The French Are Talking About Us

**Bizzaro Root** · Posted On: 5/11/2005 9:56am

Originally Posted by Sophist

I speak some little French, and with the help of a French English dictionary I discovered "bidon" is slang for phoney.

So that post you referred to, Phrost, reads something like:

"Bah, slagging off phoney martial arts is becoming quite the fashion... soon Phrost will be asking royalties."

The implication being, as I read it, that bullshido.com is the original denouncer of phoney martial arts, and hence has some kind of copyright on it.

Hope this helps.

i to thought he was kinda giving phrost a complement in a way.

**Argad** · Posted On: 5/12/2005 1:23am

Originally Posted by Bizzaro Root

i to thought he was kinda giving phrost a complement in a way.

Indeed he was ! The thread is about basically starting a bullshido-exposing website in French. Of course, not everybody agrees (" C'est le meme principe sur Bullshido.com ou la regle est le bachage gratuit.").
WHen he talks about Phrost and royalties, he acknowledges Phrost as a pioneer, and bullshido.com as a model... Those people are basically trying to follow the same path as you guys... A few years later.
Been trying to talk about Thornton views on aliveness on the french martial arts forum... As we french people say, I might as well have pissed in a violin, my time would have been used more wisely. People began to talk about Ueshiba's sayings... Ugghh

Ju

**Janissary** · Posted On: 5/12/2005 5:40am

Originally Posted by MrMcFu

Phrost, when did you start caring what the French thought about anything?

Has anyone here ever read Trevanian? He was big in the 70s, and his bestselling book was The Eiger Sanction. The best way I can describe him is having a serrated intellected and as being absolutely hilarious in an acerbic, iconoclastic kind of way.

This is an excerpt from Trevanian's book Shibumi (pg 152). Scene: Two men in the Basque country of the Pyrenees Mountains- one a gruff and ethnocentric Basque, named Le Cagot, and the other a Russian-German aristocrat, named Nicholas Hel. They're talking about a Frenchman whom they both despise and just insulted. I was howling when I finished this passage.

Shibumi was written back in 1979. France doesn't seem to have changed much in the past 26 years, has it?
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Le Cagot patted the hostess's bottom and sent her after their food. "I don't think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared." Le Cagot laughed, "After all, his father was French and very active in the resistance."
Hel smiled. "Have you ever met one who was not?"
"True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn't draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazis feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning 'bonjours' were heroes of liberty!"
Hel laughed. "You're being a little hard on the French."
"It is history that is hard on them. I mean real history, not the verite a la cinquieme Republique that they teach in their schools. The truth be known, I admire the French more than any other foreigners. In the centuries they have lived beside the Basque, they have absorbed certain virtues- understanding, philosophic insight, a sense of humor- and these have made them the best of the 'others'. But even I am forced to admit that they are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the American neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese. Take the particular manifestation of French ridiculousness that makes them attempt to combine their myopic devotion to money with the pursuit of phantom 'gloire'. The same people who dilute their burgundy for modest profit willingly spend millions of francs on the atomic contamination of the Pacific Ocean in the hope that they will be thought to be the technological equals of the Americans. They see themselves as the feisty David against the grasping Goliath. Sadly for their image abroad, the rest of the world views their actions as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing a cow's leg and assuring her that he will be gentle."