Mary's Notes, May 3, 2007

I have a personal bias against foreign election stories. In my experience, they’re a recipe for doing lame stories about otherwise interesting places. We’re hoping tonight’s show on the French election will be an exception. David found a fantastique guest in the French television journalist Christine Ockrent and we’ve booked two bloggers we know are excellent – Jerome Guillet and Patrick Belton.

I started our meeting asking how we could make the show interesting to people who aren’t following the election and the conversation quickly devolved into a chorus of bad French accents. Ask David sometime to do his imitation of Bernard Henri Levy trying to describe the American passion for Nascar to an American radio interviewer. Or just listen to the real thing. The Nascar bit comes about 14 minutes in. Katherine (who speaks fluent French beautifully) discovered today much to her amusement that the French word for podcast is baladodiffusion which translates roughly as “walkable broadcast.” What’s wrong with “le podcast” I wonder? Those crazy French.

Chelsea says these are addictive. She should know — Chelsea is the OS pusher of gum and other hard drugs.