valuable life lessons and the euro sign...

01/23/10

I've learned a thing or two over the past few days. Nothing so valuable as to drag me up and out of this abject poverty of wealth and wit that I've fallen into; that would be hoping for a little too much.

But I have learned that this damned thing isn't about to up and write itself. Or if it is able to, I haven't learned which buttons to press to fire that up. I could be spending a little more time looking for the auto-write features that this website is sure to have but I've found other entertainments that have been alot more fun. Such as looking for a way to enter the sign for the euro. You know what that is, the epsilon-y looking character for the standardized European currency. Bunch of starry-eyed one-worlders. Is this why America won World War II? The hell it is. We won World War II to make Europe and the rest of the world safe for American dollars and markets. Yeah, OK, there was this element of defeating a couple of the most evil and oppressive governments in the history of the planet. Though last time I checked, we were in cahoots up to our eyeballs in that venture with another from the all-time top 3 or 4 list of evil and oppressive governments. Go figure.

It hasn't been a total waste though. € !! See how easy that is. I actually found this whole list of Alt comands that now allows me to make not only the euro sign but a whole bunch of others as well. ¢ ♪ ♫ ¶ ░ « I don't know when, if ever, I might need to use most of these characters but I'm definitely gonna keep track of the ¼-note symbols for when I get around to writing my symphony. It turns out that you can also produce letters of the alphabet using Alt commands. I'm at a total loss as to why anyone would choose not to use the letters on the keyboard. I suppose that you might need the Alt commands if you've poured a beer into most of the left-hand side of your keyboard and shorted out the letters but how often is that gonna happen?

Some of you might be scratching your heads and wondering to yourselves why this dumb cluck needs the € symbol anyway. Good question. Because I've decided to expand the pool for adding items to the western hemisphere's (well, maybe Ramsey County's) greatest collection of postcards of Strasbourg's Pont du Corbeau. I've been relying almost exclusively on eBay vendors in the U.S. but the thought struck me that since the bridge in question lives in a town that practically straddles the French/German border, maybe I could shop some of the eBayers a little closer to source. Talk about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Unfortunately, winning auctions on eBay.fr means that I have to communicate with French sellers. Some of these vendeurs have the nerve to pretend that they don't all speak English over there after the American tourists have gone back to their hotels for the night. This leaves me to stumble along in my horrible 30-year old college French. It's plenty horrible enough without looking even worse by having to type out "euro". My 30-year old college French didn't serve me all that well 30 years ago when I was trying to fool Mme Peters into believing that I had even the tiniest ability to parler, ecrire ou comprendre le francais. She encouraged me in as many ways as she could come up with not to compound my mistakes in French 51 by moving onto French 52. I think that part of the plea agreement included her giving me a C if I promised to never, ever, set foot again in the Modern Languages wing of the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center. She kept her part of the deal and I kept mine. Just another building block in that solid 3.13 GPA I put together at Macalester. She probably wasn't the only prof who saw through my act and took pity on me. Took pity on me and allowed me to keep up the charade of going to school while actually drinking beer, sleeping through swim tean practices and shifts at the food service and hoping that the Draft Board wouldn't find me and come waving the number 15 in my face.

Even before I learned the Alt 0128 (€) command I could almost scrape by in French with a little help from the handful of French dictionaries that had previously been cluttering up the bookshelves. But, oh my god, when I've had to try to compose a little two-line message in German, I can guarantee you that Langenscheidt hasn't even begun to publish enough dictionaries to make that easy. Last time I tried to send off a note in German there were a couple of career diplomats from the State Department who showed up a day or so later asking why in hell was I threatening the Germans with a renewal of the 1917 Declaration of War. I really didn't mean any harm. I was just swept away by the prospects of buying even more cards of the Rabensplatz and the Rabensbrucke and the Munster. You can look those up in your German-English distionaries.

I did make good on my promise to stay out of the French Department but I'd still pass by the building every once in awhile. I remember one of those times when I ran into my high school French teacher, Mr. Therrien, as he was leaving some L'Alliance Francaise production at the other end of the Fine Arts complex. I got the feeling that Mr. Therrien didn't entertain illusions as to my French proficiencies any more than Mme Peters. But it was nice to see him and he seemed generally pleased, if somewhat taken aback, when I told him that I thought about him and his classes often. And fondly. I wonder if he'd be generally pleased to know that the groundwork he laid back in 1968 was partly responsible for my correspondence, if somewhat halting, with all of those various French post card merchants.

I guess I'll never have an answer to that one as it seems that Mr. Therrien has passed on. I tried to find mention of him on the internet last week and among the scattered cites for his graduate thesis on learning French via shortwave I found a memorial site put up by his kids. This saddened me, particularly coming so close on the heels of my dad's passing. He used to tell us stories of his time as a paratrooper during the Battle of the Bulge and then as an impoverished college student in Paris after the war. He wriggled those stories in under the loose heading of French Culture. I have no idea what he'd have thought about the whole concept of the E.U and euros but I doubt that he'd have objected.