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Our Favorite Clueless American In Paris

Facts are such pesky things. When you, LA Times travel writer and "blogger" Susan Spano, frequently fail to include the facts in your "blog" items, and readers write in, filling the comments page with corrections, the answer is...eliminate the comments page, bien sur!

That's what they seem to have done in Spanoland -- home of weary-dreary remarks about Paris on LATimes.com...where France is merely thinking about establishing a 35-hour work-week (not getting rid of it, like in real life), and there are myriad other errors. (I wrote in about the 35-hour work week thing, which I believe they corrected.) While it is possible some Web maestro forgot to put in the link to comments, you'll see that if you hit the comments link (in "Heh heh" bit below), there's no July 20 comment to go with her July 20 Postcard.

Heh heh...they may have removed the link to the comments on her "Postcards" page, but I have the link to them here! I'll yank a few choice reader corrections from last week's comments, just in case the LA Times wises up and pulls comments altogether.

1. She gets the name of the mayor of Paris wrong.

Oh Susan! While I'm here, it's not "Bernard" but "Bertrand Delanoe".

What's the matter, don't they pay her enough at the LA Times for her to get Google?

2. Not a word from our Spano-on-the-case about a big deal here...the closing of the department store Samaritaine. No, we're reading about how she has to get a Weber BBQ grill from Amazon in the states so she can smoke out her neighbors.

Again, Susan, you are boring your readers to death with your rambling about overpriced antiques for the superrich and stories from the British muffin man.

Could you please give us a more accurate portrayal of daily life in Paris?

3. Perish forbid she should feel some compulsion to speak to somebody in an attempt to be correct. I am going with the reader on this one...based on past experience that her readers are more likely to be correct than she is.

Just a little quibble on your latest "Postcards from Paris". "Napoleon at Bailly " is a 19th century artifact (probably around 1810), not a 17th century item.

Really, though, it's not just the constant errors that get me. I'm constantly offended by this lady's utterly banal thoughts and uninteresting writing -- for which she's paid, and probably relatively well, considering that she's been in the travel writing game for quite some time. It seems, as Janet Jackson and the late Luther Vandross advised, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." Some of my favorite unpaid bloggers on France: La Coquette and the now-in-SF Jason Stone.

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