Portugal is the new France, while America shivers in front of repeats

While the French cower beneath the boot of Sarkozy, their continental counterparts the Portuguese have been taking an altogether more more relaxed attitude to the ban. While the smoking interdit was also introduced on New Year’s Day, who should be found flouting the new legislation but the man put in charge of enforcing it. He seemed unconcerned with his offence or even with the details of the law, professing ignorance that it covered hard-living Portugeezers splashing the cash in casinos.

“We will have to look into what is in the law,” said Antonio Nunes. Well quite.

To be fair, it is complex – there are exceptions for large restaurants, but clearly the Portuguese take more pleasure in socialising than regulating the atmosphere in which they do so. And no bad thing, either. Perhaps the Portuguese are the new French? In that case, who are the new Portuguese? Maybe it will be one half of whatever Belgium becomes, should it split up. Without the climate, of course.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, the writers’ strike has once again been causing discussion among the News Hour team. As is perversely the case with the smoking ban in France (and Germany, for that matter) the ban on words hits at the worst time of year possible for couch potatoes – when it’s too cold to do anything else. Unscripted entertainment such as American Idol is spreading across the schedules as the remaining shows with words left unaired start to run out. During February, Fox plans to run Idol three nights a week, accelerating a trend – albeit through necessity – to favour factual and constructed reality entertainment over more expensive scripted drama and comedy formats.

Perhaps the nation will have had enough, and decide to take out their snowploughs and clear a path to the nearest gym or place of outdoor recreation. Shoot some hoops, build a soapbox racer, throw a football through a tire. Perhaps TV remotes will drop to the ground all across the land, reading glasses swept up in their place as the perfect occasion to finish War & Peace rears its head. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Le monde: plus ca change? Maybe non…

We think of our current times as stable, although history is quick to teach us otherwise. The modern world is a transient place, boundaries shrink and expand – on the east coast of England, the government is reportedly considering plans to abandon settlements that are simply too expensive to protect from flooding (have the beavers had a shot at it yet?). Imagine running submarine tours of the abandoned towns in 30 years time. That’s nature. The government claims that this report is not true, but that it has a policy of ‘sustainable protection’ – if that’s not a phrase that has some flex in it, we don’t know what is.

Belgium, meanwhile, has been without a government for more than 150 days, markedly longer than the last suspension in 1988. Polls in France have indicated that the Gauls would be prepared to absorb the poorer, French-speaking south (Wallonia) into the nation, thus moving it out of Departement 99 – and one suspects that Tsarkozy would like nothing better than to expand his territorial reach. Does this mean that the Netherlands would absorb the richer north? It seems more likely to stand on its own. That’s people.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a village teeters on the brink of crisis. The hamlet of Obereichstaett is facing down a horde of rampaging millipedes with its very own foot-high wall (complete with lip – the beavers could’ve done that in no time, for a tonne of fish). This is not a one-off occurrence. The invading creatures haunt the locals’ thoughts, and brought the local rail network to a standstill in 1900 by covering the tracks, making them too slippy for trains to function. That’s nature again: at least, the horror movie version.

Where are these millipedes coming from? Where do they go, those that aren’t squished by trains? Is this the millipede equivalent of visiting Mecca? One can only imagine the scenes when supplies have to be let through access points on the wall – heavily-armed SWAT squads dousing the wriggling villains with liquid nitrogen.

On that note, animal lovers may be troubled to learn of attacks perpetrated by ‘rabid otters‘ in Florida. What has the world come to? Perhaps the pair in this video have split up and gone on the rampage.

Sarko: The Americans can count on us – if only to say ‘non’

The public image of Nicolas Sarkozy is a curious beast; once the ‘Hyper President’, the ‘Sun King’ or the rather wonderful ‘Tsarkozy’, all names that emphasise achievement and entitlement – he has now been dubbed ‘Sarko Americain’. Presumably a French pun on American Psycho, this reflects both his perceived closeness to the U.S. administration (he was the first sitting French President to holiday there, and clashed rather memorably with photographers) and his explosive nature, a characteristic most recently exemplified by his storming out of a CBS interview. The trigger was a question about his divorce. The breakdown of a marriage is a hugely stressful process, so surely such a question is justified under the public interest as to how Sarkozy performs under pressure (that, and it’s gossip – and who doesn’t love gossip), although perhaps a sitting French President, who enjoys immunity from prosecution, might view the public interest differently.

Before he stormed out, the President managed to relay this unstinting message of support to the United States, indicating that even France’s closest allies would be best to regard it as having the final say in all situations:

‘I want the Americans to know that they can count on us. But at the same time, we want to be free to disagree.’

Sarkozy’s domineering management style is reflected in the French bureaucracy. France is divided into administrative Departements – Paris is in 75, Dijon in 21, etc – is extended to cover former colonies, overseas territories and the rest of the world, most of which sits in Departement 99 (sounds like a 1960s spy series), blissfully unaware of its status as just another French province.