New French news channel

 

You might be interested in clicking here to see if you can pick up this new TV channel. It's rather buggy for the moment, but it should be a powerful broadcasting vector when it works smoothly and correctly. You might be wondering why I don't try to insert the channel directly into my blog. Don't be bloody stupid!

This anchor fellow, Louis Laforge, is a TV celebrity in France:

For the moment, he's reappearing regularly to explain that there's a slight technical hitch. (We could have worked that out all on our own.) In fact, the quality of this inaugural demonstration (it goes into operation tomorrow) is very good indeed.

Their brains might teach us a few tricks

An article by Nathaniel Herzberg in Le Monde says that dogs capt the sense of human words and tones of speech. I've just told my friend Fitzroy that he should take a glance at this article.

« Les travaux récents ont montré que les bases de l’empathie, de la coopération, de la cognition, du maniement des nombres existent bien au-delà de l’espèce humaine. Nous nous inscrivons dans un arbre évolutif qui nous dépasse très largement et qui impose des contraintes. Une sorte de naturalisation de la culture. » Le chien, assistant du philosophe ?

Lionel Naccache, neurologue à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière

Blind man loses his cane

The cane bore a name : Macron.

Moths across the world

The moth plague is bad at Choranche, but click here to get glimpses of a similar plague that took place a few years ago in Australia. Just as Australia is a much bigger land than France, their moths are bigger too. My sister told me that Aborigines have cooked and eaten them for ages. There's even a local chef who serves up moths to his customers.

 
Our moths at Choranche have such a nasty stench that a lot of ketchup would be necessary, to make them tasty.

Emmanuel Macron has resigned

Serious rumors have indicated throughout the day that Emmanuel Macron was in the process of resigning from his job as Minister of the Economy in the French government. An hour ago [I am writing at 19:20], his resignation was confirmed.

Not a particularly exciting subject

Few readers will be moved by this image, nor by the French-language article that it accompanies here:

But their subject means a lot to me. Jobs I carried out back in the days when I was earning my living now result in a monthly payment that provides me with my daily soup and puts a spoon of margarine in it.

That last statement might persuade my readers that I don't eat spinach and that I probably avoid butter. Neither belief is correct. Look at these two products in my refrigerator:

At the top, you have one of the finest Brittany butters. At the bottom, it's a soft butter from Normandy. As for my spinach, it's hidden away somewhere in the freezer.

The most interesting fact in the above-mentioned press article about retirement funds is that my automatic benefits will almost certainly go on for as long as me. It's nice to know that. My sole aim now is to survive comfortably for a while at Gamone... while consuming dabs of the world's finest butters from Brittany and Normandy, not to forget an occasional bit of spinach. The global picture is one of contentment.

American smart-ass

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, is so smart at an intellectual level, and so proud of his superior thinking, that he’s turning into an obnoxious smart-ass, capable of fooling countless ordinary people who can’t always read between his lines. He has been raving on constantly about Donald Trump, as if an understanding of the behavior of this foul idiot required intelligence and imagination of the Adams variety. The inflated cartoonist (who never stops trying to flog his latest book) is now starting to be a similar self-proclaimed specialist on Hillary Clinton. Why won’t Adams simply shut up for a while, to protect the world from evil, at least until the end of the US elections?

A more down-to-earth French correspondant, Frédéric Autran, has simply said that the US presidential campaign is “un duel puant” (duel that stinks). Click here to access Autran's article.

UPDATE [7 September 2016] : Scott Adams remains one of the smartest humans in the known universe. Click here to see yet another typical example of our hero talking down to us like a smart-ass, seeing himself as a fearless observer and analyst of Trump, a brilliant hypnotist and a superior thinker, and then flogging his book. His Dilbert stuff remains amusing, but repetitive. As for the rest of Adams, he bores me. I dislike pompous people who, as the French put it, pètent plus haut que leur cul (fart higher than their anuses).

Brussels bomb

In the middle of the night, a bomb exploded in front of the laboratories of the Criminology Institute to the north of Brussels. There was much damage but the police found no victims. For the moment, there are no theories concerning the origins of this act, which is clearly criminal.

France also builds great trains

If you've visited France recently, you may have had an opportunity of seeing the great trains called TGV: Trains à grande vitesse (high-speed trains), which have become world-famous.

The French company Alstom has just succeeded in signing a huge deal of 1.8 billion euros to provide such trains to the USA... of all customers.

Whichever way you look at it, this kind of business feels more pleasant than the sale of military equipment. The two activities are actually complementary in a subtle fashion. You might say that French industry has many different feathers in its cap. And they're all fine feathers that earn our poor nation enough cash to put a bit of butter in our humble spinach... façon de parler!

War against nocturnal moths

We've been invaded by this tiny nocturnal moth called the Pyrale, which comes from China, India and Asia.

Of an evening, if you leave a lamp near a closed window, the moths rapidly form a blanket over the glass panes of the window. It's a frightening insect, because we run up against unexpected problems when trying to eradicate it. Even when you try to use a garden hose to wash them off a window pane, the moths seem to enjoy themselves. Neighbors tell me that the best way to eradicate the moths is to leave a bucket of soapy water alongside the place where they gather when attracted by a lamp inside the house. Here's a photo of moths killed by that technique in Pont-en-Royans.

I've prepared six buckets of soapy water for this evening's planned attack. Meanwhile, some specialists recommend the use of plastic traps containing a phial of a pheromone that attracts male moths. That would be fine if you wanted to castrate them, say. To destroy the entire horde at one fell sweep, I prefer the soap suds solution.