PEARLS & AMBER

YELLOW--EYED PENGUINS

These are yellow-eyed penguins.They are an endangered species living in New Zealand.

This much I followed in a recent tidbit I read in the science section of the New York Times.

I am at one with concerns for an endangered species.  Especially with penguins, ever since that movie...you know...the one where the father hatches the eggs in frigid blizzards, while the female makes a god awful trip back to the parts of the ocean thawed enough for her to dive in and eat.  Then she travels all the way back to the ...never mind.  I'm sure you know the movie I am talking about.

It's the movie in which I found out penguins do everything the hard way.  Maybe this is something I should have known.

Anyway, per this article--

While the scientists were checking to see if the yellow eyed penguin had always been as rare as it is now, or had it been more abundant in the past--

(I am absolutely sure this is an insanely important issue)--

While checking this out, they found that the fossils of the oldest penguins from this area had a totally different genetic make-up than our current yellow-eyes.

Which pointed to an older species living there in New Zealand with the yellow eyed, and that perhaps this older species pushed the yellows off the big island of New Zealand, and onto the smaller islands to the south.  This all happening pre humans arriving.

But then the Polynesians arrived, and wiped the older penguins (the ones who drove the smaller yellow-eyes away) off the face of the earth.

So, "with their competitors gone, the yellow-eyed penguins were able to take over."  The scientists seem thrilled about this.

It's the tone of the article I find tetchy.  They are thrilled the yellow-eyed got to come back?

Where is the sympathy for those older penguins?  The ones that did get wiped off the face of the earth.   

My sympathy lies with those penguins.  It took the humans about 200 hundred years to wipe them out.  This means they fought back, right?  They tried to live.

And when these stalwart fellows vanished, the little yellow eyes rushed back in.  Now they even have humans trying to keep them going.

Some tough love is what these penguins need to figure out how to survive.

A lot of tough love.

    

SO CAL THE BEAUTIFUL

We have been promised rain.  We are into rain in a major way, here in Southern California.

Schools close.  Freeways empty.  There is never a better time to go from Balboa Island to Santa Monica than the day rain is promised.

Rain has been promised for Thanksgiving.  It's all the talk.  Strangers are discussing it with each other in elevators. 

But do we believe this incredible news?  Can we actually count on it to RAIN?  Tell the children, to whom one mustn't lie? 

Should we actually dig out the rusty umbrellas?  Find the rain hats?  Devise a raincoat?

Do they make sandal rain boots?  Uggs, perchance?  Usually we don't like to cover our pedicures, but donning Ugg rain boots would be too cool, if it actually rained as promised--

But we've heard this before.  We've been disappointed before.  We've gotten one clap of thunder, for instance, so abrupt we couldn't be sure.  And that would be it.  That would somehow make the weather broadcasters not liars.

There's a movie, The Weather Man, starring Nicholas Cage as a blighted weatherman in Chicago.  I've lived in Chicago.  Indeed, the weather is too bad to talk about.  So he was a hated member of society there in Chicago.

Here our weather broadcasters have nothing to do.  So sometimes maybe they get desperate for a different set of phrases to string together during their nightly broadcasts, and maybe, just maybe they get carried away and promise us rain, when all they really should have said was 'more of same.'

In the elevator a kindly gent informed the crowd being carried upward to floors four and five and eight, that he had washed his car, so it was sure to rain.

I too have done my bit.  Yesterday I had my windows washed for Thanksgiving.

That will bring on the rain for sure, right? 

Even here in Beautiful So Cal?

This morning's sunrise, at the end of the alley--this surely looks like rain, doesn't it?

ISSUES IN PARIS

1.  Do NOT get in line in the grocery store behind any woman wearing a black quilted jacket belted at the waist.

It is the latest thing.  This means the woman is the sort who is better off having the housekeeper doing the grocery shopping. 

Or more likely she's spent every last euro on that coat, so there is no housekeeper.  In that case, send zee boyfriend.

Whatever.  Do not get behind her, as I did at the Bon Marche.  Besides the fact she couldn't move in her coat, she could barely see over the collar.  And paying seemed to be totally beyond her.

2.  Do stand in line to see the movie that reveals France's last taboo.  "Cliente."  It is about an older woman (late fifties), a "hard driving television  shopping channel anchor" who upon finding herself divorced, and therefore without regular (albeit unchallenging) sex, goes out and buys it. 

Apparently going to prostitutes is still the man's domain...that is, going to prostitutes in a dignified manner.  Well, now here comes our heroine, no victim, she, willing to pay good money for a regular sex life without the accompanying melodrama of real relationships.  She is too busy at this point in her life to do everything.

This then is the last taboo in France, according to the article in The International Herald.  Whereas the rest of the world believes all French women are Brigitte Bardot or Carla Bruni Sarkozy in her early years, the truth is the average French woman is not encouraged to go out and get good sex just because she's alone.  

This taboo may be a difficult one to end.  The French, and it would seem the rest of the world, continue to like their women, particularly older women, receiving their sex safely at home wearing diamonds and slippers, clutching her rosary beads and the check book.

3.  In spite of the above movie coming out, and like I said, breaking a last taboo, there is rising complaint among the young film-goers of France that the French movie makers are cowards.  Since this article came out the day after I read the taboo article in the International Herald, I read on.  

Well, the problem is that the French filmmakers have tended to shie away from political movies.  The young cinema fanatics here point to the US as having the bravery to make political films...nevermind these films tend to be unsuccessful financially.

Well, I don't know about all that.

My own confusion lies with the choices France makes in the American films they do bring over here.

For me, it's been a six week drought of no movies while here.  There may be those who would think I'd be able to fill my time quite well without going to the movies.

You try it.

  

OBAMA IN PARIS

                                        HE IS UP FOR THE CHALLENGE!

    AND WHAT A BLISSFUL CHANGE THAT IS GOING TO MAKE.

And I'll tell you what else is SO nice--to walk down the street, instantly recognizable as an American (is it the hair, or my attitude, like friendly or confused or stopping dead on the sidewalk to read my map?  It certainly isn't my scarves.  I KNOW my way around a scarf)--

What is really really good is the instant change of attitude towards Americans.  With the election of Obama, and what that says about Americans, the rest of the world has granted us another chance.

I know I feel incredible relief that something new has come to my country, something intelligent, thoughtful, aware, solid, and daring too. 

Meanwhile, they have a new respect for zee Americans here in Paris.  And while they are hugely imperfect beings themselves, these Parisians, I'll take the new attitude.  And intend to live up to it.

BARACK WINS!!!

So, much is being made of the YOUNG people who came out in droves, and sick of Baby Boomers, sick of the Great Generation (WWll vets, for those of you who don't breathe Tom Brokaw for breakfast), took charge and voted Barack Obama in.

Normally I'd take umbrage.  I'm a Baby Boomer who has been firm behind my man Barack since way back, and there are lots like me.

But, I like young people.  I've raised two excellent young people. Young People did get off their derrieres this year and vote for their man Obama.  Thank you, Young People.

But the crew I want to thank the most.  The people who had the biggest crisis of faith in order to get out there and cast a vote for Obama, are the REPUBLICANS who couldn't take it anymore, the REPUBLICANS who dared think outside their political habits, the Republicans who actually got out there and voted for Barack Obama, even as every bone in their body shrank back in disbelief, but as every fiber in their body said, THANK YOU.  Now you are thinking like a free person.

That is my beloved, eighty-six year old, Southern born Dad, in his day a corporate big wig, sitting in his favorite chair, a view of a Southern Californian beach and the Pacific Ocean to his back, and four major daily newspapers on the table beside him, which he reads every day.

The only Democrat he ever voted for was John F. Kennedy...because he was Catholic. 

That is until now.  It was hard.  I personally had to do a lot of flailing of my arms.  But my Dad is a brilliant man, and even more brilliant today in my eyes because of his hard won fight to convince himself that Barack Obama was the only way for this country to go.  But he did convince himself...and he would say, with a lot of help from Obama himself.

He'll kill me for showing him with that cap on...but heck, it gets cold in California in the winter.  He wears it.  We have to get new ones pronto when these caps get lost, or just too beat up.

He has some very fine hats in his closet ,which he puts on to emerge from the house.  Just so you know.

But so, to all you Republicans who broke down and voted for Obama, thank you!

CASTRATA SINGS ROSES OF PICARDIE

 I go to concerts held in Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.  It was built in the twelfth century.  It is dark.  It hulks practically across the river from the Notre Dame.  It claims it is the oldest church in Paris

Inside it is heated, which is very important.  It is lit with candles, which is very atmospheric.

Saturday night I went to an Hommage of the Castratas.  The male singers of yore who, because of the castration and subsequent rigorous training which created huge lung power and unchanged voices, had eerily gorgeous singing voices.

I'm fascinated by the whole castrata lore.  So I hastened over to Julian's, took a seat and was wowed, just as I thought I'd be.

The tenor-contralto was a young man named Duy-Thong Hguyen.  He came into the church singing.  He sang constantly for over an hour and a half.  He also introduced every song, which had me shuffling from the length of the intros (start a person speaking French, and they just can't help themselves...on and on they go), and worried sick about what all the talking was doing to that incredible voice of his.

The music was all very serious, I can tell you.  I know this about opera--the heroines are always dying.  Singing mightily while dying.  Singing lustily while collapsed on their lover's/murderer's arms.  Singing their hearts out just before that last pitiless high C.

And so it was with our singer last night.

Until his encore...when he came back up front, smiled into our beaming faces, and let loose with "Roses in Picardie".

WOW!  Such lightness.  Such yummy froth.  Such whimsy.  Such a delightful tune.

Such English!   

I am in love with this song.  And you can be too.  Click on this link Roses in Picardie, and listen. 

Ms. Paton sings it almost as well as Mr. Nguyen did.