One day, Olivier & I were walking around here in Paris with some friends. We passed a shop that I had never seen before & which immediately struck me as being odd. The sign in front read “Vélo et Chocolat”. In plain English, it said: “Bicycle & Chocolate”.

Evidently, you can get a bicycle here & some bars of chocolate. Interesting marketing idea. It’s true that chocolate goes with anything, it’s just that I had never been riding a bicycle while thinking to myself, “Hmm…yeah…a thick bar of chocolate sure would hit the spot right about now”.

Naturally, this one-stop shopping idea isn’t unique to Paris, or even to Europe at all. Before I moved to France, when I was living in the small town of Loveland, Colorado, there in the downtown area was a fabulous mecca of one-stop shopping: Probasco’s.

probasco.jpg

Yep…that’s right. Bibles & wigs all in one amazing shop.

It looks like both countries like the bizarre two-in-one stores. So, we’re not so different after all – weirdness abounds all over the world.

 

5 Comments

  • Paco de Verde

    The well-meaning douche forgot Drunken. Long-winded, whiny, -Drunken-, nonlifehaving reply. He’s from my hometown, I should give him some slack (even give praise, maybe).

    It’s been a tough week, and now that bad cop has had his say, good cop can pipe in. I’ve been drinking very heavily this week because I’m scared as hell about working New Year’s Eve in Chinatown in 2 days, after getting a threat of violence a few days ago. Fear triggers anger, and something about only getting 2 hours of cloudy sunlight a day and working on Christmas brings out the worst in a drunken tirade. It’s not healthy but it’s temporary, and ulitimately worthwhile, I think (I hope).

    Anyway, I regret the flood of emotion but stand by the message. Fuck myspace. Don’t get me wrong, love the wordpress blog but think that the myspace catfights are merely a diversion. I read one of the “poems” submitted by your readers and it was dreadful, and I hated to think that you could take criticizm, good or bad, from one so completely out of their element. With these newfangled computers, everyone’s a writer (musician, publisher, etc..) which is good and bad. Good luck amassing rejection letters from people that mean a damn. Save them in a book, makes having the last laugh easier when you have visual aids.

    “Dug” (possibly not his real name) is right, this isn’t my personal sounding board. Feel free to delete these. I don’t have an email address for you and I wanted to give you all of the encouragement that an alcohol soaked brain could muster at 3 in the morning. I stopped hating you many months ago and hope this all works out for you.

    Paco de Verde (possibly not his real name)

  • Hm. Interesting. Let me see if I’ve got the fundamentals of your long-winded, whiny, “I really need to be heard because I don’t have a life” reply to a blog that has nothing to do with what you’ve said. So essentially you took the time to write a comment on someone’s blog about your own angry opinions regarding people who base their lives around leaving comments on blogs…? Did I miss anything? Maybe you should start with tossing your own PC in a fire (or kindly stick to porn).

  • Paco de Verde

    you deleted my story about the crack head, which means that either 1) the story was too offensive, even for you or 2) you are planning to steal my story for your own uses.

    No matter, these stories accumulate by the day. Last Monday, I had to tell a man in a motorized wheelchair that he couldn’t smoke the rock in front of my restaurant, and he wheeled away with his crack pipe still aflame, which would make for a funny comic, I think. It was the second most interesting thing that happened to me that day.

    I got in a fight with a heroin-addicted prostitute, and she went and got her pimp, who got in my face. both were high on Bolivian Marching Powder, and I thought I would have to use my trusty lead pipe, to give his noggin’ a floggin’, in front of about a dozen patrons waiting for Christmas Eve Chinese food. I called the police instead, fully expecting for the man to punch me while I was on the phone. Thing is, I’ll live from a black eye, even a concussion. If I swing my lead pipe and don’t knock him out I face bad things, besides a police report (a man on coke will still pull a gun, even if his skull is split). I didn’t want to get shot on Chirstmas Eve, I don’t want to get shot at all, to tell you the honest truth.

    But this is neither here nor there, as the Swedes say. The purpose of this message is not to provide you with more free stories (fucking true, let us not talk falsely now for the hour is getting late). The purpose of this message is to encourage you to get the fuck away from the twentyfirst century sewing circle called myspace. Filled with talkers and losers, that site is. Those people aren’t your friends and never will be.

    Better yet, fuck the internet entirely. The computer wants to enslave you; I know because I program computers to enslave people for a living. 1 rejection letter is worth more than 300 comments from phonies professing to like your work. Because they don’t like your work, they just want you to like them. Because probably no one else likes them and they’ll accept a kilobyte of praise as validation for their own existence. People like this are good for you, but only if you’re selling them something. Free praise is what brought down Jim Baker, that and the air conditioning unit he bought for his dog.

    Fuck these nameless faceless assholes. Fuck this passive aggresive medium we call life, this fully deletable reality. Burn your computer, or resolve to only use it for porn. If you have words to say, say them in a forum that means a damn. A forum that holds you accountable to the highest level you are capable of.

    I work New Year’s Eve in Chinatown, keeping vigil and one sweaty hand on my curmudgeon. If I’m ready to take a shot to the face, you should be ready for people to tell you they don’t like you. Fuck these phonies.

  • This is like those old Reese’s peanut butter cup commercials. “You got Chocolate in my bike!” – “You got bike in my chocolate!” And wham-o! Instant success story. Now, what really needs to happen, is these two businesses come together in a merger of Chocolate Wigs & Bicycle Bikes (or numerous combinations in between). Could quite possibly re-shape the entire universe. (-:

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