Tragic Death of French
Super Sportsman

France Wins First Match of WC'98

Paris:- Saturday, 13. June 1998:- Last Tuesday one of the longest TV shows in history was broadcast in France and to all ships at sea. It started at, Le Parisien said in its Tuesday edition, at 18:00 but I think I heard it started before then - and it went on and on and on until the following day.

Of course I glanced at the paper in the morning, but I was startled to get an urgent email message about 20:40 telling me to turn on my TV set immediately. Thus I saw Paris' great World Cup parade, for about five minutes.

On Wednesday, Libération said it was the most boring parade in history, on the basis of the sheer length of it. Automobile drivers in the capitol probably had some things to say about it too, but these comments were not published by this normally liberal paper.

On Wednesday I decided to assist with this great event after the morning's Le Parisien boldly exclaimed, in yellow type over a background color photo covering both the front and back pages, 'La France Centre du Monde.'

Just as I saw enough of the parade to get the general idea of it in five minutes, Le Parisien was so immersed in the World Cup, that they proclaimed that Air France pilots had hardened their line, when in fact they had caved in - or at least this is the 'official' word.

The correct story, for possible visitors to France, was broadcast over the Web in a timely fashion by Metropole, until the new 'router' or whatever it was that replaced whatever it was that had blown up over the previous weekend, gave up its young ghost just after noon on Wednesday.

I have passed up some stories about the World Cup tickets, believing the best is to come. For the printing of them, the FIFA and CFO organizations thought they had a tighter operation than the Bank of France, especially after somebody looted the bank's new 'Euro' hologram.

So the ticket were distributed to their purchaser's at the last minute. Which of course, left the way open to certain operators to sell non-existent tickets and be well out of the way on ticket-delivery day.

Japanese travel agencies think 10,000 fans have been burned, but others think it is 23,000, because it is this number that the Hotel Concorde-Lafayette was expecting to arrive at any minute to exercise the hotel part of their package deals.

An official partner of the FIFA and the CFO, a company in Switzerland, is suspected of selling 1500 or 10,000 non-tickets, but it points its finger as its French subsidiary, and it in turn points an accusing finger at an employee.

Bolivians and Brazilians want to know where their tickets are too; and the FIFA and the CFO are laying charges against 'persons unknown' for crimes, 'unknown;' basically to cover themselves.

This is an especially important question when one-third of Le Parisien is football, one-third is horse racing and one-sixth is the TV guide, as has been the case since Tuesday. There isn't any other news.

There are a continuous series of boulevards in aris which run all the way around the edge, just inside the periphérique, aka the 'perifreak.' The PC bus line pounds around these clockwise and counter-clockwise, more or less non-stop.