Today was tough in the office, dear. There's the oil hostage crisis in Nigeria, the presidential handover in Burundi which just might gradually help that poor country's people out of deep shit, and more out of Africa than I can even remember tonight... (I'm linking to AFP on Yahoo now we're there too, curious about how long these stories get archived for).
Karin, bless her, seems to have improved the state of my insides with Poly-Karaya, which tastes absolutely foul. It may be on a hitlist of probably inefficacious drugs for the Sécu, but my favourite chemist also said it's good stuff.
zzz
And yeah, those elections! Union ones. A royal mess at AFP, now that the polling was supposed to be over agency-wide and the ballots counted by "category", until it was found that for the first time, the number of votes cast in the "collège journalistes was a few dozen short of a quorum. All hope of getting a consensus among the unions over what to do next were rapidly dashed, which meant going to Madame l'Inspecteur du Travail, lawyers and all that. DS will explain the next steps at his growing batch of special pages accessible via ASAP, just as soon as the situation is clear: that's all I can say here tonight to help keep people in far-flung bureaux informed.)
zzz
 So tomorrow it's May Day, street marches for all those divided unions, but otherwise dead city time, one of the very few in the year when absolutely everything but essential services (and news agencies) close down. Untold millions of bunches of lily of the valley get bought and given. Underground it's not dead at all, since May 1 is the annual field day for the ticket inspectors in the Métro, who turn out in hordes to slap fines on everybody they can catch without a valid one. We'll see about the accordion players. In the past couple of years, the rise in immigration from eastern Europe has brought dozens of them to Paris; this morning, when I got on the train at Plaisance, there were five of them on the platform and at Invalides I recently counted 11! Fortunately, none of them boarded the train because I think that the next time I hear 'Those were the days, my friend', which they all play, I shall probably scream or simply kill...
 On a different note, for the bandit in my heart, those transport demons remind me to remind you about 'Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable' by Romain Gary, the feller who won the Prix Goncourt twice, under different names in one of the finest stunts ever pulled on the community of critics. I began at the end, with 'Les Cerfs-volants', the first novel in French I really enjoyed, even if in those days it was with the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other.
Oh, and there was never anything wrong with that ticket of yours...
Spin a coin on a dead loss and it becomes an open door.
Sometimes you just have to go underground to come out in the right place.
Orpheus looked back. Silly man.
11:58:08 PM link 
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