2 posts tagged “gossip”

This video, from the Élysée, was taken yesterday when the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the First Lady arrived in London to meet HM Queen Elizabeth II and HH the Duke of Edinburgh. I wrote in a comment on Timothy’s Vox blog, after reading an article about it, that Mme Sarkozy did not know where to stand and tried to follow her husband and the Queen on the inspection. I was wrong: looking at this video, the First Lady knew exactly where to go and accompanied Prince Philip in her meet-and-greet. The Jacqueline Kennedy comparisons aren’t invalid.
   And it seems the newly hyphenated Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is on her way to being the most photographed woman of 2008: her image sells political, fashion (she’s wearing Dior by John Galliano) and gossip media.

In 2002, my colleague Nigel Dunn set up a discussion forum at Lucire, originally called ‘StyleTalk’. This was extremely successful and in the years it was up, it logged up thousands of posts.
   Unfortunately, in 2005 and 2006, this forum was hacked repeatedly—coinciding with the staff difficulties I have alluded to on my blogs over the last nine months or so. Eventually, with other issues becoming more pressing and our attentions elsewhere, we regrettably let the forum die. Its database had been corrupted by hackers so, as far as I know, it could not be salvaged. Perhaps it is for the better.
   Interestingly, we have not had any successful hacking attempts since that change in staff.
   I am happy to say that tonight, we put the forum back, albeit without posts from our lovely regulars such as Lata Tokhi and Joanne de Voe. (If they are reading this, please go there!)
   The forum was also responsible for our discovering Doug Rimington, our regular Wellington photographer, who originally posted there as an enthusiastic amateur teaching himself the trade. I responded to Doug and invited him to a shoot that was to take place the following day.
   The StyleTalk name is being used on another new service we are introducing at Lucire, so the revised forum is called a more boring Lucire Reader Community Forum. But it says what it is and I’m happy with that.
   It’s about 99·5 per cent ready—I have noted some glitches to the people at phpBB, who designed the back end to the forum—but I would love for Voxers to hop on over and see what discussions you can get going. (The glitches do not relate to privacy.) What I am saying is that I trust my Vox neighbourhood here more than any other group to be the folks who cut the ribbons. I’m also happy to hear any feedback you may have, too.
   It’s not the only new service we have there at Lucire—I look forward to letting y’all in on the next one soon.
   As for me, I am off to bed, and hope we don’t wake up to too many bug reports! Have a great day over in the US, and a great afternoon in Europe.