Previously I blogged on disliking the Japanese and Lebanese. Well now it seems to be the turn of the French. It has been going along at least since the second gulf was when the French were sensible enough to stay out of it.
- On the TV news reports of the European response to the financial crisis only pick out one country, France. The French government is reported as being the only European government to take up a protectionist line, importing a small number of jobs from Slovakia to France.
- Reports of laws being written to protect the frenchness of movies. (this is a bit odd. Australians would do the same thing to preserve Australian culture against American culture if they thought it stood a chance of working.)
- People in the pub tell me that the French, with their aerial nuclear tests in mainland France (a bit of a play on the fact that they were in the Pacific, a fact that really annoys Australians) are responsible for the rise in background radiation in those years (this is also true of other countries doing nuclear testing. And the French never did such tests on mainland Australia, unlike the Brits). I was reminded of a story I heard on the radio, where a man in Brisbane was calibrating radiation detectors. This was his job. He had a problem one day when it rained. There was so much radiation coming down in the rain (because of a test some time earlier in Western Australia) that he could not continue with his calibrations. He had his detectors confiscated and was not allowed to tell anyone until the time of the official secrets act expired.
- In a completely separate incident (as far as I can tell from the previous one), I was advised the French cars are no good as the French are a bunch of splitters who will always deliberately do things in a different way just to be different. (Apparently this is bad.)