Arts et Metiers

One of my goals during my remaining 3 months in Paris...fill in the gaps of some of the museums that I haven't yet seen! I don't know how many musées this town has, but if I had to guess, it has more museums than McDonald's. Anyways, during Nir's visit we hit the Musée des Arts et Metiers, which I had never been to. It's pretty cool. It reminded me some of the Smithsonian in DC. In one wing, they have a bunch of original scientific inventions--like the first calculating machine (invented by Blaise Pascal at the age of 16--doesn't that just make my sorry 33-year-old ass feel like shit?) and the original apparatus Lavoisier used for proving the existence of oxygen (on your right). They also have some neat exhibits on the history of common every day items--tracing the evolution of the computer, the television set, and the DVD for instance, during which I pondered the fact that my kid will never know what a VCR will look like. Other highlights included some early attempt at airplanes, a Foucault's pendulum, and Western Europe's first particle accelerator (bottom).
French for the Day: at a Pecqueur family event last week, one of her relatives told me a story where she kept on referring to the police hauling off somebody who was arreseted in "le panier salade" (literally: "the salad basket"). I'm pretty sure this is the French version for "the paddy wagon" (bonus points for the referenced Wikipedia article because it contains a photo of a paddywagon from Duluth, MN), as in, "My buddies and I got busted by the police smoking up at the reservoir Friday night and hauled us away in the paddy wagon". I'll have to ask somebody to make sure I got the translation correctly...