Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Barbara George Remembered: Singer-songwriter Barbara George -- "I Know (You Don't Love Me No More)," a song she wrote and performed at 19, topped the charts in 1961 -- died last week at 64.

Dan Philips sings her praises and passes the mp3s at home of the groove.

And he points to an appreciation -- Local R&B legend left music to be with God -- at Houma (La.) Today. (reg. req.)

Ethnic strife threatens to divide ... Belgium?

The political leader of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, has caused outrage by saying that the 175-year-old Belgian nation was an "accident of history" with "no intrinsic value".

This is confusing from the get-go: Yves Leterme, the Flemish region's premier with the French name, is on the Dutch team.

Adding personal insult to political injury, he accused French speakers living in Flanders of "lacking the mental capacity to learn Dutch". He scorned the official notion that Belgium was a bilingual nation, saying: "Look at the difficulties Francophone leaders, and even the king of this country, have in speaking fluent Dutch."

The Telegraph (UK) story certainly sounds like meiosis is near:

The two halves of the nation read different newspapers, watch different television programmes, listen to different pop music and follow different celebrities. Outside Brussels, road signs and notices are strictly monolingual, to the point of farce.

Tourists driving from Brussels to nearby Mons or Lille frequently panic when they leave the capital and those two city names suddenly vanish from road signs. They do not realise that the road runs through Flanders, so motorway signs must say they are heading for "Bergen" and "Rijsel" - the Flemish names for Mons and Lille, respectively.

Mr Leterme's hard-line stance reflects the growing sense among voters in Flanders, the richer and larger half of Belgium, that they subsidise ungrateful French compatriots in the south and the time to sever the last remaining ties may be near.

They'd call the new countries Flanders and what? Another version of this story calls it Francophone Belgium.

(Agatha Christie's master detective Hercule Poirot was born in the French-speaking town of Spa, in the province of Liege which is Luik in Dutch.)

News on the Web: Want to read what the hometown paper of the Arizona Cardinals says about last night's lovely 30-3 Patriots exhibition-game win? Newslink.org offers links to a world of metros, dailies, weeklies, radio and TV stations and more.

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