
The Peculiar Poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found - Thevet
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-peculiar-poetry-of-pariss-lost-and-found
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contingencies
I don't speak much French and have only spent a few weeks in the city all
told, but the romanticism of Paris sometimes appears inexplicable... no thanks
to writers like this! I wonder what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s? This
week I finally sat down and watched _Alphaville_ [0], a 1965 French science
fiction film about a dystopian future in which 1960s computing technology (and
period Parisian architecture) spawns an all-knowing, all-controlling
artificial intelligence with the cunningly original scheme to supersede
humans. It is full of brilliant tidbits, from _memoire centrale_ to "I would
like to telecommunicate" [...] "Local or galactic?" and perhaps proto-
instagrammery if you squint right. The film is well worth a look if you're in
an appropriate mood. Produced in 1965, the 1970s saw the introduction of the
_Concorde_ [1] and the construction of _seedy G 's_[2], which now seems such a
scathingly retro monument to French brutalist modernism, and yet another layer
of Paris... what an interesting city!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_\(film\))
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport)

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bambax
> _seedy G_

Interesting spelling! ;-) It's just CDG, the initials of Charles De Gaulle.

~~~
emmelaich
I'm sure they're aware of that; I assume this is (British?) slang for CDG.

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jwfxpr
I was impressed by a 25% return rate, and then I saw Tokyo's 60%.

Why are we not funding this??

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GuiA
Tokyo is insane on that front.

I was in the subway with a friend, shortly after lunch. As we exit the
station, she realizes she doesn’t have her phone anymore, when she definitely
had it 20 minutes earlier.

We go find an attendant, and she tells him the story. Some Japanese back and
forth ensues, which seemed to be more than just “i lost my phone in that wagon
at that time, here’s what it looks like and here’s my contact info”. I might
be able to partially understand it now, but this was during my first week ever
in Japan so I did not understand a lick of it at the time. As we exit the
subway, she tells me that she’s not so sure she’ll get it back, and she was
pretty bummed out because she didn’t have enough money to buy a new phone.

She got her phone back before dinner.

The craziest part? The reason why she got agitated during her exchange with
the agent is because, she told me, he was being lazy. If he can recover an
iPhone lost on the Tokyo subway in 4 hours, let him be lazy!

