Streptococci lurk

As I’ve mentioned, my flight back from Paris last week was a damned plague ship. So of course I’ve been sick ever since. My capacity for manufacturing snot is really impressive, but it’s the cough that’s killing me. I have a history with coughs, so I’ve been trying to tame this sucker for days.

I made an appointment yesterday with my primary care doc for a telehealth visit, because all I wanted was a prescription for cough medicine with codeine, which is the only thing that’s ever killed my coughs. Well, according to her, codeine is out of fashion and pharmacies don’t even stock it. But she wanted me to come in anyhow so she could listen to my lungs; she was concerned about the prospect of pneumonia. So I went in.

Got tested for flu and COVID (both negative); lungs are fine, although it’s hard to “breathe deep” when doing so triggers a coughing fit. She gave me prescriptions for benzonatate and albuterol and advised otherwise to rest and drink plenty of fluids.

(For the record, I’ve already gone through a gallon of various juices since Monday.)

Anyway—all this is by way of explaining today’s earworm: Vivian Blaine singing “Adelaide’s Lament” from Guys & Dolls.

Obviously, a poisen has developed a cold.

 

Our Lady

While in Paris I did go to see Notre Dame. I didn’t do it last year because honestly the videos of it engulfed in flames in 2019 were so horrifying that I just couldn’t. I could see it encased in scaffolding on my taxi ride to my hotel and just left it at that.

They’re working like crazy to get it fully restored in time for the Olympics next year. You can’t go inside, but they’ve got panels along the side documenting their efforts. It must feel amazing to be among the craftspeople repairing and recreating the structure and ornaments that have stood there for nearly a millennium.

Here’s what I could see.

I love the gargoyles.

 

 

You won't find everything...

I gave you a report on Galeries Lafayette, the iconic department store in Paris. But I also went this time to la Samaritaine, which with Galeries, le Bon Marché and au Printemps, formed the apex quartet of consumerism in the city. I vaguely recall buying a cotton top at au Printemps on a trip there in the 90s, and I made a pass through le Bon Marché in 2018, because it was between my hotel and le musée de l’Armée. But I couldn’t recall having been to la Samaritaine, so this time I went there.

Originally built in 1869 as a dress shop, the store expanded physically as it expanded its merchandise. Eventually, you could buy anything from ladies clothing to lawnmowers there (rather like Sears, as I think of it), lending truth to its slogan “On trouve tout à la Samaritaine” (you can find everything at the Samaritaine). It was decidedly more downmarket from the likes of Galeries or Bon Marché, which was evident from a display of 60s and 70s commercials they had.

(Actress looks more like Princess Margaret, but still pretty good.)

(The part I saw in the store starts at 0:44.)

The store declined throughout the latter part of the 20^th Century, and closed in 2005. It was eventually acquired by Bernard Arnault and a part of his LVMH conglomerate; Arnault poured seven years and nearly $900M into renovations before it reopened a little over two years ago. This time round, it is definitely not a middle-class mecca, and you will not find a whiff of a lawnmower anywhere near it. It struck me as a Galeries Lafayette manqué, just with fewer floors and less space, but pretty much the same merch. Viz:

It does have beautiful Art Nouveau touches from its origins, and the glass roof ensures it’s flooded with light, even on an overcast day.

But—as with GL—it’s not clear to me who would actually buy there, outside of certain categories of foreign tourists, into none of which I fall.

 

 

Tech support

A couple of months ago, my HP Spectre laptop started going wonky; symptoms included the power cable being loose in the USB port, and it kept getting worse.

I called around to a few local computer repair places. One told me they’d be happy to take a look, for $159, and then repair. Another said that there was only one place in the area (well—in Alexandria, across Fairfax County from me) that might be able to do that kind of repair, because the power ports on HP Spectres are welded to the motherboard, and that’s a tricky repair.

So I called that place, and the geek who picked up the phone was in his absolute element, being able to nerd-splain to me what such a repair involved. The key elements for me were that the operation would take at least a week (I was headed out to the Balkans in days), and the cost was not fixed. Coud be $this, could be $$$that, depending on what they needed to do.

So I ended up sending it to HP, where for $453 they replaced the motherboard (warrantee expired in April, one year after I bought it). I have to say that their service is fine—they did what they said they would do, when they said they would; they sent me super packing materials for shipping (including tape to seal the box); seems like it’s fixed.

(Fortunately, my previous laptop was still operational; that’s what I took with me on the trip.)

But hear me out: they replaced the motherboard. That means I have to reinstall everything—ev er-y-thing—on my machine. I moved all the files off before I shipped but they stripped all the apps, as well. I had to reinstall Office365; have to find and reinstall Bitdefender, Slack, Dropbox, SnagIt—even my bloody printer driver (which, between Microsoft and HP, is driving me batty). Also—I have to log into everything once again, meaning I have to remember, find or reset every single one of those passwords.

Furthermore—why has everything (Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, File Explorer) gone Darth Vader? They're all in dark mode, and I have to hunt out the settings to change them back to light. Plus, I had to stop Word and Outlook from feeding me predictive text. Ugh.

Technology is, as Dylan Thomas said of politics, bloody awful.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: timing

My flight home from Paris was a plague ship. Everyone around me was coughing; the whole spectrum from dry to wet.

So of course I came down with a sore throat/cough/cold the day after I landed.

It’s just a cold, but it sucks the energy right out of me and makes it really hard to even talk.

So what am I grateful for today? I’m thankful that I didn’t get sick until I got home; that I didn’t have to deal with this while I was in Europe.

 

 

 

That's the style

Tomorrow marks the 105^th anniversary of the cessation of fire that everyone hoped would end what was then known as the Great War.

It wasn’t really great, but people didn’t know what else to call a conflict of that magnitude, enveloping most of Europe from Russia to the Atlantic and sucking in peoples from around the world before it was done. It was an imperial war fought for imperial reasons; it resulted in the destruction of four empires (Russian, Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian) and prepped the ground for the collapse of another (British).

The subsequent treaties that officially ended the proceedings—constructed carefully to support new imperial gains (for Britain, France and the United States)—also planted the seeds of a century of discontent and conflict, the fruits of which we’ve seen in the Balkans and Middle East for decades.

High-level sweeping statement: the imperial victors drew arbitrary new maps of territories encompassed by the defeated empires that failed to take into account ethnic, religious or tribal connections. (“Bosnians, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Kosovars, Serbs, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians—we’re going to lump you all into one country called South Slavia, and here, here’s a Serbian king for you!”) Particularly in the Mid-East, they carved out mandates for the French and the Brits, ignoring not only the desires of the inhabitants who’d built sophisticated societies for centuries but also wartime promises made to Jews of a homeland for them.

At the end of the following war (seeds of which also sown in those very same treaties), a new set of empires (Soviet Union, American; then British and French) had another go at appropriating peoples and lands to serve ideology, and here we are.

We didn’t bother with a descriptor this time; just called it World War II.

I was looking for songs from the First War, and was struck by the clear distinction drawn between the battle front and the home front (unless, of course, you lived in Northern France; then you were subsumed). That dynamic has changed, as we see today in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. There is no buffer zone in those wars; civilians and civilian institutions are targets right along with military installations. We haven’t progressed as a species in the past century, that’s for sure.

Well, back to the earworm. So very many of the songs from that war were relentlessly upbeat and optimistic about defeating the Hun in a snap. (Yes, I’m looking at the English-language corpus.) I mean—of course; everyone wants to focus on the positive when they think their world has gone bananas. Along with a boatload of super sentimental things.

I rather fancied “Keep the Home Fires Burning”, but couldn’t find a decent recording of it. So I’m going with “Pack Up Your Troubles”. Trying to imagine the size of a bag that would hold our troubles at this juncture, but it’s a nice thought.

I have no idea who the performer is, but I appreciate the film of civilians being recruited and undergoing the training it takes to build a fighting unit.

 

 

Espace chiens

Some (first world) problems are universal.

Such was my thought when I came across this dog-poop bag in the Sixth Arrondissement (a very upscale district) of Paris:

It takes a unique personality to go to the trouble of bagging your dog’s excrement—thus fulfilling the letter of the law—but then leaving it on the street. Especially when there are plenty of trash bins all around.

I see it all the time in the People’s Republic of Reston.

But then there was this:

Interestingly, I never saw either bags or crap on the streets of either Dubrovnik or Sarajevo.

 

 

Lights underground

Even though le Métro tried to kill me, I don’t hold a grudge.

This was the first time I’d ever experienced a subterranean mass transit system (when I first visited in 1979), and I’ve always really loved it. (I’m from LA; I am fascinated by railed mass transit that actually works, and I will ride anything calling itself a subway, metro or light rail just to be able to say I did. There was a tram line in Istanbul that ran maybe a couple of kilometers; I rode it just because.)

So here’s a clip from Odéon station, where things were colorful:

 

La vie parisienne

A few miscellaneous shots around Paris.

This e-bike owner is serious about theft prevention:

And I guess these couples think they’re serious about each other:

(Seriously—get a life, people.)

I’ve noticed that taggers are active all over Europe; this one was kind of impressive for being a mobile target:

(Although in Sarajevo it was the rare tram car that was not grafitti’d.)

I wasn’t sure whether this was an art installation or the morning after a very special night; I suspect the former:

This tree looked like it was in jungle camouflage:

And here’s something you might recognize:

 

Gratitude Monday: all of it

Another Gratitude Monday on the road. And I’m really grateful that I took this trip. Which I probably wouldn’t have done except for the credit from Air France.

I’m grateful that the snotty Swiss deflected me from their poker-up-ass country and over to the Balkans and to Sarajevo in particular.

I’m grateful that my replacement knees have handled thousands of steps a day through streets ancient and modern, including a squillion stone stairs in Dubrovnik.

Even though I’ve had to be patted down at every airport I’ve gone through, those knees are da bomb. I’m going to save a bundle on NSAIDs.

And I’m grateful, once again, for Paris.