My Favorite Things, Paris-style

First, as seems to happen at least once every month or two, a quick apology for the lag time between my blog posts. And thanks to Sara for filling the blog vacuum while I was MIA (now, if only I could get her to empty the actual vacuum…)

One quick plug: more photos are online now at http://www.flickr.com/photos/7531775@N04/ . Check out the Paris Artsy, People, and Touristy pictures for shots of our last few visitors plus sites like Mont Saint Michel, Chartres, Versailles, and others. If you’re not a Flickr member (free and easy!), just e-mail me and I’ll add you.

Now, the blogging…

As we get older, certain line items that were once on our resume eventually get bumped off, since they are too outdated, not important enough, etc. Other items are so laughably offbeat or absurd that either you put them at the end of your resume as a fun conversation sparker, or you wouldn’t put them on your resume for a lifetime supply of ice cream (the basic form of currency in Joshland). Want an example of the latter? Here you go: in the spring of 1990, I was the Props Master for my high school’s production of “The Sound of Music”

[Yes, this is very far afield from Paris 2007, I know, but stick with me, I’m coming around the bend…]

Maybe it doesn’t get more lame/obscure/bizarre than Props Master (it’s just one word away from “Dungeon Master”), but I have to say, I had a hell of a good time working on that play (despite one late-night closet-wood-stain-fumes prop preparation incident that probably insured that any future Gibson kid(s) will all be born with “Dark Walnut” colored skin and/or internal organs…)

As a result of that Sound of Music gig, I had to hear the (in)famous song “My Favorite Things” a zillion gajillion times, over and over and over again. This is why, seventeen years later, the idea popped into my head to periodically use this blog to highlight some of my favorite things in Paris. (Ah, good segue, Grasshopper!)

Now, a list of “macro” favorite things would help no one, because any schmuck can give you that list (Eiffel Tower, tasty bread, saucy Parisiennes, etc.) No, I want to give you, Maria-style, a list of the “micro” level, everyday things in Paris that I think are great. And rather than just hitting you with a mega-long list all at once, I’ll just post a couple at a time, when the spirit moves me (or when the other “spirit” reminds me that I’m not holding up my end of the blog bargain…)

Just to refresh the memories of those of you who didn’t have these song lyrics mercilessly drilled into your skull during several months of your hormonally-active late high school years, let’s go to the audio tape:

"The hills are alive...with the sound of Gibsons!"

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, Brown paper packages tied up with strings…Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels, Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles, Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings…Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes, Silver white winters that melt into springs, These are a few of my favorite things.”

So, my take-away from this is—weird chick, probably wouldn’t know what to do with a Circuit City gift certificate, so a couple balls of twine, a McRib, and one of those “Hang in there” kitty-hanging-from-a-tree posters would probably make her whole damn year.

Similarly, my Paris “favorite things” list tells you something about me—I’m detail-obsessed and still have lingering “urban life” interests from my last couple of jobs.

If it’s any reassurance at all, I’ve shared most of these “favorite things” with our visitors, and they seem to go above and beyond their normal level of humoring me in response, so despite their obscurity, maybe these things are actually worth noticing by normal folks too.

With those prefaces and warnings, enter the dark recesses of my brain, where we can discover together tiny details that continue to entertain me here in Paris. Here’s one quick “favorite things” example, look for more to follow, a couple a week, for the next few months.

FAVORITE THING #1 (numbers here are for counting, not for ranking)
BI-BOP STICKERS
Back in the spring of 1993, as I was wrapping up my junior year in Paris, a bunch of blue, white, and green sticker bands started appearing on tall, metallic objects (streetlight poles, building downspouts, etc.) throughout Paris. I was entirely clueless about what the purpose of these stickers might be, until shortly thereafter when the modern miracle of carpet-bombing saturation advertising brought one word to everyone’s lips: Bi-bop.

What was happening, it turns out, was that the French national phone company was rolling out the nation’s (and one of the world’s) first comparatively low-cost, comparatively widespread, cellular phone program. The phones only worked, however, when the user stood next to a special Bi-bop antenna, which was, you guessed it, marked with a blue, white, and green sticker band. (A quick correction to past visitors—I’d told you, and I’d always thought myself, that any tall, metallic object would work as a Bi-bop antenna, but thanks to French Wikipedia I know know that only the selected poles with stickers got the job done.) From what I’ve just read online, apparently it worked a bit like a wifi (in French we say “weeee feeee”) hotspot, but for phones: you had perfect reception, as long as you didn’t wander too far off from one of those stickers.

Obviously, the Bi-Bop phones are history (except a few in museums), but the stickers remain, the sign of a technological era gone by. All I can think of whenever I see them is: what a crappy job placing those stickers must have been: hauling a ladder around, climbing up, sticking on the Bi-Bop band, climbing down, scooting your ladder a few hundred feet down, repeat. Definitely a job you would take off of your resume as soon as you got a chance!

Josh

PS: Proving that the Bi-Bop stickers are not just omnipresent, but also found everywhere, when I realized I needed another picture of one, I found three on our somewhat obscure street, within a couple hundred of yards of our door.

PPS: One of the Bi-Bop pictures includes a sneak preview of another of my favorite things...