Not a leg to stand on

In recent articles, I've evoked the terribly grave subjects of torture and the assassination of civilians in the context of the disastrous crusade instigated by the former president of the USA. Today, I'm tempted to evoke this domain in a more flippant manner, through an anecdote that is funny in a macabre way.

That beautiful photo of the village of Herat in Afghanistan was taken by a US photographer in 1978, when that archaic land was imagined by foreigners as a place of a thousand and one exotic charms. In Paris, at that time, I used to eat regularly in a splendid little Afghan restaurant, and I imagined the country through its cooking: in a word, delicious.

Today, the press informs us of the extraordinary operation of a suicide bomber in that village. A disabled man, with an artificial leg, stumbled towards the governor's residence. His lurching steps were aggravated by the presence of a weighty pile of explosives packed into his hollow prosthesis. To call a graveyard spade a spade, the villager had decided to be a suicide bomber. But word gets around quickly in a village: faster, in any case, than the limping speed of a one-legged would-be terrorist. He was still within a few hundred meters of the governor's residence when security staff received a message concerning the impending attack. So, the police simply acted in a way that would be considered, in normal circumstances, as in very poor taste. They took aim at the artificial leg and fired. The blast produced a death toll of one. The disabled villager was henceforth more disabled than ever, in that the governor's compound was showered with a shrapnel mix of human body parts and fragments of what was once an artificial leg.

The press article informs us that there has not been any claim for the intended attack. That leaves the way open for doubt. Rather than condemning the perpetrator for planning to kill people, I prefer to imagine that he was fed up with strutting around on an artificial leg, and that he merely wished to commit suicide in as spectacular a way as possible. To go out in fireworks, as it were, along with his damnable leg, in an open place where he was not likely to hurt other villagers. If ever I learned that his act was recorded by a friend for YouTube, I'll attach the video to the present post.

What happened next?

We human beings are naturally inquisitive, even when we're not directly concerned by the events we're observing. Haven't you ever come upon some kind of a quarrel, in public, and waited around until you saw the outcome, even though you didn't know the individuals involved in the conflict, and had no idea what it was all about? There are cases in which it's terribly frustrating to discover the premises of an interesting situation, without being able to stick around long enough to find out what happened next. I've often felt that our all-too-brief human existence on the planet Earth is exactly like that. Theoretically, the general situation is intriguing, indeed more than enough to arouse the curiosity of a common mortal. But most of us will almost certainly be obliged to abandon our earthly existence without ever having an opportunity of discovering what it's all about, and what happens next.

Look, for example, at the following photo:

I believe the photo was taken in England, no doubt around the middle of last century (judging from the automobile in the background). But the only piece of solid information I have, concerning the subject of the photo, is a brief caption:

Testing the world's first rocket-propelled bicycle.

The fellow holding the handle bars seems to be about to straddle his machine, whereas the guy kneeling down behind the bike looks as if he's fiddling around with wires, or maybe lighting a match. Really, I'm as frustrated as hell. I would love to know what happened next.

Australian gnome at Gamone

In my recent article entitled Wanderlust [display], I pointed out that the first recorded case of a traveling gnome prank occurred in Sydney in 1986. I happened to be working at the Curtin University in Perth at that date, waiting for the America's Cup season to start, and I remember hearing of that strange gnome affair on the other side of the continent. Last night, I received an email from a woman who runs a blog about gnomes, entitled Gnutty for Gnomes [display]. She asked me the origin of the anecdote about the gnome Bilbo. Well, it's mentioned explicitly in a Wikipedia page on gnome pranks [display].

In July 1986, my son François had joined me in Fremantle. At the Bastille Day ball in Perth, he met up with a Franco-Australian girl name Francine, and they became instant friends. The following year, I returned to Paris. For my birthday in 1987, Francine and François sent me a tiny Australian gnome named Rupert. Seven years later, the gnome moved down here to Gamone with me, where he spends a lot of time climbing around on rocks and searching for mushrooms.

Rupert is so small that, whenever he's out on the lawn, Sophia has to be careful not to walk on him.

In fact, it's reassuring to know that Sophia is there to protect him if ever Rupert were to be attacked by the many elves and leprechauns that inhabit the mysterious Vercors mountains. Meanwhile, I often wonder if Rupert might suddenly decide to fly off, one of these days, on a tourist trip to his native Antipodes.

Wanderlust

It appears that ceramic garden gnomes were invented in Germany in the middle of the 19th century. But it was in my native land, Australia, that an amazing gnome event first occurred, in 1986. A woman in the eastern suburbs of Sydney woke up one morning to discover that her garden gnome Bilbo had disappeared, leaving a note: "Dear Mum: I couldn't stand the solitude any longer. I've gone off to see the world. Don't be worried. I'll be back soon. Love and kisses, Bilbo." During the months that followed, in her mail, the lady received photos of her gnome in various well-known European settings: in front of Big Ben, alongside the Eiffel Tower, in a Venetian gondola, etc. And scribbled words of affection on the back of each photo assured his mum in Sydney that he was having the time of his life.

Finally, one night, Bilbo reappeared unobtrusively in his native Sydney garden. His wanderlust was fulfilled, and his mum found him posed calmly among the flowers as if nothing had ever happened. But his gnome's heart was in fact full of contentment and pride in his exploit.

We learn today that this same kind of wanderlust has struck in an unlikely place: Easter Island.

The French press has just revealed that one of the 980 giant statues—referred to as moai—has expressed the desire to travel to Paris "to emit spiritual energy that will change the conscience of humanity". Thanks to the Louis Vuitton group, the maoi's wish will be granted. Next year, a giant statue will be brought from Easter Island to the City of Lights, and it will be posed for a fortnight in the Tuileries gardens.

In my opinion, that's an excellent address for a maoi on a short trip to Paris. It will reside between the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde and the glass pyramid of the Louvre. On the other hand, unlike its homeland, there won't be a view of the vast ocean.

That particular site was chosen by two members of the island's Rapanui community, who came to Paris especially for that purpose. One of them told us what to expect from the maoi's presence: "It will metamorphose the conscience of the materialistic world into a more humanistic conscience." In my humble opinion, in this time of economic crisis and fear about global warming, that's exactly what we need, in France and elsewhere. The Easter Island fellow added: "The maoi is not a mere hunk of stone. It's a link. They show the world that, in attacking Nature, Man destroys himself. The story of Easter Island is the history of Humanity."

Do you know what I think? I reckon that the super bright guy from Hawai, young Barack, might be pulling the strings behind this unexpected and extraordinary scheme for transferring some Pacific wisdom to the Old World. Besides, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the halt in Paris were just a stopover on the way to the White House...

Nice nicknames

Ever since I saw this amazing photo of Prince Henry of Wales wearing a Nazi insignia, I've been convinced that this lad has a detached screw floating around in his royal gray matter.

Yesterday, I saw his amateur video in which he designates comrades as "Paki" (slang for Pakistani) and "raghead" (slang for Arab). In the following version of the video of Mr Wales (as his military comrades call him), the subtitles are helpful, since Harry often mumbles and swears, and his instructions to comrades are delivered with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.



Today, we hear that Prince Charles and his sons use regularly the nickname "Sooty" for a dark-skinned polo-player of Indian origins.

Since Prince Harry seems to be fond of nicknames based upon facial features, I think it's high time we gave him one: a nice little nickname that sticks, evoking what Harry sees when he looks in a mirror.

I've often pointed out that Australians are misled when they imagine that their colloquial language is particularly rich and colorful. There is little in everyday Australian language that gets anywhere near the vast splendors and subtleties of colloquial French, regional dialects throughout France and argot (slang). Just look at the huge success of the Dany Boon movie Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, inspired by the colloquial language of the Picardie region. In the domain of Australian nicknames, however, there's a peculiarity that's so silly that it's hilarious. I'm referring to the common habit of using the nickname "Blue" for a guy with red hair. That's all we need for Prince Harry (who lived for a while in Australia). So, I nickname him solemnly, from now on, Blue... or Bluey for close friends.

Paranoia

Ever since Apple announced that our hero Steve Jobs wouldn't be delivering the keynote address at the recent Apple Expo, and that this would be the company's final presence at this trade show, I have the impression that everybody is talking about this insanely geniustic guy, and that the entire business world is in a state of fever.

Or is it just me?

Two virginity jokes

The first joke is factual. It concerns a delightful adolescent habit in the USA that consists of wearing a so-called purity ring and making a pledge of sexual abstinence up until one's marriage.

A survey has just revealed that serious young folk who have decided to make such a pledge and wear such a ring end up having premarital sex just as readily as everybody else. In other words, the purity rings and pledges are mere symbols of wishful thinking. But here's the joke... which would be funny, were it not distressing for those concerned. Whenever young people in this virginal category happen to fall into the screwing trap, they're likely to be confronted with more sexual problems than the others, simply because—like bad boy scouts who haven't respected their Be Prepared motto—they're overwhelmed by the consequences of sudden unexpected passion. They've never envisaged using condoms, which makes them perfect candidates for unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

My second joke is a nice little Xmas tale.

A young girl has just been examined by her doctor (or physician, as they say in the States).

DOCTOR: Well, young lady, I have good news for you and your male companion. In about eight months' time, you'll be the parents of...

GIRL: Excuse me for interrupting, Doctor, but I don't have a male companion.

DOCTOR: Let me put it another way. You'll be able to inform your most recent male partner that you're now...

GIRL: I'm sorry to correct you, Doctor, but I've never been involved with a male partner. I've never had any kind of relationship whatsoever with males.

DOCTOR: Then you've surely been receiving treatment in artificial insemination from a gynecologist...

GIRL: I'm sorry, Doctor, but I have no idea what you're talking about.

The doctor walks to the window, opens it and starts staring silently up at the sky.

DOCTOR: The first and last time this happened, long ago, a fabulous star appeared in the sky. This time, I don't want to miss it.

Smoking gun

I recall a Dilbert story in which the pointy-haired boss got caught in heavy rain in the parking lot and turned up soaked at the office. Dilbert and his fellow workers convinced their boss that he should strip down to his underwear and put his suit in a microwave oven to dry in a few minutes. It sounded like a good idea. However, when the steaming suit was extracted from the oven, it had shrunk several sizes, and the boss looked even more bulky than usual for the rest of the day.

Thankfully, in France, most gendarmes are smarter than Dilbert's boss. There are exceptions, of course, such as these movie specimens in the fashionable Mediterranean port of Saint-Tropez:

Recently in eastern France, we heard of a real-world gendarme who would probably be ill-advised to tackle studies in rocket science. The young man was annoyed to discover that his Sig Sauer SP 2202 firearm had got damp while he was walking in the rain.

Back at the barracks, the gendarme put his gun in an oven, hoping that some warm air would dry it out.

Sadly, the elegant German-made semi-automatic firearm, composed to a large extent of synthetic polymers, melted into an ugly unusable mess.

An observer pointed out that certain gendarmes are accompanied by dogs. Maybe the authorities in charge of gendarmes should issue explicit warnings concerning actions that are strictly prohibited in the case of police dogs and their masters who've been caught out in the rain...

Stuff called spam

I went to live and work in the UK in December 1962... at a time when an obscure musical group called the Beatles was starting to become popular up in Liverpool.

The 1962-63 winter was harsh, and I could never figure out why anyone would want to stay in such an environment. Brits were then offered spectacular spring entertainment in the form of the Profumo affair, featuring personages straight out of a James Bond novel.

At the end of June 1963, I decided that my six months with IBM in their Wigmore Street headquarters had been more than sufficient as an experience of life in Britain. So, I returned to France.

The reason why I'm talking about my first and last stay in the UK is that I'm obliged to make an amazing confession. During those six months in London, I never got around to eating spam. Worse than that, I hadn't even discovered yet, at the ripe old age of 23, that such a strange foodstuff as spam existed. I had learned to appreciate English delicacies such as fish and chips, cold pork pies, etc, but the spam phenomenon somehow escaped me. In fact, during my stay in South Kensington, I usually ate in Italian, French and Indian restaurants.

Years later, I returned to England for a few extended weekend visits, assisting a French girlfriend from Paris who organized tours. We were lodged in cheap hotels, and fed in standard tourist restaurants.

And that's when I finally discovered the famous canned meat called spam, produced by Tulip in Denmark under license to the Hormel Foods Corporation. It was hilarious to see intrigued French tourists in an English restaurant, trying to identify the exact nature of the mysterious ham-like product they found in their plates. The Internet did not exist then. Today, we can visit the official Spam website. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia page on the Spam foodstuff indicates euphemistically that most pejorative uses of the term spam evoke "undesirable repetition". Readers hear of the Monty Python masterpiece that no doubt launched the concept of spam throughout the civilized world.



As of today, we're privileged to have free legal access through YouTube (authorized by the copyright owners) to many of the great Monty Python sketches.

Peace and love... and entertainment

In the Holy City of Jerusalem, there have often been nasty conflicts between various lovable and charitable Christian neighbors who happen to have inherited significant chunks of real estate at the Crusader-built church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is alleged to have been crucified and buried. The latest popular punch-out involved the major proprietors, Orthodox Greeks, and their Armenian fellow travelers. In the following video coverage of the event [turn up the audio volume], you can see Israeli policemen trying vainly to intercept the blows, which symbolize gloriously the power of the Lord.



It goes without saying that this free-for-all is taking place at the holiest of holy places in Christendom, and that the pious pugilists appear, through their robes, to be ecclesiastics of various kinds.

I can't tell you much I love this great stuff. What a pity it doesn't happen more often. I can imagine a sort of regular world series of all-out brawls between Christian groups of all denominations. Matches would be organized, not only in Jerusalem, but in all the planet's great cities where the religious fighting spirit lives on: Rome, Paris, Belfast, Salt Lake City, etc. Onward Christian soldiers! Later, the international organizing committee might explore the interesting idea of inviting teams from other faiths—such as Judaism and Islam—into the tournaments. The shows might be enhanced by bouts in feminine categories, maybe mud-pit wrestling matches between Western nuns and blue-shrouded Taliban females. To my mind, religion must become a synonym of fun. And why not fighting fun?

I love to invent names. This planetary sporting/entertainment affair could be called the World Crusader Tournament.

Wacko of the week award

In the category of Forgettable Grand Declarations, I was tempted to give this week's Wacko Award to an angry Sarah Palin, responding to unnamed McCain campaign aides who've been criticizing her recently, unjustly (of course): "That’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right." It was the lady's choice of the eloquent term "jerks", above all, that incited my immediate admiration.

But then I realized there would have to be a tie with a loud-mouthed European prime minister. While visiting Moscow last Thursday, Silvio Berlusconi referred to the US president-elect as "young, handsome and suntanned". Witty Silvio's a scream, isn't he!

Stuff that appears to be unintelligible

At first sight, the following text (sent to me by a friend) appears to be unintelligible, but in fact it turns out to be perfectly readable:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses, and you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelms. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Talking about apparently unintelligible stuff, you might contemplate the following delightful case (also sent to me by a friend):

If you click the image, you'll be offered a baffling French-language video [requires the Windows Media Player]. In case you imagine that a knowledge of spoken French would enable you to know what it's all about, I'm afraid I must inform you that this is not the case. Even for somebody who understands perfectly all that is said in this video, the affair still remains highly mysterious, indeed incomprehensible. But here are few hints about what seems to be happening. The fellow is building this space vessel in his backyard with the aim of setting out on an astral voyage. The high point of the video, towards the end, is when his mother gives us a glimpse of the vessel's electronic guidance device, which will be controlled by the guy's mind, using parapsychology.

Electronic frisbee made in China

My friend Corina, who has an excellent French-language blog named Jour après jour [Day after day], is interested in devices such as watches and clocks that are construed to keep time in a fuzzy fashion. Her latest discovery on the web is an elegantly-designed timepiece that enables you, for a price tag of merely $229, to attain the ultimate Nirvana in which Time is what you want it to be.

[Click the image to visit the website that sells this beautiful object.]

Designed by Sander Mulder, the timepiece is described poetically:

About Time

Poetry in motion,
this innovative clock reveals the passing of time by
rolling around your desk and
telling time in one long continuous sentence.

Designed in reaction to our stressed lives,
where we tend to plan our daily activities to the minute,
this clock simply tells you
"It's about six o'clock" or "it's almost seven now".

While rolling around your table,
the slow but constant, almost meditative motion
allows you to relax and maybe even
forget about time for a few minutes.

A cheaper version of this kind of clock is being sold by Ikéa. I happened to purchase my specimen a couple of months ago, for half-a-dozen euros, and I noticed recently that the same product is still being proposed in their Grenoble store for one-point-something euros. Who knows? Maybe, if you wait a while, Ikéa will get around to paying you to take one back home with you!

The plastic casing is pure Ikéa, whereas the time-keeping mechanism is pure Chinese. A nice tandem. And that's the way the fortune cookie crumbles. I really must offer this object as a gift to Corina, the next time I see her. I haven't had time [How could I, with such a device?] to analyze the product carefully, but I have the impression that the Chinese engineers have incorporated into their mechanism—no doubt for pure fun, like fireworks—some kind of incredibly miniature high-tech device for generating random numbers, which are then used to determine the slowing factor applied to the displayed time. On the other hand, a lot of the energy supplied by the clock's battery has been channeled by the Chinese engineers into the audio production of a huge once-a-second thud that is guaranteed to prevent anybody from sleeping in the same room as this extraordinary gadget.

Science historians might claim that Albert Einstein was the first genius to point out that space-time is "warped", as they say metaphorically. But Ikéa's Chinese clock manufacturers are the first people to provide us with a low-cost device for demonstrating this phenomenon in a down-to-earth daily and noisy manner.

Virginity for sale

This charming US specimen of the female sex claims she's a virgin. Based upon that hypothesis, she's offering her body to the highest male bidder/screwer at a starting price of a million bucks. To me, that sounds like an absurdly expensive deal. And it also sounds a bit like what we old-timers used to call prostitution. But I'm sure there'll be takers. The bottom line [no pun intended] is that the young lady, whose code name is Natalie Dylan [Google with this name to obtain the whole "truth" concerning this affair], intends to use her ill-gotten gains to pay her way through university, where she would like to major in family and conjugal psychology.

It's a fact that males often insist upon the virginity of their future spouses. I've heard that, in certain societies, deftly-fingered gentlemen make a living out of patching up ruptured hymens so that maidens are as good as new for their wedding nights.

OK, some of you have guessed it already: I've been waiting for ages to have a pretext for telling one of my favorite dirty jokes. If you happen to be an under-age reader of Antipodes, please go to bed, so that we grown-ups can be left alone to enjoy our childish humor.

JOKE

Veronica knew that saintly Stanislas would be out of his mind if ever he discovered, on their wedding night, that she wasn't a virgin. So, she paid a specialist to install a high-tech AH [artificial hymen] system composed of a flexible nylon frame with an ultra-thin plastic film held in place by elastic supports: a masterpiece of AH engineering.

On their wedding night, everything appeared to be coming along fine. Gentle movements. Sighs. Thrusts. Soft groans of pleasure. Then a loud crack. Stanislas cried out in terror: "What the bloody hell was that?"

Veronica: "Stanislas darling, it was just my virginity that went pop."

Stanislas: "Un-pop it immediately, for Christ's sake. My John Thomas and balls seem to be entangled in a painful mesh of rubber bands!"

Amazing American discoveries

Few observers would deny that the most fantastic American discovery of all time was the Book of Mormon.

[Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.]

Maybe the word "discovery" is not quite correct, because the golden plates upon which the original document was inscribed were actually handed over to Joseph Smith in 1827 by the angel Moroni. What I'm trying to say is: Can we seriously use the term "discovery" in the case of a holy gift from a heavenly creature? Long ago, there was a good old English word, derived from the Latin noun inventio (the act or faculty of discovery), that served perfectly well for great findings of this kind. For example, after Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in the year 327 and unearthed the true cross of Jesus (along with the crown of thorns and some nails), her amazing exploit was referred to formally as the Invention of the Cross. Since then, this usage of the term "invention" has become obsolete. So, there would be a danger of being misunderstood if one were to speak of the invention of Moroni's document.

A few decades after the Moroni event, reports of another miraculous American discovery started to appear in the press... and they still do. I'm referring to sightings of an extraordinary creature known today as Bigfoot. [Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.] Superficially, Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, looks like a large hairy ape, but there are strong arguments for considering this humanoid creature as a cousin of Man: a kind of surviving Neanderthal.

Yesterday, at Palo Alto in California (site of the prestigious Stanford University), there was an extraordinary press conference about the latest Bigfoot sighting.

[Click the photo to access an article about this amazing press conference.]

It's all rather secretive, in the sense that the three men behind this press conference did not actually bring along any biological samples of the Bigfoot corpse they claim to have discovered... which remains stored in a refrigerator at an unidentified location.

Various aspects of this latest Bigfoot affair seem to fall into place once you visit the shopping section of the trio's website [click the lapel pin, which can be purchased for $6.50, or a dozen for forty bucks]. It would appear that the three discoverers are associated with this commercial affair. In any case, two of them turned up wearing Bigfoot caps... priced $24.99 on the website. It goes without saying that this website would become a tremendous money-making affair... if only a real specimen of the legendary beast were to be found.

Incidentally, reading between the lines of his excellent The Ancestor's Tale, I have the impression that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in Bigfoot. That's hardly surprising. Dawkins doesn't even believe in God.

As for me, I think that we should believe in both of these great American discoveries: the angel Moroni and the ape man Bigfoot. Clearly, if God didn't intend us to believe in these creatures, then why did He put them on Earth and allow them to be discovered? That's the solid line of reasoning I used in my decision, long ago, to wear glasses... along with the fact that they help me to see things better. If God didn't intend us to wear glasses, then why did He provide us with a nose and a pair of ears?

Amazing Aussie powers

I've always known that we Aussies are not just a pile of crap. We have hidden talents. Look at this awesome demonstration:


Mass Spoon Bending - Click here for more amazing videos

There are two reasons why Aussies are different (I mean superior) to ordinary humans such as Americans, Europeans and Eskimos. First, the fact that we're born in the antipodean magnetic flux of the Southern Hemisphere has a lot to do with our mysterious powers. Second, we're perpetually immersed in a whole lot of spiritual energy fallout from the Aboriginal Dreamtime, which causes the typical Aussie mindset and psyche to evolve in exciting new ways. It's a pity that there aren't more revealing TV documentaries in this domain. I really must make a suggestion along these lines to some of my professional friends in French television.

Ads you won't see

From time to time, we hear of publicity campaigns that get totally screwed up by current events even before they're launched... as distinct from the achievement of the John McCain crew, who needed to actually launch their latest anti-Obama campaign in order to get it screwed up.

In France, a creative genius in an ad agency had a brilliant idea for a campaign concerning a new automobile. The idea is that Dad has just purchased this vehicle, and he's driving his kids to school. But he's so infatuated by his new car that he simply forgets the kids on the back seat and just carries on driving for hours, absentmindedly. The planned tag lines were:

7.42 am: Your kids are on the back seat, ready to be driven to school.
3.37 pm: Your kids are still on the back seat.

What a great idea for an amusing ad. The only trouble is that, over the last few weeks, there were two separate cases of a French parent simply forgetting their child in a parked automobile. And the kids in question died as a result of the suffocating heat.

More recently, in Canada, the Greyhound bus company was about to lunch a campaign centered upon the relaxed atmosphere of overland bus travel. [I agree with their good intentions. Around 1985, I had the thrill of crossing Australia in this way on two occasions.] Sadly, their planned tag line evoking the absence of "bus rage" was ruined at the last minute by a crazy guy with a big knife and a taste for human flesh. So, I guess we'll never know the exact nature of the "reason" that the Greyhound folk had in mind.

ADDENDUM

Talking about things that might not be brought to the attention of readers, I'm wondering whether my compatriots in Australia have heard about a 39-year-old psychopathic Frenchman who's accused of having murdered, apparently in a fit of insanity, an 11-year-old boy. Here are police drawings of the accused fellow and his 49-year-old female companion:

At the time they were captured, a couple of days ago, they were trying to spread the message that they were "Australian pilgrims" who had come to France on a mysterious mission of destruction. My neighbor Madeleine, who doesn't necessarily bother to digest news stuff she picks up on TV, asked me yesterday: "Did you see that story about an evil Australian couple who murdered a child not far from here? " I had trouble convincing Madeleine that the suspected murderer and his lady friend are untraveled natives of France, with no links whatsoever to Australia, except maybe as hallucinations in their distorted minds.

It's a little spooky that diabolical fuckwits of this kind [caught out by a DNA analysis] might imagine Australia—which, most probably, they totally ignore—as a plausible origin. Where could they have picked up the idea that Australia is a likely place from which "pilgrims" might decide to set out on a satanic mission to France? One guess is that this association might be based upon recent Catholic Youth ballyhoo they glimpsed on TV when the pope was visiting Sydney. Or maybe they've been watching too many exotic Aussie travelogues.

Santa Claus is not necessarily trash

A popular cult film in France, Le Père Noël est une ordure [Father Christmas is a scoundrel ], produced in 1982, starred Gérard Jugnot as a sleazy commercial Santa Claus.

Dressed as Father Christmas, Félix was earning his living on Paris sidewalks by carrying a billboard and distributing leaflets for a local strip joint. After a minor shoplifting incident and a scuffle with department store personnel, Félix lost his white beard and had to run for his life. The rest of the film is a symphony of delightfully sick humor, enhanced by splendid acting, with exotic dialogues that countless French aficionados of my generation know off by heart.

The world has just learned with amazement of another evil Santa Claus, Radovan Karadzic, who has spent the last decade or so running for his life.

A few days ago, in a totally different domain, my friend Corina informed me of the existence of an extraordinary Italian monk, Friar Cesare Bonizzi, known as Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother).

In the unlikely event that this white-bearded Capuchin could no longer count upon records and rock concerts to earn precious dimes for his monastery in Milan, he would surely be able to do Santa Claus stints.



After hearing the above stuff, I'm prepared to vouch for the fact that Fratello Metallo is not a disguised scoundrel fleeing from justice.

BREAKING NEWS

Today, it's surrealistic to discover Karadzic's website [display], including "10 favorite ancient Chinese proverbs as selected personally by Dr Dabic". I hope the authorities have the good sense to preserve this legacy site, which is a tiny fragment of the long history of evil and terror in the Balkans. It's almost like finding a nice little unpublished postscript to Mein Kampf.

Phantoms from an ancient world

After arriving in Paris for the first time, in February 1962, and starting to work with IBM Europe in the Madeleine quarter, I developed the pleasant habit of residing in cheap romantic Latin Quarter hotels... often in tiny upper-story rooms called chambres de bonnes, which used to be occupied by maids. Naturally, I ate out all the time. Today, Christine and our children think I'm maybe telling tales when I say that one of my regular eating places was the Procope in the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, where I developed a taste for snails. I assure them that, in 1962, it was a perfectly ordinary Left-Bank restaurant, well within the means of a young Aussie who happened to be earning his living as a computer programmer with IBM.

In those distant days, the Latin Quarter soon became my everyday backyard, and I ventured into every nook and cranny of this exotic territory that had belonged primarily, not so long before then, to the students of the Sorbonne and the existentialists. One of the quaintest places I chanced upon was an archaic art gallery known as the Akademia Raymond Duncan, whose boss was an aging American artist who paraded around in a Greek robe, as if he were a reincarnation of Aristophanes. French friends told me that the claim to fame of this ridiculous fossilized Californian, who had nothing in particular to exhibit in his Latin Quarter Academy, apart from his silly self, was the fact that his long-departed sister, Isadora Duncan, had been an amazing innovator in the world of modern dance.

Indeed, I soon discovered that everybody in Paris had heard of Raymond's amazing sister, who liked to dance half-naked to Ancient Greek themes. Even if they knew little about Isadora's celebrated choreography, Parisians remembered the terrible anecdote about her accidental death in 1927, in Nice. Isadora's friend Benoît Falchetto was going to take her for a ride in a fabulous Bugatti automobile named the Amilcar GS 1924. Nonchalantly, the lovely dancer threw a scarf around her neck. This scarf was caught up instantly in the spoked wheels of the automobile, and Isadora Duncan was choked to death.

For me, through the presence of her aging offbeat brother, this anecdote of the American dancer's death—35 years and a world war before my arrival in France—remained terribly present in my mind during my first encounter with the fascinating City of Light.

Things that can blow up in your face

When I was a child aged ten or eleven, one of the craziest things I ever did was to play around with the production of gunpowder. I still remember my formula: a mixture of ground-up charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). The best way of making a big bang was to pack the gunpowder into a metal can. The most difficult part of the operation was the creation of a burning fuse, generally made out of a piece of thick string impregnated in saltpeter (if I remember correctly). Often, when the fuse had burned right up to the metal can, the primitive homemade bomb didn't explode, for one reason or another. This was the kind of situation in which the bomb-maker was capable of moving towards his precious work of art, to see what has prevented it from exploding, only to have the whole thing blow up in his silly face.

Today, I cannot of course be considered as an aging extrapolation of the kid who built bombs back in South Grafton. The intervening years have made me a totally new individual, and I'm quite incapable of suggesting what might have been going on in the head of that kid who once played around with gunpowder. In any case, I survived without injuries: that's to say, without any inadvertent explosions. But I vaguely recall the case of a Grafton youth who wasn't as lucky as me. If I remember correctly, he emerged from this kind of fun with a few missing fingers.

A fortnight ago, an explosion occurred around midnight in a flat in the suburbs of Paris, and a thirty-year-old fellow was severely injured. While being carted away by ambulance people, the victim made a spontaneous confession. He said he was a member of an organization whose goal consisted of blowing up roadside speed cameras.

He was injured while manipulating a bomb that was intended for the forthcoming destruction of yet another speed camera. My article of 2 March 2007 entitled The hosed hoser [display] evokes a famous cinematographic case of something backfiring harmlessly. You might conclude that our speed-camera bomber had it coming to him. Poetic justice, as they say.


On the other hand, he wasn't attacking humans with his bombs, merely machines. The idea of a fellow declaring war upon inanimate contraptions and then getting hurt by his own weapons reminds me of Don Quixote rushing in to attack windmills, only to discover that the windmills seem to be able to launch a counter-attack.