Humor and age

I think it's good when people who are getting on in years retain a vibrant sense of humor. That's the case for my neighbor Madeleine, for example, who still gets a kick out of playing pranks. At the recent dinner for senior citizens of Choranche [display], Madeleine offered me the glass of white wine that had been poured out for her husband, who no longer drinks alcohol. Seeing that I appreciated this liquor, Madeleine soon got around stealthily to placing no less than three similiar glasses on the table in front of me. Tackling the first one, I discovered that Madeleine had simply filled empty glasses with water. That's a typically innocent prank that delights Madeleine... and I'm convinced that this kind of juvenile fun plays a part in preventing her from ever growing old. The other aspect of Madeleine's behavior that endears her to me is her taste for gossip, and tales about neighbors. That too prevents Madeleine, I'm sure, from growing old in spirits. How can you possibly accept the effects of aging when you still have so many wicked anecdotes to relate concerning folk in the commune? That kind of preoccupation necessitates an alert mind and, above all, an alert tongue. Besides, in the case of Madeleine, I'm joking when I use the adjective "wicked" to describe her anecdotes, because the amazing thing about the gossip of Madeleine (who has remained a fervent Catholic, imbued with pious and charitable intentions) is that her words could never even hurt a church mouse. It's an art of kindhearted tale-telling that Madeleine no doubt acquired and practiced over a period of decades, when she was running single-handed an old-fashioned grocery shop in the main street (well, you could almost say the only street) of Pont-en-Royans.

Personally, I've always liked to drag along with me a certain sense of humor, without ever knowing with certainty whether it might or might not be shared by those with whom I happen to be in contact... such as readers of this blog, for example. I consider, rightly or wrongly, that there's no better place for joking than in those modern tabernacles of society that are our supermarkets, both tiny and gigantic. I've considered for ages that the authentic reincarnation of the Vestal Virgins of Antiquity are the supermarket cashiers, particularly those whose smile and words would appear to be made out of plastic. (I'm joking unfairly. I've often been totally infatuated by certain local supermarket cashiers who have appeared to me as Martian nymphs within our consumer society.)

This afternoon, at the small supermarket in St-Jean-en-Royans, my shopping list was short, comprising merely two items: a glass bottle of white wine and a plastic bottle of bleach.

At a financial level, this transaction cost little, and I should have kept my mouth shut instead of wasting the time and intellectual energy of the Martian virgin who served me. But my extrovert behavior was encouraged, I know, by a silly anecdote that has always intrigued me.

The great French TV personality Léon Zitrone once came near to death when he got up in the middle of the night, feeling thirsty during a stay at his daughter's place in the country, and downed a bottle of bleach. This story has marked me indelibly, but in a funny illogically-backwards way. Whenever my daughter drops in at Gamone, I make sure robotically that there's no bleach (or avocados, for that matter) hanging around in the refrigerator...

Be that as it may, I felt mirthful, this afternoon, when I approached the Intermarché virgin with my two bottles.

William (tongue-in-cheekishly): Remind me, please. Which is the one for cleaning my sink?

Supermarket virgin (seriously, indicating the plastic bottle of bleach): This one, Sir.

William (pointing to the bottle of Alsatian wine, and wishing to appear more stupid than ever): So, I shouldn't use this...

Supermarket virgin (realizing that she's confronted by a terrible Alzheimer case): No, Sir, it would be silly to clean your sink with this fine wine.

William (realizing that his joke has backfired): OK, I must be careful.

Fortunately, the woman behind me in the queue burst out laughing. She, at least, would be a potential Facebook friend, or maybe even (who knows?) an Antipodes blog follower.

What we need is some kind of tangible smiley badge that could be worn by old humorists like me when we queue up, to pay, in supermarkets. Instead of identifying my political clan, my social affinities or my ethnicity (as was the case for the disgusting yellow star imposed upon French Jews during the frightful Pétain era), the badge would warn people: This silly old bugger is a dangerous joker.

Bad list of e-mail addresses

Spammers sell lists of e-mail addresses to entrepreneurial individuals who want to become spammers, and earn piles of cash by selling their shit through the Internet. Here's a typical case: a fellow named Edouard (at least that's what it says on the e-mail spam I just received) who's trying to peddle magic stuff that will make a woman's excess body fat (cellulite) dissolve into thin air.

I'm almost tempted to reply to Edouard, to let the poor guy know that there's surely something amiss about his list of addresses of potential customers. To my mind, the spammer has been screwed. Maybe he has paid a lot of money for nothing more than a list of bloggers, or rural hermits, or atheists, or wannabe reincarnated seven-day bike-riders. I've often wondered whether female Internauts are pestered, like us chaps, by offers of products capable of lengthening their penises.

MacLastSupper

Let me preface this article by saying that I think we have here an excellent candidate for the next Ig Nobel Prize [explanations].

Two brothers—one a marketing and economics professor at Cornell University, and the other a professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College—decided to examine 52 famous paintings of the Last Supper with a view to determining whether the size of food helpings has evolved over the last millennium. Well, the answer would appear to be an emphatic giant-sized yes. And they suggest that this might explain why many people today (at least in the USA) are gulping down bigger portions of food, served up on bigger plates. In other words, this study of religious art has provided them with God-given evidence for the dawning of the Age of Obesity.

The study, to be published in the next issue of the International Journal of Obesity, indicates that, over the last ten centuries, the size of food helpings in Last Supper paintings has increased by 66 percent. Not surprisingly, the diameter of Last Supper plates has increased to exactly the same extent. Curiously, the size of the hunk of bread accompanying the meal seems to have increased by merely 23 percent... which no doubt gives weight to the Biblical saying about man not living by bread alone.

To my mind, this study offers some great ideas that could be exploited by the marketing people in good Christian fast-food restaurants. In bars and pubs, there are so-called "happy hours" when the price of drinks drops considerably. In restaurants of the kind I've just evoked, there could be "multiplication hours" during which lucky customers would receive extra helpings of fish and bread, and "Cana hours" during which the Coke cups of a happy few would be refilled, free of charge, with Californian wine.

I'm proud to think that, in spite of my excessive age and atheism, I can still come up with a few great ideas for America.

Postmodernist presentation of transmedia

Insofar as the following impressive video presentation of the fascinating transmedia concept is in French, you might be tempted to imagine that you would understand it better if you happened to understand French. In fact, that's an illusion. The ideal way of appreciating this tiny didactic and artistic masterpiece is to open wide your mind and let the messages flow in, in their primeval impactive globality (if you see what I mean), as a pure transmedia phenomenon.



Clearer now? Did you like the fleeting image of a tweet in the sky?

PS Seriously, this is the work of a talented French media production company called Les Raconteurs (storytellers).

Cosmic cheesiness

David Pogue (with over 1.3 million Twitter followers) has pointed us to this masterpiece, billed by many as the most cheesy video of all time:



Carl Lewis is no doubt in the process of losing his record to the Trololo Man, whose moving performance can be appreciated here thanks to English subtitles:



There's a rumor that this great Russian musical artist will be setting out soon on a gigantic world tour.

Cheese power

Whenever my lovely friend Corina decides to put up a video on her blog, I'm inevitably delighted, and tempted to steal her suggestions. [I've spent the last few weeks trying vainly to liberate myself from the haunting tenor voice of the Scorpions' vocalist.] I think Corina and I share the same sort of appreciation of humor, music and other things. Here's her latest delightful choice:



This video is all the more relevant in that Corina tells me that she's thinking of settling down in this cheese territory.

Revised top ten

This is excellent Hitchens:

Aussie espionage downs an Israeli bike

A few hours after their arrival in Tel-Aviv to investigate the use of Australian passports in the recent assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Australian federal police agents in a silver Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle apparently ran over a female cyclist and failed to stop. For the moment, there are no indications that the Mossad might have played a role in this incident. And no innocent lives were lost... although the woman claims that one of her bike wheels is totally fucked up beyond repair. Could this be a disguised and disgruntled act of Australian retaliation against the Hebrew nation? No diplomats were on hand to answer that troubling question.

Health-giving drugs

Here's the gist of a trivial personal health problem that arose almost five years ago, which I've often described. My huge ram had escaped from Gamone. A neighbor phoned to inform me that the animal had apparently fallen down an embankment alongside the Rouillard bridge over the Bourne, and was now stranded, in a state of shock, on a narrow ledge about three meters above the surface of the river. I finally decided to walk into the water, throw a rope around the ram, and simply make him topple down into the water. Once he was next to me in the running river, I attached the rope securely, then we half-scrambled and half-swum to a spot some twenty meters downstream, where I made a superhuman effort (the sort of thing you can do in emergency situations) to drag him up onto dry earth. Unfortunately, the ram had apparently received internal wounds, maybe through being hit by a motor vehicle, and he died at Gamone a week later. Meanwhile, I woke up the next morning with a strange numbness at the tips of my right-hand thumb and index finger. A few weeks later, a brain scan revealed the presence of a tiny white dot, sign of a vascular accident. The brain specialist with eyes sharp enough to detect the spot told me that the national health research institute would be thrilled if I were to help them as a guinea pig in their testing of a new treatment based upon a mixture of omega 3 (fish oil) and vitamins (folates and vitamins B6 and B12). I agreed to join up. This meant taking two tablets a day for a period of several years, and having a detailed checkup, once a year, with a visiting nurse.

I took this stuff assiduously, even when I went out to Australia for a month in 2006. Their dietetic advice was always sound, and vaguely helpful, and their annual checkups confirmed that I was in perfect shape. The only thing I regretted concerning this entire experience was that I forgot to ask for the name and phone number of the splendid African girl who received me for the first visit at the hospital in Romans. (She was replaced by a dull guy.) In my mind, there was no doubt whatsoever that all this omega 3 and vitamins was truly doing me a hell of a lot of good. It made me feel in fine form. Inversely, if ever I forgot to take the tablets in the morning, I would soon be overcome by an unpleasant sensation of nausea, and the only solution was to rush into my bathroom and gulp down the precious tablets, whereupon I would perk up almost instantly. Not long after starting the treatment, I decided to create this blog, and I'm convinced that the omega 3 and vitamins actually affected me positively at a cerebral level, and were indirectly responsible for many of my best blog articles. There's no doubt whatsoever that these miracle drugs provided me with the energy enabling me to build my rose pergola and prepare the garden (which is now emerging cautiously but splendidly from winter). Although I can't actually swear to it, I have the impression that the daily dose of omega 3 and vitamins has produced another unexpected consequence (which the research institute never mentioned): they've increased the length of my penis by two or three centimeters.

Well, the experiment is now terminated, and I'm left with a small stock of unconsumed tablets.

People who know me are aware that I'm a good Christian, oozing with altruism and constantly trying to imagine charitable deeds that would render the lives of my fellow men more happy, or at least less horrible. I said to myself that I've received my fair share of these wonder drugs, and there's no reason why I shouldn't offer the left-over tablets to a less fortunate soul than me. Normally, they should be kept in a refrigerator. So, it might not be a good idea to send them to a distant land such as Australia. I was thinking that, maybe, among my blog readers, there's somebody who's planning a trip to the North Pole. There would be no problem about keeping the tablets cold. At the normal rate of two tablets a day, the available stock would be more than ample to provide the necessary energy supplement for reaching the North Pole and then getting back home again.

This morning, I received a final letter from the research institute. It's in French, but you'll recognize the Latin name of the miracle molecule upon which this treatment is based.


If you click the above image, you can see the entire letter. The female director of the laboratory was kind enough to point out in this letter that, if I want to receive a genuine dose of vitamins and omega 3, then I should eat cereals, fruit, vegetables and fish such as salmon, mackerels and sardines. Truly, those folk just can't stop doing me good.

Visited by an ancestral spirit

In yesterday's article entitled Seafarers [display], I introduced readers to my CF-haplogroup ancestor named Dreamtimer, who lived in southwest Asia with his wife and family during the Old Stone Age. As I explained, besides being my ancestor, Dreamtimer was also an ancestor of today's Aborigines in Australia. Well, during the early hours of the morning, I was awoken by weird noises, like musique concrète. It was a mysterious mix of Indian tablas and sitars, Balinese bamboo xylophones and Buddhist gongs. And above the throbbing percussion, I could detect clearly the eerie drones of a didgeridoo. My dog Sophia was awoken by the clammer, and she started to bark furiously, as she always does whenever our sleep is interrupted in the middle of the night by frightening sounds such as the shrieks of dinosaurs up on the slopes of Choranche, or the grunts of mammoths down in the valley of the Bourne. Then a voice boomed out: "Billy..."

I knew immediately who it must be, because there are only three individuals who call me Billy. The first is Natacha, who would never dream of waking me up in the night in a cacophony of xylophones and didgeridoos. The second is my 94-year-old uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker, who's prevented from contacting me through his deafness. And the third, of course, was... my tribal ancestor Dreamtimer.

"First of all, Billy, I just want to tell you that I'm furious about you showing everybody that picture of my descendant Mungo Man. Your Aborigine cousins have known for ages that this is not correct. So, why did you do such a thing?"

I tried to tell Dreamtimer that it was simply a photo I had found on the web, but it was pointless trying to defend myself. How do you talk about Internet stuff with a guy who's been dead for 60 thousand years?

"Billy, if I decided to drop in on you this evening, it's not because of Mungo Man. It's because of that fucking Russki couple, who have offended us immensely. Billy, go grab a few boomerangs and run across to Canada right now. And strike 'em dead!"

I had no idea what my ancestor Dreamtimer could possibly be talking about. I was about to tell him that I didn't have any boomerangs with me at Gamone, and that it was out of the question for me to go walkabout to an overseas place such as Canada. Meanwhile, Dreamtimer had faded back into his never-never land. Before taking leave of me, he had switched on my TV. In an instant, the images from Vancouver informed me of the cause of Dreamtimer's furious visit.





If ridicule could kill, then the corpses of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalinon, attired in their crazy "Aboriginal" costumes, would have been spread out on the ice. The next time that Dreamtimer calls me, I'll have to tell him however that I can't strike down the Russian skaters, no matter how greatly they've offended him. After all, the Russians are my genetic cousins. We're all one big Earth family.

Be a creative critic!

This intellectual exercise won't take you more than a minute, and it should be fun. Click this illustration (signed by an artist named Matthew Martin) to access a short article in The Sydney Morning Herald whose title is Fast lifestyle, faster sperm. The author of this article is Nicky Phillips. Having read this specimen of Australian journalism, I invite you to invent a terse summary of its content and style. Your suggestion can be anything from a single word up to an in-depth analysis. You might like to send me your suggestions as comments. Go for it!

Beautiful burqas

Maybe burqas might be nicer if they came in an assortment of different colors, like those delicious French cookies called macaroons, made of egg whites and ground almonds.

Dumb cops

Just in case certain readers of Antipodes have been busy navigating their space ships in remote corners of the galaxy over the last few days, preventing them from keeping up with the latest fantastic news on the planet Earth, here's a summary of a recent hilarious fiasco within the most powerful and advanced nation in the world.

As everybody knows, the great US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been getting ready to pounce upon one of America's most notorious public enemies: Osama bin Laden. Click the FBI seal to access the list of their most wanted fugitives, where bin Laden appears in third position.

Back in the days when an authentic flesh-and-blood bin Laden had the habit of posing in person to get his photo taken, he looked like this. But that was long ago. For years now, like a movie celebrity or a princess chased by paperazzi, he has made a point of avoiding photographers. During this time, he has no doubt aged, and we would like to have an idea of what he looks like today. Consequently, FBI image specialists have exploited high-tech equipment to produce the following plausible portraits of present-day bin Laden... with and without a beard.

Nice work. It's amazing to see the miracles that can be achieved when skilled US specialists use nec plus ultra state-of-the-art electronic devices capable of artificially aging the image of a fugitive who has disappeared from the daily scene. The only problem is that this resuscitated bin Laden appears to have an identical twin, as revealed in the following exhibit:

This bold fellow who dares to usurp the appearance of Osama bin Laden is a Spanish politician, Gaspar Llamazares, the former leader of Spain's United Left communist party and the caucus spokesman in the Spanish parliament. Not surprisingly, he wasn't too happy to find his face on the FBI's latest wanted-dead-or-alive poster. Besides, the Spaniard reacted in a strange unsportsmanlike way to this masterpiece by America's cutting-edge cops: "Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this, but mine certainly is." Really, how dumb can you get?

Snake oil

I've always suspected that one of the reasons why certain disgruntled customers complain that snake oil doesn't cure all their ills, as it's supposed to do, is that they simply forget to obey the all-important instructions on the label: Shake well before use! Applying a reputable brand of snake oil without having shaken the bottle vigorously for a sufficiently long period of time would be as silly as swallowing a suppository instead of inserting it into an appropriate orifice... or vice versa in the case of an aspirin for a headache. I think it was Confucius, or one of those wise old guys, who put it nicely in his famous dictum about not stuffing pearls up the rear end of swine, or something like that.




I've just heard that, on the final day of January, in the UK, there'll be a massive happening that's as potentially dangerous, for each of the 300 participants, as it would have been to drop in for a cocktail and salted peanuts with Jim Jones at the Peoples Temple in Guyana back in 1978. The event that's planned at 10.23 am on January 30th is a little like a cross between Russian roulette and a nation-wide rave party. Let me give you the ghastly details of what all these crazy folk plan to do. All together, at exactly the same instant, they're going to stage a mass homeopathic overdose session. In other words, they plan to gulp down, deliberately, huge quantities of homeopathic products: enough milligrams to cure a horse of herpes.

And why are they doing this? Well, in a nutshell: simply to let the world know whether or not they can survive this terrible ordeal. Statistically, some of the participants will have indigestion or back aches at the start of the experiment, whereas others are likely to be constipated or maybe suffering from flatulence. Well, believe it or not, they don't even care whether this massive homeopathic treatment will cure them or not. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. Who knows? Maybe there'll be miraculous switch-over cases in which a fellow who hasn't achieved anything whatsoever on the throne for at least a week will suddenly find himself gurgling melodies like the Paris Pétomane. [If ever you've never heard of the latter gentleman, click here to obtain information about him on Wikipedia.] As I said, the daring participants have nothing to win or lose. They're participating altruistically in this operation for science alone, like Louis Pasteur inoculating himself against rabies. [Did he really do that? I'm not sure he did. Maybe I'm confusing him with another hero. But it sounds like a nice idea, whether or not it's a fact.] Through the selfless participation of these 300 brave souls in this operation, future researchers will have access to vital raw data revealing what happens when a group of volunteers receives a massive overdose of homeopathic snake oil. In any case, I suggest that it would be fitting if we onlookers were to accompany them, in this ordeal, with our prayers.

Like God, the G-spot doesn't exist

My son François found that this cover of the excellent French weekly Charlie Hebdo, with a drawing by Charb, brings to mind my article entitled Fashion lexicon [display]:

[Click the drawing to visit the French website of Charlie Hebdo.]

Fashion lexicon

In France, certain mediocre journalists throw around technical terms from the clothing world without going to the trouble of making sure that their language is correct. Concerning garments that have recently been at the heart of lengthy discussions here in France, the following images indicate clearly the difference between a niqab and a burqa:

As you can see, a niqab is a far more revealing robe than a burqa, in that outsiders can actually see the wearer's eyes and distinguish vaguely the shape of her skull. Now, the reason I've brought up this fascinating subject is that I'm intrigued by an enigma that Christians might describe as Byzantine:

If a naked female were to drape herself in a see-through burqa (or niqab, for that matter) and stroll down the Champs-Elysées, should she be hailed as a militant feminist or arrested for indecent exposure?

Funny catwalk, amused cats

One of the funniest aspect of this video is the way in which two males can split their sides laughing at the problems encountered by a female wearing high heels.

Would women get an equally good laugh out of watching a guy trip over the long pointed toes of his Santiago boots?

Surplus flu vaccine

Roselyne Bachelot, the French minister of Health and Sport, is shown here receiving her shot of flu vaccine:

I, too, behaved as a good citizen in baring courageously my arm a few weeks ago. But there are still a hell of a lot of unused shots in France, and nasty critics are starting to suggest that Roselyne may have overestimated the requirements. What we need now is some creative thinking about ways and means of getting rid of all the surplus stuff in such a way that France doesn't lose too much money because of this fiasco. In the environmental domain, it would be an interesting idea to see if flu vaccine can be used as an additive to enhance the efficiency of new kinds of ecological fuel products for automobiles. We should investigate the possibility that flu vaccine might give rise to spectacular increases in productivity in agricultural domains such as wheat, soja and fruit and vegetables of all kinds. Then, we must not forget that the cycling season will be starting soon. That should be an excellent commercial outlet for a lot of this stuff... maybe mixed with other molecules to create an explosive cocktail. Last but not least, it's perfectly plausible that, with a bit of good marketing, male users of the Internet could be persuaded that a series of flu shots, spread out over a month or so, can result in an extra few centimeters at the level of their vital organ.

Once upon a time, French innovators patted themselves on the back with a popular slogan: "France has no oil fields, but we've got ideas." So, let's get together to see how we can help Roselyne to flog her junk.

Funny spam

It's rare to receive spam that's frankly funny. Here's a delightful specimen that reached me a couple of days ago:

Good Day, I am Fadhil Mohammad an accountant with Turk Ekonomi Bankasi A.S in Turkey. I want to ask your attention to receive Funds on my behalf, as you co-incidentally bears the same name with my late client. The purpose of my contacting you is because I need someone who can receive it for our mutual benefits. On your response, I will send you the full details and more information about myself and the funds. Yours sincerely, Fadhil Mohammad

As you can see, I'm about to become a wealthy man for a precise reason: namely, Fadhil Mohammad's "late client" was apparently named Skyvington. What an extraordinary surprise. I was totally unaware that I had a wealthy relative in Turkey. The funniest aspect of Fadhil's email is the header, which is particularly user-friendly:

He was smart enough to send off his shit email to a list of "undisclosed recipients". Nevertheless, Fadhil doesn't seem to have a firm grip on the English language. Somebody had apparently informed him that emails of this kind fall into a category known as spam. So, to make sure that his email is recognized as belonging to the correct category, Fadhil has inserted the word SPAM, explicitly, at the head of his subject line. That way, there's no way in the world that his email might be mistaken for something that it's not intended to be.

Fadhil sounds like a nice guy, and he has given me a good laugh. So, I plan to reward him with a sizable cash bonus for kindly informing me about this money left by my late relative in Turkey. In fact, my inherent generosity and highly-developed spirit of Christian charity persuade me to let Fadhil keep the whole bloody jackpot.

CORRECTION: The joke's on me. After examining more closely the header of Fadhil's email, I realize that the term SPAM was not actually used by the author of the email. It has beeen inserted, somewhere along the line, by a diligent spam filter. That's the first time I've ever seen such a warning, which probably indicates the exceptional purity of Fadhil's production. On second thoughts, I've decided to reduce the cash bonus I intend to give him. And I've been thinking of using this windfall money from my late relative in Turkey to buy a yacht and go sailing down along the coast of Somalia.

Gérard dislikes automobiles

Mounted on his old horse, Don Quixote attacked windmills with nothing more than his knight's lance.

France's celebrated actor Gérard Depardieu is suspected (but not yet formally accused) of having attacked an innocent automobile parked in a Paris street in the vicinity of Gérard's apartment. He operated almost barehanded, so it appears. The damages are brutal: a broken windshield and doors kicked in.

Observers are wondering what might have motivated such an assault. It has been suggested that this act of destruction might be interpreted as fallout from Copenhagen's failure to achieve what had been expected in rules stipulating cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. It's a fact that the automobile is looked upon as a major culprit in this domain, along with farting cows. So, maybe the actor's behavior was a symbolic personal expression of his profound desire that our children might inherit a cleaner planet. In that case, though, why did he perform this noble act in the middle of the night, in a somewhat stealthy manner, instead of operating in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of environmental activists and joyous spectators?

If indeed this hypothesis of an aversion to automobiles turned out to be correct, then it would be nice if Gérard were to go along to the police station, when he is summoned, on horseback, like Don Quixote. This would make a huge positive impact upon global-warming protagonists throughout the world... and might even persuade the municipal authorities in Paris—who have already reintroduced bicycles with much success—to examine the possibility of reverting massively to horses for transport inside the City of Light.

Realistically, we must not exclude the possibility that alcohol and aggressiveness might have played a role in this act of violence. If that were the case, then the lucky car-owner should look forward to the pleasure of soon being able to drive around Paris in a famous pristine vehicle. He could put photographic banners on his brand-new doors to thank publicly the benefactor... referred to affectionately as Gégé.

This automobile—the Gégémobile—could rapidly become a unique and highly-priced collector's item.