web analytics

Paddy O’Furniture

Yeah. Irish jokes. We get a lot of that here.

I used to think I had much French but no Irish ancestry, based on family lore. Then I looked it up on ancestry.com and couldn’t find a lick of French (beyond my grandmother’s family having a French-sounding name) and several forebears who at least set sail from Ireland.

DNA testing wasn’t helpful here. They lump French and German together (and I definitely had a German grandma) and then all of the British (of which I am upward of 60%).

I think how this ethnicity thing works, I’m thus permitted to make Irish but not French jokes.

Psych! Everyone makes French jokes.

We are currently semi-binge-watching a French cop series called Spiral. Yes, it’s in French with subtitles and I don’t usually like subtitles, but we’re enjoying it very much.

Dark? Very, very.

Uncle B and I both took French classes as pups and we bark like seals when we understand a French word. Which isn’t all that often because those people talk fast.

Comments


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 15, 2021, 7:54 pm

Looks like Spiral is available in the US from Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and MHz Worldview (that last specializes in international programming).


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: March 15, 2021, 8:12 pm

I enjoyed Spiral, especially Audrey Fleurot as Joséphine Karlsson.

The other French series I found engaging is The Bureau, originally named Le Bureau des Légendes. French intelligence service meets Russian and Middle Eastern double cross. That very last episode was stinky but all the others were great!


Comment from Stephen Falken
Time: March 15, 2021, 9:57 pm

I once visited England and Wales a long time ago and had no trouble understanding what people were saying. But, every time I watch a TV show with British accents I struggle to understand them. Why?

And another thing, why does Guinness beer taste great over there but terrible here in the states?

Also, “he was 193 and his name was Miles.” I believe that is known as a mile marker. The meaning of the stone probably got lost after they switched to Kilometres.


Comment from durnedyankee
Time: March 15, 2021, 11:27 pm

Sweasy – we’re mutts, the DNA with one side tracing back to the guy that fell overboard on the Mayflower (obviously they went to the effort of saving him).

The other side with a name that couldn’t sound less Irish but turns out to have been a Flemish merc family who crossed with William, then crossed over with Strongbow and his Welsh/Normans to became ‘more Irish than the Irish’ (Had a castle! Got his own poem in the process..weeelaaa, so naturally my grandfather was a gardener and laborer….)

That side has the added benefit of being half Newfie, Canada’s own Aggie province.

Irish aggies, good lord.

Mrs D’s dad’s parents ran a “Chippy” in Fall River, and her mother’s people were a bunch of Frenchies.
They all showed up in America just before the War to End all Wars.

@Stephen, my dad said the same thing about Guinness, I’ve heard it’s due to ‘our’ insistence about processing the beer for US consumption.


Comment from thefritz
Time: March 16, 2021, 12:35 am

J’ai moi aussi pris le français comme chiot, et je sonne comme un phoque quand je le parle!


Comment from catnip
Time: March 16, 2021, 5:47 am

Swease, have you ever used Mummy Brown pigment in your work? This 5 minutes of video is illuminating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rApTzWboLrA


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 16, 2021, 7:51 pm

Not *genuine* mummy brown, no, but I’ve used asphaltum. I posted about it once! Very interesting stuff, once believed to be the elusive ‘Secret of the Old Masters’.


Comment from durnedyankee
Time: March 17, 2021, 12:15 am

Hey, isn’t that part of the repave the driveway spell?

Asphaltum drivius!


Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: March 17, 2021, 12:19 am

Speaking of French crime shows, may I recommend Captain Marleau? The eponymous protagonist is a goofy old lady cop. Wears a dorky blue hunter’s hat, and is tough as nails.

It’s on Amazon Prime at the moment.


Comment from Armybrat
Time: March 18, 2021, 1:03 am

My daddy’s family were French Huguenots. They fled from France to Ireland, around the Wexford area. They stayed there a couple hundred years and then went to Canada and eventually the Chicago area. When I was a kid, French surnames or variants of them, were still very common in that area and a lot of the French named families still spoke a variant of old French. My daddy’s family owned a LOT of the land that eventually became Chicago. My grandpa got a remittance check every month from Chicago till the day he died for his share of the land trust that became the south end of Chicago. There are parts of Toronto that still bear my family’s name.
A hundred or so years after his family leaving Ireland, my daddy married a first generation American. My Maternal grandmother was “off the boat” Irish. Her mother was a Gaelic speaker…never learned English. She gave me red hair and green eyes.

Write a comment

(as if I cared)

(yeah. I'm going to write)

(oooo! you have a website?)


Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.


<< carry me back to ol' virginny