 A gifted artist can't and shouldn't be kept down. It's about time fellow Factory hands all over the world got a taste of 'Feff', a spare-time cartoonist and caricaturist who's been brightening up the walls of starship control during the latest routine winter of mild to average discontent.
I'm not in the same unions as Feff is nor do I share all his views, but that's no big deal now that AFP journos have no fewer than half a dozen labour bodies all saying they look after their interests.
One comment on big finance bodies, the fearful French media barons on AFP's board, golden handshakes and parachutes, and the current man in the hot seat simply made me laugh (the main caption reads, "This going to last much longer?"). Thanks, Feff, for permission to blog it.
Posted as one of the "old sods" of the place? I just loved that this afternoon! No sooner had I disclosed my age to the veterans of the Desk afrique than I was teasingly told that I've made it: about good enough for the scrap heap now. "Make way, make way for the young!"
Maybe one day, before then, I'll publish my own AFP "salvation scheme". People seem to have been busy producing them virtually since the day the agency was given its current statute during France's troubled years after World War II. And still we're there.
My own plan, like a few other people's, might glance across the water to the BBC's fairly similar charter. But it's not as if the Beeb is having a great time of it now either...
Youth was in evidence on the editorial floor today. Children and even babies, I mean. We're just into those splendid two weeks of each year when half of Paris disappears to go up and break legs and sprain ankles in the Alps, including lots of teachers and child-minders.
It's still too early for the tourists, these school holidays usually mean that the worst of winter is at last now behind us, and tempers improve in the Métro in proportion to the blessed elbow-room granted those of us sensible enough to stay behind and enjoy it rather than go to fight for a place on the ski-lifts.
"Zen," that's the watchword! One I might have muttered to the Wildcat, who has, yes, over the past three days restored her end of diplomatic relations after the Christmas break.
Even in Africa, Laurent is thinking about Zen. In a missive tonight, the feller in Abidjan tells me he's spotted trace elements of Zen and meditation in this blog. He recommends me, and therefore presumably you, to make the acquaintance of a Japanese writer I'd not heard of before, Eiji Yoshikawa.
Since he writes of a trilogy he's reread with great pleasure, I don't think Laurent can mean 'Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era' (trans. Charles Terry, Kodansha Europe, 1995), but if those aren't rave reviews I've linked to, I don't know what is. To be explored...
The man in the Ivory Coast also sent me in the direction of Un Zen Occidental, describing it as a "very comprehensive" Western website on Zen. That it most certainly is -- not just for French speakers, because there are some good further leads to follow on the "links" ("liens") page -- while my correspondent rightly highlights a pleasing "distanced humour" evident particularly on the meditation page.
Thanks, buddy.
9:40:58 PM link 
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