Frogsmoke

Maybe it's time to declare French a dead language. Or is it time to send journalists back to school?

(The story is about a speedy car loaded with 600kg cannabis resin, and intercepted by gendarmes.)

Sorry to disappoint you. It's a picture I created on Digital Photo Effects, just like this one:

Make your own!

Swine flu? What swine flu! While the French authorities are telling their citizens to abstain from the ubiquitous bisou, Chinese blogger Yang Yaqing, who studies music in Paris, wants to kiss at least one hundred men in Paris. Each kiss is photographed and appears on her blog. If the idea was to get a lot [...]

Imagine the scene. You are out on a quiet cycle ride in France when you're suddenly crowned as the victor of the Tour de France. From nowhere, you are jumped by the crowds, the well-wishers and the razzmatazz. Here is France's favorite nutcase Remi Gaillard with his latest prank:

Source

Gray Comic is a blog with a business-daily cartoon, except when the man behind it is too busy/lazy. Maybe he should have been busy or lazy when this came out of his pen:

Found on Times Online: a sign in Apt, France. Click for source.

Interesting legal dilemma: confessed killer declared not responsible for his acts, but allowed to inherit his parents' money
A man from the south of the country committed a double murder in 2000 by slitting his parents' throats with a knife. Psychiatrists declared him insane and hence not responsible for his acts. The verdict: not guilty. With [...]

Found on Flickr:

You can still park your car on the square and claim you didn't understand the sign…

The owner of this hotel must be a happy man:

Paul Biya, president of African nation Cameroon has block-booked this hotel, and one nearby, for his 3-week stay in La Baule, south of Brittany. The combined price for the 43 rooms he occupies with his party amounts to 42,000 euros — per day!
After three weeks [...]

On the menu in a Parisian restaurant:

(More sign language in the Telegraph)

The story continues. French business magazine La Tribune believe they can do without human translators, so they have a computer to do make their foreign versions. I have the impression that the writers of the original French articles are trying as hard as possible to make their work untranslatable. From today's issue:

(The original French headline [...]

Usually I'm not impressed with French humor but this is a cartoon I like:

Jessica and Jean Sarkozy (Nicolas' son) are expecting a child
Jessica: Doctor, is it normal that he moves like that?
Doctor: In the beginning, yes. But it'll get easier once he has had his little vasovagal episode

French business magazine La Tribune uses machine translation (without human intervention) to produce foreign-language editions. Not always with great success…
In case you have no idea what they mean with this…

Here's the original version:

If you're not francophone, l'observer in French does mean to observe it, but in this case it refers to the British newspaper The [...]

A joke I found on Bits & Pieces:
Pierre, a brave French fighter pilot, takes his girlfriend, Marie, out for a pleasant little picnic by the River Seine. It’s a beautiful day and love is in the air.
Marie leans over to Pierre and says: “Pierre, kiss me!” Our hero grabs a bottle of Merlot and splashes [...]

La Tribune is a French business magazine that has taken the bold step of producing its online content in four foreign languages (English, German, Spanish and Italian). All translations are computer-generated, using Systran technology. In most cases the non-French versions are not too bad (actually better than Google Translate), but sometimes the outcome is complete [...]