I’m sitting in a hot hot hotspot cafe in Montmartre, Paris. It’s hot because the heaters are on full. The doors are wide open. It’s February, but not that cold outside. They have heaters outside the cafe as well. Many cafes are like that here. People like to sit out on the pavement, and cafes like to use all the space they can. When they ban smoking indoors there will probably be a lot more outdoor heaters because people will want to sit and smoke without getting cold. It was like that in Canada. Many places with outside heaters for the smokers. Perhaps it would be more environmentally friendly to let people smoke indoors, at least in certain places. You can always have non-smoking cafes and bars for those who don’t smoke or who don’t like smoke.

Maybe these cafes would say that the amount of fossil fuel they burn with those outdoor heaters is not that much compared to other things, such as the flights many of the tourists took to get here. Or China. People often mention China. One new coal fired power station being built every day. Okay, but there are 1.4 billion people in China but only six or seven customers in this cafe I’m in at the moment.

I came in here to use the internet, but you only get half an hour free before it times out. So now I’m offline. I’ll have to upload this later. I’ve just managed to get MP3 uploads to work on Turnpiece Gallery sites, so people will be able to put up their music, which a number of people have saying they want to do, as well as images and flash movies. I still need to test it a bit more before making it live though, but did a succesful upload of a Boycott Coca Cola Experience song just now.

I’m in Paris at the moment hoping to meet the KarmaBanque people, originators of the Boycott Coca Cola campaign. Fairtradetrousers suggested I call in on themI’ve been listing to their podcasts recently, from their Resonance FM radio show. I think I now understand why it makes sense to boycott Coca Colam but it’s not something that can be summed up in an easy soundbite, which is a bit of a problem. Telling someone not to drink Coke because the Coca Cola company’s share price is vulnerable sounds a bit like telling your children to pick on the puny weak kid at school. But the Coca Cola isn’t a puny weak kid and there are plenty of good reasons for not drinking it, not just for your own health but I think also the health of people in India who are having their water supply polluted – I’ll need to get back online and find some links.

There’s a mermaid on the ceiling.

A woman came over to me with her mobile phone and address book and asked me someething, pointing to one of the numbers, something about it being blocqué. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do. Tu n’as pas un portable? I think she was using the familiar tu form rather than the formal vous, though not sure. I got my mobile out, telling her it was an English mobile so it would be expensive to call a French number. For me it would be like making an international call. Very expensiive. It’ll just be for two seconds, she said. So I dialled the number, putting 33 in front of it for France, and leaving off the leading 0. I got an unobtainable tone, I think. Their phone sounds are different here. I told her there’s something up with the number, not her phone. She asked me some more things, of which I only picked up a few words: England, after, foreigner. Then she asked for a cigarette, which I understood.

A few minutes later she was asking another foreigner for her phone. This time she got through and spoke for a while – more than two seconds.

A guy turns the heaters off. Temperature returns to normal.