Finally, France finds someone it refuses to surrender to: Lance Armstrong

John Leicester, AP's European sports columnist, calls the latest French probe into Armstrong fishy.

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/33390932/ns/sports/

 

First one since this:

 

Appreciate the thread title, even if I couldn't care less about this story anymore ...

 

I heard something about this on the radio somewhere today and immediately had this reaction: "Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ ... they surrender to everybody else, why not Armstrong too?" A thread slug was born.

 

We also have French tanks for sale. Six gears, all reverse.

 

I know we as Americans like to take good sport out of making fun of the French and their tendency over the past 70 years or so of appeasing tyranny and caving in the face of aggression.

But if you know a little history, you can understand where a lot of that comes from, and it goes back to the so-called Great War (aka WWI), of which a high percentage of the most serious fighting was done in northern France.

For four long bloody years, the French showed incredible bravery and suffered some truly ghastly losses in defending their country against the Germans. They absolutely refused to surrender, and paid a high price for doing so.

Not only was their land physically scarred and ruined for years from being fought over tooth and nail between armies that numbered in the millions, but most of the best and brightest from a whole generation were lost, and those were the leaders who weren't there in 1940 and in the generations that followed.

So, yeah, laugh at the French and their often pompous and defeatist attitudes if you must, but when you do also remember what they as a nation went through in 1914-18. It may make you dial back your ridicule just a bit.

 

Nah.

Rifle-droppers! Rifle-droppers!

 

Was it Patton who said "I'd rather have a German division in front of me than a French division behind me." ?

 

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

 

Have you ever read "The Price of Glory," which is about the battle of Verdun? Fascinating stuff, and you're right about the price the French paid.

The most striking thing to me from that book is the fact that they must still plow by remote control in that area, due to all the unexploded ordinance that is still in the ground. Verdun is perhaps the smallest city in the world that employs a full-time bomb removal squad.

 

After the French-Indian War, a French officer and a British officer were caught conversing. The French officer says, "You stupid Brits, you wear red coats and are easy to see from anywhere."

The Brit said, "You idiot. We wear these so that if an officer gets shot, the infantry won't see the blood and break ranks."

Ever since, French officers have worn brown pants.

 

Vanilla Coke, meet laptop screen.

Screen, that was Vanilla Coke.