« 2008-01 | HomePage | 2008-03 »
02/29/2008
Elections at the weekend
We are allowed to vote in local and European elections very kind of them as we are also allowed to pay taxes here. However local elections are very interesting spread over 2 weekends the first vote is a popularity vote so you vote for your mates and the second vote is more pragmatic at present we have a socialist bunch running Plestin they taxes us more every year employ more people who work less hard ( around 30 hours a week ) so probably the first round will vote for the opposition + my mate Rodger who plays sax in a couple of the bands I play in. Paulien was getting some bread in the boulangerie this morning so I thought I would ask him what their policies were as he is No 1 on the list for the right and off he rattlied ,improve the roads,heating for the church so I asked him why don't you reduce the Marie borrowing ( it has a loan of 5-6 million €s ) by selling the sailing school and the camp site should raise a couple million and be more dynamic ( the sailing school is actually shut on Saturday in high season ) It didn't go down too well he was a bit shocked by the radicalism.
We had a friend call in the other day he has a few houses and always comes at lunch time and as the boys were home and cooking not liking competition in the eating stakes they ground up 4 laxative pills and put it in his soup. I couldn't understand why he was moaning about the soup as I wasn't in on the joke.Hope he didn't have too bad an evening
The renovations on the gite Etables are nearly finished I changed the roof of the veranda with the aid of the boys this week they have a master's degree in destruction as it only took them a few hours to remove the old conservatory and replace it with the new panels so now the gite can be sealed and dried out and Paulien can do her subtle finishing touches covering my mistakes , as if I would make any .
20:00 Posted in Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: brittany, holiday, brittanygite.com, coat aillis, comments
02/12/2008
Saving the world on pause
Its seems I got too excited by the possibilities of the air car as it isn't going to be manufactured in France for the moment but is for sure in Australia this year I found a blog in french it explains how the environmental friendly company's such as Total and probably Renault and Peugeot persuaded the government its not a good idea for their profitability to allow the production of a zero polluting auto on the roads. So it looks as if the only possibility of getting one will be to import it assuming it meets the European norms (another word for protectionism ). Tata from India are going ahead to produce them probably for a lower price than the Australians which will be 5400€ according to the blog. I made a few errors on the last blog MDI website is www.wdi.lu they are based in Luxembourg although research is done at Nice also the pressure in the tanks will be 300 bar not 150 as I wrote last time.
Mean while the weather is ridiculously warm for February the birds are singing so will be mating far too early and when they hatch their young the weather will be foul and food supplies short but who cares the price of oil is 100$ a barrel petrol companies are making a fortune and governments are raking fuel taxes and the ice caps are melting.
19:05 Posted in Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: brittany, gite, holiday, coat aillis, comments
02/05/2008
Buy an Air cars and save the world
I am seriously thinking of buying a new car , generally I think they are a totally waste of money ,polluting and a reflection of egos, but the car I'm interested in is a compressed air car which costs less then 2€ per 100km and is totally eco friendly. You could say they will have to build a couple more nuclear power stations but you could have your own windmill and there is a solar panel version which would operate the compressor to refill the tank.,recharging the tank overnight takes about 4 hours and the tank is filled to 150 bars + of air. In reality its an electric car without batteries and just uses compressed air as the energy source. Its designed by a French ex F1 engineer and is based outside Nice. His website is www.MDI.com also there is a good short film on youtube at
The company have signed a deal with Tata the Indian car company and production has started with the car due on the market at the end of the year with prices starting from 3000€. The interesting aspect is there are going to be major losers ,big car manufactures, spare industries, petrol manufactures and governments which would lose lots of tax revenue they get from petrol/diesel.
The concept is fantastic most households would save between 50-100€ a week ,instant reduction in global warming and cheap transport for the masses. If you go to the website you can make a non binding commitment to buy one
17:25 Posted in Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: gite, brittany, holiday, coat aillis, comments