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On Wikipedia: a complete primer on French national and regional food
French cuisine is considered to be one of the world’s most refined and elegant styles of cooking, and is renowned for both its classical (”haute cuisine“) or grande cuisine and provincial styles. Many of the world’s greatest chefs, such as Taillevent, La Varenne, Marie-Antoine Carême, […]

Swiss photographer Georg Gerster has specialized in aerial photography since 1956.
“Height provides an overview, and an overview facilitates insight, while insight generates consideration – perhaps.”
By pursuing this line of reasoning, Georg Gerster has turned aerial photography into something more probing, something that, with luck, may prove a contemplative, philosophical instrument encouraging greater reflection.
Shown here […]

Take the Boy Scout approach to culture shock: be prepared. Expatica recommends 10 good books that will help you answer the eternal question: why are they like that?
The biggest mistake made by new arrivals in France is not understanding that the French really are different: if you want to feel comfortable here over the long […]

Gwenaël Bollinger in Lyon plays with light and color, and shows the results on two websites.
Le Book 1 | Le Book 2

Creative recycling meets neo-modern design.
Francois Royer expresses his dissatisfaction with our culture of relentless consumerism with these striking barrel furnishings. Each model is unique and each design is one-of-a-kind.
Stanker Collection | Via

Another French invention that didn’t quite take off:
From Popular Science, November 1934.
A spinning hat bearing advertising messages is the latest wrinkle for sandwich men in Paris, France. A concealed switch enables the wearer to start the hat revolving or stop it at will.
Lest even this strange apparition fail to arrest the eyes of passers-by, the […]

The immortal Jacques Brel singing Le Moribond (The Dying Man). With English subtitles.
Seasons in the Sun was a world-wide hit for Terry Jacks, widely covered by Indies bands like Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana and Pearls Before Swine. It was a mawkish adaptation of Brel’s Le Moribond, his portrait of a dying man’s good-bye to his faithful […]

I have no idea how it’s done, but I like the feminine shapes of this Eiffel Tower picture.
Via

From Popular Science, 1933: Propeller-Driven Car Hangs from Monorail
An improved airline cab, capable of 155 miles an hour, is the latest invention of the French engineer who developed the trench mortar used during the World War. Suspended on monorails, the cabs resemble airplane fuselages. A small propeller at the front of the cab is driven […]

In January 2006, Frenchman Jean Marc Mouligné made it into the record books with this stunt. Using a device of his own making, suspended between two cranes, he was catapulted 130m (426 ft) in the air, reaching a top speed of 200 km/h (124 mph). He came down slowly, on a parachute.
Watch on Google Video […]

It happened October 22, 1895.
A train carrying 131 passengers failed to brake in time, and crashed through the front of the Montparnasse station in Paris, landing on the street. Miraculously, only five people on the train were injured. Less fortunate was the newspaper seller below, who got killed by a brick falling from the […]

In the back pages of Vanity Fair each month, readers find The Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions posed to famous subjects about their lives, thoughts, values and experience. How did this questionnaire get its name?
The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when […]

Conquering the world at the age of less than 20:
Born in Cherbourg, France in 1988, Lise de la Salle was surrounded by music from her earliest childhood. She began studying the piano at the age of four and gave her first concert at nine in a live broadcast on Radio-France. At 13, she […]

Parisian photographer David Cousin-Marsy creates photographic images from “ordinary fragments” of the urban landscape. The results are surprising.
Home page | Flickr set 1 | Flickr set 2 | Via

This “real life Shrek” was Maurice Tillet (1903 - 1954), a professional wrestler who had acromegaly, a rare disease that caused bones to grow uncontrollably and led to severe disfigurement:
In his twenties, he developed acromegaly, a rare disease that causes bones to grow wildly and uncontrollably. Soon his whole body was disfigured as a result. […]