If you know Paris, you know that it is primarily populated by men with pencil-thin mustaches who wear berets and carry around baguettes in paper bags. A lot of them wear shirts with thick horizontal stripes. These men don't talk much, they mostly loiter around in the background speaking a language comprised mostly of sniffs and grumbles. (There are also women in Paris; they are uniformly stunning.)

The protagonists of the city are the superspies, the well-coiffed American and British men who use Paris as a rendezvous point with clumsy, heavyset agents from Russia or Bulgaria. Invariably, these meetings end poorly, and the superspies -- though heavily outnumbered -- manage to effect an escape by driving vintage cars along the banks of the Seine. Depending on the day, the Bulgarians either end up in the river, emerging with a spluttering curse, a fish draped across their heads, or they vanish from the scene in some sort of horrific explosion.

But all of that is likely to change, ruining the Paris that we know so well. The mayor of the city is going to ban vintage cars.

From the Times:

[T]he ban would include many of the most recognizably French cars, including the Citroën 2CV, known as the Deux Chevaux; the Citroën DS, celebrated for its clean, distinctive design; the Renault 4L, a practical Everyman’s car of the 1960s and ’70s; and many classic Peugeots. …

The ban would apply to private and commercial vehicles that would be older than 17 years in 2014 and therefore do not comply with existing European standards for the tailpipe emissions that cause smog.

A spokesman for the city estimated that 367,000 cars would be affected. Also targeted are heavy trucks older than 18 years and motorcycles older than 10.

Oh la la, etc.!

The Ob River is a massive tanker that can carry 150,000 cubic meters of liquified natural gas. (You can tell it carries liquified natural gas because the side of the vessel says "L N G" in massive letters.) And the ship is about to do something that no tanker has done before: traverse the winter Arctic to ship fossil fuels from Norway to Japan.

From the BBC:

The tanker was loaded with LNG at Hammerfest in the north of Norway on 7 November and set sail across the Barents Sea. It has been accompanied by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for much of its voyage. ...

"It's an extraordinarily interesting adventure," Tony Lauritzen, commercial director at [the company that owns the vessel,] Dynagas, told BBC News.

"The people on board have been seeing polar bears on the route. We've had the plans for a long time and everything has gone well."

Oh, good! There are still polar bears!

As you prepare piles of food for family and friends this week, keep in mind how much you're actually going to eat. Each Thanksgiving, Americans waste more than a third of the turkey meat they purchase and prepare.

Superstorm Sandy not only revealed the massive class divisions in New York City, but also made them worse. As wealthier areas in Manhattan recover, poor and working-class communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are still struggling.

Some New Yorkers have taken a decidedly illegal tack to solving this problem. From their press release:

Over the past two weeks, a group of concerned New Yorkers has been expropriating thousands of dollars worth of tools and materials from luxury residential developments across Manhattan and delivering them to neighborhoods devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

The confiscated materials, some of them never even used, include: shovels, wheelbarrows, hand trucks, pry bars, tarps, buckets, hard bristle brooms, industrial rope, contractor trash bags, particulate masks, work lights, work gloves, flashlights, heat lamps, and gasoline.

Liberated from their role in building multimillion-dollar pieds-à-terre for wealthy CEOs and Hollywood celebrities, these tools are now in the collective hands of some of the hardest-hit communities in the city where they are now being allocated and shared among the people who need them most. These expropriations will continue as long as the demand for them exists.

Last month, shortly before Sandy ripped apart the shorelines of New Jersey and Long Island, we noted the possibly imminent budget-related retirement of government satellites that help forecasters refine weather data. As the article we cited then asked:

All this week, forecasters have been relying on ... satellite observations for almost all of the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: explode against the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Now we know just how much reliance forecasters placed on satellites. Without them, predictions that Sandy would veer sharply to the west -- the path that brought it to New York -- would not have been made as early as they were.

The Department of the Interior has some harsh words for Black Elk Energy, the company responsible for last week's explosion on an oil  rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, actually, not really harsh at all.

From a letter from Interior's Lars Herbst to Black Elk's CEO [PDF]:

This letter is to notify you that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) has determined that the operating performance of Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations, LLC (Black Elk) must be improved immediately.

Or, ideally, a week ago.

If you're reading this on your phone from a line outside an electronics store, congratulations -- you're a real American! And you're probably way more excited about the 50th anniversary of big-box retail in this country than the rest of us are.

In 1962, when gas cost about 28 cents a gallon and the suburbs were growing faster than you can say "sports utility vehicle," Walmart, Target, and Kmart were all born.

NPR's Morning Edition talked to retail historian Marc Levinson about their rise to prominence and dominance.

One of the prerequisites for the big-box was the car. Everybody had to have a car because the big-box was sitting out in a parking lot somewhere. The big-box made shopping into a family experience. Mom and dad and the kids all piled into the car, they went out to this big store, and they could spend several hours there because there was, by the standards of the day, an enormous amount of merchandise.

Today's stores are about four times the size, but hey, so are our cars!

Since '62, the big boxes, especially Walmart, have grown like an infectious pox upon our nation. Even Friday's planned worker strikes at upwards of 1,000 Walmarts across the country may do nothing to slow the monster's growth. From The Daily Beast:

Thinking about a Mediterranean vacation? Might want to go sooner rather than later.

The above map shows how the "tourism climate index" -- a calculation of how amenable the climate in a location is to outdoor activity -- will be affected by climate change during the summer in Europe. Blue areas will see climatic improvements; yellow, moderately worse climate; brown, significantly worse climate. So if you want to visit, say, Italy or Spain -- book your flight.

Earlier today, the European Environment Agency walked into the room and, plunk, dropped a 300-page report on the anticipated effects of climate change on the continent. Three hundred pages, chock-a-block with maps far more terrifying than that one up there. It's a road map on minute details of what Europe can expect on temperature, flooding, forest fires, soil quality, sea animals. It's the Grays Sports Almanac of the continent through the year 2100.

Here are some of the more alarming maps and graphs, because terror is a dish best shared. (A blanket note: All images from the full report [PDF]; on most, click to embiggen.)

Fracking in the news! Lots of news about fracking! Step right up, get your fracking news!

New York won't allow fracking this year

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) made it official yesterday: The state's review of the health effects of natural gas drilling won't be ready until next year. According to sources that I have at the highest levels of various fracking companies, the CEOs of said companies said, "Aw, fiddlesticks," and did that thing where you snap your fingers while you swing your hand in front of you. Is there a name for that? I don't know. People don't do that very much anymore, but fracking company CEOs have a median age of 206.

The state was supposed to have come to a final decision on fracking rules by the end of the month. From the Associated Press:

The deadline for finalizing regulations is Nov. 29 under the state Administrative Procedures Act, which says a proposed rule expires 365 days after the last public hearing unless it's officially adopted by then. If the regulation isn't finalized by the deadline, the agency has 90 days to submit a new notice of rulemaking, and another 90 days to complete the job. That could potentially delay a final decision for six months. The public would have the opportunity to comment during that time.

A panel of three nationally recognized public health experts was named last week to review the state's health impact study of fracking. Cuomo told a radio interviewer Tuesday he sees no way the panel's work can be completed by the end of next week.

Just FYI, Bostononianites, there's a natural gas leak under your city. Not a big deal. It's a little one. Little small little natural gas leak.

And a tiny bit of additional bad news -- there are also over 3,300 other such leaks.

From The Boston Globe:

Natural gas is escaping from more than 3,300 leaks in Boston’s underground pipelines, according to a new ­Boston University study that underscores the explosion risk and environmental damage from aging infrastructure ­under city sidewalks and streets.

The vast majority of the leaks are tiny, ­although six locations had gas levels higher than the threshold at which explosions could ­occur. Although there have been no reports of explosions in ­Boston from any of the leaks, the study comes three years ­after a Gloucester house ­exploded probably because of a cracked and corroded gas main dating to 1911.

Happily, no one was killed in that explosion, but the owner of the home suffered burns and lacerations.