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Good morning little birds! Oh dear, oh me, oh my! You’re all covered in residue from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And on Earth Day too! We’ve got to get you cleaned up, but we’re all out of Dawn™ or whatever detergent is the one that has those commercials of workers cleaning ducks. Covered in black gold on Earth Day! Oh dear, oh me, oh my! Let’s get clean with Joseph:

There! All clean! You’re no longer an endangered species! We’ve saved you! But because you’re all such individuals, maybe you are endangered. We know for sure that LaZiguezon is endangered. That Canadian weather, man! We don’t think we could handle it and we live in Southwest Ontario*! Anyways, it’s Life, Death and Violence™, America’s number one source for environmental journalism** and jokes about The French™. Oh, the French™! And on this day, the anniversary of the greatest environmental tragedy ever perpetuated on the world by those smarmy English®, we bring you people and events that matter to their sworn enemies for all time, no matter what any treaty says! That’s right, we’re talking about The French™ so surrender your seriousness and grab a baguette, we’ve gotta get going or we’ll miss the last bus to Giverny! France shuts down on Good Friday (they’re good Catholics, well, the France we romanticize is), so we’re going to talk about what happened yesterday! OMGSHUTUPLETSGO

LA VIE!

(En ce qui entre parenthèses est absolument vide de sens)

• Michel Rolle: 1652: That hair! So French™! A mathematician, which explains the adult onset acne*** (or is that supposed to be scruff?), he developed Rolle’s Theorem which states that “a differentiable function which attains equal values at two distinct points must have a point somewhere between them where the first derivative (the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function) is zero” or f'(c)=0. He also hated calculus, which isn’t surprising since Wikipedia says he deserves to be credited with the invention of Gaussian elimination which stems from Newton’s notes and Newton invented calculus. J’accuse Rolle! J’accuse! The French™! Always at war with The English®! There is no known portrait of Rolle. Newton slashed them all****.

• 1774: Jean Baptiste-Biot: Watch out everyone! Rocks can fall from the sky at any moment! Not only that, they’ve been sent this way by aliens! Three run homer for the Orion Warriors! And The French™! They believed him! Meteorites are now considered scientific fact as opposed to sports history, which, really is a shame, because the Warriors went all the way that year for the first time in a lightyear*****.
• Jean-Baptiste, and how could he not be French with that smug face, also participated in the world’s very first hot air balloon ride! Is anyone shocked by the fact that the French conquered hot air? Anyways, he rode with some gay guy named Lussac. They talked about physics, if you know what we mean.
• He also studied polarization which gave us LCD televisions and camera filters. Bow to your French master. He lived in Paris, he died in Paris. He knew how fucking magnets worked.

• 1972: Gwendal Peizerat: Listen Gwendy, ice dancing is not a sport. No matter how many medals you win (silver at Nagano, gold at Salt Lake), no matter how much the Olympics tries to legitimize it, ice dancing is not a sport. Couldn’t you have been a figure skater like your cousin****** Jean? He never amounted to anything, but at least he had some athleticism!
• All you have is jazz and a pretty face, Fabio. You’re from Bron for chrissakes. You couldn’t do something more befitting of the Brawny paper towel guy? Oh, you don’t know who that is, Fabio? Of course you don’t. Get back to your theatrics, pretty boy. I’m sure the high school quarterback is really as interested in you as you want him to be. We’re sure he is.
• Anyways, we’re sure that after your “career” is over you can sell fake butter and be on romance novel covers. Oh wait, that job’s already taken by actor slash model Fabio! Dance away Gellert Grindelwald. Dance into the sunset and do your French thing. We don’t care.

LA MORT!

(La mort est tout sauf féminin, à moins, bien sûr, il est le résultat d’une cession)

• 1142: Pierre Abélard: Peter was a sexxxy theologian who is famous for sexxxing sexxxy French nun*******Héloïse. With all those accents and umlauts, how couldn’t he find her attractive? They met at the Notre Dame (the Parisian one) and it was love at first sight. She with her deep knowledge of classical letters in Greek, Latin and, oh!, HEBREW and him with his ability to spout theology and philosophy to thousands at once! Oh! Le petit mort! How couldn’t they be together? But, oh, it wasn’t to last. After one particular petit mort, Héloïse’s womb grew and grew until out popped a baby boy named Astrolabe (who would later become the inspiration for the Japenese AstroBoy********)
• To appease her uncle, they married secretly, so as not to harm Peter’s Important Man Career™. The uncle, j’accuse!, announced the marriage publicly and after Pierre sent Héloïse to a convent, Fulbert, the uncle, castrated him! He castrated him! Why? Because he thought Pierre wanted to be rid of  Héloïse who was then forced to become a nun and write letters saying how sad she was because all she ever wanted to do was be a can can dancer at the Moulin Rouge which hadn’t even been built yet which is probably why Fulbert was always so confused by his niece. She spouted crazy talk. Witch? Maybe that’s why she was forced to be a nun. She was a witch*********.

 

 

 

• 1699: Jean Racine: He wrote plays at the same time as Moliere and was considered one of the Big Three. Unlike Moliere, he wrote tragedies. He drank too much and died of liver cancer. Obviously, the following video is all that needs to be said of Jean:

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hXzKnVgMdU

LE VIOLENCE!

(Dans lequel je suis pas par des traducteurs)

• 1809: Battle of Eckmühl: Oh, it’s on. It’s on like Donkey Kong! BANG! POW! SHOOT EM UP! Napoleon took control of the horribly named “Campaign of 1809” after having to, oh my god le grande mort, retreat eleven days earlier after a surprise attack when the war began. However, Napoleon didn’t know that the French garrison of Ratibone had fallen to the Austrians and inadvertently gave the remaining Austrian calvalry (since he killed about a third of Austria’s army) a route to escape. Damn Austrians. Why can’t you just let The French™ have what’s theirs!? Oh, because it’s not? Oh, well, that seems fair. You go on with your bad selves. Bee tee dubs, Napoleon the Short (ohmahgawdguyzthatssowittyandoriginal) showed up and rotated the entire French army with his mere presence. Now, that’s a leader!

D’AURES TRUCS SYMPA QUI S’EST PASSÉ AUJOUD’HUI!

(Certains cela n’a rien à voir avec le français)

• 753:  OMG NEW AND IMPROVED! Twins found Rome™! Rome™ conquers France sometime later.
• 33:  OMG BETRAYAL! Judas betrays his buddy for some silver. The French™ go cuckoo for the buddy sometime later.
• 1519: OMG SHINY! French neighbor’s Spanish son Hernan lands in Veracruz and begins slaughtering everyone due to his gold-lust.  The Aztec™ never saw it coming until sometime later.
• 1898: OMG WAR! The United States (patent pending), with land purchased sometime before by The French™, declare that they’re at war with Spain! The Spanish find out sometime later
• 1910: OMG A COMET! It flies over France and the rest of the world, too, we guess, but mainly France.
• 1910: OMG SAD! Comedian Mark Twain, born under a comet, on land originally owned by The French™ sometime before the Louisiana Purchase, dies under the same comet that flies over France and, we guess, Connecticut, but mainly France.
• 1952: OMG SECRETARIES! It’s Secretaries Day! Canadian fellow David Rakoff has a story about how when he was an assistant at a publishing company, he and all the other assistants would take the day off so as not to be confused as secretaries. These shenanigans would obviously go over well with the class obsessed French.
• 1994: OMG ASTRONOMY! How many Poles does it take to find an extrasolar planet? Just one! Aleksander Wolszczan! Poland is near France (sort of, not really) and we know that the aliens on extrasolar planets are just goo goo for French cinema. We just know it!

You know what? Fuck The French™. We always liked American boys better. See you on Tuesday, birds, for more historical accuracy. We’re outta here (until Photo Phriday. Stop by that!)!

 

*Southwest Ontario is what we call Detroit. Mainly because of Tim Horton’s and hockey.

**Life, Death and Violence is not and has never been America’s number one source for environmental journalism.

***People who study mathematics are no more likely to get adult onset acne than people who study, say, business.

****Mr. Newton is not responsible for the absence of any portrait of Mr. Rolle.

*****We are aware a lightyear is a measure of distance, not a measure of time.

******We have no proof that Mr. Peizerat has a figure skating cousin named Jean.

*******Héloïse did not become a nun until after the culmination of her affair with Pierre. This obviously diminishes how sexxxy they were together.

********Mr. Astrolabe is not the inspiration for AstroBoy.

*********Ms. Héloïse was not a witch. She was a very nice person by all accounts who found herself in a bad situation.