Musings about the French language

I'm sitting in a self-service restaurant inside the boarding area of Roissy airport in Paris, on a connection from Belgium.

In front of me a sign reads "A L'epoque de Clement Ader". My limited French allows me to understand it is about an engineer from the turn of the (last) century. And it shows some things that happened at his time, such as "1905 - Les frères Wright parcourrent 38km en 38mn sur le Flyer III".

I am considering learning French. It is close to Portuguese and therefore might be easy. You must be touched by the way it sounds. Merci, fermè, non, allez, all sung with mouthful and lippy hisses, like in Marie Antoinette's court.

Plus Paris is an inspiring place and knowing French is really handful there. And France Football and L'Équipe are great papers.

And old French songs are très cool.

All right. Will start learning.

Baghdad blogger

Click here to see CNN's Baghdad Blogger.

This is excellent, mind-broadening, highly recommended reading.
The program on CNN international is definitely my top pick of the year.

My world

Places I've been to are indicated in red*


This is my world and I am
A world leader pretend
This is my life, and this is my time

I have been given the freedom to do as I see fit
It's high time I raise the walls that I constructed
(R.E.M.)



*places I've spent at least 8 hours in.

Will we pull this one off?

We need you, Anfield Road, to beat Chelsea. That's a fact.

We also need Mascherano to rule over the midfield with grit, but without compromising flair.

We also need Pennant to dribble and cross like he's been doing of late.

We also need Crouchinho to keep up with the neat finishing.

And we need inspired performances from our dynamos Carragher, Finnan, Riise, and, most of all, from our captain Steven Gerrard.

"In distant Athens, we'll win it six times"

What I'm listening to

Marching the hate machines
Thievery Corporation (featuring Wayne Coyne)

Well let's start by
making it clear
who is the enemy, here

And we'll show then
that it's not them
who is superior

It's gonna be bad,
It's gonna be wrong,
It's gonna feel... good.

Marching the hate machines into the sun

Marching the hate machines into the sun