Paris and I ~ 'Answers In An Eggshell'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Answers In An Eggshell ~

Answers In An Eggshell, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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And if you happened, upon a sleepy Sunday afternoon family stroll, upon a sinister sculpture of a snake-armed soldier, one arm protruding from the barrel of his canon(?), the other clutching his private parts and an egg on his tongue.

"What's he doing Daddy?" would be one of the less obvious questions a parent might be required to hazrad an answer to under the unforgiving glare of a hot August sun.

I'd like to see it attempted. An explanation comprehensible to an eight-year-old, I mean. Never mind an adult, most of whom could also do with one I imagine. Loving it, for the most part. (For the private part, send me a message.)

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.

Paris and I ~ 'Leaving Impresions'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Leaving Impressions ~

Leaving Impresions, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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Lose yourself in a leafy landscape today! I won't tell you where this is in Paris because it just doesn't matter. It could be any one of ten or twenty lovely luscious parks where you can wander and wonder to your heart's delight (yep, I'm in Paris city tourist board mode today - must be missing the old place).

This is also a great example of a picture reinvented from a load of old murky mush, thanks to the wonders of some of those funky iPhone (other brands of smart phone are available) apps which I use all the time on this Paris blog, and you should too!

Getting meaningful blur is a bit of a challenge on these things, with their 'make it sharp at all cost' inbuilt settings - kinda takes the artistic fun out of it, but I won't be defeated, and yes, of course I meant it to look like that ;~S

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.

Paris and I ~ 'Open For Buziness'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Open For Buziness ~

Open For Buziness, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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Now if you didn't read French you might be forgiven for thinking, what the Beeep? It's a strange structure indeed.

It's a 'charming hotel for bees' although I didn't see too many buzzing around, so either it's very new (which it seems to be) or its charms are failing to attract the targetted clientele for the time beeing.

Suffering eschewdom or not, it's a wonderous thing to behold, this bee hotel construction.

A vast number of little holes have been drilled into the equally diverse range of pieces of wood placed in formations which I can only guess are of the aesthetically pleasing sort favoured by our furry little honey-hoarding friends.

It can be found in the Jardin des Plantes if you care to take a closer look, and you should, as this garden has more than a couple of curiosities up its greensleeves for those who wander with their lenses open, biological or mechanical, the surprises remain the same.

Bees are fascinating creatures, by the way. Apparently they have more lenses in their five eyes (thousands in the two compound ones) than any photographer could ever dream of having, and can perceive movements only 1/300th of a second apart as opposed to our measly 1/50th of a second. They can't see red but are rather responsive to ultra-violet. The honey we are so partial to is actually multi-regurgitated, dehydrated nectar (yummy!) and they inadvertently pollinate plants allowing life on the planet to go on lifing. They're grumpy when it's cloudy or windy and they can't go foraging and a sting can kill someone with a propensity to be killed by a bee sting. There's more, but that'll do for now. How do I know all this? Well I just did a funny little dance and the facts came flooding in.

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.

Paris and I ~ 'Excuse Me For Sitting'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Excuse Me For Sitting ~

Excuse Me For Sitting, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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I don't know when you are, but right here and now as I type the weekend's a-startin' (30 minutes in already and counting) and I thought I'd try to inspire you to do something worthwhile this time round.

Here are the options as admirably illustrated in the pic, taken last weekend in the Jardin des Plantes in pretty central Paris:

Option One: get totally physical and look down on the losers wasting their lives lying on benches like there's no tomorrow and no fat to burn.

Option Two: get totally relaxed and laugh at the loonies killing themselves and their knee joints running in circles like hamsters like there's no tomorrow and no facts to learn.

Come to think of it, you could do both, one after the other, leaving you with the less onerous task of deciding simply on the order of said activities.

A feasible further option would be, I guess, to do none of the above. As a cartoon I gave to my mother one time as a kid said, and which I may have quoted before: "Sometimes I just sit and think; and sometimes I just sit".

Say, would 'all of the above' now be a logical impossibility? I'd like to sit and think not.

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.

Paris and I ~ 'Taken To The Cleaners'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Taken To The Cleaners ~

Taken To The Cleaners, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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Just been watching a wonderfully silly ad in a country near you. Young couple panic coz mother/mother-in-law is in the street about to pay a surprise visit. The problem? The bathroom sink's a disgrace! Panic all round.

Luckily... there's some stoopid cleaning product there to save the day, and mum comes in and immediately checks the bathroom for grime, obviously, because that's all that matters in her life, and is unsurprisingly suitably impressed. Calm returns and a good life is had by all.

The usual, pathetic, intelligence insulting stuff of course, except that... well, it's true, isn't it?

Try as we might, and much as we'd like to think these shallow stereotypes don't hold water, unfortunately, they do though.

In my household, general panic ensues around a two to three days before a motherly or auntily visit is scheduled to materialise. D-3 and battle plans are drawn. D-2 and stern reminders and reiterations of scrubbing duties are hammered home for the hard of cleaning in the 'team'.

D-1 and woe is he (no, not the missing asexual English pronoun, I mean 'HE') who hasn't at least made signs of thinking of moving in the general direction of a well-known faster-acting, now with added... detergent of some description or other.

And if the actual day of the visit arrives without said tasks having been completed to SWMBO's general satisfaction, well, either the visit is cancelled, with all the fun for all the family that engenders, or the visit goes through, again with plenty of family 'entertainment' (grovelling apologies, sly recriminations and looks-that-kill) worthy of any given crappy (but apparently clean) soap opera storyline.

But do you buy it? That's what I always ask myself: to what extent to these damn things work. The ads I mean - we all know the products are much of a muchness, which is why all they are selling these days are dreams...

You have to assume they do work, or companies wouldn't spend millions visually polluting our environment in an effort to drive their message into our poor over-loaded brains and our hands into our under-funded pockets.

My personal approach is to not buy anything I'm conscious of having recently seen advertised on principle, but then again these things are so sneaky and subliminal and snidey it's practically impossible these days to say exactly why we choose one brand over another, even if we think we know the reason. In the end I advise you simply to "Think". Don't ask questions, "Just do it!"

What? "Think"'s owned by IBM? And "Just do it"'s Nike's? Well how about the grammatically appalling but appealing "Think different"? Apple? Uh-huh.

Errr... "Don't think and just don't do it"? Not bad.

"Just don't buy it!? Hey, I think - oops, beg pardon - I mean I 'believe' we're getting somewhere at last!

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

_________________________________________________________________________________
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.

Your Time Starts... Now!

Your Time Starts... Now!, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

Here's a funny thing I stumble across (well, drifted by, almost missing it) the other day. "What on earth..?" I asked myself. "Not another strange Paris curiosity that's just been sitting under my nose for years waiting to be crowbarred into my consciousness? Yep.

Now this will certainly be a future Paris curiosity in one of my Paris Curios publications so I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but it seems it's yet another fascinating aspect of time linked to the French capital. I'm not kidding when I say that time has a multi-intertwingled relationship with this city, and here's yet another example of that.

What's it about? Well in the old days not only did different countries have different time zones, but different towns within countries had their own hour system too. So how did people actually know what time it was?

Mmm... how about the central Paris hour guru? And this... would be it. Time over - same reader read again tomorrow!

(A Paris iPhone street photograph by Sab Will for the 'Paris and I' photo blog @ paris-and-i.parissetmefree.com )

Wolf Mother O'Mine

Wolf Mother O'Mine, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

Romulus and Remus come from an old story about the founding of the city of Rome.

The twins were thrown into the Tiber river when their grandfather was overthrown by his brother (nice folks gettin' along jus' fine, y'see) but they were rescued by a female wolf who looked after them.

The original, or best known of these sculptures is to be found in Rome itself, but on the occasion of the 'twinning' of Paris and Rome back in 1962 a copy was offered and now sits somewhat embushed in a small enclosure called Square Paul-Painlevé, right next to the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages.

It's one of those nice surprises you stumble across during an unplanned sandwich stop as you stroll around the city. I mean, there are few of us who would actually go looking for this modest little piece, but when you do suddenly spy it it's a pleasant, rather conspiratorial sensation, as though you've just uncovered a secret and the park is saying to you in hushed tones 'OK, you've found it, but keep it under your beret, right?'

The square's got quite a few other interesting items, remarkable really considering its diminutive size, but this is the most interesting for me. Go and see what you think.

(A Paris iPhone street photograph by Sab Will for the 'Paris and I' photo blog @ paris-and-i.parissetmefree.com )