If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum

Ah, la nostalgie, as the Frenchies say. (Maybe that's what the Frenchies say. I don't know. My French has always been execrable. Votre francais est execrable, people kept telling me as we recently toured Belgium. 50000 Belgians can't be wrong.) Thumbing through the epistles brought me to this one:

The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the fact that the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts has accepted a few francs under the table to fund a Disney chair for cultural exchange. This from the same country that refused to visit EuroDisney because they didn’t sell wine in Cinderella’s castle? The same country where every intellectual worth his Derrida spent every waking hour bellyaching over the Americanization of the glories of French culture? The same country where eventually some Arab sheiks had to come in and bail out Mikey Eisner and change the name to Disneyland Paris (a city which, we hasten to point out, has a booming Disney Store on the Champs Elysees, patronized mostly by American tourists)? What are these people coming to? And to think, without them, we never would have bottled up the British at Yorktown, and George Washington would have been hanged at dawn...

Anyhow, as a tribute to our Gallic cousins, we offer a unique episode this week. The episode itself—which even we admit is pretty boring—discusses modernism; that’s rather French right there. But what we’ve done is used Babelfish, an on-line, automated translation service, to translate the episode into French, and then used it again to translate the French version back into English. The results are, well, interesting. We are especially pleased by the rendering of the name of Bill O’Connor, our heroic albeit partnerless polician.

And yes, we did steal the idea from MT. He’s our other hero, right after Dickens. Except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it’s the other way around.

___

 

The vast Nostrumian army will recall the episode: #55 Hand Me De Construction Paper / Papier De Hand Me De Construction / Paper De Hand Me Of Construction. Stolen directly from Twain, who printed a version of Jumping Frog as written, as translated into French, then as translated back from the French into English. Very drole. Tres drole. Very funny. 

Ah, the good old days. 

Meanwhile, editing continues apace. Last night I reintroduced myself to Quack the Forensic Duck in Series 2. I can see the proverbial light at the proverbial end of the proverbial tunnel.