Finding Fun No 6 (and a bit about Michelin)
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 June 2012 18:59:54
...I missed No 5 and I'm a bit late with No 6!
It certainly hasn't been quite the weather for swimming costumes, has it?! The theme over at Mess, Muddle and Fun this week is Rainy Days and Sunny Days. Well, yesterday was definitely rainy - I came out of my lesson to be almost lifted off my feet by a fierce wind, which carried a rain and hail storm on its back. Running back from Reception to my car I got soaked! Then driving home I met the same storm again. I don't think it was much fun driving home in that, I can tell you!
But today I had a space of two-and-a-half hours between lessons, so I left Ladoux site and drove 5 minutes down the road to Le Sentier des Orchidées (The walk of the Orchids) I'd seen the noticeboard for this walk several times, so I decided to follow it. It was perfect - just an hour long, with a bit of Up at the beginning, to make you feel like you're making an effort, and then a flat walk through a mixture of woodland and open patches of meadow. It used to all be vineyards, before the Phylloxera outbreak which decimated so many vineyards in the late 19th century; then with the First World War taking so many young men who could have worked in the vineyards, they were abandoned and gradually returned to the wild. Now there are some vineyards on the southern slopes, but on the northern slopes, the orchids and other wild flowers are flourishing.
Of course, I didn't have my camera with me... but I saw wild honeysuckle (the scent was beautiful!)
(source)
and the humming bird hawkmoth too
I leant over a fence and stole a cherry from a cherry orchard (delicious!) and I did, indeed, see orchids
(source) (in fact that link takes you to more information about the walk itself) There were other beautiful flowers, but I have no idea what they were! I heard jays calling, as well as other birds (one of which sounded suspiciously like a Trimphone!) (that's something for my older readers!)
When I got back to the car, I was able to open the door, eat my sandwiches and revel in the warmth of the sun shining in a blue sky with clouds racing across. Still windy, but much more pleasurable. It was quite hard to go back to work!
It was really very enjoyable, and I look forward to doing the walk again.
***********
On other news, Bib is growing - she has put on 180 g in a week! She's a greedy little thing, and while she loves solid food, we are still feeding her from a bottle just before bedtime! She loves company, and follows us around the room - unfortunately, because she is so small, there is a risk of standing on her. The others have come nose-to-nose with her: some hissing, but nothing too aggressive!
Ian asked about the names Michelin and Bibendum. The company, Michelin, was started by the Michelin brothers ( Eduoard and André) in the late 19th century, and, I believe, they invented the pneumatic bicycle tyre.
Here's an early poster of the Michelin Man on his bicycle. Note, he is very fat and he is smoking! He now has a much trimmer figure and of course, does not smoke! So, the company is named after the two brothers who founded it: Michelin.
Bibendum is the name that the French give to what we know as "the Michelin Man"Here he is in one of his earliest incarnations:
(Source) He isn't a very attractive figure, and this passage explains the imagery of the figure:
The Michelin Man was anything but cuddly in his earliest incarnations. He had a frightful, mummy-like aspect then, and sometimes appeared as a gladiator or a kickboxer. In the Italian market he was a grandiloquent memoirist, a nimble ballroom dancer, and an incorrigible ladies’ man. Stranger still, back then he was known as the “road drunkard.” To this day his official name is Bibendum, the Latin gerundive meaning “drinking to be done.” The name comes from the first series of posters featuring him, which bore the Latin legend Nunc est bibendum–”Now is the time to drink”–and depicted the tire man hoisting a champagne goblet filled with nails and broken glass, sometimes garnished with a horseshoe. The seemingly tortured conceit, as the ad copy spelled out, was that “Michelin tires drink up obstacles”–i.e., they wouldn’t puncture easily. (-from Michelin Man: The Inside Story by Roger Parloff)
The modern Bibendum is much jollier and friendlier
as well as being slimline and a non smoker!
I hope that's interesting for you. I've found out quite a lot of interesting facts while I've been working at the company. Ladoux is the R&D centre, and there is a test track there, where they (d'oh!) test the tyres. One of my students took me out on the track - he was a test driver - and we started off with me correcting his English as he gave his typical "speil". It ended up with me, white faced and silent, clutching the door handle as he span the car off the skid pan at 90 kph!
(source)