Did you know that May 1st is a state holiday in France? Though it is “May Day” in the US, a seldom reflected upon holiday where school children dance around maypoles, it originated as a springtime festival during ancient polytheistic times to celebrate the season of growth and fertility.

However, in European countries the beginning of May has morphed into an important holiday to honor socialism and Marxist ideals. The day is called International Worker’s Day (Labor Day) and actually stems from the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886. In the US and Canada, Labor day has been kept on September 1st, as to separate it from the May 1st Labor Day which is a major holiday in socialist countries.

Actually, it does seem slightly ironic to celebrate this socioeconomic system during a season of growth and fertility… (read: lack of economic growth and job creation)

First notified of this exciting news by Nate, Bally’s total fitness is not doing so well it turns out. This really brings tears to our eyes, as we used used to be customers of theirs back in the day. Customers who could not end or suspend contracts with the said company and whom payed many extra dollars for good/services that were never received.

Poor customer service/outdated policies/crappy facilities –> Movement of customers to the competition –> Company suffers severe financial consequences for their incompetence/arrogance.
For further reports on Bally’s well known shady business practices just google ‘Bally’s total fitness sucks’.

Tonight my fingers are not cooperating with me on my keyboard as I was dragging them across sharp limestone cliffs this afternoon. Doesn’t help that my fingers and forearms have not been subjected to climbing in… well a very long time!

After gearing up yesterday (no JT, they don’t have “outlets” here…), we hiked for 4hrs today to do 40min of climbing. Then, for some reason, it was only a 25min hike back to the lab. Some pictures of our climb are here.

The first thing I did when I got back after the holidays (after sleeping for 15hrs) was to capture Cassis in the light of the winter sun.

A couple Sundays ago I hiked up Ste Victoire with Matt C. and another American researcher living in Marseille, Bob.

Pictures from our arduous climb are here.

To see Ste Victoire through the eyes of Cezanne, go here.

Here is the old site so everyone can still link to the image gallery. I’ll figure out where to put it soon.

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”

Heh, heh. That is the default wordpress message after installation. Yup, switching the site over to a Wordpress CMS to make posting much easier. My past brute force method of updating my website through manual editing and ftp was great for adding automatically generated image galleries– but addition of any other info/links was a pain in the arse.

Expect this site to be back-updated with my past stuff and image galleries, once I figure out what I’m doing.

In the mean time here is the news for the day:

http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/01/17/1913210.shtml