David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 176

Dear Wife: I Am Eating Your Potato Chips

My wife is fond of the cheddar & sour cream oven baked Ruffles. I like them sometimes too, but my wife gets ticked if I eat them because we buy them for her. I already buy myself kettle chips and baked Cheetos. She thinks I should stick to those and leave her chips alone so that they’ll be there when she wants them.

However, my wife is in Maui right now. She’s on a vacation there with a friend. I was welcome to go, but could not take the time away from work. As such, I’m working here in the cold while she’s on a beach in Hawaii.

As such, I’m eating them potato chips.

Animated Eiffel Tower!

To put a cap on my recent posts reflecting on our Paris trip, I though we’d just look at an animated gif of the Eiffel Tower today:

This fits really well because my wife and I made a special trip down to the Eiffel Tower at night, in the cold, and sat forever, so my wife could try to get a video of the lights going. They went off regularly at night, except when we were there because they weren’t apparently doing that while lighting it up with the climate change conference messages instead.

Wish someone had told us.

Paris Reflections: His Name Is Waldo!

I’m almost done with reflections on our recent Paris trip, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t cover an example I saw of those “little differences” mentioned in Pulp Fiction. Just take a look (not my picture, this was just easy to find and illustrates well):

His name is Waldo, dammit!

Seriously, apparently the character has different names and characteristics in different countries to make him appeal more to people there. For some reason, Waldo wasn’t good enough for the French. They’d rather call him Charlie.

I really don’t get why this was necessary.

Paris Reflections: The Most Interesting Man In Paris

I’m not done yet with my reflections on the recent trip my wife and I took to Paris. Today I want to talk about the most interesting man in Paris. He was an older guy wearing a worn white suit and walking with a cane while waiting for the Metro down in one of the stations. He’d also crapped his pants.

My wife and I had been at a café with some friends getting drinks when we decided to go to the Latin Quarter for dinner. A friend rode the Metro over there with us, though he didn’t have time to join us for dinner. While we were waiting for the Metro, my wife and our friend remarked that something smelled like crap. I’d already noticed where it was coming from and pointed the gentleman out.

It was pretty obvious.

I mean, he was wearing a white suit. Without trying to be gross, the stain was watery and variously colored. You could see the chair he’d been sitting in (he was walking around at that point), due to material that had bled through the suit onto the chair (quite a bit, though not as much as was still on his clothes). The smell was also unmistakable.

I was trying to figure out whether the guy needed some kind of help or not. The suit was worn and he was behaving strangely, he might simply have been drunk enough to crap his pants. Then again, maybe there was something wrong with him (stroke, mental difficulties, defecation as a climate change protest, whatever?). He might have even needed help. However, whatever he was saying was in French and I didn’t understand. No one else on the crowded platform did anything, so I don’t think he needed help. He just walked around muttering and people mainly avoided him. He didn’t plead with anyone directly, certainly not anything that looked like a request for help. I wouldn’t have known who to call if he did. If he didn’t need help, then I didn’t want to bother him.

He had issues enough to deal with.

Regardless, I thought about him more than probably anyone else I noticed in Paris while trying to figure out whether I should have done something or not. Whatever was going on in his life at that moment, he was certainly the most interesting person I saw in Paris.

Paris Reflections: They Don’t Mind Seeing Men Pee

Continuing both on the Paris trip reflections and the toilet theme (since that seems significant when traveling abroad), I’m suspecting that people in Paris don’t mind seeing men pee. Bathroom privacy seems important for the most part, but in certain noticeable ways I found it lacking.

When at one café, I happened to visit the restroom. It was down in the basement, where there was a common sink room with a single stall room well separated therefrom. I didn’t use it, because there was actually a box on the door requiring .5 Euro before it would open. However, there was also an alcove just off the sink room separated by cowboy style swinging doors, that did not require any money. Inside the alcove was a urinal.

So they charged for the bathroom but only for a full toilet? If you used the urinal, you didn’t have much privacy. The doors only covered about two feet of the doorway when closed, pretty much chest (not the most private part when using a urinal) height. If you were using the urinal, you had to squish in there pretty good if you wanted those cowboy swinging doors to close. The alcove was pretty small. Otherwise, they stayed mostly open, held in such position at about a 45 degree angle or more by contacting your back.

So what was it? Did it not cost because you were trading for privacy? It cost .5 Euros unless people could at least partially watch you? I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t ask.

Another restaurant we went to was similar (bathroom upstairs instead of in the basement). There was again a common sink room connected to a privately separated stall room. The stall didn’t cost this time, but there was again a urinal alcove. However, there was no door at all this time.

Seriously, if someone came up into the sink room they walked right by the alcove where a bunch of men might have been using a urinal. No privacy at all.

I can only think that they don’t consider men peeing to be something private. Either that, or they want to look. Either way, I wasn’t entirely comfortable. Bathroom time is me time, not public time.

Paris Reflections: More On Toilets

More Paris trip reflections! Let’s go back to toilets. Not every toilet I found in Paris didn’t have a seat. Not all of them were poorly maintained, even in restaurant bathrooms. I found one pizza place that still had an original Crapper, and still in really new looking condition. One restaurant even had a downright fancy toilet.

Admittedly, that restaurant had only one toilet. The signs said “toilets,” but there was only one beyond the door, separated from the sink room by yet another door. I didn’t notice anything the first time I went to use the bathroom, as I stood since I am a guy, but my wife came back from a trip and mentioned that the seat was heated.

That was different.

At first, she’d thought that someone had been sitting there for a long time previous, long enough to still be noticeable. That kind of creeped her out, but then she realized that the seat was simply heated. Fancy. When I used the restroom again after that, I still didn’t need to sit down. However, I wondered about that heated seat…so I did.

I had to try it.

That’s when I noticed a control box off to the left. There were all sorts of controls. This was a fancy toilet. Apparently, it was also a bidet. You could press to have warm water shot at different angles, also to have warm air blasted out to dry. There was even a “massage” button, though that didn’t appear to do anything.

Yes, I tried a few buttons. When was I ever going to run across something like that again?

I tell you though, I made sure not to press any buttons marked “ATR.” With that many fancy options, there was a chance it could actually be there. Definitely wouldn’t have wanted to press that.

Paris Reflections: Metro Doors May Not Behave As You Expect

Reflecting more on our recent trip to Paris, I think it is worth mentioning that the doors on the Metro may not behave as you expect. The doors on the light rail in Denver will not close if someone is in them. If you put something in their path when they are already closing, they will spring open. The doors to the Paris Metro do not behave this way.

Now, I know that one is not supposed to try to hold these doors open. I know this. There are signs posted everywhere and announcements regularly request this. However, this is also the case in Denver. People hold the doors there too.

At one point, my wife and I were coming up the stairs to catch one of the Metro lines. My wife says: “We’re going to miss it” because it was about to depart. Thinking she wanted to try to catch it anyway, I ran up ahead of her and got on the car, intending to hold the door for her. She chased after me and I backed up as she was hopping on. The doors, along with a set of safety barricades in front of the doors, closed on her.

They did not immediately open.

In fact, she had to pry them open from within. This required some amount of force. Someone was about to get up to help us, but by that point she already forced them open. My wife is not a weakling.

My wife was ticked at me.

Apparently, my wife had merely been remarking that we were about to miss that particular Metro. She was fine with this, merely stating it aloud. She intended to take the next train, which would doubtlessly be along within ten minutes or so. She did not intend for me to run for the train, causing her to be caught in the door and risking me being lost in Paris if she didn’t.

It wouldn’t have been such a big problem if the Metro doors there behaved like the light rail doors do here. However, they do not.

My wife has not let me forget this particular error as of yet.

Taking A Break From the Paris Posts: Second Chance Books Showcases “Bones Buried in the Dirt!”

I’m going to take a brief break from my Paris posts…because Second Chance Books is showcasing Bones Buried in the Dirt right now! For anyone who doesn’t know, Second Chance Books is a Facebook page that works hard to spread awareness of great small press books. They do a lot of good work for a lot of good books, so you should definitely check them out and give them a like so you can see all the other great books they showcase.

Yet another innovative example of exemplary literary citizenship, and I’m thrilled that they chose Bones Buried in the Dirt to spread the word about.

It’s gestures like this that really keep you writing when things seem really hard. I’m so glad they do this, and so glad they were gracious enough to choose one of my books.

Paris Reflections: Toilet Seats

Keeping the reflections going…what does Paris have against toilet seats? I know they use them. Most of the toilets I ran into in Paris were fine. However, sometimes they just didn’t seem to feel a seat was necessary.

Seriously, I went into the bathrooms at a Greek restaurant we visited. Perfectly fine toilets, but no seats. They’d been removed. The toilet was there, without a toilet seat. The same thing at a bar/coffee shop we went to. It wasn’t exactly common, but I found it often enough. It was always at restaurants and things like that, particularly the smaller places we went into.

Did they just not buy any? Did they remove them for some reason? Were they commonly stolen and no one felt like replacing them?

I really don’t know.

Personally, it didn’t bug me too much. I’m a guy so I was standing pretty much any time I came across this. I did make sure to warn my wife, but it was still weird. It made me wonder.

Paris Reflections: Mistranslated Signs At Surprising Locations

Continuing the reflections on our recent Paris trip, let’s consider mistranslations. We see these a lot from countries less familiar with the language into which they are translating, and in lower budget places in particular. Machine translations, being very literal, often end up garbled. However…the Eiffel Tower? Wouldn’t we expect them to do a little better? So many people there speak English as well as French, and very good English at that. Shouldn’t someone have taken a peek at this sign?

I kept thinking, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” I know what they’re trying to say, but it isn’t what they’re saying. It really surprises me that they don’t have a better translation at such a place.

The wine is agreeable but the meat is spoiled.