elf

I'm going to be fairly busy this next week, preparing to move back to Louisville now that the sabbatical is all but over.

Through the week, I'll try to post some notes I made while in France.

For example, here's something odd that caught my eye: It seemed like every Renault we saw in Paris and Normandy had a rear window sticker with the letters "elf" prominently displayed. The sticker references a European petroleum company:



It's image thus makes a perfectly natural sticker on a car. It's like an American car with an STP bumper sticker.

In the US, of course, ELF is the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI considers ELF to be an environmental terrorist organization -- the largest and most active domestic terror organization!

So...imagine a bunch of cars with rear window stickers promoting a prominent green terrorist group.

That's the image that kept coming to my mind. Quite a contrast with those yellow ribbons on SUVs, eh?