Two Things

One. It was so foggy today that you could hardly see the top of the Montparnasse tower.

I brought my camera out at 9:00 am to take a picture, but I didn't have any battery left. I wasn't about to climb back up all 150+ stairs to charge the thing, so I ended up taking this one out my living room window around 17.00. I still like it, although the fog had cleared up considerably by then.

Two. You know how liberal, natural-foods-loving people are always talking about how much they hate how out of touch Americans have become with their food? And how animal rights people, and those that think about such issues, often argue that we are too disconnected from the fact that the meat we eat was once a living animal in part because it always comes in such neat little packages?

Well, I always agreed with that, and thought that it was great that in France you can still buy, if you want to, the whole pig - including his head. Or, if you like, the whole chicken, with his flimsy little broken neck. Nevertheless, I never managed to get myself to buy such things, and never really planned on it.

Today, I bought quail. Like a true American, I went to the big plastified meat section, instead of to the local butcher where you have to, ew...rip out the feathers and stuff. I always buy a certain brand, which actually requires a fair amount of feather plucking despite the plastic. But it was out, so I bought the next best kind. They had conveniently tucked the quail heads under fairly plucked bodies so that all looked normal. The tucking was obviously simplified by the cracked neck. Imagine my surprise when I pulled those little suckers out of their package and their little, feathered heads were dangling below with their innocent little eyes still hazy gray from the kill.

So I chopped 'em.

That's a big move for a former vegetarian.