Lovers of France’s two great symbols of cultural exception – its haute cuisine and fine art – are aghast at plans to open a McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum next month.
America’s fast food temple is celebrating its 30th anniversary in France with a coup -the opening of its 1,142nd Gallic outlet a few yards from the entrance to the country’s Mecca of high art and the world’s most visited museum.
@ Telegraph
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As he clambered over the parapet, rush-hour motorists a hundred yards below screamed at him not to jump. After a moment’s hesitation, he dropped into the void. He left his wife a suicide note clearly stating that his work had driven him to despair. “He was not a depressed man,” she cried.
Mr Rouanet became the 24th employee of France Telecom – which owns Orange – to take his life in 19 months, plunging the company and France deeper into soul-searching over how the once much-loved state utility could have fallen so far.
In the land of savoir vivre, whose President has just declared gross domestic happiness as important as GDP, such despair has come as a nasty shock.
@ Telegraph
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Police in Staffordshire are investigating the mysterious case of a garden that vanished from behind a suburban home and reappeared — plants, rockery, shed and flowers — in the backyard of the house next door.
@ Times (via Shedworking)
Wow is there a story about malleable identities and tight living spaces waiting to be written in this strange occurrence “I came home from vacation and discovered my neighbor had stolen my life…”
Two ways to write about airports: by sitting still, and by never stopping.
And a third way: by being Brian Eno.
Three things that leak at first slowly and unnoticed, then more rapidly with increased risk:
- The roof of a house;
- The cooling system of a car’s engine;
- My patience with houses and cars.
Rock, paper, scissors isn’t just a children’s game. It’s also the history of writing.
~ David Weinberger
In the heart of Puisaye, in Yonne, Burgundy, a team of fifty people have taken on an extraordinary feat: to build a castle using the very same techniques and materials used in the Middle Ages.
The materials needed for the construction of the castle — wood, stone, earth, sand and clay — are all to be found here, in this abandoned quarry. Before the gaze of thousands of visitors, all the trades associated with castle-building: quarrymen, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, tile makers, basket makers, rope makers, carters and their horses are working together to complete the castle. (via)
It is not quite a return to the days when dolphins and even whales were seen making their way upstream to Paris, but the Seine is welcoming back at least one long-lost visitor: the Atlantic salmon.
A fish that in the Middle Ages abounded in the river is returning in healthy numbers after efforts to clean the polluted waters. (via)
NORTH HAMPTON, N.H. – State Representative Judith Day shakes her head as she strolls along an old, winding country road in her seaside community, gesturing toward a wall of lichen-covered rocks that gradually dwindles from waist-high to nonexistent.
Pilferers have been here, just as they have been at historic stone walls across the state, loading swiped stones into pickup trucks for new uses in 21st-century walls, patios, recessed gardens, and swimming-pool margins. Along with the stones, they are stealing, rock by grayish rock, an iconic emblem of New England’s cultural heritage.
@ Boston Globe
An interesting case of New England’s reverence for its own history running awkwardly into our cherished self-image of the frugal, thrifty Yankee who gets the most possible use out of whatever is lying around.
Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental ‘heresies’
Maps of Bermuda, Iceland, Jan Mayen Island, and Newfoundland
Vincenzo Coronelli, 1692
Consider the Rivet...
Because for every story featuring a retired academic mulling over his creative mechanism in the face of impending cancer, an angel die.