Petanque Peniston Style

As you can see from the picture, the Peniston Athletic Club has added a new sport. Colleen is clearly getting an early jump on her Petanque skills. The soft sand surface, however, is better for their beach volleyball tournaments than Petanque. We'll see if her practice pays off when we have our tournament in France.

The Little Differences

Today I want to introduce a concept I'll develop in the next post. You'll soon see where I'm "going" with this, but for now I want to start with a little dialogue (language edited for our audience) from the Quentin Tarentino movie Pulp Fiction.

In this scene, Vincent, a mobster played brilliantly by John Travolta, is just back from a "business" trip and he's sharing his impressions of Europe to colleague Jules (played equally brilliantly by Samuel L. Jackson).

VINCENT: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: It's the little differences. A lotta the same stuff we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different.
JULES: Example?
VINCENT: Alright, when you go into a movie theatre in Amsterdam, you can buy beer.
And I don't mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald's. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
JULES: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
VINCENT: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't have a clue what a Quarter Pounder is.
JULES: What'd they call it?
VINCENT: They call it Royale with Cheese.
JULES: Royale with Cheese. What'd they call a Big Mac?
VINCENT: Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.
JULES: Le big Mac ! Ahh, what do they call a Whopper?
VINCENT: I dunno, I didn't go into a Burger King.

You can see the whole 1:41 minute clip in all its glory by clicking here, but be forewarned that the language is pretty raw.

Anyway mobster Vinnie Vega gets it exactly right in his commentary. In some ways European cities are more familiar than they are dissimilar from our home towns in the States. But those "little differences" truly do make all the difference.

Until next time.

The Dollar Keeps Rocking!

Hey our 401(k)s may have lost something like 40% of its value in the last year (at least mine has) and we may be heading for the worst recession of our lifetimes, but there's one little bright spot in this bleak economic picture.

The US Dollar continues to gain ground vs. the Euro, effectively dropping the price of everything we will buy in France. Early this summer, it would cost you about $1.60 to buy one Euro. As I write this, the Euro is selling for just under $1.25. That's a huge difference gang. I wrote about this about two weeks ago and the price of a Euro has dropped another 10 cents just since then. That's a dramatic change and it's in our favor.

As the investment disclaimers are wont to say, "prior performance is no guarantee of future results," so this could all fall apart tomorrow. But business people also like to say "the trend is our friend," and the trend is very friendly indeed right now.

Of course the only time this will really matter is the day we land in Paris and there's no way of knowing what will happen between now and then.

Just be thankful we're going to Paris and not Tokyo. When Teri and I had a layover in Tokyo in June 07, one Dollar bought about 120 Japanese Yen, and I didn't think things were as expensive as I had heard they would be in Japan. Today the Dollar will buy only about 92 Yen. Look for Honda and Toyota prices to go up in the near future.

Peniston Beach Volleyball Tournament

How can I resist posting this picture of Colleen in action? As you can see, there's some long overdue sewer and street work being done on Peniston Street. And in New Orleans, when the going gets tough, the tough turn their street into a beach volleyball court. Let's hope that the work goes quickly and there isn't a second annual Peniston Street Beach Volleyball Tournament.

Mystery Unveiled

Congratulations to Jen for being the first to identify Colleen's alter ego as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on Nurse Ratched:

A cold, sadistic tyrant, Nurse Ratched has become the stereotype of the nurse as a "battleaxe." She has also become a popular metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and authority in bureaucracies such as the mental institution in which the novel is set.

Nurse Mildred Ratched is the head administrative nurse at the Salem, Oregon State (Mental) Hospital, where she exercises near-absolute power over the patients' access to medications, privileges, and basic necessities such as food and toiletries. She capriciously revokes these privileges whenever a patient displeases her. Her superiors turn blind eyes because she maintains order, keeping the patients from acting out, either through antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs or her own brand of "therapy", which consists mostly of humiliating patients into doing her bidding.

Here's a clip of Nurse Ratched in action. There is some strong vocabulary in this clip, so those with delicate sensibilities shouldn't click through.

Who is This Person?

Tonight I accidentally figured out who it is that Colleen selected to represent herself in the picture that accompanies her profile (its the picture that shows up along with her incisive comments on this blog), and when I did figure this out I laughed for about five minutes. Am I the only one who didn't get the joke?

If you know who this person is, post a comment, reveal the mystery for all and win five points.

At the same time I learned that Cathleen selected someone named Heidi Klum as her alter ego. At least that's who I think that is. I hate to admit that I don't really know who Ms. Klum is, but I think she may be an actress. The depth of my cultural illiteracy is amazing.

A Picture I Found Looking For Something Else