Random pics and pointless analysis of stuffs
First, some utterly random, non-Parisian trivia that has been amusing me recently:
You know the song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”? Catchy little tune put together by some bandleader type guy in the Union army, about how everybody in [generic 19th-century town] gets all happy when their darling little boy comes back from war (Sample verse: “The old church bell will peal with joy, Hurrah! Hurrah! / To welcome home our darling boy, Hurrah! Hurrah! / The village lads and lassies say with roses they will strew the way, / And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home” ).
Funny thing is, in the early 1800s, the same tune was used for an Irish antiwar protest song, about men coming back from fighting in Ceylon (that would be Sri Lanka nowadays) for the British East India Company (Sample verse: “Where are the legs what let you run? Huroo! Huroo! / Where are the legs what let you run? Huroo! Huroo! / Where are the legs what let you run when you ran off for to carry a gun? / Indeed, your dancing days are done! Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye”).
So essentially you’ve got two songs, same tune, same basic premise, same generic-soldier-boy name, entirely different meaning. Which means it’s really hard to tell when the tune’s being used ironically, or seriously, or ambiguously, or what. Also, in case anybody was wondering, that does seem to be the source of the phrase “Johnny, I hardly knew ye,” via the title of some book about JFK. And this has now mutated into “[insert name here], we hardly knew ye,” which has replaced the old meaning of the word knew as “recognized” (e.g. “I hardly recognized you, what with all the missing limbs”) with the more current meaning of “learned stuff about you” (e.g. “I hardly got to know him before he asked me to lend him money”). Fascinating stuff, innit?
And now back to our regularly scheduled Paris-focused excitement. With Pictures!
Stuff from my latest trip to see if my grammar professor had dropped off my grade forms (she hadn’t):
Yes, i photograph this courtyard a lot. Mostly because it’s in the building where I had all my classes, and where the Foreign Language office is. But this was just a nice arrangement of colors, so I had to take the shot.
Stairwell w/ drawings!
I may be crazy, but I think that every time I’ve passed this emergency callbox type thingy (not entire ly sure what it does, it’s located in the above stairwell), there have been soda cans perched on top of it.
Pretty purple cage! Seriously, if you were going to be locked out of, or into, some part of a school campus, wouldn’t you want them to at least paint the cage lavender?
Irreverent graffiti on restroom paper-towel dispenser (empty, by the way; right next to the broken air-dryer, which is above the sink that doesn’t work). The French reads, more or less: “We didn’t ask him to!”
The St Denis Métro station. That’s a pretty sturdy windowpane, quite thoroughly cracked but still hanging in there.
The French lotto logo. Isn’t this just clever? It manages to incorporate 3 out of 4 card suits. Hearts, of course, in the clover petals; the big red diamond; and the clover itself (the suit of clubs is called trefles, or “clovers,” in French), with the requisite four leaves to suggest that, hey, you might get lucky.
Oh, and here’s what happens when I decide that maybe I don’t need to keep all my receipts:
They’re in the middle of being sorted right there. I just had a big bag full of them, and decided that perhaps when I was advised to “keep your receipts” for the Opportunities Fund documentation, they hadn’t meant “keep all receipts, including every time you bought groceries, ate out, or restocked on paper towels.”
