Saturday, June 02, 2007

Flux

There is a lot of flux at work these days: people leaving, people coming, people terminated. Yesterday was the last day of a friend, Jack, who is responsible for, among other things, turning me on to Seize Sur Vingt shirts. (Fingers crossed: going to buy one today!) Before we went out for drinks, someone passed around a card to sign. Each time it went to a new person, that person sat and pondered the other messages for a while, thought about his own, then scribbled something witty or sweet. By the time this got around to the seventh or eighth person, it was a bit laborious. Someone summed up the situation:
"Never let a bunch of writers sign a card."
Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft in Russia, surrounded by white butterflies. For 60 years of Magnum Photography, see here.

2 comments:

rt said...

Most grades in the French educational system are given out of ten, but more often out of twenty. Because their system is universal but not quite meritocratic (refer to last week's ny-er talk of the town comment), they lack any semblance of American grade inflation. Thus, one of the most outstanding and realistic grades you can get is 16/20, or seize sur vingt. Can you imagine boasting about a lousy 80% in high school? (Obviously not even curved or weighted.) The envy we reserve for any GPA>4.0 is, in France, given to those who score what we refer to as decidedly average.

Barrett said...

i was very much wondering what that meant. the web site is 16sur20.com, which makes much more sense now.