Blogging is good for you

In the latest issue of my favorite magazine, Scientific American, there's a brilliant one-page article by a New York freelance writer named Jessica Wapner on the therapeutic value of blogging. She starts by declaring that "self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off ". In a nutshell, we bloggers seek to take advantage of "the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings ".

Jessica suggests that creative writing in general, and blogging in particular, provide physiological benefits of many kinds... involving appetite for food and sex, and even cancer treatment!

[If only Nicolas Sarkozy were to read Antipodes, if not Scientific American, I'm sure he would promptly "invent" the idea that blogging expenses should be reimbursed by France's splendid health system.]

Jessica quotes a Harvard neuroscientist named Alice Flaherty who provides us with a word that we bloggers should paint in large letters on the wall above our computer: hypergraphia, designating an uncontrollable urge to write. Maybe it's a viral affliction. Personally, I see it as a genetic thing. You're born with this psychosis, and you simply have to learn to live with it... but it seems to get worse with age.

Gee, I feel so much better since writing the above stuff. I only hope that my words don't sicken any disgruntled readers...

Magic talents

This is a rare photo of me engaged in the mysterious activity known as dowsing. If you don't happen to know the meaning of this term, you might take a look at my article of 13 August 2007 entitled Strange skills [display], or you might do better to go directly to the Wikipedia article on this subject [display]. Basically, I'm using a pair of metal rods to search for water beneath the lawn at Gamone. The image is rare in the sense that I don't usually authorize people to take photos of me when I'm engaged in dowsing, because this art involves a set of secret principles that I do not wish to divulge. Exceptionally, this particular photo and the one that follows were taken by a professional dowsing colleague from Marseille who was visiting Gamone in order to watch me in action, and partake of my wisdom in this domain.

In this second image, you might be able to discern, on my black tracksuit trousers, my sponsor's logo. As you can see from my tense concentration, this activity is akin to a high-level competitive sport such as curling.

So, it's normal that the big guys in the sponsorship arena seek out talented dowsing athletes such as yours truly.

To be perfectly truthful, on the particular day these photos of me were taken, I did not actually succeed in detecting the presence of water alongside my house in Gamone. But that was neither here nor there, because it rained for most of the weekend. And, in any case, I'm hooked up to the municipal water supply at Choranche.

Falling faster than sound

Around noon on Monday [French time], a few hours after the successful landing of Nasa's Phoenix vessel on the surface of the planet Mars, a 64-year-old French parachutist named Michel Fournier will be ascending in the Canadian skies for two and a half hours by means of a giant helium-inflated balloon. Then, at an altitude of 40 kilometers, he will be detaching his nacelle. Finally, he will be falling to Earth for over seven minutes at speeds in excess of the velocity of sound.

Fournier is no newcomer to parachuting, having made some 8,600 jumps. He has been planning this high-altitude tentative for years, and training intensively for the exploit in the style of an astronaut.

If he succeeds in his exploit, Michel Fournier will gain no less than four world records: (1) altitude of balloon ascension, (2) altitude of parachute jump, (3) speed in free fall and (4) duration of free fall.

BREAKING NEWS: The website for the Big Jump [visit] indicates that weather conditions have enforced a 24-hour postponement of operations. So, rendezvous Tuesday morning in Canada.

Colored umbrellas

This a quiz, in the domain of general knowledge and culture, based upon the above photo. To help you answer, I'll give you a few hints. Last weekend, when Natacha and Alain came to visit me at Gamone, the weather was mainly wet, but the three of us were equipped with umbrellas. Two of us do their shopping systematically in a chain of international stores of Scandinavian origins, whose name starts with I. The colors of the flag of the home country of that celebrated commercial organization, largely present in the stores themselves, are well known. The third umbrella owner is less organized, purchasing goods in any old boutique at all.

Question: Who are the respective owners of the umbrellas?

Piss stories

The elegant old cylindrical public urinals in Grenoble, molded out of reinforced concrete, have always reminded me of upended sarcophagi from an ancient Roman burial ground. They're fit for a dead emperor to pee in. In fact, Grenoble is full of all kinds of decorated concrete constructions dating from the second half of the 19th century. This is largely due to a pair of related facts, one historical and the other geological.

The inventor of artificial cement, Louis Vicat, was a native of Grenoble. With his son Joseph, he founded a cement company that is still in full swing today. Visitors who arrive in Grenoble by the northern highway (passing along the valley of the Isère, between the Chartreuse and Vercors mountain ranges) drive beneath an archaic system of Vicat conveyor buckets that descend minerals constantly from mines in the nearby mountains. Geologically, the Chartreuse range is one of the rare regions with sources of the precious mineral required for the manufacture of rapidly-setting concrete, which is essential for the creation of molded objects.

Talking about urinals, two young Belgian guys invented recently a mobile video game, named PlaceToPee, for outdoor festivities where people are downing large quantities of beer.

As you can see, their main logo is inspired by the celebrated statue of the Manneken Pis in Brussels. When the device is in operation, the open booth receives a pair of contestants with full bladders and good aim, and each contestant stands in front of his personal urinal.

Above the urinal, a video screen displays the graphic elements of a typical contest such as a downhill skiing race.

Inside the urinal, elegantly described as interactive, several sensor pads, distributed on the outer edges of the bowl, react instantly to the impact of a strong jet of urine, and this input is processed by a computer in such a way as to impinge upon the video contest between the two players.

To avoid being accused of sexism, the inventors offer cardboard funnels to female contestants, enabling them theoretically to focus their fire. I'm convinced that a smart girl with dexterity could win comfortably by concealing a powerful plastic water pistol in her cardboard funnel. She would really take the piss out of male onlookers, who wouldn't be able to witness her stealthy manipulations and certainly wouldn't dare to search her for cheating equipment. As they say in the classics, with a hint of inverted syllables, if the lady could get her act together, that would be a truly cunning stunt.

For me, the very idea of pissing onto electronic sensors brings to mind one of the most memorable funny lines in modern French cinema. The actress Marie Laforet was evoking sarcastically the death by electrocution of her former husband, who happened to piss onto a high-voltage cable. ”During our entire relationship, that was the only time his prick ever produced fireworks."

Crazy Dutch website

Click the logo and simply wait. You'll be thrilled to discover one of the most crazy websites I've ever seen. When I say "crazy", I mean insanely wonderful. Apparently, Hema is a chain of department stores in Holland. The first one opened in 1926 in Amsterdam. Today, there are 150 Hema stores throughout Holland. This extraordinary website has obviously been developed by a creative genius with a sense of humor and some brilliant computer people.

Attempt to knock the socks off democracy

Perpignan is a charming French city on the edge of the Pyrenees, not far from the Mediterranean. And it has a famous railway station.

You can buy a ticket from Perpignan to the Spanish border town of Portbou, just three quarters of an hour away. Then, from Portbou, you can set off on a wider railway gauge towards the Catalonian capital of Barcelona, two and a half hours further down the line. So, Perpignan is the hub of the Franco-Spanish Mediterranean world.

The Catalonian surrealist painter Salvador Dali [1904-1989] went one step further, in decreeing that the railway station at Perpignan was indeed the center of the world. His painting on this theme, three meters high and four meters wide, contains subtle symbols that can hardly be appreciated in a tiny reproduction, but they all get back to the idea that Perpignan's station is a Christian holy of holies, whose light spreads out towards the four corners of Christendom.

Holy city? Perpignan has just been thrown into the electoral limelight through a tale of holey socks. A local official was arrested on the evening of the second round of the municipal elections because he had stuffed his socks with voting bulletins, so that they wouldn't be counted.

Technically, this novel approach towards knocking the socks off democracy was a failure. Since then, local folk have been demonstrating in the streets of Perpignan, calling for a new election. Not surprisingly, as a symbol of their cohesion, the demonstrators brandish socks. Dali would have loved this affair. In his own words, the story of Perpignan's socks would have surely provided him with the stimulus for a huge "mental ejaculation".

New brand of ready-made pastry

I've noticed that the quality of uncooked pastry, sold in supermarkets, changes considerably from one brand to another. Some are good, while others are poor. Obviously, none of them are as good as home-made pastry, but I find it convenient to use the commercial stuff whenever I want to make a tart quickly. The other day, I noticed a new brand of pastry at the supermarket. A test, last night, revealed that it's excellent for my traditional 20-minute apple tart recipe.

The topping is simply a whipped mixture of an egg yolk and thick cream. [It's amusing to see that the color of my cooking blends in well with that of the old pine family table from our former Parisian residence at 16 rue Rambuteau.]

The only hitch is the brand-name of this new pastry:

In French, it's OK, because "crousti" evokes the English adjective "crusty", whereas "pate" is French for "pastry". But I'm incapable of glimpsing this term (on packets in my refrigerator) without imagining that I've seen the word "constipate"... which is not exactly appetizing for the name of a foodstuff.

As the duke said to the actress

Cate Blanchett is accustomed to playing the part of a monarch. She was the elf queen Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Recently, she portrayed the great Tudor queen Elizabeth, for which she has received an Oscar nomination. Apparently, though, Cate's talents at being a queen have made no lasting impression upon a man who's quite at home in this domain. Upon being introduced recently to Prince Philip, Cate told him that she worked in movies. Philip must have thought that this pregnant woman was some kind of a technician, for he immediately started to tell her about his DVD player: "There's a cord sticking out of the back of the machine. Might you tell me where it goes?"

Cate was obliged to point out that her specialty in movies was acting, not handling machines. [I can't help imagining that Cate, if she were less of a lady, might have told the duke exactly and curtly where he could put it: this dangling cord.]

I recall a similar misunderstanding on the part of an old lady in the flat next to mine in Paris, back at the time I was making science shows for French TV. "Monsieur William, you work in TV. Would you mind having a look at my set. The image is all blurry."

Amazing song-writing experiment

The blog of Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) is a constant source of surprises.

Recently, Adams evoked the nonsensical nature of the lyrics of many popular songs, including those of the Beatles. He went on to suggest a collective experiment in song-writing. To start the ball rolling, Scott proposed two delightful lines of nonsense:

She had runaway eyes and marshmallow kittens.
My heart heard a dream like ten thousand mittens.

Then he asked his blog readers to submit similar couplets of amusing gibberish, to complete the lyrics for a song. Scott weeded through all the stuff that reached the blog in the form of comments, and ended up with plausible lyrics [display]. A few days later, a German group named Rivo Drei composed music for these lyrics, and recorded the song. As of today, there's even a music video:



Personally, I'm highly impressed by the style and outcome of this amazing song-writing experiment... even though it's imperfect. I'm convinced that it proves something, but I'm not quite sure what.

Above-the-limit Labrador

My daughter Emmanuelle cares for the well-being of our Labrador Sophia with the same kind of intensity and love as for me.

An ad hoc principle is accepted by the world's medical highlights: When a dog's fine, so is the animal's master. And vice versa.

In Austria, a three-year-old Labrador named Dingo was recently found to have 1.6 grammes of alcohol in its blood. The veterinary said that the animal emitted the smell of an alcohol distillery. Normally, it should have been dead. It was merely dead drunk. Why? Dingo had consumed inadvertently—insofar as a dog is capable of devouring anything in a supposedly inadvertent manner—no less than half a kilo of fresh baker's dough, prepared by her master, a baker. And baker's dough, in the belly of a dog, is rapidly transformed into something with the effects of prime whisky. Now, I hope and pray that Dingo survived this ordeal.

Let me be quite clear about this whole problem of canine inebriation. If ever my Sophia, for one reason or another, were to attain the same alcohol reading as Dingo, it goes without saying that there's no way in the world I would allow her to take the wheel of our old Citroën.

Near misses

In French, a young lady capable of winning a beauty pageant or the title of Miss France, say, is referred to as a "miss"... and this English term can even be found in French dictionaries. On December 8, the winner of the Miss France 2008 contest was Valérie Bègue, from the French island in the Indian Ocean named La Réunion.

In the above photo, behind the new miss, the lady in a black and white hat is Geneviève de Fontenay. Having chaperoned the Miss France contest for ages, she has become a celebrity in her own right. It might even be said that, in France, the look and the outspoken personality of Madame de Fontenay are probably better known than the identity of the latest miss.

Now, the famous chaperone turned red with fury when she learned that some old photos of Valérie Bègue, posed in a suggestive manner, have been published in a French magazine. Madame de Fontenoy announced that the new Miss France should resign immediately, and she even referred to La Réunion in an impolite fashion that might be construed as offensive, indeed racist. As for Valérie and her countless supporters in La Réunion and elsewhere, she doesn't appear disposed to yield her newly-won crown. So, a war has broken out between Miss France and Geneviève de Fontenoy.

Not to be outdone by miss-behavior in France, Belgium provides us with a shocking case of an unexpected miss-adventure involving their newly-elected national miss, named Alizée Poulicek.

Normally, in Belgium, individuals in the public limelight are expected to be fluent in at least two languages: French and Flemish. Well, Miss Belgium doesn't seem to understand a word of Flemish. To put it bluntly, in the case of Miss Belgium, something is seriously amiss.

Elsewhere on the planet, another miss has hit the news: Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007. Somebody asked her what she thought of the fact that many Americans can't locate their land on maps. To my mind, her reply was more stunning than the sexy photos of Miss France and more alarming than the linguistic infirmities of Miss Belgium.

For sale: horses, carpets, souls...

Referring to current discussions in Bali on the conception of a post-Kyoto agreement on greenhouse emissions, Australia's new prime minister Kevin Rudd used a quaint Aussie metaphor: "It will be a negotiation, and negotiations involve horse-trading. People here know a bit about what horse-trading means."

Here in France, when negotiators get around to trading advantages and disadvantages in a laborious fashion, a common metaphor evokes Middle Eastern merchants selling carpets.

At the Vatican, the pope is selling neither Australian horses nor Persian carpets. As we all know, he deals in souls. And, in his soul-trading, the pope uses neither dollars nor euros. The papal currency bears an antiquated name: indulgences. The basic idea is that the sins of pious people can be pardoned, at least partly, by the pope. In the 16th century, you could even obtain an official papal receipt (hot off the newly-invented printing presses) stating the precise terms according to which a part of your debt due to sin has been canceled.


Pope Leo X [1475-1521] got around to selling indulgences to acquire finance to rebuild the basilica of St Peter. There was even a brilliant marketing slogan: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs."





A strait-laced German monk named Martin Luther [1483-1546] was quite exasperated about this procedure, and the final outcome of his fury was the foundation of Protestantism... which seems to confirm that God moves in mysterious ways.



For the third time since he became pope, Benedict XV has just bestowed a so-called plenary (full) indulgence upon the faithful. This latest papal offer will benefit pilgrims visiting Lourdes during the next 12 months. Opening date = Dec 8, 2007. Closing date = Dec 8, 2008.

Always interested in the possibility of using the Internet to make money [which, sadly, has never been the case for me up until now], I seize this opportunity of announcing to pilgrims to Lourdes that, for the duration of this exceptional and highly attractive Vatican offer, I'm prepared to advertise and market their indulgences through my blog... or maybe, if the volume of trade were to become excessive, through a dedicated website [what a lovely adjective!] whose coordinates will be announced at a later date. My fees are amazingly low: a mere 15% of the sales value of the indulgence. And I promise to send each purchaser, for a small extra fee, a computer printout that illustrates—more eloquently than graphs or pie charts—the soundness of his/her investment: an ancient engraving revealing the horrors of eternal damnation in Hell.

Mind the gap!

Readers who haven't had the privilege of being jolted around in the London underground train system will need to know that the gap in question lies between the doors of carriages and the edge of the platform. Its width varies from one platform to another, even from one part of a platform to another. And passengers who forget to "mind" this abyss stand the risk of falling into the depths of subterranean London, and maybe breaking an arm or a leg. So, that's why the transport authorities hired a woman named Emma Clarke whose delightful voice floats out constantly, from one end of the underground network to the other, warning passengers of this danger. She also chatters on nonstop about all kinds of trivial things, as if traffic would grind to a halt were it not for all this verbiage. Emma Clarke tells you, for example, that you must stand on the right-hand side [if I remember correctly] of escalators. She informs you that volunteers are collecting money for such-and-such a worthy charity, just as she lets you know that pickpockets have been sighted in such-and-such a zone.

Personally, accustomed to the quiet and smooth métro in Paris, I'm horrified by the noisy London underground. Besides, their stylized maps are far removed from geographical reality, the color-based signs associated with the various lines are meaningless for newcomers, and the basic system for designating itineraries—using directional adjectives such as northbound and southbound—is poorly conceived. In other words, I look upon the London underground as an uncomfortable mess... almost as antiquated and unpleasant as Sydney's trains.

But let me return to Emma Clarke. Having attained celebrity status, she started her own elegant website, with all kinds of unexpected goodies:

Now everything would have been fine, and Emma Clarke would have continued to expand into a bigger and more sophisticated media business if only she had remained a serious young lady, respectful of her employer and her audience. Alas, Emma started to crack jokes on her website. For example, she made a fake public announcement to inform US tourists that they're talking too loudly. And other cheeky things. Well, London Transport doesn't seem to share Emma's sense of humor. In any case, they've just fired her.

Having reached this point in my presentation of the wonders and woes of Emma Clarke, I hasten to add that there might not be a word of truth in all that I've just been saying. Maybe the charming voice of the alleged female is the synthetic audio output of a robot. Her existence could well be a gigantic hoax conceived by smart marketing people and computer experts at London Transport, with the aim of smoothing the edges of their rough network by introducing an imaginary feminine touch. Be that as it may, I'm obliged to point out that my disparaging remarks about the London underground were, of course, totally false. Just ask a typical Londoner and he'll tell you that their trains are the finest service in the universe... even better than Sydney's fabulous system.

Saving the planet

She's not in the same heavyweight category as Al Gore, but Australian star Cate Blanchett has just revealed that she's making a personal effort to save the planet's natural resources.

"I really love a refreshing shower. But I'm careful about how much water I use. So, I've just had a shower timer fitted, which means I don't have more than four-minute showers."

On the other hand, she denied a rumor about no longer washing her hair at all. And she ended her interview in the UK's Daily Express by a curious evocation of her home land.

"I do live in a desert called Australia, you know!''

We're all familiar with the "sunburnt country" image invented by Dorothea Mackellar [1885-1968]. But I feel that Cate Blanchett has parched us out excessively when she refers to the Australian continent as a desert. Although I know it's wrong to judge an individual from her physical appearance, Cate doesn't strike me as an expert on deserts. I have no idea whether she spends much time Googling about the environment. Besides, I wonder what kind of a computer she uses.

Optical illusion

The first time I saw this optical illusion, I was tricked. I believed naively that it had something to do with left brains and right brains.

From time to time, the spinning woman seems to change directions, going suddenly from from clockwise to anticlockwise, or vice versa. It's easy to find an explanation for this illusion on the web. It all depends on when the viewer's brain suddenly decides spontaneously that the direction should change. There's no real trick, simply a finely-designed demo.

Bone box excursion

In my recent article entitled Bloody beliefs [display], I described a place of pilgrimage, not far from where I live, named Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier. Well, I went back there last Sunday to witness a curious event, of an anachronistic unworldly nature: the arrival in the church, for a few hours, of a bodily relic of a relatively recent Christian saint, Thérèse de Lisieux.

She became a nun at the age of 15, and her life was uneventful. Afflicted with tuberculosis, she died unknown at the age of 24, leaving behind a simple autobiography entitled Story of a soul, which made her posthumously famous throughout Christendom. It was said that the corpse of Thérèse Martin produced a strong scent of roses for several days. Now that is literally what the Church has often referred to, ever since the Middle Ages, as an "odour of sanctity". As weird as this phenomenon might appear to us today, this allegedly pleasant odour of such-and-such a dead body has often played a role in transforming the deceased individual into a candidate for sainthood!

Inside the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier last Sunday, I was surprised by the size of the crowd of reactionary Catholics who had gathered to welcome a relic of Thérèse de Lisieux.

Up until recently, I had imagined it as unthinkable that Catholics in France, in the year 2007, would still allow themselves to be mystified by a fragment of bone from the body of a young woman who had died of tuberculosis 110 years ago. I thought that the primitive adoration of relics had disappeared with the Middle Ages. Not at all! The people I saw in the church at Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier a week ago looked like the ordinary parishioners you might see of a Sunday morning in front of innumerable French churches. Inside their brains, though, they must nurture very weird beliefs... of corpses that smell like roses, and of bone fragments, capable of bringing them nearer to God, which are worthy of being carted ceremoniously around the countryside in a glass and gold box. In fact, I went off to Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier with my new movie camera, thinking that it might be an interesting subject for a short reportage. But the vision of all those crazy people parading in front of the reliquary nauseated me to such an extent that I lost whatever desire I might have had to communicate with them and make a video.

It could only happen in France

The following true story is perfectly trivial, but it's amusing in the sense that it could only happen in France. It starts with a typical photo of Nicolas Sarkozy, in a hurry, taken on 12 September 2007 as he leaves the weekly Conseil des ministres at the Elysées Palace.

Journalists confronted with this image [taken by an AFP photographer] were intrigued to notice that Sarkozy was carrying what appeared to be a handwritten paper. Once the photo was enlarged [no doubt on a computer screen], the contents of this document could be easily examined and analyzed. Surprise! The round handwritten letters had obviously been penned by a female, and the document appeared to be a personal letter that started out as follows: "I have the impression that I haven't seen you for ages, and I miss you..." The short letter indicates that the writer and her husband will be away from France for a while, then it ends on a highly personal tone: "I'd love to succeed in seeing you during the following week or weekend. Millions of Besitos." Although I'm not familiar with this kind of language, I would imagine that "besitos" are little kisses. My God, everybody thought, this is as good as love notes between Charles and Camilla! Was it imaginable that the president of France, leaving a ministerial meeting, was carrying an open love letter under his arm, for everybody in the world to see? Was this another example of the Sarkozy shock style (like spending a few days on the luxury yacht of a friend, or jogging in front of press photographers) aimed at startling mildly the world in general and his French compatriots in particular?

Next step in the puzzle. Journalists had no trouble in identifying the woman who wrote the letter: Isabelle Balkany, a 60-year-old local-government personality, and the wife of Patrick Balkany, a member of parliament. The Balkanys have always been close political associates and personal friends of Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy. Was it thinkable that Nicolas Sarkozy might be involved in a romantic relationship with the wife of a prominent politician?

Following step. Isabelle Balkany quickly explained to curious journalists that she was indeed the author of this letter, but that it was addressed, not to the president, but to his wife, Cécilia Sarkozy. "I'm simply an old friend of Cécilia's." Fair enough. But, in that case, why was Nicolas walking around with Cécilia's personal mail, opened, in his hand?

Final step [for the moment]. Here we move into higher realms of expression, which can only be appreciated if you know how to read and write immaculate French. I'll try to summarize the situation. There are certain tiny linguistic details in written French [as in written Latin] that reveal the sex of the individual to whom the letter is addressed. For example, if you see the sentence "Tu es désirable", you don't know whether it's a male or a female who's being described as desirable. But, if you see "Tu es beau", you know it's a male who's being described as handsome. And, if you see "Tu es belle", you know it's a female who's being described as lovely. Well, in the context of the affectionate communication written by Isabelle Balkany, there's a tiny word, vu [past participle of the verb voir, to see], whose spelling would normally indicate the sex of the individual to whom the letter is sent. If Isabelle Balkany's sentence "I have the impression that I haven't seen you for ages, and I miss you..." were intended for a female receiver, such as Cécilia, then the tiny word should have been written with a final e, as vue. In fact, it's written as vu.

Maybe this simply means that Isabelle made a spelling mistake. Maybe she speaks and writes French, as the saying goes, like a Spanish cow. If not, it's Nicolas who may have made a faux pas by strutting out of the ministerial meeting with a private love letter under his arm... unless, of course, he did so deliberately. Who knows? In any case, as I said at the beginning of my article, this delightful storm in a wine glass could only happen in France.

Rugby craze

In France, even cats are following the Rugby World Cup on TV.

This young rugby fan, named Lulu, is a new member of the household of my Mediterranean friends Natacha and Alain. They noticed that the cat seemed to be watching TV out of the corner of its eye, as it were. When they installed Lulu's scratching pedestal in front of the TV set, Natacha told me they were astonished to discover that the cat apparently follows the movements of the rugby action on the screen, for long periods of time. What I don't know yet is whether Lulu is betting on the Blacks or the Wallabies... or maybe even France.

God save the court

A court of law in Timisoara has just thrown out a case against God filed by a 40-year-old Romanian citizen named Mircea Pavel. Insofar as the plaintiff himself just happens to be doing a spell of twenty years in jail for murder, an observer might conclude that Pavel is attacking God because (a) he feels that the Lord has not taken adequate care of him, and (b) he has nothing better to do with his time. Be that as it may, the Romanian court apparently examined the affair seriously before throwing it out. Pavel's lawyers gave the identity of the accused as God, residing at present in the Heavens, and represented in Romania by the Orthodox church. The divine defendant was charged with "fraud, breach of faith, corruption and bribery". In particular, the plaintiff insisted upon the fact that the accused had failed to answer his prayers. "At the time of my baptism," explained Pavel, "I drew up a formal contract with the accused whereby I would be delivered from evil. Well, for the moment, the defendant has failed to honor our contract, in spite of the fact that I have sent him numerous contributions and countless prayers." In throwing out the case, the Romanian court explained: "God is not subject to law... and, in any case, we don't have his full address."