Kirk Douglas has turned 100

#KirkDouglas100th

Issur Danielovitch Demsky, alias Kirk Douglas, was born in New York on 9 December 1916. He is the father of the actor/producer Michael Douglas.

 

My Antipodes blog has turned 10 today.

Click here to see the first post.

Oldies at Sydney University

Click here to see how the famous old Honi Soit weekly newspaper will be preserved online.

This 88-year-old jacaranda tree in the charming quadrangle won’t be there to celebrate the launch of the new database. It died over a month ago, on 29 October 2016, and collapsed onto the sunny green lawn.

Australia and her Aborigines still trying to understand each other

#Australie #AustraliaDay #Aborigènes

The long road has been winding its way through a tunnel for many years, and the bright light is not yet visible. The newspaper The Australian recently shocked indigenous people by publishing this cartoon by Bill Leak:

Click cartoon to enlarge

People were hurt by this silly representation of an Aboriginal as a beer-guzzling father who has forgotten the name of his son. Reactions blossomed immediately. Aboriginal fathers spoke with pride of their sons. Everybody agreed that Leak's hurtful depiction of Aboriginals served no useful purpose. The newspaper itself lost readers and money.

Recently, animosity of Aborigines towards white society arose in Fremantle (Western Australia) on the old question of Australia Day festivities next 28 January. Many Aborigines call it "Invasion Day", considering that it marks the moment in history when white Europeans stole their land. The mayor Ecologist of this city near Perth, Brad Pettitt, whose wife is an Australian international netball player, had hoped that next Australia Day would be celebrated solely by citizenship ceremonies, but the federal government vetoed this idea. So, traditional celebrations will be held as usual.

Pair of simple English words that utterly confuse the French

Here's an example of a confusion I found yesterday:

 

Plantu's  presidential candidates both regret their years spent applying the politics of a certain "looser" (meaning a loser):
Hollande for Vals, and Sarko for Fillon.

• The verb “to lose” is extremely simple for an English child. French people are familiar with this verb. They would understand somebody who says he has lost his wallet. They recognize the sound of the word “loser”, pronounced as luzeur. They know that it designates somebody who has lost something, or has a tendency to lose things often. But they often don't know how to spell it correctly. They might even spell it incorrectly as “looser” (as in the above political drawing).

• The adjective “loose” is equally simple in the English-speaking world, because a child soon learns, say, that one of his/her teeth is loose. That child might even discover that he/she can loosen that tooth by wobbling it to and fro. In the unusual case of two teeth that are simultaneously loose, the one that wobbles more might be said to be looser than the other one. And you might have to explain to a French friend that this out-of-the-way comparative form, "looser", is pronounced as lousseur. Indeed, were the child to have three loose teeth, you might ask him/her which of the three is the loosest, pronounced louceste.

If you want to see how complicated the English language can be for a French friend, try to explain the meaning of my last two paragraphs. French people often find it difficult to grasp the distinctions between these two totally different sets of terms. If a French child found that a tooth was loose, he/she would simply say that that it moves.

For the moment, I'm not even sure I can find a common French equivalent for the adjective "loose". Suppose, for example, that I would like to say in understandable French that a certain lady has a screw loose. (Elle est givrée.) I've discovered personally that it's an incredibly difficult task! I'm not even convinced that many French people really understand the precise meaning of the saying "to have a screw loose".

Lost enough already — no more time to lose

François Hollande has barely started his speech revealing that he won’t be seeking a second term in office. Removal people are already carting away his personal furniture and belongings. Click here to appreciate some well-done presidential humor.

Family-history detective work

A few days ago, an unknown person wanted to leave a short comment on one of my family-history articles written in 2009 : “What a great piece of detective work”.  I had almost forgotten that piece of research work, which started with the following photo of my Irish-born great-grandfather Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934] in South Grafton:

In a nutshell, my "detective work" consisted solely of phoning up an uncle in Australia to obtain the name of Isaac's street in South Grafton, and then searching through Google Street View to see if there was a house with a fence of that kind. I soon found the right house:

46 Spring Street, South Grafton

Today, it would be impossible to conduct this research, since all the residents of Spring Street have recently (?) removed their front fences to allow the entry of heavy equipment to raise the houses above flooding.

Click here to access my original article.

Our suddenly-popular president

For a current president, there's no better way of gaining popularity than to announce that you'll be abandoning the job. That leaves the way open to both friends and enemies to say publicly that you were a nice fellow.

I wonder what would happen if he were to suddenly say: "Now that I see that more people admire me, I think I should change my mind and envisage a second term." If ever François Hollande were to adopt this approach, I think he should be careful. I'm not very experienced in the domain of presidential counseling.

I'm pleased to see that Bernard Cazeneuve has accepted the nice task of guiding both the nation and her chief to the end of an era. He's a courageous gentleman. Above all, he has been a faultless head cop, and he'll surely go down in modern French history for that. As for the outgoing president, I'm not convinced that history will store away a good image of his passage.

Ancestry company’s DNA conclusions “mostly total bollocks”

                                            Graham Roumieu for BuzzFeed News

I was pleased to hear the British geneticist Adam Rutherford saying that the conclusions of the BritainsDNA company are “eloquent, but mostly total bollocks”. Click here to read an amusing article in BuzzFeed by Tom Chivers that pulls no punches on this subject.

It so happens that my limited use of Y-chromosomal testing carried out by a US company was highly successful in the sense that it enabled me to prove that my paternal great-grandfather William Skyvington [1868-1959] was a scoundrel, indeed a crazy nincompoop. Click here to visit a page on this so-called Courtenay Affair. I've handled the facts in detail in my book They Sought the Last of Lands, Gamone Press (Choranche), which can be purchased through Amazon. Published in 2014, its number is ISBN 978-2-919427-02-4.

My personal Y-chromosome data is displayed publicly on the ysearch website. Curiously, apart from the Courtenay Affair, I’ve never obtained the slightest match with a so-called “genetic cousin”. This seems to suggest that we Skyvington folk are rather rare birds.

Mind-stuff

As a young man encountering mathematics, science and philosophy at the University of Sydney, I was fascinated by a book by Arthur Eddington [1882-1944] : The Nature of the Physical World.

In this breath-taking book, published in 1928, Eddington introduced the concept of mind-stuff.

The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds.... The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it.... It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness.... Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature.... It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.

Thanks to Eddington, I acquired my fundamental awareness of science-based philosophy at the age of 15. Apart from my later passion for quantum theory, biology and computer science, my thinking has not changed greatly since then. These days, I find it more and more difficult to communicate meaningfully and profoundly with people who are not on this wavelength.

More Leonard Cohen... for eternity

                                                                       DIEGO TUSON/AFP

Click here for Suzanne,
Bird on the Wire and
Hallelujah

WARNING: If you don't read French, then so much the better...
because the text in Le Monde contains some utter nonsense. Ignore it!