Today's Hoot!

(Hat tip: Slashdot) Two weeks ago I didn't get around to the story about Jacques Chirac's knickers getting knotted over the Google plan to put a large number of English books online with the help of some American and UK universities. Well, now the big counterattack has been revealed - Europe's response to Google to be managed by... Microsoft?:

...but I was brought up short by the end of an article by Béatrice Gurrey et Emmanuel de Roux in Le Monde on 3/16/2005:
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In the mind of the chief of state, it's a question of building an alter ego to the american project, before thinking of an eventual collaboration with Google, so as not to negotiate from a position of weakness. Would the president be ready to make a deal with Google's competitor, Microsoft, since he has so many views in common with its president, Bill Gates, whom he has long welcomed to the Elysée? "Why not?", respond M. Chirac's advisors.

I don't want to encourage any facile Microsoft-bashing here. I often use Microsoft software, generally without complaints, and I have a lot of respect for the research carried out at Microsoft Labs. Still, the idea of Bill Gates being enlisted by Jacques Chirac to defend the world's citizens from the crushing domination of American culture... Well, words fail me, that's all.

With respect to this same idea, La République des Lettres commented, under the headline La Grande Bibliothèque Virtuelle de Jacques Chirac:
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It seems nevertheless like a bad beginning to hear the suggestion of the advisors of the President of the Republic -- in any case a great friend of Bill Gates, the great american supplier (?) of french administrations, welcomed several times with all the honors of the Elysée Palace -- not excluding an association with Microsoft to accomplish this digitization program against american domination. LOL (rolling on the floor laughing), as they say on the internet.

Um, guys, that would be the acronym ROFL, or else the translation should be whatever the French idiom for "laugh out loud" is -- "rire tout haut"?

More fun by following the link.