Puppets, Sex, and French TV

The anchor and host of Les Guignols de l'Info

We have 400+ channels at our flat in Paris, most are devoted to imported TV shows and movies, live soccer, and round-table discussions. News, entertainment, sports; it all apparently requires a roundtable discussion consisting of a host, a panel of experts, and a studio audience, the most attractive of whom are positioned directly behind whoever spends the most time on camera.

I don’t understand what is being said – the French is spoken quickly and dives into material deeper than favorite colors and counting to ten – but it appears as if the conversation is very intelligent and insightful. Compare this to studio audiences in the United States where, if participants can’t laugh, see someone famous, or have the chance of winning a new car, seats won’t get filled.

When our friend Mark – a registered Francophile – came to visit us, he introduced us to one of the oddest amendments to the roundtable discussions: Les Guignols de l’Info. The program is a seven-minute interlude of short sketches—kind of like Saturday Night Live if the actors had comically-large heads, stiff joints, and rigid facial expressions. The actors are puppets.

The episode we watched started innocently enough with an interview with Clint Eastwood, followed by two smoking and drinking E.T.’s in a fake promo for the movie “E.T. the prequel.” Next, a jovial and casually dressed Gerard Depardieu made a cameo carrying a bottle of wine. It is refreshing to know that Gerard maintains cultural relevance somewhere in the world.

The final sketch featured Jean Dujardin, the lead actor in The Artist and showed excerpts from his next film: The Infidels.

I was in the other room when the next three clips showed, but based on the audio of woman moaning, I knew that this would never see primetime in the States. I rushed back into the room and sure enough: two clips of Jean Dujardin the puppet having sex with two different female puppets, in different positions. The third and final clip was of puppet felatio, with no puppet elation spared in either video or audio.

I’ll let Dujardin’s face speak for itself but, if you are from North America and 18 years or older, you can view the original screenshots here, here, and here.

It transitioned seamlessly to a straight-faced round table of experts who continued their conversation without missing a beat.

Wait, what? It’s 8:00pm—dinner time in most French households. You must be able to air anything on French television.

As it turns out, no.

I heard of a commercial where a woman, drinking a cup of coffee, walked in to the living room to help her son with his homework on the computer. Sounds benign, no? It was denied by the Autorité de Régulation Professionelle de la Publicité (ARPP) citing Clause 1/4 – “All Consumption situations in front of a screen, in a house, are prohibited.”

This is one of eighteen rules enforced by the ARPP to avoid promotion of “bad eating habits.”

Here are some direct excerpts:

1/1 Well-balanced diet: When the meal as a whole, lunch or dinner, is visualized, it must be a well-balanced diet.
1/3 Nibbling: Nibbling shouldn’t be presented as substitutable to a meal.
1/5 Societal Values: Adverts must avoid any stigmatization of persons because of their size, their stoutness or their thinness.
2/1 Association of performance to humor or to an imaginary world: The use, in an advert, of humor, original and unusual situations, or the reference to an imaginary world, is possible if it stays in a fantasy world and doesn’t risk to be understood by children like real achievements which could result from the food consumption.

Similar rules exist for those marketing cars:

1 Speed: The advert must not argue about speed, neither exploit the attraction it could represent, in the images, the sound, the overlays or in any other written information in the advert.

Better keep those puppets busy fornicating so they aren’t tempted by such
moral deviations as “nibbling.”

August 26, 2012May 13, 2023

Pigeon Nest On A Ledge

Common Wood Pigeon (right) with Rock Pigeon

Pigeons are everywhere in Paris. The Common Wood-Pigeon is larger that the other two species possible in Paris—Stock and Rock Pigeon—and it’s the most numerous, by far. You can’t enjoy an open expanse of Parisian sky without seeing a handful of these avian porkers flying in any or all directions. Watch a tree for 5 minutes and chances are good that you’ll see a wood-pigeon using it’s vividly banded black and white tail to frantically decrease its speed before crashing into the foliage, displaying as much grace as a rhinoceros on a patch of ice.

My first morning in Paris, a Common Wood-Pigeon perched on the ledge outside our bedroom window and woke us with its incessant call. It has woken us every morning since.

Most horizontal surfaces in Paris are fortified with spikes to dissuade these birds from defecating on whatever lays beneath. Park your car underneath a tree in Paris for a couple days and the scene will look like an avian Beirut.

In July, Kristi and I were fortunate enough to gain a glimpse into the secretive nesting life of a pigeon on an adjacent window ledge just outside our apartment door. Early in the month, I noted an adult pigeon (both sexes look the same) setting down some twigs on the window sill. I admired its fortitude, considering the ledge was plastered with strips of pointy spikes, a.k.a “pigeon skewers.” Perhaps their landings are more precise than the crashing sounds of wings against leaves leads one to believe.

I wasn’t able to document every single day due to travel, but we did enjoying seeing the incubated eggs on July 14 with periodic observations until the second young fledged on August 7.

July 14, 2012

On two eggs, typical of pigeons.

July 22, 2012

After 17-19 days, the young have hatched.

July 31, 2012

After just nine days, the ledge is growing cramped with two adolescent birds. The last image shows one nestling begging for more “crop milk,” a fatty substance that adult pigeons produce in the chamber at the base of their esophagus (the “crop”). Pigeons, penguins, and flamingos produce this substance during the breeding season, which, in the case of pigeons, is higher in fat and protein than mammalian milk.

The adult sensed my presence and wasn’t willing to take an eye off of me, but I caught a better view of the exchange on August 7.

August 1, 2012

August 7, 2012

After its sibling fledged just an hour before, I watched the remaining youngster peer over the edge. After watching it pace for 15 minutes—trying to muster the courage to take its first flight—I went away for half an hour. When I returned, the nest was empty.

August 13, 2012May 13, 2023

How to attend the Olympics, last minute (2012 London)

With the entire world descending on a city for two weeks, it’s easy to make excuses to not attend the Olympics: snarled traffic, inflated hotel prices, crowds… If you find yourself with the opportunity to make a last minute decision, here’s what you can do.

Step 1 – Try to find alternative accommodations.

Assuming the hotels were clogged with overpaying tourists, Kristi and I surfed several websites where Londoners offered their apartments for rent. Despite having the technical capacity to match available apartments with our travel dates, each booking required approval from the owner. Ultimately it took 24-48 hours for half of London apartment owners to deny each of our requests.

Step 2 – Give up on alternative accommodations. Use Priceline.

Book a room at the Hilton overlooking the Thames for just over a hundred bucks a night. Breathe a huge sigh of relief that you won’t have to seek shelter from the drippy English skies by huddling in a red phone booth.

Step 3 – Buy tickets to an event. Any event.

Don’t let your mood be dampened by every Londoner with a pulse—cabbies, bartenders, waitresses, random grandmothers—who says that buying tickets is an exercise in futility. It was a challenge to find one Londoner who actually scored tickets to an event in their home city. Despite the negative prognosis, our mood was buoyed by the rumor that batches of tickets were being released every day at 9am and 11pm. We checked frequently every day and, each time, felt the elation of victory as we came tantalizingly close to purchasing tickets followed quickly by the sting of defeat as the website returned the same cold response: “there are no tickets available for this event.” We received this prompt after every stage of the purchase process: after clicking on the event listed on a page called ‘Available Tickets’; after selecting the number of tickets to purchase; after waiting for 15 minutes (yes a quarter of an hour) for the system to check an unknown, and apparently distant, database; after adding the available tickets to our shopping cart; and even after inputting our credit card information and clicking “Purchase.” After 20+ failed attempts, I yearned for the relative sophistication of the Ticketmaster website, words I swore never to speak.

Step 4 – Give up on purchasing tickets. Attend any free event.

Events like triathlons and marathons require lots of space and are ultimately difficult to control access to. Over our three-day stay we attended the women’s Triathlon, women’s Marathon, and men’s 20km Race Walk.

Step 5 – Figure out what the heck is “Race Walk.”

The Race Walk course looped past Buckingham Palace and was lined with thousands people drawn together by the sunny weather, Olympic spirit, and the desire to figure out what the eff race walking entails. I’ve seen videos and caught a glimpse during the 2008 Beijing Olympics: the comically fluid hips, limp arms, and the overwhelming urge to yell “just frickin’ run already!” make it hard to take the sport seriously. And when the pack rounded turn one in front us, a wave of amused disbelief swept through the crowd: they looked ridiculous … and they were going bloody fast.

20km Men’s Race Walk rounding the first corner, with Japan’s Yusuke Suzuki in the lead.

Race Walk rules:

One foot must be in contact with ground at all times.
The front leg must be straight when it touches the ground, and continue to be straight as it passes under the body.
If a course judge–with the naked eye–determines that a racer doesn’t have a foot on the ground (i.e. “loss of contact”) or their forward leg isn’t straight, the racer will receive a warning in the form of a yellow paddle. Violations are radioed in to a central judge who posts the tally on a leaderboard where racers can check their status on each lap. The third violation will come in the form of a red paddle, signaling their disqualification from the race.

The rules of race walking shortens racers strides, thus, in order to achieve higher speeds, race walkers attain cadence rates similar to 400 meter runners … that they maintain for the hours it takes to “run” 31 miles (50km). And for the runners out there, the winner of the Men’s 20km—Chinese race walker Ding Chen—averaged a 6:20 mile (the winner of the 50k was just under 7 minutes).

But if those times aren’t fast enough for you…

Step 6 – Have a drink or three with the former “world’s fastest man”

Turned out Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey, who broke the 100m world record in Atlanta in 1996 (an Olympic record that would stand until Usain Bolt), was staying in our hotel. After befriending a couple inebriated Canadian Scotsmen, my friend Mike and I found ourselves at the table with Donovan—now a sportscaster for CBC—sharing beers until 4:30am.

Drinking British pints with a Jamaican-born gold medal sprinter, the father of the current world record holder for speed skating, and a Scottish doctor for the Canadian Olympic team: if that doesn’t embody the Olympic spirit, I don’t know what does.