Frogsmoke.com 

Found on Flickr:

Photo by by natalia & gabriel

Not your average mermaid: Woman hangs herself on fish hooks in Paris shark protest

Alice Newstead, an artist and animal rights activist, painted herself silver before spearing the skin of her shoulderblades with oversized shark fishing hooks. Then, resting her feet in a harness, she was hoisted up into the air.

She spent 15 minutes suspended in the window of a Lush Cosmetics store in the south of the capital, as passers-by walked along the busy boulevard, her skin stretched upward and streaked with blood.

Full story here | More gruesome pics for strong stomachs

Your Friday headlines:

Asylum seekers in makeshift Jungle camp in France seek British ‘Eldorado’
French cowboy defies odds
France imports UK electricity as plants shut

French cops use racial profiling for stop and search
The End for Paris American book shop
Virgin Mobile France Mulling Bid For French 4th Mobile License
Sarkozy ignores debt warnings with new French loan
French PM seeks to raise business profile in Iraq
Yemenia plane crash: only survivor of Flight 626 is reunited with father

Today, French actress and model Ludivine Sagnier turns 30.

Sagnier started taking acting classes at a young age and had her film debut at age 10. In 2001, she was named one of the Shooting Stars by European Film Promotion. In 2003, she won the Prix Romy Schneider.

From Wikipedia:

Sagnier has appeared nude in extended scenes in several films. Addressing this issue, Sagnier told Playboy: "I'm much more confident in front of a camera, hidden by a character, enhanced by makeup, so I can go much further than I can in real life. Sexual acting is painful, because even though you're pretending, you have the skin of the person in front of you, and it's not the skin you wish you had. After that, you run into the shower to get rid of everything"

Paris-based photographer Laurent Champoussin prints anatomic images on paper, and then photographs them on his own body. The results look rather gruesome:

Click for more

In his own words (if you can follow him):

I’ve always been interested by the écorché model. I was inspired by the classical representations of Andréas Vesalius, Charles Estienne or Adrian Van Den Spieghel. My idea was to play with the partial, the uncovered (open/discover) of an essential part of ourselves. I also wanted to work on the propagation, the invasion. My will was to design the model, to file down it like a texture and I hope, somewhere like a poetry.

Via Street Anatomy | HT Neatorama

… but there's always a comeback at #3003.

Photo on Flickr by Polbar

Evian seems to believe that drinking their bottled water is good for babies. Here's their new Live Young commercial:

Looking at this "Making of" video the film was shot in the USA.

The French football federation hopes to host the 2016 UEFA cup, and selected this logo to visualize their bid:

This type of doodle seems to be a trend. A few years ago, France tried to get the 2012 Olympics with this logo:

We all know what happened with that attempt…

British illustrator Jonathan Edwards dedicates an entire blog to drawings of Serge Gainsbourg: Draw Serge!. Here are two recent contributions (click each for source):

Is his own words:

'Welcome to "Draw Serge!", my illustrative tribute to the late, great Gainsbourg. I'm a huge fan of Serge Gainsbourg. He's a hugely important figure in 20th Century popular music but, outside of France, seems to be remembered mostly for "Je t'aime…. Moi Non Plus" (a song which is oddly unrepresentative of the rest of his work) and an embarrassing TV appearance with Whitney Houston in the late '80s. His music encompassed styles as varied as pop, jazz, reggae, lounge, bossa nova, Africana, prog, pyschedelia and rock'n'roll yet is never referred to in the same hushed tones reserved for Dylan, the Beatles, etc. Unbelievably, his masterpiece "Histoire de Melody Nelson" was only released in America THIS year!

Next year Joann Sfar (coincidentally a comic artist) releases his film based on the life of Gainsbourg which should hopefully redress the balance and introduce a whole new audience to the music of Serge. In the meantime I'm trying to do my own bit to help the cause. Serge was an incredibly charismatic performer with an unmistakeable look. He's a joy to draw hence "Draw Serge!".

HT Filles Sourires

Your Thursday headlines:

France's Sarkozy laments 'totally inhuman' job
Starbucks to Open 50th Café in France, Seeks More, Figaro Says
French PM apologises to New Zealand for rugby disgrace

Latest: Air France jet 'broke on impact'
'Daddy, I couldn't see anything' - Yemenia Airbus crash survivor speaks
Fear and facts on Airbus disasters
Al Qaeda vows 'dreadful revenge' on France over plans to ban the burqa
As a Meal Tax Shrinks, Restaurants Hope to Gain
French nuclear test victims to get compensation
Ties that bind: Comoros and France
France's EADS wins contract to provide border security system for Saudi Arabia
Scrappage scheme boosts French June car sales
Areva to Boost Funding To Expand Nuclear Power
Chinese cheese lover tries to win over Beijing
Pirate Party Finds France Fertile Territory
Algerian pop star faces trial in France on kidnap and abortion charges
Cannonball run Britons banned from driving in France

In the British Science Museum: Human skin tattooed with two women's heads and a sailor, France, 1880-1920

Click for large size: 1342px × 1536px

Images of a sailor and two women wearing hats have been tattooed on to human skin. The skin was purchased by one of Henry Wellcome’s collecting agents, Captain Johnston-Saint, in June 1929 from Dr Villette, a Parisian surgeon. Villette worked in military hospitals and collected and preserved hundreds of samples from the autopsies of French soldiers. In the late 1800s, tattoos were often seen as markers of criminal tendencies, or ‘primitiveness’.

Photo by jacco.org on Flickr

Each first day of the month, the world's City Daily Photo bloggers share a common theme. Today, that theme is Empty. From the French entries I picked these two:

Menton Daily Photo

Monte Carlo Daily Photo

View all entries

If your brain is better than mine you may know the answer to this puzzle:

During the 1st World War (1914-1918) a grave was discovered. It belonged to a French soldier who died the last day of a month in another war, in Italy. His halberd lay next to his body. The day carved in the grave’s stone tablet multiplied by the length of the halberd (in feet), multiplied by the half of years between his death and the discovery of his grave, and finally, multiplied by the half of the age of the French commander of the campaign where the soldier died, make 451,066.

Who was the French commander?

Submit your answer here.

Your Tuesday/Wednesday headlines:

Al Qaeda vows revenge for France's burqa warning
Sarkozy Says Michelle Obama’s Sunday Shopping Should Be Allowed
France rugby star Mathieu Bastareaud tried suicide, says newspaper
Rai star 'forced French abortion'
Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard gossips about co-stars in French

Bribes, a bomb and the Sarkozy trail
French cuisine – not so haute any more
Britons Abandon Cheap Booze Cruises to France on Weaker Pound
66 French on crashed Yemeni Airbus
Airbus could be asked to ground all long-range airliners
French-Israeli spat over comments
Prosecutor seeks life for gang leader in anti-Semitism case
French budget deficit could fall in 2010: minister
French restaurant prices to drop after VAT cut
UK regulator raises French nuclear concerns
French film firm convicted over 'Taxi' stunt death