Entertaining and action packed. French tactical unit chasing down terrorists. Turns out the terrorist mastermind is one of their own who got pissed about something and plots revenge with a capital R. We also get the usual Netflix domestic drama. If you are going to have kids, don't have just one, have a bunch. That is not always possible, but if you can, that's the way to go. That way when one of them comes to an unhappy end, you will still have several others to share your misery.
Summer of 1936 on the French Riviera. Factory workers have just gained a two-week, annual, paid vacation, so we've got a bunch of proles as well as the usual gang of swells in town. Our girl is also here, just graduated from the police academy and assigned to this out of the way place on her request. It also happens to be where her father is locked up awaiting his upcoming execution for murder, a murder his daughter is sure he did not commit. She's trying to do her job, and trying to find evidence to clear her father without letting her boss know that she is her father's daughter. And then we get swells being murdered, one after another, at the fancy hotel, so the cops have got their hands full.
Very entertaining in an Agatha Christie kind of way.
P. S. In French. Execution is be done using a guillotine. From Wikipedia:
After its adoption, the device remained France's standard method of judicial execution until the abolition of capital punishment in 1981. The last person to be executed by a government via guillotine was Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian murderer, on 10 September 1977 in France.
California Bob sent me the link to an ad for this car. I wonder what he's thinking. It's kind of cool, and a little unusual:
The Comète was developed at the direction of new Ford SAF president, François Lehideux, who desired a new level of prestige for the French subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. Legideux pressed forward with the Comète independent of their American parent company in Dearborn and sought help from the most notable European automotive visionaries. The Comète combined the elegance of Farina design and the expertise of Facel coach work. The result: a car some have dubbed the most beautiful Ford ever produced. The V8 powered Comete was both large and expensive for the European market. The expensive production and French taxation system, that heavily penalized automobiles with engines larger than 2.0 liters, meant few examples were produced.
Ask Google Map for this place and it shows up on the east coast of France. Yes, France does have an east coast on the Mediterranean. The castle is just a few miles north of the Spanish border.
Google has removed the 3D feature from Google Maps, now you can only get it on Google Earth and it's really slow. Using the 3D view on Google Maps you turn your view any which way and it would faithfully follow your mouse. Google Earth takes its own sweet time about responding to mouse inputs, and keeps moving after you have released the mouse. Maybe I need to add a zillion bytes of RAM to my two buck machine. I'm sure Google had a good reason for this change. Maybe my next two buck machine will have the requisite amount of RAM.
A French startup has completed ground avionics testing of an unusual fixed-wing aircraft with a pneumatic wing structure, targeting long-endurance cargo logistics missions with a design that trades speed for dramatically reduced energy consumption per kilogram transported.
“Celeste isn’t a blimp, it’s a fixed-wing aircraft,” the company stated. “Lift is aerodynamic, not buoyancy. What’s pneumatic is the wing structure itself: a pressurized textile envelope replacing the rigid skin and spars, which is what makes the airframe deployable, field-repairable, and gives it an unusual radar signature for an 8-meter platform.”
Renault made 44,000 of these cars between 1934 and 1938. The engine produced 34 horsepower. It sold for $1,100 when gold was $35 an ounce. In 1964 gold was still $35 an ounce and new American car cost $2,000, so this Renault was really cheap. In 1934 this Renault would have been worth two pounds of gold. Two pounds of gold today is worth about $100,000 which would allow you to have your pick of a new car.
La Favorite distillery was founded on a former sugar cane plantation. La Favorite has been producing Rhum Agricole near the village of Fort de France since 1905.
Martiniqueis an island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. A part of the French West Indies, Martinique is an overseas department and region and a single territorial collectivity of France.
The CMS detector is built around a huge solenoid magnet. This takes the form of a cylindrical coil of superconducting cable that generates a field of 4 tesla, about 100,000 times the magnetic field of the Earth. The field is confined by a steel “yoke” that forms the bulk of the detector’s 14,000-tonne weight.
An unusual feature of the CMS detector is that instead of being built in-situ like the other giant detectors of the LHC experiments, it was constructed in 15 sections at ground level before being lowered into an underground cavern near Cessy in France and reassembled. The complete detector is 21 metres long, 15 metres wide and 15 metres high.
The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving about 5500 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from 241 institutes in 54 countries (May 2022). For the latest information, see here.
The CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) Cadarache research center in southern France operates the WEST (Tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a, tokamak that set a new world record on February 12, 2025, by sustaining a 50 million-degree Celsius plasma for 1,337 seconds (over 22 minutes). - Google
The chemical symbol for Tungsten is W, which is how they cobble together the acronym.
The entire complex is blurred out on Google Maps. Huh.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as HT-7U (Hefei Tokamak 7 Upgrade), is an experimental superconductingtokamakmagnetic fusion energy reactor in Hefei, China. Operated by the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science conducting its experiments for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, EAST began its operations in 2006. EAST is part of the international ITER program after China joined the initiative in 2003 and acts as a testbed for ITER technologies. On January 20, 2025, it sustained plasma for 1066 seconds.
Néro the Assassin | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
1504 in France and there is a drought. There was a big drought in Europe in 1540. You don't suppose they got the four and the zero transposed, do you? I do. Anyway, the situation is grim, but doesn't keep people from lusting after power and killing people to get their way. Matter of fact, it gives some people an opportunity to wreak havoc. We have a nutcase leading the pentitents who claims people have not been been penitent enough and that's why god is withholding the rain. The pentitents work to rectify this situation by cutting off people's noses, ears, fingers and even heads. Lovely bunch of folks.
That's the background. In the foreground we have a fat cat, his daughter, his number one assassin, the assassin's daughter, a one eyed witch, and a couple of dark skinned soldiers, one male and one female. All of these people change loyalties with every episode. It basically makes the story incoherent.
There is a bit of a love story and there is plenty of fighting, but the story is weak, weak, weak.
Wikipedia knows something about Terrot Motorcycles:
Terrot was a motorcycle manufacturer in Dijon, France.
Charles Terrot and Wilhelm Stücklen had founded a machinery factory in Cannstatt, Germany in 1862, and Terrot added a branch factory in Dijon in 1887, and in 1890 the Dijon factory added bicycles to its products.
In 1902, the Dijon factory made its first motorcycle. It was powered by a 2 bhp engine supplied by Zédel of Switzerland. After that, Terrot built motorcycles with engines from 173cc to 498cc from proprietary engine suppliers including the Swiss manufacturers MAG and Dufeaux, the English makers Chater-Lea and JAP along with Givaudan engines from Lyon, France.
Terrot produced its first twin-cylinder model in 1905. From 1915 onwards, it supplied 500cc machines to the French Army. In 1921, Terrot launched new two-stroke models: the 175cc model L and the 267cc model E. In 1925, the latter model was developed into the 250cc model F. From 1923 onwards, Terrot also produced four-stroke models. First with a 350cc JAP engine. From 1927 onwards, also with a 500cc engine. In 1926 Terrot began to make its own four-stroke engines. In 1929, the company produced its 100,000th motorcycle.
After the Great Depression a new class of vehicles, motorized bicycles, was introduced.
In 1932, Terrot entered motorcycle racing and won a triple championship, winning the French 250cc, 350cc and 500cc classes.
In the Second World War Terrot supplied the French Army with sidecars: the model GT from 350cc to 750cc and the model DT from 500cc to 750cc.
In 1951, Terrot produced its first motor scooter, called VMS. In the 1950s, the company focused on the market for mopeds and lightweight motorcycles.
In 1958, Peugeot took over the company. In 1961, production ended at the former Terrot factory.
SS Normandie was a French ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France, for the French Line Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). She entered service in 1935 as the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat, crossing the Atlantic in a record 4.14 days, and remains the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built.
Normandie's novel design and lavish interiors led many to consider her the greatest of ocean liners. During service as the flagship of the CGT, she made 139 westbound transatlantic crossings from her home port of Le Havre to New York City. Normandie held the Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing at several points during her service career, during which RMS Queen Mary was her main rival.
During the Second World War, Normandie was seized by U.S. authorities at New York and renamed USS Lafayette. In 1942, while being converted to a troopship, the liner caught fire and capsized onto her port side and came to rest, half submerged, on the bottom of the Hudson River at Pier 88 (the site of the current Manhattan Cruise Terminal). Although salvaged at great expense, restoration was deemed too costly and she was scrapped in October 1946.
Cute little video, cleverly done, all to the tune of some French pop song. At least I think that's what it is. The guy hanging from the 'chute, presumably that's Jean-Baptiste Chandelier, is talented and skillful.
This car was Motor Trend's Car of the Year in 1972. Citroen listens to the beat of a different drum. My Uncle Eddy had a Citroen DS about a zillion years ago. They are kind of cool, mostly because they are different. Nobody else makes a car like Citroen. Wikipedia explains:
This car was unusual for France – production of luxury cars was heavily restricted in the country by post-World War II puissance fiscale horsepower tax, so France had not had a production vehicle in this market sector since before World War II. The SM had an engine of only 2.7 liters owing to these regulations; it was the first response to the luxury/performance sector since the export oriented ChryslerHemi V8 engineFacel Vega in the late 1950s.
. . . .
Contemporary automotive journalists were effusive about the SM's dynamic qualities, which were unlike anything they had experienced before. The SM provided a combination of comfort, sharp handling, and braking not available in any other car at the time. The magazine Popular Science reported that the SM had the shortest stopping distance of any car they had tested.
Automotive journalists marveled at the resulting ability to travel for hours at 124 mph in comfort. In 1972 Motorsport (U.K.) noted ..."that rare quality of being a nice car to be in at any speed, from stationary to maximum." The touring range based on the SM's fuel economy and the large 24 US gallon fuel tank made long, fast, relaxing journeys possible.
The car had a sophisticated power steering system - DIRAVI. I found some technical descriptions and schematics of this system, but I think this picture does it better.
The clip is from the movie 1923, so they are talking about WW1. Funny how people will become so enraged that they will spend their entire fortune on destruction and then steal the country's future to buy more death and destruction. People shouldn't be in charge. I can't wait for AI to take over the world. Oh, wait, all that AI knows they learned from humans. They'll probably be more efficient at killing people, so maybe hoping for an all powerful AI isn't such a good idea.
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