Okay, bear with me.
By the time you read this, an album of photos from our trip to Paris is well on its way to being posted on Facebook.
Until then, check out a few videos I made--on my digital camera.
Yup, they're low quality, they're shaky, they're sub-amateur. But I want you to watch them, so there must be something to them, right? RIGHT?
Well, at least they have audio.
First up, an exhibit at Musee des Arts et Metiers (Arts and Crafts), the kick-ass museum of imaginative technological advancement located about 1 Chicago block from our rented flat. This is an animatronic clock (19th cent., I think) behind a pane of glass. I pressed a glowing green button, and some imaginative technology projected a video onto the face of the clock, showing me (and now, you) how it would've moved.
I find the YouTube player works best if you let the video load completely before playing it:
Hopefully, you have a fast computer, and that video was "quirky". If not, it was "choppy" and "unwatchable". Sorry.
Next up is a video from that same great museum of an object I've been wanting to see for years now, ever since reading a book by Umberto Eco called "Foucault's Pendulum".
It's Foucault's Pendulum.
Yes, true, there are a handful of these scattered around the globe, I've already seen the one hanging next to the staircase--in some or other American museum. Christa, where was that again?
Anyhow, this is THE pendulum, the one Leon Foucault himself set up in 1851 to prove to the plebian naysayers of Paris that the Earth does indeed spin around an axis. It was the first (!) empirical evidence of what everyone but Scientologists now know to be the truth about planetary rotation. For those who don't know, here's how it works:
The (huge) pendulum is attached to a very long cable, which cable is drilled into a fixed point on the ceiling. The pendulum is set swinging, while a huge glass compass just underneath it demonstrates to the observer that pendulum's angle of swing is changing very slowly, due to the rotation of the earth--that is to say, you are watching the Earth revolve around the swinging pendulum, which I think is fucking brilliant. (Click here for a more apt description of how this works).
In this video, Christa and I are waiting for the pendulum to hit a tiny metal target, which impact demonsrates the barely perceptible change in the pendulum's arc. That's Christa talking to me near the end of the video:
Wow. So cool.
Okay, and finally, something that will totally seem pointless unless the video runs smoothly, in which case, IT'LL ROCK YOU.
Or not. We took this great bike tour of much of Paris on Monday morning. It was run by Fat Tire bike tours, which is an American company which conducts english-language bike tours. We had some apprehension about an expensive guided tour, but it turned out to be so awesome that we took them up on their half-price offer for a NIGHT TOUR of Ile-de-la-Cite, in the heart of Paris. This we did on the last night we were in town, and there were many amazing things about it, but the best part was when we jumped off of the bikes and got on a Seine river boat. We got to chill on a boat for an hour, our tour guide was passing out vin rouge like it was going out of style (which will never, ever happen in Paris), and our wine-loosened tongues made for interesting chatter with some other english-speaking visitors.
Christa was watching the banks of Seine--I was too busy talking. I did however, manage to get this video of the Eiffel Tower, an obvious landmark which we deliberately avoided for most of our trip. In 1999, the gov't of Paris decked out Le Tour for a top-secret unveiling on the eve of Y2K. Everyone was so dazzled by this display that Paris decided to keep it, and now, after sundown, the Tower "sparkles" every hour, on the hour, for 5 minutes.
Again, I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is to let the video finish "buffering" before playing, or this won't seem so impressive. The chatter is a combo of the automated "tour guide voice" on the boat, the other tourists, and me talking to myself, apparently:
The rest of the details from this trip will be hinted at in the (soon to be posted) photo captions, and related verbally in great detail when next I see the 6 of you who read this blog.
A bientot!
