Yesterday marked the 6-year anniversary of the savage terrorist attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. That morning, two gunmen killed 12 members of Charlie Hebdo’s staff and left 11 injured. I wrote about one of the courageous survivors, Coco, back in 2017. The word courageous, however, doesn’t do…
Last week I began summarizing some of the highlights from The Story of French, by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow. My post left off in the midst of the French Revolution. I read much of the book in November. During the week of our election, I was learning that at…
Today, France lands at number 22 in the list of countries when ranked by population size. Yet, French is the 5th most spoken language in the world, behind English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish. It’s an impressive status for a relatively small country—49th in the world in terms of geographic area.…
While many of us are tired of the isolation and solitude provoked by the Coronavirus pandemic, a few dozen of the world’s elite sailors are currently putting our notion of hardship to shame. On November 8th, 33 skippers set off on a solo, non-stop sailing race that circumnavigates the globe.…
For the last two weeks, I’ve been experiencing increasingly annoying pain in my right arm. This all began after spending many consecutive hours at my computer, sitting on a wooden chair that belonged to my grandfather, working on my Evangeline post. Anyway, this week, I started waking up with excruciating…
Throughout the month I come across a fair number of articles, blogs, images, books, or videos that I’d like to share with readers, but they don’t necessarily work into my typical format. So, I’ve decided to create a monthly post that briefly highlights some of the Internet gems that have…
In June of 2019, I wrote about Rudy Kurniawan, Extraordinary Forger of Fine Wine. Kurniawan’s story is told in the documentary film, Sour Grapes, and in an award-winning book, In Vino Duplicitas. In short, he was a young and charismatic wine dealer who scammed wealthy wine collectors out of millions…
In recent weeks, I’ve been making my way through The Story of French, a history of the French language. In a chapter devoted to French spoken in Canada, I was reminded of the history of the Acadian people. The authors made note of an epic poem, Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth…
