Below are odds and ends we couldn't wedge in elsewhere.

That French Merde Thing

ENVELOPE CONTAINING ELEPHANT POO SPARKS ALARM

CERGY, France August 4, 2005 (AFP) - An envelope leaking a strange pinkish powder sparked an alert in a Paris suburban post office, but tests revealed the substance to be nothing more than desiccated elephant dung, police said Thursday.

Police said the envelope was addressed to a Paris-based immigrant from Sri Lanka who apparently used the pachydermal poo for traditional religious rites.

Ouais. Nous Lisons Les Articles.

EXPLICIT SEX PUTS FRENCH SANG FROID TO THE TEST

PARIS August 6, 2005 (Telegraph) - France's carefully cultivated reputation for being unshockable is under challenge from an explosion of explicit material in its normally staid press.

Libération, the high-minded Left-wing daily founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and kindred spirits in 1973, is leading the way with a lavishly illustrated series on a different sexual topic every day. ... [I]n the first three weeks of its series the paper...has already featured oral and group sex, bondage and internet pornography. ... Editors say they have enough ideas to keep going "all summer long". Wordy articles in the centre pages are illustrated by lewd cartoons and close-ups of genitalia.

From the offices of Libération, there is no news yet of the impact on circulation, which fell by nearly 9,000 last year to just under 150,000.

"Sex is a subject like any other, there to be covered," said Mathieu Lindon, who edits the supplement in which the series appears.

Or rather, uncovered by Libération. And imagine, sex in France has become "a subject like any other". Like political exposés, for instance.

Great French Moments In Processed Foods

August 8, 2005 (Guardian) - [The origins of the tin can] lie with that Frenchman of so many parts, Napoleon I, who in his early, optimistic days of power invited the Republic's finest minds to "design me a container that will keep food fresh". He baited his hook with a 12,000 franc reward, but unfortunately his compatriots had been too enthusiastic with their guillotine, whose victims included such obvious can-inventors as Antoine Lavoisier. As the great mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange remarked: "It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it."

The prize was claimed in 1809 by Nicolas François Appert, a Frenchman with an intacto head, and, to those in the know, the "father of canning". The following year, Appert published L'Art de conserver les substances animales et végétales, its main principle being to boil the life out of foodstuffs.

Napoleon III sponsored his own competition for long-term food storage. It was the means by which, in 1869, the winner Hippolyte Mege-Mouries gave us margarine.

Oh my, thank you France for the oleo and the trans fats.

PFFT (What is this?): Bathroom reading entertainment 3 | Rayonnement français 1

Sex is a subject like any other !

Are you doubting about it Damian ?

An old Sgt Major said of the French, 'how can you trust a race of people that make wine with their feet and f*** with their face?' Nothing else needs to be said!