Amandine Bourgeois to sing French Eurovision Song Contest entry

Proving there really is life after television talent shows, Amandine Bourgeois has been chosen to represent France at this year's Eurovision Song Contest in the Swedish city of Malmö in May.

Bourgeois won the sixth edition of Nouvelle Star - France's version of Pop Idol - in 2008.

The show, which was cancelled by M6 a couple of years ago, is currently undergoing something of a renaissance on D8.

And that's perhaps what Bourgeois is hoping for by taking part in the annnual Europe-wide musical jamboree, because since winning Nouvelle Star, her career has hardly been...well er...decidedly rocky (although not in the musical sense of the word).

It all started off reasonably enough, with her debut album "20 m2" in 2009 being pretty well received by music critics and the public alike.

It reached a high of number five in the French charts and went gold. The first track released as a single, "L'homme de la situation" was a catchy little number which received plenty of airplay and reasonable chart success.

Amandine Bourgeois (screenshot from "L'homme de la situation" official clip)

There were two follow-up singles both taken from the album - "Tant de moi" and "Du temps" - which helped keep Bourgeois in the public eye, her album in the charts and bolster tickets sales for her tour of generally small to medium-sized venues around the country.

Bourgeois' second album in 2012 "Sans amour Mon amour" apparently "inspired by the retro 60's R&B of Amy Winehouse" and the two singles "Sans amour and "Envie d'un manque de problèmes", although well-written and produced, pretty much failed to register on the all-important commercial rader.

The result? Well Bourgeois was forced to cancel her tour after selling only 4,000 copies of the album and admitting how upset she was.

"I'm very sad and sorry, but it's really difficult to fill venues when my album simply isn't selling well and the songs aren't played on the radio," she said on her Facebook page, making a promise that she would "work and pray hard to continue living her passion".

And the way apparently to "live her passion" is to represent France in Malmö!

Amandine Bourgeois (screenshot from "L'homme de la situation" YouTube clip)

A France Télévisions committee designated Bourgeois as this country's representative - yes that's the way things are done in France: no leaving it up to the public to decide.

And the song chosen for the 33-year-old to sing in front of millions will be  "L'enfer et moi"

Here's wishing Bourgeois all the best in Malmö.

She'll certainly need it if the recent past form of French participants is anything to go by.

Last year Indonesian-born singer Anggun only managed to finish 22nd out of 26 in the final and the previous year, the man with the big voice and dodgy "hairdon't" Amaury Vassili, only managed a self-described 15th placed "shitty finish".


In fact you have to go all the way back to the hey days of the competition for France's last win.

As the French media keeps reminding everyone each time Eurovision comes around, the last "triumph" for the country was in 1977 when Marie Myriam captured the hearts (and ears) of those watching with "L'oiseau et l'enfant".

"It's an honour for me to represent France," Bourgeois says on her Facebook page.

"I'm a little frightened but I also have the ability to transform that into a something positive," she told the weekly television programming magazine Télé 7 Jours.

"Whatever happens, Eurovision should open doors for me and boost my career."

There's no video of "L'enfer et moi" available yet, but here's a reminder of how she sounded back in her Nouvelle Star-winning days.

François Hollande stands firm on same-sex marriage

Well good for the French president François Hollande.

He has repeated that there won't be a referendum on proposals to allow couples of the same-sex to marry or to adopt.

"It's a promise I made to the French and it has to be honoured (some throat clearing might be necessary in believing the next bit) just as the other promises I made, have to be," he said in his New Year wishes to parliament this week.

All right so the protests might not be over yet, but with the end of January approaching and the proposals due to go before parliament, it's maybe Hollande showing that he actually has the cajones to follow through on a pledge.

Perhaps he's not so "Flanby" after all and is less lightweight with no hard core set of principles than his critics might claim.

From Wikipedia

After all, isn't there a sense of social justice in allowing those who wish to marry someone of the same sex, to do so?

Those 800,000 who marched in Paris recently (a questionable figure anyway as official statistics provided by the police put the number at around 350,000, even if we all know those can also be "massaged") will now just have to get used to the idea that the law is likely to pass.

As will those who claim to be oh-so-proud of their discriminatory and reactionary views as to what constitutes a "marriage", because - well it's going to happen, just as it has in Argentina, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa or Spain (to name but a few).

And that, dear reader, is called progress.

Welcome to the 21st century...France.

Chinese tourists take a roundabout pilgrimage to Lourdes - 800 kms away

It's easily done isn't it?

You arrive at an airport, rent a car, complete with GPS or SatNav, and tap in your destination.

If you're lucky the thing will direct you to exactly where you want to go without any problem.

If you're not, or are hopeless at following instructions, then you could end up taking a route which will allow you to see a little more of the countryside than you had intended.

The chances are though, that you'll eventually reach where you want to be.

Both scenarios of course rely upon your having entered the correct town or city.

But there remains another possible outcome: arriving miles away from your intended journey's end.

(screenshot Mappy  - the green flag is Paris, the yellow one Leuhan, and the red flag is Lourdes)

That's exactly what happened this past weekend to a group of Chinese tourists who had arrived at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from Los Angeles and decided to hire a car with a GPS, to drive to the southwestern town of Lourdes.

Except they ended up over 800 kilometres away in the village of Leuhan in Brittany, in the west of the country.

As the regional daily Ouest France reported the five women had indeed entered Lourdes into the GPS but they had forgotten to include the number of the département: hence they arrived in the village where the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes can be found.

An easy mistake to make!

"They got out of their car and asked me where they could find their hotel," Manée Peron, the owner of the village bar-tobacconist Ti Manée, told the newspaper.

"But when I looked at the reservation slip they showed me I saw that they were looking for Lourdes in the southwest of France and I told them they were in completely the wrong place."

Not surprisingly the women were apparently more than a little fed up but reprogrammed their GPS, and were on their way once again...to the correct Lourdes.

Let's just hope their rental contract allowed them unlimited mileage.