HOME/ARCHIVES http://www.kazooweb.com/textes/
Merci de choisir un ou plusieurs textes plutôt que d'imprimer la totalité... Les arbres vous sont reconnaissants...

C'est une reprise de la semaine dernière avec quelques rajouts...

********************************
THE REGULARS: Summary
A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Ice Carving and Sculpting [La sculpture de glace, un art éphémère.]
B) CNN/Global Office: Overtime costs UK works $43bn [Les heures supp non payées coûtent cher aux salariés britanniques.
C) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Airport interpretor [Un casse-tête. On ne triche pas !]
D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de janvier.

********************************
B*) CNN/Global Office: Divided by an uncommon language [Des salariés poursuivent la filiale française de GE pour non-respect de la loi Toubon sur l'emploi de la française.] VOIR LA SUITE DANS ARTICLE 1!
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/11/24/french.english.ap/index.html
Divided by an uncommon language

Wednesday, November 24, 2004 Posted: 1115 GMT (1915 HKT)

PARIS, France (AP) -- General Electric employee Nadine Meslin says dealing with computer software in any language is tricky, but it's even worse when you're French and the jargon is in English.

So what's the answer? Sue!

French employees of a GE branch that makes medical equipment, tired of struggling with company e-mails, manuals and meetings in English, took their fight to court on Tuesday -- the latest flare-up in the French language's struggle to maintain linguistic pre-eminence, at least at home. "It is really for work purposes, so we can do our jobs competently," Meslin, a GE Healthcare marketing assistant who also represents the CGT trade union, said of the court action. "It is in no way a question of pride."

Pride, nevertheless, has a lot to do with French discomfort over the creep of English, both here and elsewhere in the world. A French law aimed at fending off English usage in business and on the airwaves marked its 10th anniversary this year. French-language defenders keep an eagle-eye out for transgressions such as -- quelle horreur! -- English-language advertising.

The Web site of the Defense of the French Language, a group partly financed by France's Culture Ministry, even has a page titled "Museum of Horrors" showing photos of English-language billboards on buses, at train stations, airports and that most iconic of French institutions, the Paris Metro.

On Wednesday, it and other groups are to award their annual English Doormat Prize for perceived offenses against the French language. Last year's winner was an academic who promoted teaching in English. The 2002 award went to the esteemed Le Monde newspaper for running weekly excerpts in English from the New York Times.

This year's candidates include the head of the French Football Federation for using the song "Can You Feel It?" as a national team anthem, luxury goods firm Dior for promoting perfumes in English and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet for giving a speech in English.

GE Healthcare based its court complaint on the Toubon Law, introduced in 1994, which makes French mandatory in a variety of situations, ranging from advertising to workplace documents employees need to do their jobs. The latter must be written in French but can be accompanied by translations.

The employees claim English has become the main language in their branch of GE in recent years for instruction manuals, company e-mails and meetings. Older employees, hired when English was not a requirement, find it particularly hard to adapt, they claim.

The case was brought by the left-wing CGT union and more moderate CFDT, and hearings opened Tuesday in a court in Versailles west of Paris, union representatives said. They expect a verdict in January. "We are asking for the translation into French of a certain number of documents and software applications. All we want is to be able to work well, in good conditions," said Meslin, the CGT representative. "It's especially important for software," she added. "Already, in French, it's not easy, so imagine what it's like when it's not your native language."

Employees contend safety is also an issue because technicians may incorrectly assemble medical machines sold by the firm if they don't understand instruction manuals.

A 1998 study by the national statistics agency INSEE backs them up: it found that 64 percent of people aged 15 or above whose mother tongue is French say they have no working knowledge of English.

In a statement, GE Healthcare said it provides employees with translations of business communications and French language tools. The firm employs more than 1,500 people from 45 countries at its site in Buc, near Versailles, and from there exports to more than 100 countries. "GE Healthcare is committed to upholding the highest standards when it comes to respecting local laws, customs and cultures in countries where it operates," the statement said.

Employees say the company has made an effort since the complaint was filed in June, with all e-mails from management offered in English, French and other languages since September. The firm has also promised that a software package in French would be made available, employees said.

Marceau Dechamps, vice president of the Defense of the French Language group, said the Toubon Law has proved effective in previous cases but lamented the number of French companies using English is increasing. French employees faced with English in the workplace "often don't say anything because they are scared of being judged poorly, of appearing backward, of compromising their promotion prospects. In meetings in English, they act as if they understood, even though they understood nothing or little," he said. Using French is a matter of economic efficiency, not just pride, Dechamps said. "People can only think and communicate clearly in their language. It's utopian to think tomorrow we'll all speak in the same language."

And the Doormat Prize?

Marc Favre d'Echallens, secretary general of the Right to Understand, one of the sponsors, promised results would be sent to reporters by "courrier electronique" and "telecopie" -- which many people in France prefer to call "e-mail" and "fax."

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
2*) The Economist: The software-development industry [Il est de plus en plus de difficile de concevoir des logiciels.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3423238
The software-development industry: Managing complexity
Nov 25th 2004

Most software projects fail to meet their goals. Can this be fixed by giving developers better tools?

ON SEPTEMBER 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities. But why did Palmdale's radios fail? A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. The culprit: poor design.

At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time. The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. And such problems are confined neither to governments nor to America. A £456m ($844m) project for Britain's Child Support Agency came in over a year late, and has failed to deliver payments to more than half of eligible applicants.

As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing. A study earlier this year by the Standish Group, a technology consultancy, estimated that 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late. A 2002 study by America's National Institute of Standards (NIST), a government research body, found that software errors cost the American economy $59.5 billion annually. Worldwide, it would be safe to multiply this figure by a factor of two. So who is to blame for such systematic incompetence?

Cost overruns and delays are common in numerous industries—few large infrastructure projects, for instance, are completed either on time or on budget. But it is peculiar to software that billions of dollars can be spent only for nothing useful to result. At a very basic level, it is the fault of the software engineers who are writing the programs, and of their bosses. Even companies that specialise in software development suffer from delays and overruns. An obvious example is Microsoft: its “Longhorn”, the long-heralded successor to its Windows XP operating system, was originally scheduled for launch this year. Longhorn is now not expected before mid-2006, and many of its key features have been put off until 2007.

The prevalence of such failures can be explained by one startling weakness: the tools available to software developers. As software projects have become more and more complicated, it has become impossible for even the most talented team of programmers to keep track of the millions of lines of “code” required. As long ago as the 1980s the industry began to rely heavily on software-development applications—basically, software that helps write software, for example by creating reusable modules that form part of broader processes. The problem is that these have simply not been up to the task. As a report in May by Forrester Research, another consultancy, succinctly put it: “Corporate software development is broken.”

Dale Fuller, the boss of Borland, a software-development company, agrees. He also thinks he can fix the problem of weak tools. So does John Swainson, long in charge of software development at IBM and now bound for the top job at Computer Associates. John Montgomery, who runs such things for Microsoft, does not think the situation is quite so bad. However, he believes Microsoft has what it takes to “commoditise common problems” and so enable average software developers to write above-average programs. And a bevy of smaller companies offers solutions as well. The challenge facing all of these companies is how to create tools that are reliable, yet capable of dealing with millions of lines of code and requirements that can shift, sometimes alarmingly, during a project's lifetime.

The importance of the software-development sector to business as a whole is huge. It is also an increasingly substantial business in itself (see chart). And, as Mr Montgomery points out, although selling software-development applications is profitable for Microsoft, it is also a way of winning new business. Better development tools mean more software is written for Windows, which in turn means more people are likely to use the operating system. Ditto for rivals—one reason IBM is making a big push to support development in various flavours of Unix (including in the “open source” version—ie, software code that is non-proprietary and ostensibly free to anyone—Linux). Unix is a long-established operating system that remains the biggest threat to Windows.

Three main trends are shaping the future of software development and giving hope to those who oversee big software projects. The first is awareness of the need to pay greater attention to the lifecycle of a piece of software, from the initial setting of requirements to ongoing implementation. The second trend is towards automating the testing of software. The NIST study estimates that $22.2 billion (more than one-third) of the cost of software failures could be eliminated simply by improved testing. The third trend is the emergence of open-source code, something embraced even by Microsoft, which is often seen by its many critics as the would-be nemesis of the open-source movement.

The five-step program

There are five steps involved in creating a piece of software: enumerating the requirements; designing the program; actually writing the code; testing it; and then deploying it. Traditionally and naturally enough, this was seen as a sequential process. However, Mr Swainson points out that by the time an organisation gets around to deploying a piece of software, its requirements have often already changed. This, he says, means that an “iterative” model, in which an organisation continually cycles through the five phases, makes more sense than the traditional “waterfall” which puts them in sequence.

Although the consensus among software-development providers is that iterative models are the way forward, a note of caution is in order. A paper by Phillip Laplante and Colin Neill of Penn State University in the February issue of ACM Queue, a scholarly journal, claims that, in practice, the waterfall remains by far the most popular model. It may be that real change is lagging behind developers' marketing literature, or that the iterative approach is more style than substance.

Borland, though, is betting its business on the success of the iterative model. In September it announced “Software Delivery Optimisation”, an approach that seeks to bring together all five bits of the development cycle, along with the people who are constantly making decisions about the project. At the heart of the system is management software called Themis (the Greek goddess of order), planned for release in the first half of 2005. Themis will have a module that turns models automatically into programming code. When code is written, it will instantly update the requirements input by the business developers. Mr Fuller says that this will transcend even the iterative model because the iteration will be so fast as to be seamless. As soon as a portion of the code is completed, it will be tested. As soon as requirements change, programmers will instantly change course.

If that sounds a bit utopian, it is by no means unique. In October, IBM announced its newest package, called “Atlantic”, which is poised to compete with Themis. Atlantic is based both around IBM's own products and those of Rational, a company bought by IBM in December 2002 for $2.1 billion. Not to be left out, Microsoft will release a similar product called Visual Studio 2005 sometime in the first half of next year. The rhetoric of this rush of entrants into the marketplace is almost indistinguishable.

This is partially due to the fact that, although they are competitors, and fierce ones at that, they are also collaborators. Mr Montgomery points out several bits of development software—WS-Routing, for instance (which handles network routing) and WS-Security (you guessed it, security)—that were developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. Both firms trumpet that their development software is used by an impressive percentage of the world's largest companies, and both support the same basic standards, such as XML (a language for exchanging data on the web) and other web protocols.

Indeed, so-called web services—programs that are meant to run on the web and be accessed by many computers remotely—are the primary battleground for the next generation of software-development applications. The business case rests on the view that almost anything can be done over the web. This is particularly true for the most common, commodity-type applications where most of the available revenues appear to be.

Tick this box

One snag is that, so far, web services have turned out to be much harder to deliver than their champions had hoped. Consider the example of a relatively simple challenge: enrolling 6m Americans living abroad who wanted to use the internet to cast their votes in the recent elections. America's Defence Department, which has responsibility for helping expats to vote, decided to launch a pilot program for 100,000 people, and even came up with an acronym: SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. In February, after $22m had already been spent, the project was abandoned. The software was judged to be too unreliable.

The various efforts to prevent the occurrence of such disasters—IBM's web-services platform is called WebSphere, and Microsoft's suite of development tools for web services is known as .NET—have more similarities than differences. IBM tends to favour Java as its native programming language, while Microsoft prefers C#, a language it developed itself. However, both firms' platforms support other languages. Borland claims that, being neutral, it does a better job, but marketing seems to be as important as technology when it comes to winning market share.

That is why Mr Montgomery emphasises Microsoft's efforts to create an “ecosystem” of developers. He says that the company has spent, over the years, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars investing in the Microsoft Developer Network. This is certainly a busy website—some 3m developers a month visit to exchange programs and ideas, Mr Montgomery says. Indeed, some of the developers come up with products that compete directly with elements of .NET.

What's more, Mr Montgomery says that the tools made by companies such as Component 1 and Infragistics are better than Microsoft's own, and that this is something Microsoft encourages. The small fry make millions of dollars by staying one step ahead of Microsoft, but the giant benefits because its overall ecosystem is strengthened.

If software development in general is somewhat fragmented, in the area of software testing there is one clear market leader: Mercury Interactive, a company based in Mountain View, California. Other companies, especially IBM, are trying to make inroads into testing, and Mercury itself is trying to expand into other areas, particularly through an initiative called “Business Technology Optimisation” (yes, the initiatives all start to sound rather similar). That aims to do the kind of system-level integration at which companies such as Borland have traditionally been best. However, industry watchers say there is real promise in efforts to refine the testing process.

There are two sorts of software testing. The first, unit testing, tests a very small subroutine to see that it does what it should. The second, functional testing, is actually trying to use the software. Unit testing is far more straightforward—it is easier to test if a brick will crumble than if an entire structure is sound. Functional testing, on the other hand, is tricky—how is one to know if the software is fully tested? However, according to Mercury, about 60% of the necessary functional testing can be automated—things like repeatedly entering data. And automation allows the developers to explore a far larger number of test cases than would be possible by hand, in far less time. The gains are even greater when software is revised—old automated tests can often be re-used, whereas manual testers would have to start from scratch.

The benefits of this approach are amplified by the transition to the iterative approach—testing is much more effective if its results can be easily re-integrated into the software. Indeed, there is a symbiosis here: the faster testing made possible by automation is easing the transition from the waterfall model to an iterative one. Hence the interest from IBM and Microsoft.

An open-source solution?

The third big industry trend is arguably the most promising of them all. As Mr Montgomery points out, there are two ways of thinking about open-source software development. The first is to see it as a business model, and the second is to understand it as a development process. Microsoft, he says, makes a large amount of source code available under a so-called shared-source licence, which grants users downstream a limited set of rights to modify and use the code.

For purists, this is not enough. However, Mr Montgomery says it suffices to build the sort of community Microsoft wants, while retaining its ability to make a profit. (For instance, people are allowed to take the code, modify it and sell it, but only if it will be used on a Microsoft operating system.) IBM uses a similarly restrictive licence, but it has built its platform on top of Eclipse, a purer open-source framework for building integrated development environments.

However, other companies, such as CollabNet, a firm based in Brisbane, California, are using a less restrictive licence, along the lines of what is traditionally thought of as open source, with only one exception—the licence allows for commercial use. Brian Behlendorf, founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet, says that the open-source ethos allows programmers, particularly those collaborating from different locations, to work together more efficiently. He contends that the freedom to tinker with and improve tools essentially without restriction is the best route to efficiency. Mr Behlendorf was a pioneer in the development of the well-known Apache open-source web server, so his views come as little surprise. Less predictably, they are shared by businesses not usually thought of as being open-source enthusiasts.

For instance, CollabNet signed a deal earlier this month with Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a large asset manager, to provide it with development tools for the next three years. Mr Behlendorf points out that software-development companies, like software companies themselves, are moving towards a model of selling services rather than products. The tools that CollabNet uses are almost all open-source, but by paying “rent”, clients get the benefits of the company's expertise. It seems to work. BGI reports that since it first started using CollabNet two years ago, the time it takes to complete a project has halved.

The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come together in a movement known as “agile” programming. This approach to software development was codified in a meeting in February 2001 in Utah when a group of programmers declared its allegiance to doing things quickly, using common sense and simplicity. The canonical example of what they are trying to avoid was a 1980s program called CONFIRM. Funded by a consortium of hotels, airlines and rental-car companies, it was meant to be a comprehensive travel-reservation system. After three and a half years and $125m, it was cancelled.

The main principle of agile programming is that developers must talk to each other often, and that they must talk to the business people setting requirements equally often. Combine this with a short time-scale—ideally agile proponents seek to deliver a working bit of software every few weeks—and you have an accelerated, informal version of the iterative model. This means that no project can go on for years and produce nothing—a fatally flawed project will be caught sooner.

Gartner, a consultancy, estimates that agile programming will have a substantial impact on high-priority projects. Nonetheless, pessimists argue that the problems plaguing software development are so fundamental that none of the many innovations being pursued today will really make a difference. In mitigation, software engineering is still an immature discipline. It is just possible that the techniques now being pursued by Microsoft, IBM and their growing army of competitors will lead to a future where failure is an exception rather than the rule.

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
6*) Test for dementia [Un petit test pour la démence. Il faut surtout ne pas prendre trop de temps pour répondre, mais réagir spontanémment.]
TEST FOR DEMENTIA

Below are four (4) questions and a bonus question. You have to answer them instantly. You can't take your time, answer all of them immediately. Let's find out just how clever you really are.

Ready? GO!!! (scroll down)

-*-*-*-
First Question:

You are participating in a race. You overtake [dépasser] the second place person. What position are you in?

Answer: If you answered that you are first, then you are wrong! If you overtake the second place person, and you take their place, you are second!

-*-*-*-
To answer the second question, don't take as much time as you took for the first question.

Second Question:

If you are in a race, and you overtake the last person, then you are?

Answer: If you answered that you are second to last, then you are wrong again. Tell me, how can you overtake the LAST person?! You're not having a good time at this! Are you?

-*-*-*-
Very tricky maths! Note: This must be done in your head only. Do NOT use paper and pencil or a calculator. Try it.

Third Question:

Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. now add 10. What is the total?

Answer: Did you get 5000? The correct answer is actually 4100. Don't believe it? Check with your calculator!

-*-*-*-
Today is definitely not your day. Maybe you will get the last question right?

Fourth Question:

Mary's father has five daughters: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

Answer: Nunu? NO! Of course not. Her name is Mary. Read the question again!

-*-*-*-
Okay, now the bonus round. You can partially redeem yourself with this one!!!!!

Bonus Question:

There is a mute [muet] person who wants to buy a toothbrush. By imitating the action of brushing one's teeth he successfully expresses himself to the shopkeeper and the purchase is done. Now if there is a blind [aveugle] man who wishes to buy a pair of sunglasses, how should he express himself?

Answer: He just has to open his mouth and ask. He's blind, not mute - so simple.

KEEP THIS GOING TO FRUSTRATE THE "SMART PEOPLE" IN YOUR LIFE

********************************
A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Ice Carving and Sculpting [La sculpture de glace, un art éphémère.]
http://www.kidzworld.com/site/p1590.htm
Ice Carving & Sculpting

Duncan Hamilton is an artist. He doesn't use paint or a musical instrument. The longest it's taken him to complete a masterpiece is 2 weeks, but most of the time he's under a tighter deadline. What does Duncan sculpt and carve that he has to finish his work in such a short period of time? Ice.

Before turning blocks of ice into people, animals and other interesting objects, Duncan used to be a chef. He began sculpting in the mid '70s after dishing it up in London for a while. He also lectured at a college for a short time but dropped that to spend all his time sculpting ice. Now he has his own business and international recognition. Here's what he has to say about his ice sculptures.

How Long Do Ice Sculptures Last?
Ice sculptures are going to melt but the good thing is, most of them actually look better after a few hours at room temperature. You don't have to keep them in the fridge when they are on display. An average sculpture will last around six to seven hours. It might take a couple days for it to completely melt. Obviously, smaller ones don't last as long.

An Ice Sculpture Down The Drain
Duncan doesn't have a problem with his work disappearing so quickly. "A carving should be considered like a
This igloo is one of Duncan Hamilton's many ice carvings.
Courtesy of Duncan Hamilton
performance, where the work evolves and changes in fascinating and unexpected ways."

Special Ice For Special Sculptures
Ice sculptors don't use tap water to make their carvings. They carefully and slowly produce their own ice to make it perfectly clear. They've also come up with a technique to control the number of bubbles and fractures. They can also make white ice.

The Studio Of An Ice Sculptor
Duncan and his team don't usually work in the freezing cold. Deep frozen ice can be too brittle to make into works of art. Instead, they store ice at different temperatures. Even when it's melting, ice can still burn your skin, so everyone wears special, cold-resistant clothing.

Ice Sculptures Come In All Shapes and Sizes
The largest ice sculpture made by Duncan and his ice sculpting team was comissioned for an advertisment. It took two weeks to make and weighed about 26 tonnes. The largest indoor carving was a 40 foot wide fantasy castle for a wedding. The smallest are hand-made ice cubes and rocks for drink commercials - something Duncan does often.

Have any other questions about ice sculpting and carving? Or just wanna see some super-cool ice sculptures? Check out www.icesculpture.co.uk.

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
B) CNN/Global Office: Overtime costs UK works $43bn [Les heures supp non payées coûtent cher aux salariés britanniques.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/06/overtime.uk/index.html
Overtime costs UK workers $43bn

Friday, January 7, 2005 Posted: 1147 GMT (1947 HKT)

LONDON, England -- Many workers in the UK may have been lucky enough to bank a Christmas bonus last month, but new figures suggest most of them may still be out of pocket. According to figures released this week, British employees did unpaid overtime worth as much as $43 billion last year.

The Trade Union Congress (TUC), which conducted the research, said that each employee who performed an average number of extra hours should have received an extra $8,700 if paid at their normal hourly rate. Or, to put it another way, if they had done all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year, they would have worked for free until February 25.

The TUC said that London workers suffered the worst deal with more than 700,000 people putting in average of 7.9 unpaid hours a week -- almost a complete extra day at the office every week. Had they been paid for the extra time, the average London worker would have picked up more than $13,000 on top of their regular annual wage.

The average number of unpaid hours for the UK as a whole was 7.3 hours.

Long hours can contribute to stress, poor health and relationship problems, and few managers would argue that tired, burnt-out staff are good for business. But TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber warned that the UK, which already has the some of the longest work hours in Europe, had become an overtime culture, in which companies were increasingly reliant on workers exceeding their contracted hours.

"We're not saying that we should turn into a nation of clock-watchers. Most people do not mind putting in some extra time when there's a crisis or an unexpected rush. But too many workplaces have come to depend on very long hours. They get taken for granted and staff have to do even more if there is an unexpected rush," said Barber.

"Worst of all is that many long hours workplaces are inefficient and unproductive. People are putting in long hours to make up for poor organization and planning in the workplace. It also puts employer complaints of the costs of benefits such as pensions or time off for new parents into perspective. Employers have been cutting back on pensions even as their staff put in longer hours."

To draw attention to the issue, the TUC has declared February 25 "Work Your Proper Hours Day," when it is urging staff to stick to their contracted hours to remind their bosses how much they depend on their extra efforts. "Take a proper lunch break, not just a sandwich at your desk, and leave on time, to enjoy your own time on Friday evening," it says. "Why not get together with friends working nearby, and go for a coffee, a pint, or take in a show? You deserve it! This is one day in the year for your boss to appreciate your efforts, and for you to appreciate yourself."

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de janvier.]
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/
columnists/dave_barry/10496338.htm?1c

2004 | The politics, the passion, and Paris

DAVE BARRY

Looking back on 2004, we have to conclude that it could have been worse.

''HOW??'' you ask, spitting out your coffee.

Well, OK, a giant asteroid could have smashed into the Earth and destroyed all human life except Paris Hilton and William Hung. Or Florida could have been hit by 20 hurricanes, instead of just 17.

Or the Yankees could have won the World Series.

But no question, 2004 was bad. Consider:

• We somehow managed to hold a presidential election campaign that for several months was devoted almost entirely to the burning issue of: Vietnam.
• Our Iraq policy, despite being discussed, debated and agreed upon right up to the very highest levels of the White House, did not always seem to be wildly popular over there in Iraq.
• Osama bin Laden remained at large for yet another year (although we did manage, at long last, to put Martha Stewart behind bars).
• The federal budget deficit continued to worsen, despite the concerted effort of virtually every elected official in Washington -- Republican or Democrat -- to spend more money.
• As a nation, we managed somehow to get even fatter, despite the fact that anti-carbohydrate mania worsened to the point where the average American would rather shoot heroin than eat a bagel.
• The ``reality''-show cancer continued to metastasize, so that you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing either Donald Trump or a cavalcade of dimwits emoting dramatically about eating bugs, losing weight, marrying a millionaire or remodeling a bathroom.
• Perhaps most alarming of all, Cher yet again extended her ''farewell'' tour, which began during the Jimmy Carter administration and is now expected to continue until the sun goes out.

So all things considered, we're happy to be entering a new year, which according to our calculations will be 2005 (although the exit polls are predicting it will be 1997). But before we move on, let's swallow our anti-nausea medication and take one last look back at 2004, which began, as so many years seem to, with ...

JANUARY... a month that opens with all the magic, excitement and glamour conjured up by the words ''Iowa caucuses.'' All the political experts -- having gauged the mood of the state by dining with each other at essentially three Des Moines restaurants -- agree that the Democratic nomination has already been locked up by feisty yet irritable genius Vermont governor Howard Dean, thanks to his two unbeatable weapons: (1) the Internet, and (2) college students wearing orange hats.

But it turns out that the Iowa voters, many of whom apparently do not eat at the right restaurants, are out of the loop regarding the Dean strategic brilliance. Instead they vote for John ''I Served In Vietnam'' Kerry, who served in Vietnam and also has many policies, although nobody, including him, seems to know for sure exactly what they are. Dean, reacting to his Iowa loss, gives an emotional concession speech that ends with him making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork. Incredibly, this fails to improve his poll standings.

Meanwhile the Bush administration, increasingly disturbed by the bad news from Iraq, cancels the White House's lone remaining subscription (Baseball Digest).

But the news is much better from Mars, where yet another spunky li'l NASA robot vehicle lands and begins transmitting back photographs of rocks that appear virtually identical to the rock photos beamed back by all the other spunky li'l NASA robots, thus confirming suspicions that the universe has a LOT of rocks in it. In other outer-space news, Michael Jackson, clearly concerned about his trial on charges of child molestation, dances on the roof of an SUV.

In lifestyle news, the hot trend is ''metrosexuals'' -- young males who are not gay, but are seriously into grooming and dressing well. There are only eight documented cases of males like this, all living in two Manhattan blocks, but they are featured in an estimated 17,000 newspaper and magazine articles over the course of about a week, after which this trend, like a minor character vaporized by aliens in a Star Trek episode, disappears and is never heard from again.

In sports, Pete Rose publishes a book in which he at last confesses to an allegation that dogged him throughout his baseball career: He's a jerk.

^RETURN TO TOP

********************************
THIS WEEK'S TEXTS

********************************
1) Daralhayat: English Doormat Prize [Les gagnants du fameux prix de la carpette anglaise sont publiés.]
http://english.daralhayat.com

Defenders of French Language Bestow Dubious Honors on Elite Who Prefer English

AP, 2004/11/24 | Paris

It is likely not a prize he'll cherish but Claude Thelot, who oversaw a debate about school reform, was awarded the "English Doormat" prize on Wednesday for his perceived assault on the French language. The prize is awarded each year to the person from the "French elite" who has shown a particular "determination to promote the domination of Anglo-American in France to the detriment of the French language."

Thelot's crime, according to Philippe de Saint Robert, president of the English Doormat Academy, was his suggestion in a report on school reform released earlier this year that children should start learning a foreign language, notably English, as early as elementary school. "Our reasoning is not hostile to English or any other language," said Saint Robert. "But a lot of educators believe that, before learning a foreign language, children should master their own language first."

But the wrath of the private academy is not reserved for offenders inside France. There is a special prize for those who insist on perpetuating the dominance of English abroad. This year's honor, with 10 of 11 votes, went to Jean-Claude Trichet, a French man who heads the European Central Bank. Trichet has gotten under the skin of the English Doormat Academy for years. "Already, when Mr. Trichet was governor of the Bank of France, he sent his reports in English to other French banks," said Saint Robert. "Then, when he got to Frankfurt, he said 'I am not a Frenchman,' in perfect English." Trichet had no comment, according to bank spokesman Niels Bunemann.

The English Doormat Academy does not inform nominees of their candidacy, and it counts on the media to let the winner know he has been chosen. Pascal Lamy, former French commissioner at the European Commission and winner of last year's foreign Doormat award, was incensed at winning. "He was so unhappy that he wrote me a letter in four languages -- in French, English, German and Spanish -- to show me that he speaks all four!" Saint Robert chuckled.

Thelot narrowly won the domestic Doormat award this year, with six of 11 votes. In second place, with four votes, was Michel Prigent, head of the Presses Universitaires, for having published a volume of the popular study aids, "Que sais-je?" or "What do I know?" in English. Dior chief executive Bernard Arnault also was a nominee for the prize, for the company's range of products with "anglomaniac" names.

The English Doormat award was presented a day ahead of the opening of the Francophone summit in Burkina Faso which promotes French language and culture and the French-speaking world. "We need the French language," Renaud Muselier, secretary of state for foreign affairs, told the French parliament Wednesday. "We possess the second cultural network in the world."

Not surprisingly, Anglophones are pleased at the rapid spread of English as a sort of universal language. "We see this as very positive for everyone involved," said Guy Roberts, spokesman for the British Council in London. "People have very good reasons for wanting to learn English -- professional, socially and culturally."
But Roberts does not hesitate to give French its due. Without the French language, English would not be what it is today, he suggested. "Old English up to 1066 was almost entirely Germanic," he said. According to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, nearly 30% of English words originated from French.

^RETURN TO TOP^