Meh, this site is hard to find. The dot mac account is pretty groovy for publishing stuff to the web and other toys but it's useless for finding us. Who can remember that URL? Not me.

So I fixed it. Now you can just go to www.johnpagani.com

And you come here.

UPDATE: And now also www.josiepagani.com

Now who couldn't remember that?

So I got hold of this groovalicious and completely useless little app that analyses my itunes library and provides statistics on my listening habits.

Statistics are fun.

In a nutshell it tells me I like Moby. It tells me I like whitebread. Mainly. (Also some new stuff is too up to date - we started listening to Fat Freddy's Drop an d Carla Bruni at Christmas and they ain't here).



I know there is nothing more boring than other people's iTunes stats, but I just know I'm gonna look back at this one day and see how much my listening habits have changed.

Anyway, here are the top 25:

Top 25 Artists
-----------------------------
1. Moby - 773
2. Madonna - 244
3. Fatboy Slim - 165
4. Fleetwood Mac - 158
5. Celia Bartoli - 157
6. Cat Stevens - 145
7. Norah Jones - 142
8. Sheryl Crow - 92
9. James Blunt - 74
10. Toots & The Maytals - 71
11. Robbie Williams - 67
12. Trinity Roots - 65
13. The Clash - 56
14. Bruce Springsteen - 52
15. Hootie & The Blowfish - 51
16. Dionne Warwick - 47
17. Macy Gray - 47
18. Van Morrison - 43
19. Talking Heads - 41
20. Black Eyed Peas - 39
21. Dead Kennedys - 39
22. Eminem - 37
23. U2 - 37
24. Linda Ronstadt - 35
25. Cyndi Lauper - 33


Top 25 Songs
-----------------------------
1. Another Woman (Moby) - 35
2. Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday) (Moby) - 30
3. In This World (Moby) - 28
4. Extreme Ways (Moby) - 27
5. One Of These Mornings (Moby) - 26
6. 18 (Moby) - 26
7. In My Heart (Moby) - 25
8. The Joker (featuring Bootsy Collins) (Fatboy Slim) - 24
9. Rafters (Moby) - 24
10. Fireworks (Moby) - 24
11. At Least We Tried (Moby) - 24
12. Sleep Alone (Moby) - 23
13. I Deserve It (Madonna) - 23
14. Down To The River To Pray (Alison Krauss) - 23
15. Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby (Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss & Emmylou Harris) - 23
16. Great Escape (Moby) - 22
17. Morning Has Broken (Cat Stevens) - 22
18. Signs Of Love (Moby) - 21
19. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? (Moby) - 21
20. Look Back In (Moby) - 21
21. Jam For The Ladies (Moby Feat. MC Lyte & Angie Stone) - 20
22. American Pie (Madonna) - 20
23. Harbour (Moby Feat. Sinead O'Connor) - 19
24. Ray Of Light (Madonna) - 18
25. Don't Stop (Fleetwood Mac) - 18

To: The Editor, Private Eye magazine

Dear Sir

Could it be that Christopher Hitchens and Robert Palmer are both addicted to love?

Today we went on a long bendy bus, stuffed to overflowing and smelly on the first truly sweltering summery Saturday of the year.

We went on the 'PC' route up to Clignancourt in the north of the city to the biggest flea market in Paris.

It's a collection of markets. Around the perimeter there are clothing stalls and trinkets where immigrants vend dodgy gear and know the customers enough to speak to passers-by in English. I bought a silver bling bracelet to replace the expensive beautiful one Josie gave me that was stolen from my suitcase on the flight home in January. Josie bargained the stall-holder down to half price through the simple device of threatening to walk away.

Inside there are established buildings selling 'antiques' - the French plates and sketches to furniture outlets selling exquisite commodes, chandeliers and vases worth €10,000. I have seen a €6,000 candlestick. Gold paint, about 18 inches high, maybe holds six candles. Bling. There were exquisite eighteenth century clocks straight out of Versailles. There was a Napoleon table, with a picture of the Emperor and all his generals depicted in smaller ovals around the outside. There were beautiful French chairs and marble top bedside tables. All massively, preposterously, outrageously expensive. But who pays label?

There is a post over here on one of the Paris blogs about the Musée Picasso.

It was my favourite Paris museum from the first time I saw it and everyone who goes there seems to come away thinking the same.

The big galleries, the Orsay and the Louvre, are just collections of stuff. You need to know about the stuff to see why it matters. The Picasso museum gives a context, you understand the breadth of his work, see the brilliance and that it wasn't all just about odd shapes and understand what he was doing.



It's a dead collection though. It's not as if it will get any bigger.

It's a search engine quirk, but this very small site comes up on the front page of MSN search results if you search for 'Ségolène Royale' (misspelt with the extraneous 'e' as I did in a post here the other day).



I've had a few visits from people searching for info about her (and now I'll have some more - hi). She is a political phenomenon. In the last month she seems to have been on almost every magazine billboard. Now she has surged to the front of polls as the preferred choice for the next President of the Republic.

When you visit her site - it translates as the excruciating and empty 'future desires' - her policy and values are so much beige. She really stands for nothing, except being a fresh face in a sea of beige men. Then again, so does everyone else: Sarkozy, the Minister for the Interior, is a hyperactive, pro-American free marketeer one day and a France-first, consensus-seeking softer-than-Villepin moderate the next. Royal is at least unblemished and uncompromised by years of govenrment.

There is a long way to go. But imagine what could happen here. Hillary in the White House, Ségolène in the Elysées Palace. Crikey.

So what will driver her to the presidency? The issues in France are often represented as a clash between the need to change and the the difficulty of change. But this article is an excellent and intelligent discussion of the myths.

The French economy isn’t actually in trouble. Growth, although not great, is ticking along, inflation is controlled, unemployment is higher than the UK but lower than Italy or Germany, and the demographics ... look a lot better than many other countries.

The central argument of this commentary is that France has

a two-speed economy; a core of high productivity, highly globalised but also highly labour-protected industries that you really don’t want to compete with (think Alcatel-Lucent, nuclear power, high-speed trains and AXA), and a crappy small business sector that tends to combine poor social protection with worse productivity

I think the analysis is pretty much on the money, even if it's cavalier about the level of unemployment. In some areas it is horrendous and it ignores the obvious objection that many young people stay in higher education because it's so damn hard to get a job.

But there is a good case to be made that the French model is working well.

In 1967, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass toured New Zealand:

In the band's line up, there was a 'Lou' Pagani.

Snigger.

We've had successive guests for a couple of weeks and because there were kids they got on the regional train and sped out to Disneyland for the rides and the magic.

Maria went twice, to add to her two trips last year.

Add that up.

Maria added it up and told us excitedly she has been to Disneyland five times!

Just possibly if she spent more time at school and less at Disneyland, she would have a better command of the calculations involved.

It's my fault.

Carlo broke something the other day and I said a slightly bad word. I saw him clock the word and file it and I thought to myself 'oh no, that is coming back soon.'

So last night he showed Josie a small broken toy and Mummy asked him what happened.

"Carlo buggered it," he told her.

Maria stayed home with me today and discovered my iPod. She spent hours plugged in, singing along very loudly and dancing to the same three songs played over and over. The hit was the Steriophonics' Walkie Talkie Man. Then she tried holding the iPod by the headphone cable while she danced and so when it clattered to the floor nearly buggered it.

Then our new tv was delivered this afternoon. The guys set it up and then seemed perplexed when I asked them how to get dvds going on it. So they set it up some more and were about to leave when I asked for a demonstration. The demonstration didn't work very well, so they changed it around and left. Of course then the damn sound wouldn't work. I swore and cursed and it still wouldn't go, so I had to go back to the shop and ask them to return and fix it, stretching my pidgin French slightly beyond its limits. When we got home I switched it on and it worked beautifully. So I had to ring them up and explain that I got the tv going and the repairman was no longer needed. This was much beyond the few nouns and fewer verbs of my French, but I still congratulated myself on achieving the conversation. About thirty minutes later the repair guy showed up.

Bugger.

Not sure how big a 70cm screen is in inches, but it's plenty.

Why are televisions so ugly? Because the Apple company doesn't make them.

Quick round up of things recently seen on the web.

Slate magazine calls sauvignon blanc the world's most boring wine. In particular, Marlborough SB.

I'm outraged. It's my favourite drink in the world. The writer is a snob. He is a great example of how snobs use their wine conversation to express social status. Having said Marlborough SB is crap, he recommends SB from the Loire. It's often all I can get, so I drink a bit of Loire SB. It is not a patch on Marlborough. Anyone would call sauvignon blanc dull if they thought the Loire provided the best in class. Then he says chenin blanc is a more interesting variety. That is like lamenting the decline in standards at the world's universities and then praising the intellect and wisdom of George W Bush. Chenin blanc is fit for casks and barbecues. Nothing more.

Meanwhile the BBC reports, apparently with amazement, that people over 40 'engage in a significant amount of sex.' The verifying quote is that between 70% and 80% of people aged over forty say they have had sex in the past twelve months. Golly. People over forty. Who would have thought.

From the 'all politicians are liars' file, the French Trade Minister Christine Lagarde says:

"It annoys me when France is portrayed as an awkward, backward country. It is not."

Can't think why she would feel as if people portray the republic way.

An excellent way to waste time: This programme is awesome. Don't be mean to people of different religions, but just be sure to report anyone who wants to use that programme to learn how to fly a jet but not land it.

And finally, a video of someone driving a mini. On two wheels. I'll have to try that in my Jag.

I read on Stuff there is rising hysteria in NZ about the declining performance of boys at school, compared to girls.

The issue is not unique to New Zealand. Check out this update on the issue globally from author and management consultant Tom Peters.

The issue has some potential to profoundly change society. If girls are going to be the main income earners, there will have to be some cultural adjustment.

It's ironic that people get uptight when boys don't do as well as girls, but you never see the same astonished reaction when some racial groups do better than others; much less when some social groups do much better than others.

Why is that?

Personally I'm not surprised that boys' are doing worse than girls at school. There are hardly any men left teaching, especially in primary schools. What else would happen?

Serious historians, when they have a serious pint to make, choose a serious academic journal right? Like, say Rolling Stone?

Anyway, the latest Rolling Stone has a pretty convincing argument for why Bush is the Worst President In History. It's a good round up of the case against him, without all the nutty stuff about stolen elections, Haliburton and the Cheney shooting that guy. In the face.

It's worth a read.

Coincidentally, Carl Bernstein in the new Vanity Fair has a stinging attack on him too.

When popular culture is running against you like this, you're done.

Okay, most personal blogs are little more than (very) light weight news aggegators.

Rather than genuinely creating original content, blogger links to news stories, and a community of readers forms on the basis of mutual interest in the topics.

Never one to eschew the prevaling flow of the stream, allow me to swim once again downstreram with the fastest moving salmon and bring to you a choice of up to date humorous links.

A few tips on how to be a successful evil overlord:

I will never employ any device with a digital count-down. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable. I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

Remember to thank me for this link when you are in a position to use it.

A nihilist's resume. Under skills:

I eschew all so-called personal development, instead dying under the premise that, when I'm a biodegrading mess of worm feed hopelessly buried beneath a fathom of dark earth, being able to type 70 words a minute really won't do me a modicum of what you so ignorantly refer to as "good."

And an art history professor explains to his four year old daughter that the market value of her work is far below a thousand words:

Your picture feels incomplete to me. Formwise, it's a staticky blue cloud hovering in space. There's nothing dynamic about it. You didn't even push down on the crayon very hard, so there isn't really any depth of color.

The protests have worked and Chirac has dumped the CPE.

He is promising to replace it with the usual pile of fluff and bluster that will change nothing.

Dominique de Villepin, I would be thinking, will never make the Elysees palace.

Josie's brother Reuben and his partner Maggie are over from Oxford. Yesterday we went up the Eiffel Tower.

Pics of and from the tower are here.

Maria's school term ended last week with the annual printemps fete (spring fair).

For weeks Maria has been working on her costume. With parents clicking cameras and video cams as rapidly as any papperazzi the kids emerged ensemble and marched around the local streets in full dress.

When they assembled to sing to us the techaer led them through ten minutes of warm up scales and exerices before unleashing two little ditties, back to back and commercial free youwillneverhearthesamesongtwicehitsofthesixtiesandseventies.

Link to pics is in the right hand menu as 'Printemps fete'.

Andrew Hilditch is the new Australian cricket selector. He used to be Richard Hadlee's bunny. The 'Caps called him the 'Happy Hooker'. Hadlee would put a fielder out at backward square leg and then drop one in short, Hilditch would swot it, the catch would be taken and Australia 8-1. Those were the days.

Kathryn Ryan is taking over nine-to-noon. Well done, good for her.

In my package of books from Amazon today: Getting Things Done by David Allen. (Hint: Don't waste time blogging).

Also, one on the collapse of Yugoslavia in the nineties, a topic I've been voraciously reading up on because I feel guilty for not paying enough attention at the time. And if you want to know everything about Europe, it's all there.

Segolene Royale is emerging very strongly as the left candidate to oppose Nicholas Sarkozy in next year's presidential election.

She seems to be everywhere. Consequently her poll ratings are on a vertical growth path.

One searches in vain for evidence of her actual, you know...policies. She has mastered the emphatic evasion for now. She will have to say what she wants to do one day and her ratings will return to earth then. Always goes the same way with the Next Big Thing.

She has the advantage of having gone to the school you have to attend if you want to be anything in French politique.

It is not unhelpful to her that her rivals are reported saying:

"Who will look after the children?" (Laurent Fabius)

and

"The presidential race is not a beauty contest." (Jack Lang)

Fabius was the French PM when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed and organised the cover-up. Ran against his own party over the Europe constitution, arguing it was neo-liberal because it allowed poor foreigners to come here and take their jobs. Nasty piece of work with a sense of entitlement. Still, didn't stop others. He won't get the nomination from the socialist party, but he will probably run anyway.

Lang is a charming former culture minister who would have been a spectacular candidate in, oh I don't know, 1973?

The other potential candidate is Francois Hollande. He is Segolene Royale's partner, which is all very Bill and Hillary. And just like Bill and Hillary, Francois and Segolene aren't actually married. Francois is the leader of the Socialist Party. Other than the excruciating Professor Prodi, he is possibly the most boring man in Europe, Swedes included.

Check out this guy, carrying a placard saying:

"Je suis la!."

I am here. Uh huh.

Ferrari.

The front page headline of Le Parisien today asks of the French PM, "Quoi serat, Villepin." What'll it be, Villepin? News media are getting stuck in to him. He looks finished. A few months ago he was a rock star.

The thing that puzzles foreigners living here is that protestors expect to defeat the government. In most democracies, the government does something lots of people don't like, they take to the streets to express their disapproval and if they're still angry next election they vote the buggers out. Here, no one talks about reprisals at the next election; they expect to win the protest. They say it's undemocratic if the elected government can simply pass laws over the top of the mob on the street.

The Guardian has good photos of the 'carnival like' atmosphere on the street yesterday -- as most called it, though I watched CNN for about an hour as the police tried to clear the moron trouble-makers from Place de Italie after the match and from the comments of the dimwit in the studio you would have thought a revolution was starting.

I was very critical of the police methods in the car-burning riots this year, but you have to admire the way they handle these marches. They recognise there is a substantial element trying to provoke them and they are careful to engage without escalating. They form squads, grab a trouble-maker and pull out, without getting into the full-on confrontation the idiots are seeking. Then they slowly break up the trouble spots when they must be tempted to pull out the artillery as the stones and bottles rain down on their shields and helmets.

The poms are enjoying it. Dodgy Airlines had a flight interfered with and put up a news release on their website headlined "Jet2.com condemns French strike action and calls for lazy frogs to get back to work!"



That'll be good for business.

Meanwhile the president of the Sorbonne university says protesting students are ignorant and stupid.

"Today's youth don't have dreams, they have illusions."

Yep, the money quote. I'm pretty certain every old codger in history has expressed the same view. They must be right because after all the world is going to hell in a basket. Oh wait a minute...

There is a nice piece on how the city feels here.

No food without politics. No politics without food. Vive la France.

I snapped a few shots as I passed through Trocadero today.

Click on the pic.

Humbling flash animation about Iraq here.

(Via Canadian speech writer Rob Cottingham).

Why is it called the Super 12?

A French dude makes a claim on his travel insurance:

There were many forms to fill out in what became known as Dossier 52219220. One form confirmed, reasonably, the cancellation of the trip. Another, again reasonably, was the original bill for the ticket. Another, beginning to shade into the unreasonable, was a letter from his new employer testifying to his hiring. Then he had to supply his salary, his insurance with his employer, his expense account qualifications and his "compulsory payment for fixed-term contract."

Eeewwwwwww.

Speaking of 1968, what an amazing month April was.

In rough chronological order...

The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt had just disappeared while swimming.

The Tet offensive had just begun in Vietnam and General Westmoreland was asking for another 200,000 troops.

Then in April, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Prague Spring began in Czechoslovakia.

Trudeau was elected PM of Canada.

The Wahine sank.

Britain introduced the race relations laws that led to Enoch Powell's infamous 'rivers of blood' speech.

LBJ announced he wouldn't contest the US Presidency, while Chicago mayor Daley announced a shoot-to-kill policy against demonstrators and Bobby Kennedy stepped into the presidential race.

French university students began the sit-ins and protests that led to the fall of the French presidency.

Crikey. I don't remember any of it. I do remember 1968 a little though: We lived in Northland and every Friday we would drive into Kaitaia to see my Mum in hospital.

If you have ever seen pictures of the May 1968 student riots in Paris, you have seen those large circular iron railings being used by students to make barricades. They were grills which had been placed around the base of trees so the roots could get water and still be protected from pedestrians. The kids dug them up along with cobblestones from the streets, hid behind the railings, and threw the cobblestones at the police.



In St Germain at the moment, the area around the Sorbonne and epi-centre of the protests against the CPE, the railings have all been removed. Most of the cobbled streets were tarsealed long ago, but the absence of the heavy iron-railings caught everyone by surprise. Tourists walking along the footpath suddenly would step into the muddy pit next to the tree.

The consensus is Monsieur Le President Chirac butchered the politics on Friday night in his effort to play all sides on the new jobs law, so the rage will take to the streets again on Tuesday. Another day of all the schools closed, the trains and the Metro shut, demonstrations, riots and rising worries where this is all going.

There is a reason everyone sings about Paris in the Spring. The sun came back with daylight saving a week ago and it's been tolerably warm since. The parks are getting busy again and the evenings linger a little.

Last night Josie and I headed out into the pleasant spring air aiming to meet as many new people as we could, first at the monthly meeting of New Zealanders in France and then at a meet-up of Paris bloggers.

We arrived at Eden Park, the pub in St Germain named after the place where I mis-spent my youth, ordered a drink and looked around for signs of New Zealanders. The first we saw was Zinzan Brooke, though he was only in a large portrait on the wall. Everyone in the bar - everyone - was watching a rugby game on tele. Just like New Zealanders, we thought. Silently watching the footy. But they all seemed French. They spoke French when they were asking us to move out of the way of the tv screens. There wasn't much nzedness in sight. So we left.

Next it was over to the marais where a bunch of Paris bloggers were meant to be getting together. (Hey, we've got a blog! Let's go to that!). It was quiz night. Everyone there was listening to snippets of excruciating French pop songs and guessing the names. Whenever we detected someone speaking English or vaguely fitting the description, we went up to them:

"Excuse me, are you the bloggers?"

"What?"

"The Paris bloggers?"

"Sorry I don't understand." (Weirdest pick-up line I've ever heard mister).

"Paris bloggers. Petite Anglaise. There is a meeting of Paris bloggers - are you with them?"

"No." Go away.

By the end of the night? Not a single person met.

Although Josie bought a lovely new handbag and I got some excellent Italian leather shoes.

Invest in these:


Ah, yes.