"French mothers can download an app which claims to tell them if their son is gay. For just one euro 99 centimes they receive a questionnaire that aims to give them pointers about their son’s sexuality." Telltale signs, according to some of the app's questions, include a love of musicals and spending a long time in the bathroom. "No app to establish whether one's daughter is a lesbian is on the market," notes RFI, but you have to imagine that will change fairly quickly.

French loud-talker Bernard-Henri Levy has stopped mouthing off about his friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn and how simply terrible the American system of arresting people suspected of violent crimes is, at least in part because he's away, acting as an unofficial envoy to Libya. (Poorly.) He took a boat from Malta! This prevents him from weighing in on the John Galliano case, which is soon to go before a French judge (in their bizarre system of justice!) on charges of being a racist and hating Jews. (That charge carries jail time.) Galliano's defense is to blame prescription meds and alcohol for his language. (You know who else blamed pills and booze? That's right! Hitl—hmmm, Mel Gibson? Maybe also Dominique Strauss-Kahn?) Anyway: where is the BHL essay bemoaning the rush to judgment on Galliano? Mon Dieu, etc.

Now that the party's over for the monsieurs of France's Parliament, as hushed-up pedophilia, routine sexual assault and general misogyny are suddenly no longer federally protected perks of the job, a vital question emerges: Will the exposure of all this Gallic turpitude make the merest difference to American society’s perpetually raging, and mostly unrequited, crush on Paris? All signs point to non. READ MORE

You've pretty much perp-walked yourself down a dark alley of the theoretical if you have to include the disclaimer "I, of course, consider rape and attempted rape as crimes," Bernard Henri-Levy. Oh do you? That's great. READ MORE

We talk quite a lot of smack about France here, because we can. But one of the underlying points is that, in our terrible American high school educations, we're taught that there are countries "like" ours (France, England, Italy and maybe now Germany), countries that are less-good versions of ours (Mexico, Canada, Australia), countries that are disasters (Russia, India) and countries that are weird and scary (Japan, Honduras, Philippines, "Africa"). And this isn't true at all, and in the actual practice, France is as "alien" in terms of operational ideas as, well... Senegal and Algeria. (Heh.) The usual history lesson here goes something like "de Tocqueville blah blah," and since then we're basically the same country—but that couldn't be more wrong. And we are bizarre to them, which is why the French are horrified at how we treat the arrested in general (as in, with a lack of dignité), among other things. This is why we have the bizarre and somewhat paranoid ramblings of Bernard-Henri Lévy today, whose last official act as dominant philosopher was to send France to war with Libya. To us it is incredibly absurd that he can write "I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed 'accusatory,' meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime." The French horror at our criminal justice system is not unreasonable, all told—Americans should as well be horrified at the way we've created an immense second class of semi-citizens in the prison industrial complex. But in terms of operational principles of accusation and trial? I can't even imagine another way! And neither can BHL, who has no conception that to us, the ability to accuse is considered a foundation of equality.

In what the New York Times described as "tawdry allegations," the head of the International Monetary Fund and the possible next president of France was yanked out of first class on an Air France flight at JFK on charges that he'd raped a maid at the Sofitel in New York City. READ MORE

France (or as I like to call it, Cheesecrime Nation) is the worst country on the planet, and now this worst country is all hopped up in a scandal and growing worser, because they are planning on denying the right of their riot cops to drink alcohol with lunch. READ MORE

France, the tourism capital of the world, is actually a xenophobic hellhole of white supremacists carrying baguettes. It is run by a tiny monster in platform shoes, and while France barely cracks the top 100 of most densely populated countries (ranking near Portugal and Albania), it leads the world in nationalist panic and manifestations of emotional scarcity. READ MORE