Mumbai

If like me you're looking for live info on what's happening in Mumbai, check here for video and here for twitter updates.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've made pumpkin pies and cranberry sauce, Betsy's taken the day off for doctors' appointments and a massage and shopping, and she and the boys are on their way home soon. We'll head over to spend Thanksgiving dinner with our new friends Rachel & Greg, plus old friend Philippe and family, but we'll be missing you all and thinking of you. Happy turkey and don't stuff yourselves! (ugh)

Under $500 Washington to Paris?

Looks like it!

Flat Stanley in Paris

The boys' cousin Cooper sent Flat Stanley to visit Paris, and all he got was these lousy photos!

Field trip!

Today I went with Calvin's class to the city's modern art museum. No, not the national museum of modern art (a/k/a, the Pompidou center, that ridiculous alien Habitrail dropped on the Beaubourg neighborhood. The much less known city's museum, or properly le Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, which occupies part of a decrepit and alarmingly fascist building left over from the fifth and last world's fair in Paris, the same one that gave us the excruciatingly bad Palais de Chaillot at Trocadero. I actually like a fair bit of the modern art I've seen but I haven't found a museum of it I like. Anyhoo, I rant.

Wait a sec, I'm not done! What a fun one that 1937 World's Fair must've been, eh? As the ExpoMuseum site says, "it is remember (sic) mostly for the contrasting pavillions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which literally 'faced off' in front of the Eiffel Tower."  Gee, sounds like fun for the whole family.  If that didn't float you, the art highlight was Picasso's Guernica, showing the atrocities of the Spanish civil war.

Well then, back to fun for the whole class!  I met them at school around 12:30, and the kids had just finished lunch and were heading outside to burn off steam for 15 minutes.  They returned and my group of five kids joined the other four parents (moms), teacher, and 20 other kids to troop to the bus stop around the corner.  I'm thinking the other passengers noticed we were there, eh?  After a slow walk up the hill from the bus stop to the museum, and a crazy maze of directions trying to find the bathrooms for the kids, and then waiting 15 minutes with the kids being shushed by museum guards, the docent finally showed up.  I recognized her french accent as American, and from speaking to her briefly learned that she spent a year at the Smithsonian American Art museum a couple of years back.  Too bad I couldn't remember the name of the woman we knew from there - Duncan's mom?

The docent showed the kids two major works - La fée electrique by Raoul Dufy, and something else by someone else.  (Fine liberal arts education coming through here!)  It's easy to describe the first, an enormous panorama of the history of electricity (!) painted for the 1937 fair.  It's hard to picture, though, since it's 10 meters (33 feet) high and 60 meters (200 feet) long, wrapped around a mostly oval room.  You'll have to check out the movie.  The second main piece she presented was a geometric abstract, and if you know the artist shout it out!  The kids did little art projects with each, making a colorful fairy inspired by the first, and (you guessed it) a colorful geometric thingy from the second.

Blah blah blah, we made it home fine after a walk in the rain and a wait for the bus.  Thanks to the wait, you get to see a movie of the kids singing in a bus shelter too!

And those and other pics are located here.  Enjoy.

Châteaux

Carter has an exposé (project report) on châteaux forts (medieval castles) in a couple of weeks. Here are some pictures he's collected from our trips to Provins and Vincennes.

Cassoulet?

See the things we miss by not having US TV coverage of the election!



From the Wikipedia page on cassoulet (which is a southwestern french dish of beans and duck and sausage and ... general yumminess),

Cassoulet enjoyed a burst of unexpected fame in the United States on election night, November 4, 2008, when a large "Cassoulet" banner along with a smaller "Cassoulet Forever" banner was repeatedly held aloft from a crowd gathered outside ABC News' Times Square studios in New York. This banner was a joke made for a French TV show named Le Petit Journal presented by Yann Barthès (in Le Grand Journal presented by Michel Denisot, Canal+), that was broadcasting from New-York for the election. In a matter of hours, the word was actively looked for over the internet[1], being the 62th most searched word on Google [2].

19 hours

We just talked to Mom/Nannan/Glennell who reports that after a loooong day of flying - up at 7am Paris time, arrived just after 8pm Washington time after a delay in Newark - she's at Michelle's and up and playing with her and Will.  In other travel news, Betsy is in Tokyo, Cathy is in Vienna, and Josh is in Hawaii.  So add us all up and we cover 19 of the earth's 24 hours right now, with Tokyo +8 from here and +14 from the US east coast, and Hawaii a further five back.  Crazy!  That means right now it's 2am for Josh, 7am for Michelle et al., 1pm for us, and 9pm for Betsy.  We hope you all have a good morning/afternoon/evening/night!  Oh, and enjoy an appropriately reflective Armistice Day as well.

How the Map Changed From 2004 - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

How the Map Changed From 2004
This is a really neat analysis by the NYT (boo, liberal media elite!) of county-level changes to presidential voting. Even all those unpopulated counties that are still red are trending blue. And hello, deep south? You missed the boat big time.

Bluuuuuuuue

The Eiffel Tower is blue.  Turns out it's celebrating France's presidency of the European Union this six months.  The boys and I captured it on the way back from Carter's fencing lesson a couple of weeks ago.

Spooooooky

Here's our Halloween mantle tableau, with a peak at the beautiful oil painting that our friend Charlene did of the boys.

Beautiful image

You think this is good? Check this out.

About damn time

Congratulations, my fellow Americans. Perhaps our long national nightmare is at least dormant, if not over. As The Onion said,

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

I've just ceremonially retired the "I did not vote for Bush" black wristband!