White wine with food coloring, anyone?

Chris is reporting that the Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived. According to the "experts", aged wine tastes better than young wine, meaning that the beaujolais is nothing to celebrate.

What does it take to be a true wine connoisseur? If there is any veracity in this report, I choose to stay ignorant.

Retirement is for the dogs

The French are en grève at the moment. What's new. This time it's about pension reform, which has been attempted by at least the past two administrations to no avail.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) The French should be extremely grateful to have a state-funded pension program that works. Here in the US, social security doesn't come close to comparing to a true pension. We have to voluntarily save for our own retirement which isn't always easy to do.

2) Those few workers who, under Sarkozy's plan, will have to work 40 years before retirement instead of 37.5, should hear both sets of my grandparents talk about retirement: it ain't all it's cracked up to be. One grandfather went back to work part-time 2 years after retirement and worked until 6 months before he died. He was miserable during those two years. The other grandfather is bored out of his mind. It's hard to make hobbies and volunteer work fill 40+ hours a week.

In in any case, I really hope Sarkozy is determined enough to get his reforms through. The situation doesn't look too hot.

First Post

It's been a couple of years since I've been an active blogger - TOO LONG! I'm excited to be back in the game. Stay tuned for lots of changes to the design and template of the blog. Thanks for stopping by!