arm of the United Nations, intends to call on governments to avoid the criminalization of mistakes and insulate air-safety investigators from judicial interference. [...] The lengthy Concorde trial had symbolic importance for Continental, as well as for French political sensitivities. The carrier's French lawyer, Olivier Metzner, said on French television that the decision protected "national interests" because foreigners were found primarily responsible."

Ah, yes, yet more feckless French perfidy.

Globish ~ French Defeated by Simple English;-)

The BBC's Hugh Schofield reports that New lingua franca upsets French...

"That the French resent the global supremacy of the English language is nothing new, but [...] a newly evolved business-speak version is taking over. [Already] French executives draft reports, send e-mails, converse with their international colleagues -- and increasingly even amongst themselves -- in English. It is of course a kind of bastardised, runty form of business-speak full of words like "drivers" and "deliverables" and "outcomes" to be "valorised", but is nonetheless quite definitely not French. [One day, French author-observer Jean-Paul Nerriere] noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed [...] a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language. It may not be the most beautiful of tongues, but in this day and age he says it is indispensible. He calls the language Globish and urges everyone -- above all the French -- to learn it tout de suite."

Even an entire country, Rwanda, has joined the movement, tossing the French language into the dustbin of history in exchange for the far more global and useful English. De Gaulle and Napoleon are no doubt flipping in their graves;-) See here the creator...