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Tag Archives: ben ali

Conjugaison: The Verb Comprendre (To Understand) Posted by on May 4, 2011

“Je vous ai compris” (“I understood you”) is a famous political statement made in l’histoire de France. Its inherent semantic ambiguïté managed to buy some time for its inventor, le Général de Gaulle, in dealing with la guerre d’Algérie (the Algerian War), but somehow didn’t do much good, half a century later, to ex-presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak—A…

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Poisson d’avril (April Fools) Posted by on Apr 1, 2011

Poisson d’avril (April Fools) 🙂 * * *     Due to serious difficultés techniques (technical difficulties) caused by a wave of sophisticated cyber attacks targeting The French Blog, the “Jacques Brel” post scheduled for today is postponed to an ulterior date. * * * A message left by “les hackers professionnels” who targeted The French…

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Jacques Brel vs. Colonel Gaddafi: Zangra Meets Zenga Zenga Posted by on Mar 31, 2011

IF someone told you that Colonel Gaddafi‘s life-long vocation as a deeply confused dictateur (dictator) traced back its origin to the military career of a World War II fascist foot soldier, whose mission was to resume the century-old Italian occupation of la Lybie, you probably would wonder how that could be the case. But what if, in…

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DÉGAGE! Le verbe dégager Posted by on Feb 25, 2011

Le monde arabe se soulève toujours ! (The Arab World still rises up!) “IR’HAL” (إرحــــــــــــــل) is actually the Arabic word for “dégage“, which means “get out” in French, and if you’ve payed attention, it was very often written as such, en français, in the massive demonstrations that still shake this strategic region of the world. After…

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