So in France, when someone is really ugly, you call them a tuna, which I believe is way more potent than "dog." Dogs are cute, but man, to wake up with a tuna in your bed is really serious.

So, you guessed it. This is the analogous ugly list. Because not all soccer players are created equally. I am throwing out Ronaldinho (Brazil) and Franck Ribery (France). Not that they aren't both awesome players and probably people...

So, I must agree with Karebear over at Shrimp and Grits that the World Cup provides all of us women and gay men with some excellent eye candy. I was trying to come up with a Top 5 of my favorite dumb but pretty hands-free athletes, but could only think of two off the top of my head. They are Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast) and Andriy Shevchenko (Ukraine). Now I have been watching diligently in order to complete the list but the poor state of close-ups in soccer filming has made this task pretty difficult. So I ask you, Mandounette readers, to tip me off if you happen to catch a glimpse of a player that deserves one of the three other spots.

Every city—every place for that matter—has a set of smells that is unique, a mix of savory and stench, often more powerful in evoking memories than the sights and sounds of the locale. American airports smell like fast food. European ones like stale cigarettes. Summer on Coniston Drive (and probably most analogous American suburbs) like freshly cut lawns and backyard barbecues. As for Paris, the smells I most associate are freshly baked bread, the spoiled milk odor of camembert that emanates from every fromagerie as well as many a French refrigerator, dog poop and the occasional human poop, the special saccharine cleaning solution they use in the Metro (sometimes mixed with the aforementioned human poop), the chestnuts roasting on metal sheets big like garbage can lids, and flowers of all varieties. But last night, I took a new route home, and a familiar smell made me do a double take. It didn't take me long to place it. It was the smell of Krispy Kreme. Not of the donuts but of the shop. That smell you get sometimes up to two blocks away from one in New York City that is probably the result of evil genius marketing experts and their chemical engineering comrades. The smell that sets off the Pavlovian Krispy Kreme response in most normal Americans.

I turned down many a side street and alley looking for the source of the aroma, but I was not able to find any conclusive evidence of an underground Krispy Kreme in the heart of the 11th arrondissement.

I went home and ate some frozen chicken curry. But what I wouldn't have given for a lemon-filled, glazed bundle of Krispy joy.

Last weekend, I found myself locked out on a balcony with three other lovely women. We were at a get together and the increasingly inebriated male consortium that were responsible for our imprisonment surely thought that that this would be some kind of teasing punishment for us. Of course, when they realized the lameness of their inside sausage fest they opened the doors and were begging us to come back in. But we had no desire to return, the only phallus we needed to inspire our "girl talk" being the sparkling, silent, and sober Eiffel Tower.

The topics of discussion do not need to be enumerated here, but needless to say, they were things that should only be discussed between women and exceedingly cool gay men. And I have missed these talks. So, last night, I invited some of my fellow Juliets to see the girliest movie around: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

No, it was not historically accurate. No, it was not politically pertinent. No, it was not even a very good narrative. But it was magnificently fun. Like a John Hughes movie in period costumes. Like Paris Hilton with a beehive. And it inspired me to party better, with towers of champagne and endless plates of pastries and shoes.

I wish I had seen it before my wedding though, as I would've realized that many of the strange things (for example the fire spitting tower of mini-pastries that they called a wedding cake) were in fact French royal traditions. But then again, it could've just been Sophia Coppola's poetic license again.