Re: French question -- tenses

From: "Oskar Gudlaugsson"

> >From: DOUGLAS KOLLER
> >So, like, yesterday I'm eating this duck, you know, and it's, like, sooo
> >good, and then this man I've never met before comes up to me and, like,
> >pukes on my shoe, and I'm like, "Ew!".
> Show me a Western language which doesn't allow a use of present tense like
> that. I think most less linguistically aware people wouldn't even think of
> it as language-specific. I guess what I'm saying is: it's normal.
I'm not so much balking at tense usage as the rest of the sentence, and, as
a non-native speaker without exposure to French teens or "universitaires",
I've never heard French people speak this way. Still, glossing "je mange" as
"I ate" rubs me the wrong way intuitively. Without the above allowance, (ie:
you are there) I don't see how it works. But I'm more concerned about the
sentence as a whole, which sounds (to me) rather ungrammatical. Native
speakers, where can you be?

Kou