Francophonie

The Toronto Star: ANDREW CHUNG QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF MONTREAL – In Lara Croft’s latest action adventure, part of the wildly popular Tomb Raider video game series, the lithe heroine can demand of her evil doppelganger either, “What the hell are you?” or, “Qu’est-ce que tu es, exactement?” And that’s exactly the way Quebec wants it, from now on. French language rules on video games come into force today prohibiting the sale of new English-only video games in Quebec if a…

Slate: Scratch a KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski enthusiast and he’ll insist that everybody who reads the master’s books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how…

BBC: Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it. Parodying the French readiness to say “non”, the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: “No to 2007” and “Now is better!” The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time’s “mad race” and declare a moratorium on the future. The protest was held in the rain and organisers joked that even the weather was against…

So here’s the deal: Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.) The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care. Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations…

When I was a sophomore at Berkeley in 2002, I took a class with Prof. Anna-Livia Brawn, on French colonial films — given that I knew I would be headed to Senegal later that fall. One of the filmmakers that she introduced us to was Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director and writer who she highly lauded and suggested that if ever we had the chance to see a Sembène film, that we should, given that Sembène apparently is very finicky…

So I don’t know which is more ridiculous, the cover of this new book Chine-Afrique: Le Dragon et l’Autruche (China-Africa: The Dragon and the Ostrich), or the fact that it would cost me 40 € to buy the book and have it shipped to the U.S., or the fact that I can buy it direct from the publisher in PDF form for 17.85 €.

ESPN.com: [Russ] Martin spent part of the winter catching Dodgers closer Eric Gagne, who is continuing his comeback from elbow surgery. “He’s throwing very well,” Martin said. “His changeup is as filthy as ever.” The two have spent a lot of time together this spring because they’re battery mates, Canadians and they both speak fluent French. “We speak French all the time, out on the field sometimes, but not when anyone else is around,” Martin said. “We decided that we…

Slate: On a certain level, it’s hard to blame Anglophone critics. Your junior-high être et avoir won’t get you very far with the torrents of slang that fill French rap. Even most French-speakers find it hard to follow along. Many MCs deliver whole songs in Verlan, the ingenious, dizzying slang in which words are reversed or recombined, turning arabe (arab) into rabza, bourré (drunk) into rébou, bête (stupid) into teubé, and so on. (Verlan is itself an example of the…

So as many of you know, Taxi is one of my favorite films — it’s a fantastic French action comedy about a superfast driving Taxi driver who ends up working for the Marseille police when he gets busted by a bumbling cop who enlists him to stop the German Mercedes gang bank robbery gang invading Marseille. It’s been remade for an American audience and will be released this October. I’ve just watched the trailer for the remake and there are…

Just when I was starting to get used to this gorgeous weather, I have to head for the frigid East next week. Should be cool, though. Planning on seeing Sina “Herr Doktor” Mohammadi in Boston, which should be cool. Yeah, and I’m supposed to do a story while I’m there, too. Good luck. BCN’s pretty quiet today. I’ve been delving into my thesis a little bit: and have been pondering these paragraphs, which was quoted in a friend of mine’s…