Nom du jour

[muckefuck]

Krugman thinks the election of François Hollande is a triumph for France; The Economist believes it is a disaster. I don't really care either way. The candidate that really captured my imagine was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but not for his politics. It was his name, which immediately brought to mind Melanchthon, the Protestant theologian who decided to Graecise Schwartzerdt. Despite appearances, however, Mélenchon isn't Greek at all but supposedly a corruption of "Belinchón", the name of a hamlet in Cuenca. His paternal grandfather migrated to Oran from Murcia and married another Spaniard. His maternal grandfather was Valencian and married an Italian, but his parents fled Algeria for Morocco and he ended up being born in Tangiers and then named for a Starfleet captain.