French "The Voice" Contestant Wows With A Twist On The Village People

This woman, on the French version of "The Voice" show
us the right way to do the YMCA.

As people who read this blog thingy know, I'm one of those hopeless people who's a fan of some talent competition shows on TV, with "The Voice" being one of my favorites.

I missed the season debut of "The Voice" this week, so I was rummaging on YouTube to see what happened, and there's was some great auditions here in the Great Old U.S. of A.

But as you know, every place in the universe, probably including Neptune, has a "The Voice" franchise, and I stumbled upon some recent auditions from France.

One of them was by a woman named Nathalia, who did a version of the Village People song "YMCA"

The original song has frankly become a tired cliche of a tune that is played at every bad wedding you've been to. However, Nathalia turned "YMCA" into something flirty, gorgeous, new, powerful, playful, soulful and sexy.

As you might know, during "The Voice" auditions, the judges, all musicians, sit in chairs with their backs to the stage so they can't see what the performer looks like. They must rely just on what they hear. If the judges like what they hear, they press a button and their chair turns to face the performer.

Not surprisingly, all four French "The Voice" chairs very quickly turned for Nathalia.

Here's the video

Wouldn't It Be Great If There Were Breaking Good News For Once

Bodies in the streets of Nice, France after
the latest in an unending series of terrorist attacks.  

Last night was the same old sad routine.

And to call the deaths of 84 people routine made the evening particularly sad.

As you well know by now, some scumbag drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, France who were out enjoying Bastille Day. 

Cue what happens with such hideous regularity now:

Networks broke in and gave updates. It was all Nice truck attack all the time on outlets like CNN and MSNBC.  It was the sad top topic on social media. Governments vowed vengeance, and we learned the stories of people who died while just living their lives and trying to enjoy the moment.

Mayhem and murder keeps happening  again and again and it's going to happen again and again. It's hard to stay positive in this kind of environment, isn't it?

I know this is fantasy, but wouldn't it be great if, just for once, some sort of shocking but wonderful breaking news came out of the blue?

Television stations would break into the mid-day game shows to breathlessly announce the news.

Wolf Blitzer and his CNN Situation Room would give us all the up to date news and rumors about how this Great Development just keeps getting better and better.

Rather than having somber and argumentive pundits give their take on what the latest tragedy means, they'd be forecasting the happy effects of this Great Breaking News.

People would be out on the streets celebrating. All you'd see on Facebook and Twitter is ecstatic reaction to the Great Breaking News. Wouldn't this be a great Top Trending Topic.

A smiling President Obama would hold an impromptu news conference, in which he announces this is the best day of his presidency and the United States would do everything in its power to ensure this Great Breaking News just keeps going and going.

Fantasy isn't reality, though.

The even sadder thing is I can't even imagine what my theoretical Great Breaking News would actually entail.

Depressingly, it's easy for me and everyone else to imagine the next terrorist attack. The guns, the bombs, the deaths, the bitter aftermath.

But what would the Great Breaking News look like? I can't even think of too many examples in history. Maybe the end of World War II? The moon landing?

The optimistic side of me wants to think that the reason the bad news dominates the airwaves is because things are basically good, and the bad is the exception. News is defined as something out of the ordinary happening. So a terrorist attack is out of the ordinary and an exception to the goodness maybe?

We also take comfort in the people who rush in to help the victims.

All that is well and good, but it doesn't feel like enough. What else can you do, though?

The darker side of me wants a little bit of torture against people like the idiot who drove the truck into the crowd in Nice, killing all those people.  I know torture is wrong and shouldn't be done.  I'm not talking about physical torture, though.

Most of the time, the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks are killed to stop them from doing further damage.

My idea of torturing the perpetrators is try to take them alive.  Meanwhile, videotape statements from victims and relatives of victims about the impact the attack had on them.  Get as many victims as you can who want to talk.

Then you put the perp in a cell forever. In that cell, 24/7 for years on end until the perp dies, you project the video of the victims' statements on all four walls of the cell, and play their words full volume. And just never stop

If it drives the terrorist in the cell insane, oh well. Let 'em suffer. The dark side of me says they deserve such awful mental pain.

Meanwhile, I keep longing for the Great Breaking Good News. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some anti-terrorist cell that keeps launching "attacks" of wonderful goodness and kindness on an an unsuspecting population

French Blogger Found Guilty By Judge Of Being Too Popular

A French judge who really doesn't understand how Google searches work at all, has fined a French blogger, essentially for the crime of being too popular.

A French judge ruled against a blogger, essentially
because she was ranked too high in Google searches for his taste. 

The problem, according to the BBC, is blogger Caroline Doudet wrote a scathing, negative review of a restaurant in her blog. The restauranteur said the review was hurting his business.

The judge said that since a Google search brings up Doudet's blog fourth from the top, and that her blog has 3,000 or so followers, she is popular and has influence.

Therefore, she should be fined for the negative review, said the judge.

I doubt Doudet had much influence on how Google ranked the blog for searches, but that apparently is beside the point, if I'm reading the judge's "reasoning" right.

Doudet was fined about $2,000.

Doudet said that basically, the judge made it a crime to be ranked too high on a search engine. "What is perverse, is that we look for bloggers who are influential, but only if they are nice about people," she said.

The restaurant review has since been deleted, since Doudet said the whole thing has been too much of  hassle.

It sounds like in the judge's mind, you can be nasty to someone on line if nobody reads your stuff, but you can't if people actually do read what you write.

The restauranteur never denied the service at his restaurant fell short when Doudet visited, the problem was too many people were finding the negative review.

Yes, people write a whole lot of unfair things on line. Or they write things that are fair but negative.  And it's a problem for business owners.

But getting "help" for the problem by complaining somebody is too popular on line seems like it would backfire.

I kind of hope in this case it does.

Dumb Idea: Setting BBQ Fire Among Cars Parked On Dry, Windy Field

So a bunch of people went to a stunt  show somewhere in France. Motorcycles performing loop de loops or something like that. Sounds fun.

The results of a French  barbecue gone badly awry.  

As is often the case in events like this, people arriving were told to park their cars on a grassy field.

That wasn't a problem until two drunk guys (It's always drunk guys) decided to have themselves a little barbecue. In the dry, grassy field.

They "thought" they put out the fire when they were done, but the started themselves a fire that tore through the parking lot in the field, destroying at least 64 cars

It caused quite a little blaze, as you can see in the video below. Authorities also had to stop people from approaching the flames to rescue their cars. (People could have gotten hurt or killed, obviously)

The two guys responsible are reportedly might get up to two years in prison and might have to pay restitution to some very, very pissed off car owners. 

Here's the vid: