Computer Love

God I love the Internet today, too bad I've been in meetings most of the day and haven't gotten much time to peruse things.

First up, a post from the venerable YarnHarlot about how the bank thought the sock yarn of the month club must be a scam so they froze Blue Moon's account and returned all their orders! Unbelievable...a bank just throwing away money like that!

Secondly, a NYT article about how the French are trying to bring back politeness. The whole thing is pretty interesting, all the signs and such that they are putting up reminding people to behave a certain way (how Academie Francaise of them, always heavy-handed from above). There are some pretty choice quotes here.

In the perfect French world, rules govern even the most mundane subjects: how to answer the telephone, how to greet a guest at the door, how to address a stranger, what to take to a dinner party, how to behave on the Métro.

“It’s like a sport, you have to train hard,” said Marie de Tilly, a rail-thin expert on manners, who teaches a two-hour course in Paris to women who pay $90 to attend. “But once you train and know the rules, it all comes naturally.” Yes $90 training sessions and rules memorization = perfectly natural!


Some of the traditional politeness rules tickled me.

A married woman should fold one hand over the other at the table, the better to show off her jewels.

Wine is not an appropriate dinner gift. (It assumes that the host does not have good taste.)As a habitual hostess and wine drinker, I roundly disagree with that idea.

Only a country bumpkin would say, “Bon appétit” at the start of a meal.

and my absolute favorite:If a woman’s wineglass needs filling, she should play with it until her male neighbor notices and fills it. OK I don't know about you guys, but I think that's classy as hell. I am totally going to try to this and see if it works. I doubt it will, but I would be very impressed with any man who would pick up on that.

Also a friend sent me this amazing hunk of Internet eye candy from Vice Magazine, a photo shoot of chic Swedish librarians. Mmm mm. Now that's a look that's worth cultivating! Sarah's a particular scorcher...



Also I love that I have so much in common with the lovely ladies of the library featured. There are former journalists, ladies who worked in "big publishing", francophiles, etc. And I love this little tidbit:

Working at the library I get guys hit on me quite a lot. Mostly they’ll say corny things like “You have beautiful eyes” or they’ll leave me little notes with their phone numbers. Once a guy returned a book and told me that there was something for me in the first chapter. When I opened it there was a long letter where he explained why he didn’t dare to come up and talk to me and that he wished that some day he would have the courage to do that. It was a really nice letter but he never showed up again. Oh if only!

And to round out a rather long entry, I took a few pictures of my new El stop in the pretty winter sunshine yesterday morning.