Frogsmoke

The French love pi so much they usually say it twice. Pi Day (wiki) | Image source

Fredrika Stalh is Swedish and came to Paris to brush up her French. Now she speaks the language like she was born here. But best of all: she sings like not many do. Here she is in a (French) interview. Listen… [quicktime width="400" height="20"]http://frogsmoke.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/fredrika-stahl-pourquoi-pas-moi.mp3[/quicktime] Fredrika Stahl – Pourquoi Pas Moi HT J-Walk

Nice marketing blunder by German car manufacturer Audi. Their novel electric E-tron supercar has a name with crappy connotations in France:

Via Failblog.org

When I was still in my teens I was in love with Marianne Faithfull. One of the albums I owned (and loved best) was the one on which she sang French. Here's one of the tracks, a francophone version of her 1965 hit Tomorrow's Calling. Some anecdotes: Faithfull was perfectly bilingual but according to her [...]

On Flickr: another Parisian menu, celebrating great crudeness, and serving salmon paving stone, in (or with?) a fried house:

Useful or gimmicky? For those who have an iPhone there's now an application named iLingual, which translates anything (well, many things) you say into French, using your own animated lips. Source

Tongue Twisters are phrases that are a struggle to say out loud. This is a site that currently has 177 of those French virelangues. Here are some of them: 8. Gros gras grand grain d'orge, tout gros-gras-grand-grain-d'orgerisé, quand te dé-gros-gras-grand-grain-d'orgeriseras-tu? Je me dé-gros-gras-grand-grain-d'orgeriserai quand tous les gros gras grands grains d'orge se seront dé-gros-gras-grand-grain-d'orgerisés. 23. [...]

(From the Sign Language series in the Times)

Soon you can ask that question to Dita Von Teese because she's learning French. Why? The dancer/stripper/model/actress (boasting a waistline which can be laced down as far as 16.5 inches – 42 cm) is taking lessons in the language so she can converse with her boyfriend, French aristocrat Count Louis-Marie de Castelbajac, in his native [...]

Don't you just love those kiddy journalists showing off their French when their editor-in-chief has a day off?? (Click to read their stories)

It's true and it's all Sarkozy's fault: Irish accent beats French as world's sexiest Men with an Emerald Isle brogue came top in a poll of 5,000 women worldwide, while the French accent only came fourth, just ahead of Australian. Italian was second, Scottish third. A spokesman for www.OnePoll.com, which carried out the international survey, [...]

A humorous excerpt from the book: Words You Don't Know. This is a chat between a French and British robot. It begins with the vagaries of the French number system and relating it to the strange phenomenon of sheep counting. It suggests that their strange counting system motivated the French into inventing the metric system.

Found in a parking garage in Cannes; click for original on Flickr:

(Found on Flickr — click for source)