It didn't freeze the Emacs of the guy writing it :-D
1 point for Emacs !
218 karma · joined January 12, 2019
If it's about Rs, I worked on an oil rig with a Mexican guy named Javier. The American OIM had such hard time telling "Javier" (with the two different gutturals) on the tannoy, Javier got called "George" for the rest of our stay.
When he won the presidential election, everybody thought it was no big deal, as he hadn't shown a single viable candidate to staff any of the 577 seats in the parliament, without which he couldn't wield any real structural power. But he used that weakness as a strength. He hired inexperienced people from all regular ways of life, young and shiny. To the voting public, the message was "you wanted neither left nor right ? Here you go, vote for the almost normal people I'm offering you." This turned into a huge strength, as once in office these inexperienced MP simply followed the group leader, who, you guessed it, was a seasoned politician from olden, and made the parliament a transparent corridor for the presidential power for quite some time.
The public pitch was along the "climb over the left/right stalemate and go forward". But the mechanics, besides good ties with the corporate world, were a masterpiece of perfect timing for every action along the campaign, and then for the legislative elections. In those days I was admiring Macron like you would admire a talented enemy general.
The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics, and offered an alternative to fed-up voters who didn't dare turn to the usual far-right and far-left "protest votes".
Headed with a nimble tactical vision, the formula was extremely efficient... for one mandate.
But it gets even more impressive when you know what the times were like when this map was made.
Neighbouring valleys hosted different languages that sometimes were not intelligible to each other.
In places, local people didn't have a name for the prominent mountain they grew up and spent their life under.
One of Cassini's young cartographers was notoriously killed by villagers who put an axe in his head, because pointing his mysterious brass and glass instruments at mountains and bell towers made them be sure he was a bad wizard.
Those were the times. And this is the map !
I work with several professional cartographers here in France. All of them have several large printed maps in their offices, just for the beauty of them. I don't know of one who does not have a Cassini map along, somewhere on an office wall.
The amount of snow we get is never anywhere close to those American phenomena I see sometimes in the news, where snow gets half way up your front doors nearly overnight. Seeing that, I'm surprised to read that most people don't use snow tyres in such places : it feels like going against common sense even on an purely individual level.
But obviously, even with this 1/2, your relation after dividing between two tanks still holds. :)
I'm with you on the dead ecosystem thing. Besides the vegetable patch, my garden is deliberately a happy self-regulated mess of grass and wild strawberries, trees and bushes, planted flowers and all sorts of plants and mushrooms. I only remove the thorns, and walk though with a scythe twice a year (one tough enough to cut the smaller saplings). It's quite rewarding to watch the birds, small mammals and amphibians that thrive there, and a delight for my young daughter. It is quite a surprise to hear that I'd have trouble doing that in the land of the free. Thank you for the insight !
I won't argue with the essence of your point though, although, for what I know, much of the nobility up to the 1800's was of Frankish descent, while Gallo-roman blood dominated among the commoners. So some heritage was there indeed.