Thursday, March 04, 2004
The anti-French websites
I promised you to speak about the anti-French websites that are rather numerous. The majority of these ones are for sure amateur and we can suppose that only one young webmaster wanted to have fun with such a website. Unfortunately, some other websites seem to be quite serious. Of course, the title of the sites www.fuckfrance.com and merdeinfrance.blogspot.com do not show professionalism but there are several rather long articles a day and it looks a bit like a newspaper. On the second one, there is a translation in French, which can interest some people.
These websites can be interesting in order to know the opinion of a part of the US citizens. Yet, I think that such people are a very little minority. We can gather information that aren’t in any newspaper. Furthermore, they speak about the last actuality. For instance, today (03/04/2004), there are articles about the movie of Mel Gibson “The passion of the Christ”, about French foie gras ban, the strikes by Air France, the letters threatening bombings on railway tracks from a group demanding millions of dollars, and the trial of Marc Dutroux, etc. Nevertheless, I am in doubt about the truthfulness of several topics.
The novices have to know some vocabulary in order to understand this kinf of websites but I think that it is not very difficult: Froggystan=France, Al-Jazira sur Seine=Le Monde, etc.
There are serious anti-French websites calling for total boycott too, such as www.francestinks.com where you can find a list with the main French companies. (go to the link : French! Don’t Buy!).
On several websites, you can buy anti-French products, for example a t-shirt on www.kissmyfrance.com.
I promised you to speak about the anti-French websites that are rather numerous. The majority of these ones are for sure amateur and we can suppose that only one young webmaster wanted to have fun with such a website. Unfortunately, some other websites seem to be quite serious. Of course, the title of the sites www.fuckfrance.com and merdeinfrance.blogspot.com do not show professionalism but there are several rather long articles a day and it looks a bit like a newspaper. On the second one, there is a translation in French, which can interest some people.
These websites can be interesting in order to know the opinion of a part of the US citizens. Yet, I think that such people are a very little minority. We can gather information that aren’t in any newspaper. Furthermore, they speak about the last actuality. For instance, today (03/04/2004), there are articles about the movie of Mel Gibson “The passion of the Christ”, about French foie gras ban, the strikes by Air France, the letters threatening bombings on railway tracks from a group demanding millions of dollars, and the trial of Marc Dutroux, etc. Nevertheless, I am in doubt about the truthfulness of several topics.
The novices have to know some vocabulary in order to understand this kinf of websites but I think that it is not very difficult: Froggystan=France, Al-Jazira sur Seine=Le Monde, etc.
There are serious anti-French websites calling for total boycott too, such as www.francestinks.com where you can find a list with the main French companies. (go to the link : French! Don’t Buy!).
On several websites, you can buy anti-French products, for example a t-shirt on www.kissmyfrance.com.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
"My shit doesn't explode"
The story starts on January 10 on board of a plane of American Airlines. A young French guy, Franck Moulet, who is 27 years old, stay for a too long time in the toilet. Then a flight attendant comes and hammers at the door. Now, two different versions:
- According to the stewardess, Franck would have declared: “Shit, the bomb I planted in the toilet don’t explode”.
- According to him, he did not use the word “bomb” but said: “My shit doesn’t explode”.
Then he was 21 days and had to plead guilty in order to come back to France.
What I want to do in this article is to compare the way of speaking about this information in France and in the US:
First, we can notice that I found almost no article about this case in the most of information website.
Secondly, the few articles, which treats this subject, criticizes the French media, because they speak all the time of the “dreadful conditions” in which Franck Moulet was kept, how “scandalous” it is, how he "suffered a lot" in prison (there’s an entire Le Monde article about Moulet’s nightmare).
Finally, I found elements on a website that I have never heard in France: For instance, I have read that Franck Moulet would have insulted George Bush Senior. However, I think that we have to take this cautiously because that comes from an anti-French website: merdeinfrance.blogspot.com.
I will try to post an article about this kind of websites.
The story starts on January 10 on board of a plane of American Airlines. A young French guy, Franck Moulet, who is 27 years old, stay for a too long time in the toilet. Then a flight attendant comes and hammers at the door. Now, two different versions:
- According to the stewardess, Franck would have declared: “Shit, the bomb I planted in the toilet don’t explode”.
- According to him, he did not use the word “bomb” but said: “My shit doesn’t explode”.
Then he was 21 days and had to plead guilty in order to come back to France.
What I want to do in this article is to compare the way of speaking about this information in France and in the US:
First, we can notice that I found almost no article about this case in the most of information website.
Secondly, the few articles, which treats this subject, criticizes the French media, because they speak all the time of the “dreadful conditions” in which Franck Moulet was kept, how “scandalous” it is, how he "suffered a lot" in prison (there’s an entire Le Monde article about Moulet’s nightmare).
Finally, I found elements on a website that I have never heard in France: For instance, I have read that Franck Moulet would have insulted George Bush Senior. However, I think that we have to take this cautiously because that comes from an anti-French website: merdeinfrance.blogspot.com.
I will try to post an article about this kind of websites.
