She weighs about 130 kg, or twice what her normal weight should be, and she strips off in front of her webcam, to gorge herself on food and smear her body with sauces. She also farts to order, while people can also see her vast bulk sitting on the loo. Needless to remark, she charges for all this and there are enough people with very strange desires to give her a weekly income of $1, 000. All very disgusting, but strangely compelling in its revulsion!
Back in France, employees with a vastly pampered work regime are still on strike at Radio France, the public service broadcaster, over fears that budget cuts could mean lots of job losses and heavy outsourcing. Now it turns out that if someone has a permanent job with Radio France, they are entitled to 13 weeks holiday a year! And the ceo of the organisation, Mathieu Gallet, didn’t exactly endear himself to staff when it was revealed recently that he had spent €100, 000 doing up his office. Mediation talks are ongoing, but for the moment, the French listening public has proved remarkably adept at doing without the regular programmes on the Radio France channels.
Then TV5 Monde got hacked by Isis. The station broadcasts to 200 countries around the world on 11 channels and last week, hackers brought the entire operation to a halt. If the Isis hackers are so sophisticated that they can close down an entire TV network, heaven forbid what they could do to an important part of any country’s infrastructure, from its energy sources to transport networks and banking systems. These days, everything depends on computers and the Isis hackers have already shown amazing dexterity. Governments everywhere should be very afraid. Here in Ireland, an anonymous group of hackers have threatened to bring down the computer systems in the country’ s parliament and reveal a lot of highly classified personal material to the world.
Neither is it any surprise that close on half of Europe’ s jihadists are from France. There also seems to be yet another threat coming down the line from that same source, if a story in the London Independent newspaper and website is to be believed. It says that in a recent video, Isis has threatened to carry out more militant attacks with international ramifications, a frightening prediction indeed.
Amid the deluge of gloomy news from around the world, at least, the positives keep happening in France. The city council in Paris has just voted in favour of making an application to the International Olympic Committee for the city to host the 2024 summer Olympics. But the city elders in Paris should beware of the gifts of Olympia- look what happened to Athens and Greece after the Olympic Games there.
Another piece of good news in Paris is the launch of a new shuttle bus service from the city centre to Charles de Gaulle airport at Roissy. At the moment, travellers have the choice of taxi, which is quite expensive, or the RER train service, where they are at risk from pickpockets wanting to hijack their luggage. So the new bus service sounds an excellent idea.
Yet another brilliant tourism idea is being opened in the Ardeche department in southern France on April 25. The Grotte Chauvet has 36, 000 year old cave drawings that are the oldest figurative cave drawings in the world. Letting people in to see them is dangerous, because people’ s breath is highly damaging. So at a cost of €200 million and after two years of construction, an exact replica of the caves and their drawings has been built and people will be able to go and see them perfectly freely. It’s expected that the replica caves will draw 350, 000 visitors a year. I always remember, many years ago, going to see the cave drawings at Lascaux in the Dordogne. They were a remarkable sight indeed but have been closed to tourists for years.
Another interesting “first” is coming up on May 13 when the Cannes Film Festival opens. For the first time in its history, it will open with a film directed by a woman, a welcome development. Emmanuel Bercot’s film, La Tete Haute, has among its stars Catherine Deneuve.
A rather nastier story emerged in the south- western city of Montpellier, where it seemed that so many buspassengers objected to Roma people being on the same buses, because of their smell, that a special segregated bus service was being planned. But such were the legal objections that the idea was soon dropped. Also on the subject of legal issues, Yannick Tavolaro, who runs a patisserie in Grasse in Provence, is appealing against the court ban on him displaying chocolate figures showing ancient African deities. He claims the ban is another form of censorship.
Then the taxi drivers are at it again; they’ve threatened to cause massive disruption, as only they know how, before the end of this month if the Uberpop taxi sharing service isn’t banned. Always in France, if any group of vested interests sees the remotest threat to their livelihood, it’ s means an instant strike.
Someone else who isn’t at all happy and is threatening legal proceedings is SNCF. Last Sunday afternoon, a well- established cycle race took place in north- eastern France, from Compiegne to Roublaix. Some of the cyclists got separated from the race when level crossing barriers came down, so they cycled round them to the other side. Some of the cyclists just missed being hit by a TGV and seeing the episode on YouTube, it’ s very clear just how close a call it was.
I was very interested to see what Pierre Gattaz, the head of the French employers’ union, MEDEF, had to say the other day. He said that the French economy was like an exceptionally gifted student whose talents are being exploited by excessive bureaucracy. But whether the French will ever overcome their ridiculous obsession with form filling, on paper or online, is a very good question. I don’t think it’ s ever going to happen any time soon, since it would require such an earthquake in collective thinking. It’s hardly any surprise to know that VAT was invented by a diligent French civil servant in the 1950s!
But the French government is pressing on with a €2. 5 billion programme of tax incentives to try and encourage more industrial investment.
The big news at the moment on the political front is of course the bust-up in the Front National, with its leader, Marine le Pen disassociating herself from her father, the elderly Jean- Marie, who has a knack of putting his foot in it. It seems that the vast majority of Front National supporters agree with the modernising ways of Marine, but Jean- Marie’ s grandchild, Marion Maréchal- le- Pen is going to replace her grandfather in regional elections in Marseilles in December.
The other big news of the moment is the Vatican refusing to accept the new French ambassador there, Laurent Stéfanini, because he’ s gay. So much for the supposed wind of change blowing through the Vatican!
Someone who died the other day, at the age of 98, was Jean- Louis Crémieux- Brilhac, who was the last surviving member of de Gaulle’ s entourage in London during the second world war. In the run-up to D Day in 1944, it was he who wrote the script advising how everyone in occupied France could do their duty when the Allies invaded France. After the war, he became a high ranking civil servant, then in retirement, reinvented himself as an historian of great renown, writing several well- received books on French history, especially during that war. He never married, but had a superb place to live, an apartment on the boulevard St- Germain in the 6th.
Down in the far south- west of France the other day, in Port Vendres, an 18 year old Belgian man who was on a wine making course, dashed across the railway lines at the local station, only to be killed by an oncoming freight train. Then in Cannes on Monday of this week, a woman in her 40s was found dead in her apartment, with her throat slashed; apparently, an intruder had got in through a window.
Back in the UK, the general election campaign plods on, with vast amounts of meaningless verbiage. It’s all become so boring and tedious that I don’t bother reading much of the coverage any more-the headlines do me! I reckon the aftershocks are going to be far more fascinating than the run-up to the election. One writer in the London Times predicts a hung parliament, with a minority government in such a chaotic position that the election will have to be rerun within three months. There’ s an Irish general election coming up fairly soon as well; the two parties that form the present coalition government made so many pledges and promises they promptly abandoned as soon as they got into power that most voters would be hard pressed to remember them all. All kinds of ‘nasties’ are coming down the line, like the 50, 000 people likely to be evicted from their homes this year because of mortgage arrears and rent increases. The present government in Dublin seems remarkably complacent and uninterested in such pressing social issues. Just like the Tories in Britain, the present government parties in Dublin want to present a wonderfully gloss on the state of the country, a gloss that bears little resemblance to reality.
Also in Ireland, the takeover battle by IAG to win control of Aer Lingus is nearing its climax. And it seems that if the takeover is successful, some present and past senior executives in Aer Lingus are going to reap small fortunes for their shares. It seems that greed is no obstacle to selling out the Irish airline, but then the rich are usually very greedy and want more whenever they can get it.
I was also struck recently by another gloss, this time literary, that bears little resemblance to what really happened. I was reading a biography of Vivienne, the first wife of the poet T. S. Eliot. Painted Lady, a life of Vivienne Eliot, by Caroline Seymour-Jones, reveals how the great poet was really a nasty piece of work, a dirty bugger who was big into homosexuality, and in even more revolting hypocrisy, became an ardent church member in England. Eliot may have been a great poet, but he had so many warped ideas, especially about women, that one can only conclude that he wouldn’t have been a nice person to know.
At least there was one good laugh in the book. In the early 20th century, when lesbianism was becoming very fashionable in literary London, one peer of the realm rushed into his London club one day exclaiming: “Who is this wonderful Greek god called clitoris, of whom we have never heard” .
I was also intrigued by the wedding last Saturday of tennis star Andy Murray and Kim Sears in the cathedral of Dunblane in Scotland. Intriguingly, they refused to sell photos of their wedding to such publications as Hello, thus avoiding the long proven curse on people appearing in that publication. But there was one bad omen, when on the day before the wedding, rehearsals were being carried out. A middle aged news photographer from Glasgow collapsed in the cathedral grounds from a heart attack and died in hospital the following afternoon, the afternoon of the wedding.