Brief squibs from Paris.

I said, "Bonnes nouvelles pour tout le monde!"—meaning both our cities, as we'd been discussing earlier—and she readily agreed.

What in the world happened to New York while we were gone? There are huge banner advertisements hanging over staircases in the subways and billboards affixed flat to the pavement on street corners. Is the city trying to make up for lost Olympic revenue?

So part of my job is, every month or so, to update the city and ZIP code information in our database from a service to which we subscribe. As I was watching the names of new cities (or, more properly, valid postal nodes) scroll by, the new Missouri nodes raised my eyebrows. While Georgia has "Wentworth," Maine has "Waltham," and New Mexico has "Jicarilla," Missouri has "Country Mart" and "Linda's Kut & Kurl."

And should the devil drive up
With his business card out
I'll tear it to confetti
With a grin and shout

This is perhaps the weirdest list in which I've ever been included.

My contribution to the July CD Mix of the Month Club was Disappointed.

(The story so far.)

Happy Pi Approximation Day! One version of it, anyway.

Happy birthday to Laura!

Vendredi 15 juillet 2005

Our last full day in Paris, and the last full day of our trip. Rise with the dawn, walk our tired asses up Avenue Bourdonnaise to the Eiffel Tower. Zip zip to the top! among the first batches of the day, keeping a close eye for pickpockets. Quick circuit around the top, spectacular but palm-sweating views a thousand feet up. Laura, who didn't have the tower high on her list, now glad we came. Elevator down to second level, where we spy a workman in full climbing regalia wandering the platform. Stairs down from there.

Café crème on the first platform, writing postcards at a table in the shade of an umbrella in the already fierce sun. Mail postcards from Eiffel Tower post office to get the good postmarks. More stairs down, but not before spying two guys working outside one of the elevator inclines, above the interior courtyard. Photo doesn't do justice, but watching was more palm-sweating than being at the tower's top. Bill finds internet cafe while Laura shops for chocolate. Then it's the Metro to l'Île de la Cité.

Through the metal detectors of the Palais de Justice enclosure, past the stupid American tourists, we enter the spectacular cathedral of Sainte-Chapelle, where all the beauty and ornateness has been saved for the stained-glass windows, the greatest collection in the world, ringing the upstairs chapel on all sides. Don't know how long we stay. Could be months.

We buy two cheese baguettes and Perrier at a convenient boulangerie and sit in a nearby plaza to eat lunch, stuffing the baguettes with country pate we've brought from Normandy and stored in our hotel room fridge for just this opportunity. After lunch, we stroll past Notre Dame and cross to l'Île Saint-Louis for ice cream. Every shop on Saint-Louis sells Berthillon ice cream, but holding out for the Grail itself I dredge up the home office's address from the memory of our abortive expedition more than a week earlier with Laura's parents and lead us straight down Rue Saint-Louis en l'Île to Berthillon's own serving room. Camera pans respectfully from ice cream, chantilly, and chocolate sauce decadance to gently fluttering curtains and blue sky.

Back to the hotel for naps and showers, then it's Metro to Montmartre. The funicular railroad cranks us up a hill we decide from the top we could have walked. Two billets wasted in a hot, claustrophobic glass box. Ah, well. The basilica of Sacre Coeur, crouching atop a hill covered with stairs, grass, and loungers, wipes all thought away. No cameras inside, but it's a gigantic feat of classicist 19th century architecture. An immense, spacious cathedral that manages to be humanist at the same time, especially by way of the generous and inclusive tile murals inside the dome.

A long wander down the hill and back up again through the residential and touristy bits of Montmartre. How cool that people live here! A fondue restaurant on Rue Trois Frères has been recommended by a friend, but look too dark and close inside for comfortable dining on such a sweltering evening. We keep wandering, shopping for postcards and beer. We stop at an Irish bar where my limited French is (unnecessarily) deployed to get us cold beverages. After refreshment, we continue to our fallback dinner plan on the far east side of the basilica. Down a long flight of outdoor stairs, restaurant doesn't appeal, back up again.

We eat at an Auvergnian restaurant right on the east flank of Sacre Coeur, where my good French accent and bad French vocabulary again get us into trouble. But dinner is stellar, and when we emerge full and tipsy into the dark night (sunset being 2200 or so), Sacre Coeur blazes like a castle of sugarcubes, and Laura snaps terrific pictures.

Last errand of the night—indeed, of the trip—is to troll the sex clubs of Montmartre's main drag for a suitably naughty postcard for bobhowe. Success a few doors shy of the Moulin Rouge. Blonde hair, naked breasts, and a U.S. Navy baseball cap. We didn't think we'd complete this errand, but now it's done, and in my broken French I try to direct our gypsy cabbess to the 7ème Arrondissement and our hotel. Again, success. Big tip. What the hell—we're Americans. Why pretend otherwise?

Lights out.

Bill

• Some Rain Must Fall by Michael Faber
• Stable Strategies and Others by Eileen Gunn
• Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
• The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley

Laura

• A Changed Man by Francine Prose
• How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
• The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser
• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones
• Stable Strategies and Others by Eileen Gunn
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger