L'ironie francaise

It's been a while since I watched a good French film. I was just looking through this year's French Film Festival programme I'd forgotten how true the french film stereotype can be sometimes. Out of 12 blurbs that I read, 6 mentioned some kind of complicated sordid liason. Some of them are quite comical... my favourite has to be "Envoyés Speciaux" where apparently amongst the normal crazy lives of war correspondants in Baghdad, "Things also get complicated when Franck inadvertently sleeps with Poussin's wife before their mission." Inadvertently...?! Only in French films!

The last time I was in France I did however see one that didn't fit all the stereotypes - for one it had French actors speaking English!! Welcome is definitely worth seeing, being beautiful, thought-provoking though unfortunately also heart-breaking. You can watch the trailer here. Some of it is in English so hopefully you'll get the gist! Though good luck with the accents... Anyway I highly recommend it, go and see it while it's out in the UK during the festival!

On voice neurocognitive psychologists and diagrams

On Tuesday, my sort of supervisor showed me what she'd done to my data the other day to put in her own paper. It was this intelligent and beautiful rainbow spectrum of a graph, all blue, red and yellow, and where data overlapped it became purple and orange... it was preeetty! And it was the data that I'd collected! Sadly I won't be using it for my own project cos that would feel too much like cheating. Turned out she wasn't the only working on pretty diagrams. That same morning, one of the other francophones in the lab also showed me his crazy complex multiple graph diagrams that he'd been creating. And then yesterday (after a right cuffufle of forgetting the right usb stick with the version of my project that I'd been intensively working on over the last couple of days) I got some highly useful feedback from my actual supervisor.
At least half of what he said could be condensed into this:-
- "Put in some cool diagrams here and here and here and here"
(it may have been a summary of what he said but I assure you, the word "cool" made an appearance on several occasions). So I had a go at some "cool" diagrams today. I made a reasonable effort I think, but none of them come even close to the rainbow spectrum graph I saw on Tuesday :( siiiigh...

Lessons for the week:
- Programming matlab is a useful skill to learn
- Voice neurocognitive psychologists like "cool" diagrams
- Never put your usb stick in your jeans pocket so you don't lose it. You will inevitably forget to take it out the next day

Man am I becoming geeky... see what final year is doing to me!

Des bizarreries d'aujourd'hui

Today I was a little perplexed by

- my dad refusing to put ham in his sandwich this morning which contained the apparently satisfying and tasty combination of humous and chilli sauce
- a very lost and confused Indian woman with near incomprehensible english running very late for a job interview, who I went on a wild goose chase with, first looking for Buchanan Galleries, then Buchanan Bus Station, then for a bus to Bearsden. She was hoping that I spoke Hindi...
- a giant (at least 6 feet high and 12 feet wide) Adidas shoe box, literally blocking my path, in the middle of the square round the corner from my flat

Ah the joys of those petits bizarreries which render life all the more interesting!

hmmm...

I have just been eyeing up my essay questions for french. They always pick such interesting and often contraversial topics, this semester's include:

For or Against the practice of strikes in France?
What are the causes of fanaticsm
Are religions a source of irrationality in our societies?
Is the internet an instrument of freedom or alienation?
Can we guarantee social well-being by respecting traditions?
Is feminism an exclusively western idea?
Is political power becoming a media power?
Is a truly multicultural society possible?

It actually makes my mouth water looking at them, unfortunately it also makes it difficult to choose between them! I also get to choose something contraversial to talk about in one of my Oral exams for my presentation. Anyway, I thought I would maybe tackle some of these (abridged and in english of course!) in my blog over the next few weeks. Gives me a good excuse to do some reading (in french) and might help me choose a good oral topic. Procrasination that is actually revision... ah how I love my course! :D