Frogsmoke

The bold, the dreadlocked and the beatlified: Zidane, Noah, Hulot
Twice a year, French Sunday paper Journal du Dimanche publishes a list of France's most popular personalities.
It's no miracle that football player Zinedine Zidane tops the list, beating previous winners Yannick Noah (tennis player turned singer) and Nicolas Hulot (treehugger turned environmental lobbyist).
It looks like [...]

La Place de l'Etoile in Paris
From South Africa's bloody riots to Ceausescu's fall, from the Tien An Men massacre to Desert Storm, French photographer Patrick Durand has covered history-making events. After 16 years at the frontline, he now concentrates more on feature stories, from his base in Bangkok.
On his website, Durand exhibits a large collection [...]

La Jetée (literally "The Jetty") is a 28-minute science fiction film in black and white, made in 1962 by Chris Marker.
Undergoing something of a revival, through its inspiration of Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, this is a strangely wonderful film with many memorable images.
In fact La Jetée is almost totally composed of individual frozen pictures, [...]

Following in the footsteps of Pamela Anderson and Kim Basinger, French singer Eve Angeli throws her body and soul in the battle for the ethical treatment of animals.
There are no photos of Eve's soul, but if you have 15 euros to spare you can enjoy pictures of her body in the next twelve months [...]

STAP (sport student) protestors at the anti-CPE marches in March 2006
British David Tell, student at the Department of French at UCL (University College of London) went to Montpellier in France for his exchange. With his camera, he managed to capture moments of a highly eventful year which saw him work on a local newspaper [...]

Supersize me: Chateau d'Yquem goes large
With good vintages of Chateau d'Yquem selling at upwards of 800 dollars a litre, the king of French sweet wines is among the most expensive elixirs on Earth. And now it's available in a new, giant size.
For the first time in the chateau's multi-century history, a limited number of 15-litre [...]

After the Polish plumber, selected Bulgarians and Romanians can also join the French work force
With Bulgaria and Romania joining the EC on January 1st, France has made it very clear that not all residents from those countries are welcome.
Bulgarians or Romanians who want to work in France must be professionals of the kind France [...]

This could become a hit: 6,000 official UFO reports go public
The French space agency CNES is to publish its archive of UFO sightings and other phenomena online.
The French database of around 1,600 incidents will go live in late January or mid-February. It consists of around 6,000 reports, many relating to the same incident, filed by [...]

Common sense prevails: why pay three times the price for the same water?
Sales of bottled water in France, the largest market in the world, fell 2.6 pct this year, in line with the decline seen in 2005.
The high prices of premium brands like Evian and Volvic, owned by Danone, or Vittel and San Pellegrino, owned [...]

Chinese, Italians, Americans are trying to cash in:
Last summer, French football player Zinedine Zidane made the headlines with his infamous headbutt during the final of the UEFA World Cup.
Now, Italian fashion designer Alessandro Ferrari is trying to cash in on the event, by launching a clothing line under the name Xqua, using a poorly [...]

A dream come true? Mobile phones that charge themselves
French designers ModeLabs have developed three self-powered cellphone concepts. The designs rely on the inherent movement of their users to regenerate power and signal the possibility of using smaller batteries or even eliminating them entirely.
The company revealed the U-Turn (shown above), a business phone which can [...]

Newspaper Liberation asked three astrologers and clairvoyants who will win the French presidential elections. Their revelations are bad news for Nicolas Sarkozy.
Michael Delmar, astrologist, looked at the expectations of French society and the position of the heavy planets, and predicts the outcome with high precision. In the first round, Ségolène Royal gets 20%, Nicolas Sarkozy [...]

When designer Coco Chanel unveiled the first real 'Little Black Dress' 80 years ago, it caused quite a stir in the world of women's fashion.
Now the iconic garment is so ubiquitous it has its own entry in the online Wikipedia encyclopedia.
Fashion's most timeless of octogenarians today remains as much a style statement as it [...]

British soldier Robert Petersen joined the French Foreign Legion in the eighties, and has nothing but good memories.
On his website, he shares many aspects of this strange army. One of them is a rather comprehensive collection of movie posters, offering an 80 year retrospective of the Foreign Legion in the movies, from the 1920's [...]

Every Friday, Frogsmoke gives a French female singer her own space. Today’s “Fille Sourire” is the 28-year old Rose from Nice, singing 'La Liste', from her first (and only) album.
The lyrics of the song are here.
More girls singing in French on Filles Sourires
Watch on YouTube | Official website
[tags]France,French,Rose[/tags]