Carlo's creche will be closed on Monday because the teachers are going on strike.

It's nothing to do the the CPE. This is an entirely separate grievance. As for the CPE, well Chirac is addressing the nation on tv tonight to tell us what he is going to do. Word on the street, he is going to do something to soothe the angered masses. A delay in implementation while talks are held, maybe? We'll see.

No the creche teachers all over Paris are going out because the Paris city council is opening lots of new creches. You may recall it took us ten months to get Carlo into a creche last year because they were all full with waiting lists. There are complex committee decisions to allocate places with the priority going to white people who speak the language and pay bribes. (I may be mistaken on this. Possibly). Anonymous, totally unaccountable bureaucrats are enjoying the rushing feeling of power as they determine whether or not to allow two year olds to get into childcare.

The council is under pressure to relieve the jam, but it is not hiring sufficient teachers, the existing teachers claim. The council, in a notice published on the door of the creche, insists it has to make sure all teachers are adequately qualified.

I talked to one of the mothers this morning who was frantic about what she will do for childcare on Monday. She said all the parents are worried, especially since the strike is indefinite. It will probably go on to Tuesday and maybe longer. They'll let us know.

So summarising then:

1. There aren't enough creches in Paris because they can't get enough 'qualified staff'.

2. There is ten per cent unemployment in France and only a quarter of graduates have a job a year after they finish university.

3. The students are on strike over the government's efforts to do something about 2.

4. The teachers are on strike over the council's efforts to do something about 1.

5. There are plainly important reasons we don't understand why they can't use some of the people affected by problem 2. to fix some of problem 1.

6. There is no better way to address any of these problems than to go on strike.

CNN employs morons.

One special idiot on CNN is Kyra Phillips:

This fool, this gibbering American numb nut, this expert on the democratic protests of June 1989 felt confident enough to declare on air that a few water cannons in Place Du Republique this week looked like tanks rolling over the top of seven thousand students and killing them.

What a tit.

She was not a reporter during Tiananmen Square. I did cover Tiananmen Square, albeit by phone. I talked to large numbers of people there every day for several weeks. I also covered the marches around Paris. One event was hideous, outrageous mass murder. Another was light-hearted enough that I took the kids along to see the balloons and the bands. CNN can't tell the difference.

What a ridiculous, second-rate junk broadcaster CNN has become.

Meanwhile the Sun newspaper apparently advised its readers users, "Don't Go To Paris." This advice I agree with -- IF YOU ARE A SUBSCRIBER TO THE SUN. Do Not Ever Leave Your House. If you are stupid enough to spend money on a newspaper like the Sun, you are too stupid to make it to the train station. You are a retard. An imbecile. A vacuous dolt. A drivelling, drooling simpleton. A boneheaded, slack-jawed ninny and the rest of the world doesn't want you here.

Just to let you know.

Paris is not like Baghdad. Some students are peeved with their government and vamp up and down the boulevards with placards. That doesn't mean the city is inflamed in civil war. You have to go a long way out of your way to see the fun. You have to be looking for trouble to find a water cannon. Even if you get tear gassed, it will not be the most wretched experience of your life.

Reading the Sun or watching CNN would be a worse experience. And much worse for your mental health.

Come to Paris and you face the risk of choking on a baguette. You do not face the risk of being injured in student protests unless, like this guy, you want to be.

At one point, the cops were lined up long, fifty in a line, standing wait. In front of them was a deep row of open space. Herb, drunk and laughing, walked straight in front of them, and started to put on hero poses, flexing his muscles. He has the build of a stringy professor. He started to wiggle around and Gary flew in front, miming photographer motions. They were isolated. The crowd grew silent and, while Herb and Gary put on a show worthy of Blow Up, the cops became increasingly agitated.Finally, one of them stretched out and pulled Herb’s hood, throwing him down on the ground. They wrestled briefly until the cop managed to pull out Herb’s flask of gin, pouring it out in front of him and the watching public. Herb stood alone with a smile on his face. He shoved his hand in his pocket, searched for a moment, then pulled out triumphantly his backup flask of whiskey. The crowd roared with laughter and Herb skipped gaily back towards us.

The Chrysler PT cruiser is being marketed in France to the child molester demographic.

That's the only plausible interpretation of the new billboards.

I could find only this small reproduction of the billboard on the Chrysler France website.

The US Chrysler site doesn't seem to have the ad at all, so I'm thinking this is a French campaign.

The car is featured prominently with a bra hanging out the window. In the foreground lie some roses, a discarded shoe, tie and lacy underwear. The message is, 'have this car and get more sex'. Fair enough, virtually every billboard in Paris has the same message, suggestively draped in appealing bodies as most of them happen to be. It's a French thing and you would have a coronary if you got offended easily.

Except also in the foreground of this one is jarring further element: A child's teddy bear.

You can't see it in the pic here, and it's discreet on the real thing. But it's there.

And it's creepy - who is it suggesting the owner of the car is having sex with?

It's possibly there to show the car is being marketed to sexy parents. As well as being sexy it's good for getting the kids round in. But then there would be a few blocks and toys thrown around too.

Or perhaps it's saying the teddy is a part of a romantic package of gifts - sexy underwear, red roses, a teddy and a Chrysler. Bit weird, though. You would use something less ambiguous - like another rose or diamonds.

I'm always fascinated by the way companies use billboards. The tactic is usually to stick up a gigantic picture and hope someone who might be interested in the car you're selling just happens to wander by and understand your meta-messages at exactly the time they are making their next car-purchasing decision. So marketers tell themselves they are building brands with the billboards (so how come there is a message about this month's special finance offer on the car?). Anyway, to build the brand, the elements of the billboard need to be focused uncompromisingly on the brand values. What exactly is the brand value of associating teddy bears with sex and Chryslers?

Personally, I would be keeping well away from Chrysler drivers.

I meant to write something about this the other day when it happened.

An ardent defender of the French tongue, Chirac said he had been "deeply shocked" to hear English on the lips of the Frenchman in a speech at the two-day European summit.

"I was deeply shocked that a Frenchman would speak at the council table in English," he told journalists, explaining for the first time his abrupt walkout when the summit opened on Thursday.

"That's the reason why the French delegation and myself left so as not to have to listen to that."

Prat. He's a prat. A walkout was a petulant, flouncing, indulgent way to react.

But he has a point, doesn't he?

English might be the international language of business, but it isn't the international language of the French. If I were French I would want to see the language used as widely as I could. The more French is used, the better it is for France. So there is self interest for the French.

If monolingual ignorami like me want to understand, then that's our problem, no?

* This is running at Scoop.

The Maori guy in the All Blacks beanie confused me. We emerged from the underground right in the middle of Place de Republique and he came straight up to us. I thought he had clocked us as kiwis, so I said, 'kia ora'.

He wasn't Maori, he wasn't a kiwi. He was a plain clothes cop telling me to get myself and the kids out of the way. A moment later as I pressed the kids into a wall a gang of teenage boys jostled past, running, aggro, getting close to a fight. The front of the giant march was charging into the square and there were scuffles and pushing to clear room. There were young men prowling for trouble. If the demo I watched in the wet spring sunshine ten days ago was a Saturday afternoon party, this dark afternoon was a tense confrontation with gatecrashers.

My five year old was off school because it closed for the general strike; my two year old was turned away from creche this morning because not enough teachers showed up to work. Our underground Metro line was running though, so it was easy to travel across Paris to watch the 'the parade' as my five year old called it.

I sped them away from trouble, past streets blocked by lines of riot police standing only just out of the way. They stood glaring behind riot shields and visors, bristling batons and holstered sidearms, guards over their shins, knees, elbows and shoulders like blue Star Wars soldiers. Behind the pack a cop held a cannon for the tear gas and then there were trucks for dragging away prisoners and more trucks for spraying water at crowds.

It would have made a great photo if I could have stopped, but you don't with two small kids clinging on. Behind the police was sanctuary and their protection.

The Place de Republique is beautiful, dominated by a towering goddess, La Republique, reaching out with an olive branch in the street where Louis XVI's head left his shoulders.

Under the darkening sky, we looped around the central square and found a safe pool to drop anchor. Then the near-black sky broke and drenched the march as tens of thousands poured into the plaza like rain water sluicing down a river.

The noise and humour of the early protests was gone. This was angrier, rows of young men surged around the sidelines waiting for the rumble.

I told the kids a 'parade' is called a 'manifestation'. Everyone was angry because the guys who make the rules were making a new rule they didn't like. They were shouting 'resistance', which means 'you can't tell us what to do' but you're not allowed to say it to Dad. I told them there once was a king who made bad rules no one liked and he didn't listen when people told him to stop taking everyone's toys for himself. So you know what they did? They brought him here and they chopped off his head!

Will they do that to these guys? I don't think so baby.

While we were on our way home the riot police moved to clear the square, firing tear gas and their water cannons.

The trouble-makers are a different group, not the students and union-organised workers, but young groups travelling in from the out suburbs. Last week some of them started attacking the students.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion the protestors are demonstrating to keep their own protections, while that protection comes at the expense of others who know they will never share in the future that the students feel is being threatened.

I took some photos of Republique. They're here.

And I made a brief movie of the pix, which you can click in the sidebar (about 3 megs to download - don't bother if you don't have broadband. You might need Quicktime to watch it - free download for osx and windows here).

Maria is home from school. When I took Carlo to creche they turned him away because not enough teachers had been able to get to work.

High schools are closed and hundreds of students in front of their school in Saint Denis have set fire to cars. Saint Denis is pretty much the epi-centre of the riots last year.

The universities are occupied, trains and subway services severely disrupted and the serving staff at the boulangerie around the corner are more than usually surly.

Interesting comment on this Paris blog:

I was discussing, with a Parisienne student today, the nature of the recent violence and crime associated with the protests (the group of people who came in to beat people for their cellphones) and she said it actually made her scared. She felt that a boundary, the unspoken boundary of the Periph, had been crossed. The violence and crime associated with disaffected youth from the suburbs had finally breached the barrier.Which, in turn, made me realise how the protestors are those who will have access to jobs in the higher eschelons, and that their protests are not recognised by young uneducated thugs precisely because they don’t even see this kind of future as possible. Which in turn brings me to the CPE. It was created to help ease employment situations among the discontented and discouraged youth of the suburbs. Is fighting against the CPE then a means for the privileged class to remain privileged?

Yup, pretty much true. This is a demonstration by the inside to keep the outside out.

Intrigue has deepened in Maria's ongoing effort to win social acceptance.

Her nemesis cunningly won Maria's friends back to the other side with wizard japes such as sticking a tissue to the back of Maria's shirt and telling her she had stuck it to the back of her head, where of course Maria couldn't find it and became more agitated while her persecutor laughed and pointed. Her distress only deepened when all her friends found this hilarious and this visible distress only heightened their enjoyment.

She is excited and happy when I pick her up from school every day but her mood darkens when she relates to me the tense dynamic of her social circle. It is a classic pecking order scrap: Her nemesis thinks Maria is a place too high and she - nemesis - wants that spot in the pack. Girls start this stuff so young.

We had a chat about laughing off provocation.

Although to be honest all my soul tells me that if there is one way to handle war, it is to counter-attack much faster and harder than your enemy expects. Overwhelming force, lightening speed, a clear objective. I know this strategy to be correct, and appeasement to be wrong. [Aha. Sun Tzu - Make enemy regret ever making you enemy. Inflict much pain so enemy hesitates before striking again. Attack your enemy in this moment of indecision].

And yet I betrayed the strategy I know to be best. I spent a long conversation with Maria rehearsing provocation and how to respond gently without escalating, how to deny her taunter the prized reaction. She seemed to accept it, but she won't when it comes to the crunch. Children know how to get under each other's skin .

I am teaching her to be an appeasing, peace-loving coward.

Her little brother, however, conducts his wars clandestinely. Tonight he didn't want to go to bed. We put off the hour by reading a French kids' book together, the three of us - which is really Maria asking Carlo about the story in her perfect French accent ("Ou est le couchon, Carlo?") and Carlo pointing it out on the page ("C'est la.") with an intervention neither by father nor the English language. ("Tres bien Carlo. C'est-que ce?" "C'est canard! Quack! Quack!").

We tucked him in just as his Mum arrived home from ending global poverty.

So Josie and I dined and chatted and I suppose an hour and a half went by and the kids fell asleep, right? No. Carlo climbed silently from his cot and pulled out a very large toy box, stood on it to reach the light switch then for ninety minutes quietly played with his vast collection of plastic junk. He distributed items round his room and never let out a peep.

When Josie walked in, it was all just a big naughty grin.

"I know I'm naughty, but I also know you're not going to do anything. Shall I get back in my cot now? Righto!"

Tomorrow they can sleep in.

Maria's school is closed by the general strike. Carlo's teachers are not going out, but the creche will be on limited hours because staff can't easily get to work with the transport system being out.

The strikers will hit the government with huge demonstrations. The government will not be provoked. It will respond gently and with calm soothing sensible talk.

And the government will lose.

One of the girls in this picture got in touch through Old Friends and sent this pic from my 1972 primary school class.



I look exactly like Carlo. Even the haircut is the same.

Yow the teachers were hot in those days, no?

Maria is happier with school at the end of the week. One by one her friends have defected to her side. One came up to her and gave her a long apology for siding with the other friends. The games girls play. Only one little one remains off side with her. So we had a chat on the way home about how she felt when the other kids didn't want to be her friend, and how important it is to make sure the last hold-out doesn't feel alone and left out. Fat lot of good that talk did.

When I said to Maria 'who cares what other kids think?' she was shocked. "Daddy, don't be so mean. I care about it very much!"

She told me with a beaming grin she had a good day today.

Perhaps not coincidentally, and though it is raining and overcast, spring is here. The temperature has soared to double figures. For the first time in month the kids don't need jackets on to go outside. The new season has arrived in time for daylight saving this weekend.

Without a car to go to the shop, we can either organise livraison - home delivery - or we take a little old lady shopping trundler with us. When Carlo is with me he goes in the backpack or else he comes in the pram and I have to leave the trundler behind. Then even a small shop means balancing shopping bags all over the handles of the pram and shredding my palms carrying them (it would be easier if there weren't so many bottles of wine).

What I'm saying is, when I come home from the shopping I usually look something like this:


More pics of overloaded stuff here. The donkey is laugh out loud funny.

How beautiful is this?

Alfa Romeo 8C. Put me down for one.

Protests over the job contract are spreading and there is a general strike planned for next Tuesday.

Someone got beaten up last Saturday. That was the march I covered, and I'm amazed it ended up like that.

This photo is doing the rounds on the blogs. I think it's fake:



Here are more photos from the demo.

We've been invited to a cocktail party with all residents of our building in one of the upstairs flats. The old lady from the ground level will be there, the one I insulted once when she burst into our place rudely and remonstrated with Maria for spilling a teaspoon of water over the balcony while watering plants. The couple downstairs who bang on the pipes every time Carlo pads across the floor, they'll be there too.

As I struggled out the twenty-inch door of the lift this afternoon with Carlo in a pushchair a vinegary old matron stood unhelpfully in front of us tutting, sighing and tsking at the hold up and inconvenience, with that impatient, contemptuous glare dessicated Parisian women have; as Bill Clinton's mother once said of Barbara Bush, I can't tell y'all the word for 'em, but it rhymes with 'rich'.

She'll be there.

I can tell from brief conversations in the lift and at the door that most speak a little English and not many speak enough to see us through a martini.

Equipped as I am with tiny talk, I will make small talk. I've been studying:

"Oui, nous sommes mariés." Yes, we are married.

"J'aime beaucoup votre moustache." I really like your moustache.

"C'est charmant sur une dame d'un certain age." It's charming on an older woman.

"Est-ce que vous-etiez dans la resistance?" Were you in the Resistance?

"Parlez-vous Allegmagne?"

Maria had a bad day today. She told me no one wanted to be her copine, her friend. She sat by herself in the tunnel, whatever that is, and cried.

They told her it was because she played their game the wrong way. They spoke to her in a mean way. She thinks they just don't want to be her friend.

We walked home together, both of us desperately sad. Daddy can't fix this one, but can make it hurt a bit less with a few hugs. For her anyway.

Carlo was not concerned. He likes to stand on the coffee table and hurl himself on to the sofa his own length away. He usually makes it with a soft splat but sometimes bounces off the edge and thuds on to the floor. Unlike Maria's emotional bruises, his stop hurting in a moment.

There is still a sour cold as mean and breath-freezing as the deepest days of winter. Though the sun crept through for a while on the weekend and we even enjoyed double digit temperatures for a few hours, the skies are mostly formless slimy and grey, the air is wet and the ground never dries.

Every time I leave the apartment I look for a green sparkle in the branches. The first green flickers of spring arrived suddenly last year. Over a year ago I wrote:

"It's warm outside, the sun is shining and you can walk around in your shirtsleeves. In fact it's too hot to wear a jacket outside."

Not this year. Winter is later, grimmer, greyer. In fact, looking back over those posts, at the end of March 2005 I said,

"Those nude branches lining the rues and the avenues are flickering with spring. We are in the uncertain weeks between overcoats and suncream, like Island Bay any week of the year. In the parks, busy gardeners dress more stylishly than any casual visitor in suits of gleaming green trimmed with thick silver bands, tuned perfectly with their trucks and their trolleys."

No this year is different. Spring is coiled in its box. But any day the sun will come out and the air will turn warm and the parks and sidewalks will be suddenly gowned*.

It can't come soon enough.


* "gowned": verb, like a garden version of pwned. Also, I don't care, a third of English verbs started life as nouns: Pedalled? Booked? Tabled? Chaired? Sounded? Claimed? Pictured? Calculated?

** "Pwned" Currently my favourite 'word'.

My wife gave me this beautiful bunch of flowers.

I have no idea how to photograph it.

This is up on Scoop.

They say the street always wins in French politics.

Daily for a week the Paris streets have filled with protests organised by students and unions demanding 'retrait du Contrat Première Embauche', or withdrawal of the 'first employment contract' law. The CPE introduces a two-year probationary period for anyone under 26 when employers could fire them for any reason.

Opponents say making it easier to sack people won't create any jobs, that it will increase insecurity for young workers and make them more likely to be exploited.

The government says employers are more likely to hire young workers when they know they can change their minds later. The point is a strong one in France because it is very difficult to dismiss staff for poor performance or even because business conditions demand cutbacks.

The CPE was one of the measures prime minister Dominique de Villepin proposed to reduce youth unemployment following the car burning riots last year. In the months following he became the favourite to replace Jacques Chirac as President in presidential elections next year. Now his popularity is being shredded.Villepin has managed the almost politically impossible - for the first time since Mitterand the socialist party is united, and in tune with the large majority of French public opinion at that. Although it continues to languish in polls its leaders queued at the rallies as if at a beauty contest: The socialist party leader Francois Hollande was there with his wife Segolene Royale - both are front runners to be the left's presidential candidate next year, along with former culture minister Jack Lang who was also there. The ridiculous Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe was there too.

As the three-mile long demonstration walked through Paris' elegant streets marchers chanted in rhythmic beat with drums keeping time, 'Chirac. Villepin. Sar-ko-zy...retrait, retrait, retrait du CPE'. The President, the Prime Minister and the right-wing populist Interior Minister. In the cool afternoon sun demonstrators waved flags and flew balloons. Many students wore plastic bags to show the government regarded them as disposable.

It's obvious the protesting students are largely not the same group of young people as the marginalised young rioters and car-torchers in the Paris banlieue, or suburbs, last year. Out there in the suburbs media vox pops commonly find unemployed Arab men and women saying a job you can be fired from sounds better than not having a job at all. Still, there are few who believe there will be more jobs in a country where youth unemployment is over twenty percent, and forty to fifty percent among young suburban ethnic men.

The general public's feeling of insecurity dominates French politics. It was expressed in the furious, frustrated rejection of the European constitution at last year's referendum. Though average incomes in France are a third higher than New Zealand's and its companies are prospering French workers worry about losing their employment protections - long holidays, a 35-hour week and security.

Sixty-eight percent of the French public oppose the CPE, according to the most recent poll on the subject. On Saturday marches were organised in 160 towns and cities. Organisers claimed 300,000 marched in Paris; the government said 80,000. I calculated maybe more than 100,000. (If you discounted the ubiquitous media presence, the participation might have fallen by a fifth).

The huge trade union CGT is preparing for a general strike sometime this week. It will surely go ahead because the government may back down, but it will never back down enough. So transport will gridlock, schools will close and public amenities won't function but baguettes and croissants will still be available at the boulangerie.

This is escalating. The universities are paralysed or virtually closed.

President Chirac is already beginning to sell out his protege, publicly telling Villepin to defuse the protests and declaring 'of course it won't be possible for people to be fired without any reason at all.' That's not what the law says as it stands.

PM Dominique de Villepin has never been elected to anything in his life. He was handpicked from the bureaucracy by President Chirac then elevated through the ministry. If he finds a way through this crisis he will be well placed to win his first campaign, for the highest office of all. But the Paris street knows he has no employment security. 'Better him than us', one of the chants went. And, as they say, the street usually gets its way.

I talked to one student on Saturday who opposed the CPE but said it would make almost no difference for many. If students want a professional job they work as unpaid interns for large corporates or organisations, hoping for paid careers at the end. He said he's much more worried about the future ability of France to provide jobs at all. Taxes and the cost of living are far too high, he complained.

As the protestors sang and chanted they passed small barbecue stands selling little duck sausages wrapped in a baguette for five euros each. About NZD$9.60 for a bird flu hotdog? Now there's something to protest about.

Cyclone Larry is due to come ashore in North Queensland sometime around day break.

It looks very bad.

"This is the most devastating cyclone that we could potentially see on the east coast of Queensland for decades," Mr Pagano told reporters in Brisbane. "There is going to be destruction - we are very certain this cyclone will not peter out."(Residents) should be really considering about evacuating any low-lying areas ... that may become mandatory in the future."

My brother Damon lives about 20 minutes drive north of Townsville. His house is on the beach.


UPDATE: Ecch...where he is: Just a bit of rain.

I went to cover the big Paris march against the government's CPE law, which introduces easy-fire' rules for under-26s.

I'll post fully on the demo later, but I have posted some pics here.

I'm filing for a couple of media, so I'll post links here. Apparently there was light rioting after the match as police tried to clear Place de la Nation, where the march ended. I missed that - I left the main march around 5.00PM to look for organisers. The march was then very calm and there was no sign of trouble at all.

Just on the numbers - the government is saying 80,000 marched and organisers 300,000. I've been in crowds of 80,000 before but I've never seen a demo as big as that. It was too big to count from one end to the other, too big for a single person to find both ends. I stood on a corner and counted ranks that were conservatively thirty people wide. In five minutes at least 120 ranks passed (some ranks are wider than others; some stop, others keep moving). I estimate it would have taken two hours for the march to pass that point, but I could be wrong by half an hour either way. 30x120x24=86,000. So the official estimate would be nearer the truth. I should also record I did the count after crossing the Seine, when the march was thinner than it was at the departure point. Many people were not marching, but attending. So I would think over a hundred thousand altogether. No lower than about 85,000, certainly no higher than 140,000. Lot of people. Not the biggest Paris has ever seen. (You'll see how sensitive counts are to the width of the ranks, the speed of the march and other errors of asumption).

I love my iMac.

I love this:

New Zealand Post made $34.7 million after tax in the six months to December, largely as a result of rapid growth at Kiwibank. ...The result was driven by Kiwibank – which contributed a $5.4 million profit.

The bank is signing up 2500 customers A WEEK. We thought it was doing well when it hit the business case target of signing up 450 new customers every week. Now it's doing that every day.

I was there at the act of conception of Kiwibank, at the drama-filled pregnancy and at the somewhat surprising delivery. Would it be bitter to go through all the quotes I've stored up from experts, reporters and commentators who vowed the bank would fail? Yes of course. And don't begin to get me started on the political campaign against it. But I'm thinking, if the bank is attracting 2500 customers a week, the market wants it, right? So, ummm, everyone who thought the idea of a New Zealand-owned bank was stupid, is the market now wrong?

Apple has launched a new ad for the iPod, which would be pretty small bananas were the iPod not (a) the most interesting cultural phenomenon on the planet; (b) a central component of our family's cultural life in Paris, and (c) promoted by what has been, until now, one of the best thought out campaigns you are likely to see.

You can tell Apple thinks the new ad is the shez, because it has a link to it on the front page of its website. Anyway, good for them. There is a reason for boring you with all this.

The old campaign was designed around silhouettes of people daggy-dancing to the songs. There were the white cords to the ear piece, but nothing more. By now you know the idea:



This campaign has been round for a few years and it needed updating.

The new ad is funky, but it betrays the heart of the what has made the iPod cool: The old ads told you what you do with an iPod and gave you a thrilling reason for having one. The new campaign just sells tech specs.

Yes the new campaign is funky. But the message is geeky. It's golly! look at the number of songs. The old one was emotional. WOW! I want to do that! Showing some album covers and playing a hit song is something anyone can do - radio stations do it every survey. Going off to the music on your iPod - that's something only iPod can do. And the ads have missed it.

* Favourite song on the iPod at the moment? The White Stripes Fell In Love With A Girl. Turn it up.

"Bonjour madame. Je suis John Pagani, le pere de Carlo."

"Bonjour."

"Carlo est malade aujord'hui avec petite tousse. Il est absent."

"Oui, d'accord."

"Merci, au revoir."

"Au revoir, bonne journee."

I know you won't approve of this, but every now and then I take the kids to the McDonald's over the road.

As a matter of fact, I don't feel the need to rationalise it. Anti-McDonalds cant is nothing more than middle class snobbery, an affectation meant to emphasise superiority to working class tastes. Most of those arguments you hear about it are rubbish - thank you, our kids are not obese or even average weight. As for the corporate deathburger thing? Please. There is nothing more intellectually demeaning than directing pseudo-progressive analysis at fast-moving consumer goods suppliers simply because they are retailers. How ironic that the people with the fattest, laziest philosophical analysis spend so much time targeting fat and leisure. Although McDonald's could help themselves. When you go to their website, they ask you to select your 'country/market'. I mean honestly, you can smell their greed can't you? There are no countries, only country/markets. And they wonder why they're the target of so much nihilistic cynicism.

Anyway, so the kids enjoy themselves and their happy meals. The promo at the moment, which is the point of this discursive rave, is with Happy Meals they give away minute boom boxes, which play one song. The sound is badly distorted and tinny, the snippet of song is thirty seconds long and it takes about three plays to start driving me up the wall. But, hell, I bought it for them.

Carlo walks around the house with two boomboxes playing different songs, one pressed to each ear, starting and restarting them, nodding out of time to the beat and mixing discs like p-Money.

One of the songs is that deeply irritating Aqua 'song', 'Barbie'.

You know the one: "I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie wo-ooorrrllld. (Come on Barbie, let's go pardy)."

Carlo plays it over and over.

When Maria first heard it, she looked stunned and said to me, "The Barbie World! I would like to go there."

My poor little iBook has served me superbly for three years. I love it, but for the number of things I do it's a little underpowered.

So yesterday I headed down to the local apple shop and picked up this:



Yeah, baby, 20 flat screen inches of super-fast, ultra-chic, mega-cool goodness, with built in video camera, bluetooth, wifi, dvd writer, 250 gigs of harddrive and screaming speed. It fires up my programmes in a flash, snip snap claps everything I want into place before I know I want it and just hangs around being beautiful.

As machines go? This one's a keeper.

When Carlo spills something, he says 'Ooo la la!'. When it makes a mess he says, 'Oooo la lala laaaaaa.'

Maria marches into his creche when we pick him up, looking tall, confident and elegant among the little kids. Today Carlo was playing by himself a little apart from the other kids, as he often is. He seems to enjoy creche though.

Maria translates for me. I showed her a cartoon image of a new tramway for Paris and she asked me 'c'est n'exist pas?'

"No it doesn't exist yet. It will soon."

She giggled. "Daddy, you know my French!"

"Not really, just a little bit. You're the best at French in this house."

Big grin.

Each night over dinner we practise together. She will put together a French sentence meaning something like 'I picked up the cup' and I will try to comprehend. This exercise benefits my French more than hers - though she's building confidence in using full sentences.

In English whenever she refers to something in the past tense she carefully enunciates the suffix.

"Carlo catch-ed the ball". "I drop-ped it." "I ate-ed it."

Over dinner we came to discuss Bananas in Pyjamas.

Maria calls them 'banane dans le jamas.'

She tried to teach Carlo the song. "Banane. Dans jamas. Je va en va de l'escalier."

Carlo looks unhappy. "No 'nanas. Chips!".

Today when I picked him up his teacher told me - as part of the comprehensive daily report on what he played with, how long he slept and what he ate -- he ate a lot of kiwi.

That's funny because he IS a kiwi, I told her. She gave me that funny look they give me most days when I'm not quite keeping up with the flow of things.

"Non, MANGER beaucoup de kiwi." Manger = eat. Accompanied by the Universal Knife And Fork Gesture.

"Oui. Kiwi est neo-zelandaise. Carlo est neo-zelandaise!" I smiled.

She gave me that look that says, 'you're a goddam freak'.

The argument here is that women leaders make much more of a difference to women. Did Margaret Thatcher? No. The claim is nonsense, which undermines the entire point of the article.

Over here, there is an interesting backgrounder on Muslims in Amercia. They're not radicalised as Muslims in Europe are, because they're better integrated. That, incidentally, fits my view about the Paris riots last year. Worth noting: Muslim households in America have a higher average income than American households as a whole. A quarter of Muslim household in the US - a quarter! - have household incomes over US$100,000 a year, or more than NZ$150,000.

By comparison, the average weekly household income in New Zealand is US$42,000 (something here is not right - this makes our household incomes about the same as those in the US. I suspect the US figures are out of date, but I am assuming the comparison of relative wealth still holds).

There are figures at the link for average weekly income by household, but I couldn't find up to date figures on the number of NZ households earning over NZ$150,000. It obviously must be less than a quarter - so Muslim households in America are far better off than average New Zealand houses. The implication is clear. We must all praise Allah.

Bonus factoid: The richest households in New Zealand? Couples with adult children. They have an average wekly income of $2031. Unfortunately, there are only 4500 of them.

Finally, the never ending supply of ironic names. Hello officer Fagley.

Here's the stupidity of selecting Hamish Marshall, who is not an opener, ahead of Lou Vincent, who is the form batsman of the New Zealand summer.

There is a case to be made that John Bracewell knows something about the one day game but he shouldn't be allowed within a hundred miles of a test side.

Apparently, Wellington was the sunniest main centre over the summer.

Mmmm, and I'm thinking also the windiest and the coldest.

Check out this for kitchen toys:


And over here, someone takes literally the expression 'Communist Party'.

Amazing what you find when you Google your own name.

This Pagani is no relation, but there is some fantastic photography on his site.


The Pagani Zonda is no relation either. But it is the fastest production car in the world. To be honest with you? I've always thought it's not the coolest looking car I've ever seen. But look at the new model.



This is not a car, it's a Batmobile.



There is more Pagani car porn over here.

"Dancing was an indispensable social skill when I was young," says the European Union's Commissioner for Communications, Margot Wallstrom, on her blog.

Oh yes, Margot, you could dance! You could sing! Dig it Margot! You were the dancing Queen!

Margot closed her eyes and travelled back to that night. Bjorn, Agnetha and Freda rocked quietly on the radio of Olafs' Dad's Volvo. His skin was still hot from the sauna. Her head spun from the vodka. As he leant to her and bent to kiss her neck, she inhaled the delicious scent of herring...of God how she missed him. How she missed the rough texture of his reindeer-hide jacket. How she pined to be seventeen again and twirling on the ice with Olaf...oh, Olaf, only you Olaf!

Her slender long fingers extended silently to the phone. A thousand miles and thirty years away in her misty daydream she let herself begin to tap out his number. If only to be seventeen again. If only to be held once more in Olaf's arms, to massage each other after ice fishing in the midday dark. If only to let our lips tangle again as we softly sing 'Fernando' to each other. To take off our clothes and run through the snow. To frolic in the eighty degree steam of the sauna. To laugh with you Olaf!

The line connected and purred as it rang that distant number of her youth. And suddenly the crushing snap of reality, as Magnus walked in. "What are you doing darling?"

Margot slammed the phone back on its cradle. "Oh just updating my blog....ummm, how does this sound?

"I find it strange when European leaders refer to other Member States as 'foreign'… Have we not come further in co-operation in this European Union? And I of course regret very much what seems to be a nationalistic and protectionist tendency in Member States."

"I dunno," Magnus said.

"Maybe they refer to other Member Stats as 'foreign' because... they ARE foreign."

"The creche will be closed tomorrow because the teachers will be on strike," a small sign on the door informed yesterday when I collected Carlo. Only it was en Francaise, of course.

Great. A single evening's notice and hard luck if you have a full day's work to do. So he stayed home with me while the winter rain fell outside. He didn't mind so much. At one point he took off all his clothes, including his nappy, and cackling like a madman sprinted around the house. We've all done it.

Meanwhile his teachers marched in tens of thousands along Paris streets with other public sector employees.

Their cause is to protest against jobs for young people. Not that they would describe it exactly like that.

Keen observers of France will recall that last year mobs of rioting young people took to the streets and set fire to their neighbours' cars. There was a very convenient explanation for the riots offered by the kind of politician who was hogging TV cameras on those marches today (here's looking at you Monsieur charisma-free-zone-Francoise Hollande, leader of the Soclialist Party): The kids were alienated from society, and that was hardly surprising given youth unemployment is over twenty percent.

Well, most people, whether you think unemployment caused the riots or not, seem to think twenty percent youth unemployment is a bit too much. The government of Dominique de Villepin proposed new laws allowing businesses to hire young people on short-term contracts. There would be a trial period and kids could be sacked more easily during the trial. This would make it easier for businesses to hire them, since at the moment once you hire a Frenchie it's almost impossible to get rid of him. Or at least, you can, but you have to endure a few weeks of Carlo's teachers marching up and down the street with banners.

Now, every single one of the people I've met in Paris who have been looking for work has been trying to get an UNPAID position, just to get in the door. I can think of a couple of quality young people who looked after our kids and had good university qualifications - and they spent their holidays looking for any intro-professional position they could find, trying to get a start. Their friends all do the same; it's how a young person starts out, in many if not most cases.

So the reforms the de Villepin government proposed would more or less formalise something that happens anyway, only allow new staff to actually be paid for their work.

I'm thinking a country doesn't have sustained ten percent unemployment, and twenty percent among 18-25, unless there is a systematic problem. And the cost of hiring staff is one prime suspect.

The teachers who were marching today, of course, have nothing to gain by making it easier for new staff to enter the workforce. It would only put pressure on their conditions. It's easier to blame the government for the riots than to look at whether their protests against any change at all maybe stop the government from doing much.

It's not so surprising they can casually wildcat, inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of parents and dooming poor little Carlo to another day at home with Dad.

Couple of things I've been meaning to catch up on...

There are two ways to make lots of money with a website. Sam Morgan's way, and this way.

Adopt a comedian (movie link - don't bother unless you have broadband).

Visual hunting assistance for Dick Cheney.

Damn this happening while I was out of the country: Apparently, there's been a beer price war.

"discounting by the three major beer companies - DB, Lion Nathan and Independent Distillers - had caused the latest price drops."

It's just not my day.

Meanwhile, on an Oscars theme, you know how in the movies you always see some dude shoot a padlock open? With a handgun? It's all bollocks.

Finally, don't be clicking this link at work unless you own the company. It takes you to the Phallic Logo Awards - for real logos. For example - here is the logo of the Brazilian Institute for Oriental Studies. Yup.

Last night I filled out this informal online census of Nww Zealanders living overseas.

I'm slightly sceptical of KEA. A few years ago they got very precious about government attempts to form expat networks -- you got the feeling they would rather have no network than see themselves displaced in any way.

But here's hoping there is some point to it all, if you feel like being part of the loop, that's the place to start.

Back at Christmas we had some interesting dinner party conversation about organics.

For instance, would you be keen on organic eggs right now, when they are from the only unvaccinated domestic birds running around outside where they can play with wild birds?

We had a smoker over who told us eating anything other than organics is simply poison.

Which reminds me of this concerned citizen:

Yep, those jackhammers could do untold damage.

The world's most Muslim countries.

Just in case you're maybe a cartoonist thinking of taking a trip somewhere.

Advertising executives are getting old.

Students at Oxford have voted

"overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the tradition of wearing full academic dress for examinations."

It's been a while, yes.

Time to get cracking.