Gumption

Gumption. I love that old Scottish word (which I recall from my childhood), although I'm not really sure it means much, and even less sure that I grasp what little meaning it might have. My online dictionary says it designates "shrewd or spirited initiative and resourcefulness". Then there's a wishy-washy example about a woman who had the gumption to put her foot down and dissuade a fellow from pursuing his crazy schemes. In fact, I don't like that example. In my mind, this vague stuff called gumption—whatever it might be—is exactly what you need to pursue crazy schemes. I would go so far as to say that, without a good supply of gumption, it would be crazy to even think about crazy schemes. In such contexts, gumption is a sine qua non.

For some time now, I've been saying to myself [that's a habit derived from living for too long in France: the homeplace and haven of reflexive verbs] that, if only I had the necessary gumption, I would embark upon a popular-science book project, to be known simply by a one-word title: Creation. The basic idea—the inspiration, if I were to take myself more gumptiously—is that, while the scientific writers Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins have already done a hell of lot about making the world a more understandable (but not necessarily easier) place to live in, they are both visibly weak (well, less than optimal) in the domain of computing.

I had this impression about Dawkins when I first read The Blind Watchmaker. Like everything by Dawkins, it's a fabulous book, but his biomorphs (computerized graphic gadgets) reveal instantly that the author is a novice computerist, unfamiliar with more sophisticated realms of information science... otherwise he would have alluded to the pioneering work of precursors such as John von Neumann and others. [Click here to see my earlier blog article.]

The "missing link" between Dawkins and me (to borrow a silly Darwin-inspired expression) might be referred to pompously as the computing paradigm. Already, back at the time of my Machina Sapiens [click here to see an earlier reference to this book], I hinted at the fact that we computerists are tempted to see almost everything in terms of... computing. There's a trivial saying in France. What do you bike-riders talk about when they come together? They talk about... bikes! Well, we computerists are like bike-riders. It's a fact. We see the world as some kind of a giant computer...

In the USA in 1971, when I was filming Les machines et les hommes for French TV, I encountered an amazing man named Ed Fredkin. If I remember correctly, he was in charge of computers in the artificial-intelligence laboratory at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], whose intellectual star was, of course, Marvin Minsky. Fredkin invited me to his family home to talk about his work and my TV project. There, in his family environment, I lost no time in discovering that Edward Fredkin was an amazing individual... probably one of the most surprising and talented people I've ever met. He didn't fit into the US academic mold. He belonged to an intellectual America that has fascinated me on countless occasions, that has nothing to do with Bush mediocracy. As a retired jet pilot in the US Air Force, Fredkin came upon computers as some kind of a gigantic and delightful game, which enabled him to become a millionaire, among other things. When I met up with him, he was fascinated by the possibilities of computer music, and had actually designed a prototype thing that emitted ugly noises. Ed was persuaded that this amazing gadget would enable him to earn further millions, and he started out naively by manufacturing hundreds of these devices which were stored, when I met up with Ed, in the basement of his luxurious Massachusetts home.

Today, the former jet-fighter pilot Edward Fredkin is living somewhere on the planet Earth in recluse... as a digital monk. I would love to see him again, but I don't know how to go about getting back in contact with him.

Meanwhile, an MIT acolyte named Seth Lloyd has become famous by publishing a wonderful book on the subject that enthralls me. Basically, in terribly rough terms, the idea is that quantum mechanics can be visualized as a computerized affair. It's all very vague, very hard to fathom. That's why I'm hoping, as a writer, that I'll be able to amass enough mysterious gumption to tackle this affair, and put a little much-needed order into the Cosmos.

Geography lesson

In this blog, I often refer to the nearby village of Pont-en-Royans, which is famous for its houses clinging to the vertical cliff above the River Bourne. The French word pont means "bridge". So, the name of the village means "Royans bridge", where Royans is the region in which we are located.

In this photo, you see the old stone bridge, called the Pont Picard, high above the waters of the Bourne. For centuries, this bridge was one of the rare access points between the Isère valley (to the left in the photo, a dozen kilometers below the village) and the rugged Vercors mountains, which start as soon as you cross over the bridge. If you stand on the bridge and look upstream, you see the chilly waters of the Bourne tumbling down from the Vercors range.

Towards the top of this photo, there's a rocky plateau. My property, Gamone, is located on the lower slopes of that mountain.

Local political meeting

Before today, the first and last time I attended a political meeting in France was in 1969, when a dynamic young political figure named Michel Rocard was campaigning in the Yvelines département near Paris. This morning, at Choranche, it was a more modest affair. The Socialist member of parliament, André Vallini, was accompanied by his vice-candidate, Jean-Michel Revol, and the local councilor, Bernard Perazio (my former neighbor, whom I've known for years).

In the audience, besides a journalist-photographer from St Marcellin, the wife of the mayor of Choranche and me, there were three other people. The major theme of the discussions (introduced by the mayor's wife) was the possibility of serving bio food in the school canteen.

Vallini, a 50-year-old professional lawyer, is well-known throughout France since his much-publicized role as president of a parliamentary commission, last year, that inquired into a great miscarriage of justice known as the Outreau Affair. A group of irreproachable citizens had been wrongly accused of sexual misconduct, and condemned in an outrageous fashion by a biased, stubborn and immature judge, as a consequence of dubious evidence extorted from children. Vallini's TV appearances at the head of this commission earned him the reputation of an outstanding individual, capable of soaring above partisan politics. Indeed, if Ségolène Royal had been elected, he would have surely been named Minister of Justice. Meanwhile, a jury of 120 political journalists recently elected Vallini as the "parliamentarian of the year".

Latest Nicholson animation

I've just received the latest Nicholson animation, which features the Dalai Lama. [Click on the image to see it.] Incidentally, on the opening page of Nicholson's animations, there's an invitation to subscribe to their alert service, which means that you receive an e-mail as soon as a new animation exists. I've been using this service for months now, and I recommend it to all Nicholson fans.

I think I've said before that it's a pity that Peter Nicholson limits his repertoire to the relatively tiny universe of Australia's political leaders. I've always imagined that his extraordinary artistic talents and his sense of political satire could be extended to embrace other personalities and situations in the world at large. Indeed, Nicholson's excellent depiction of the Dalai Lama (image, voice, attitude and thoughts) demonstrates what I'm saying.

My magic mountain

It's 8 o'clock in the evening, and well past sundown. In this photo I took ten minutes ago, in the diminishing light, the Cournouze seems to be floating on clouds.

Upside-down world

In Europe, throughout the 15th to the 19th centuries, people were fascinated by all kinds of variations on the theme of mondus inversus, an upside-down world in which things would happen in quite a different way to familiar events in our real world. Animals would get humans to work for them. Buffoons would reign, while kings would be their clowns. And, in the antipodean vision of exotic lands on the other side of the globe, people would walk on their hands, with their legs in the air.

In an earlier post whose title was Epinal images [click here to display this post], I spoke of colorful old French engravings from the city of Epinal. The upside-down world theme was a popular subject for these images, as illustrated here:


Yesterday, a Reuters dispatch from India described a wacky offbeat event of a mondus inversus kind. In the state of Bihar, an electric train carrying a hundred passengers ground to a halt because somebody had inadvertently pushed the alarm button. Unfortunately, in its halted position, the train's pantograph (the hinged frame, with a strong spring, that collects power from the overhead line) was touching a neutral section of cable, which did not carry electricity. When a train is moving, its momentum carries it across these neutral sections. But, in its stopped position, the train would have to move a few meters forward along the rails in order to receive the required current. Consequently, the conductor simply asked the hundred passengers if they would be so kind as to get out and push the train forward over these crucial few meters! They got the job done successfully in half an hour, and the train was able to get back to using electric rather than human power.

That story reminds me that, when I was a kid, I used to watch in wonder as pairs of railway workers used their arms to move a big lever up and down, driving a lightweight trolley along the rails and enabling them to attain remote sites where work was being carried out on the lines. I had an exciting vision of my pack of Wolf Cubs setting out in a convoy of such vehicles for a distant camp in the middle of the woods. In my upside-down world, kids would take over the state railways network and use the lines for boy-powered trolley excursions. As I grew older, I even imagined seating our girlfriends on the edges of the trolley, where they would be able to admire our muscular forearms propelling them into Great Adventures.

Holy days

A few days ago, when I took this photo of the last section of the road leading up to my house, I had the false impression that the warm dry season was under way.

The grass and weeds had shot up rapidly over the last few weeks, so I put the two donkeys down in the paddock where I used to run my sheep... until they strayed to my neighbor's place last year, at the time I went out to Australia. My neighbor and I had been waiting for winter snow to drive the sheep down from the rocky slopes, enabling us to capture them. But this did not happen, since last winter was exceptionally warm. My neighbor told me that the five stray sheep did make a brief appearance at his house, accompanied by three baby lambs! But they moved back up the mountain as soon as the snow melted. We have the impression that they've become totally wild, and there's no obvious way of catching them. Pierrot, a local sheep owner, has tried to coax them towards his van with a bucket of food pellets, but the sheep are not attracted by this familiar technique. It's amazing that they haven't been decimated yet by roaming dogs. For the moment, they've never ventured near the road, where they could become a traffic hazard. Naturally, if this were to occur, our only solution would be to go out with rifles (with permission, if possible, from the local gendarmes) and cut them down.

The warm dry weather didn't last for long. It has been drizzling at Gamone for the last twenty-four hours or so, and I have the impression that I'm dwelling in the middle of an equatorial rain forest.

When strolling around in front of the house a few hours ago, waiting for Sophia to return (drenched) from her morning piss/turd excursion, I noticed that my neighbor's huge truck (I'm talking of another neighbor, down in the valley, not the guy with my stray sheep) was still parked in front of his house. This reminded me that today is in fact a religious holiday in France. Ascension Day. Isn't it amazing that the whole economic activity of the nation grinds to a halt because of an alleged miracle that took place two millennia ago, when an individual who had been nailed to a wooden cross, up until he was pronounced dead, apparently recovered magically his good health and finally drifted up into the heavens like a hot-air balloon?

I remember above all Ascension Day in 1964, when I was residing at the Franco-British College at the University City in Paris. I had recently encountered a Breton girl, Christine, whom I would end up marrying one year later. She had been obliged to explain to confused Anglo-Saxon students such as me why the country was on holiday once again, just a fortnight after the May 1 holiday... celebrating workers! Christine's theological English wasn't sufficiently fine-tuned for her to give us a convincing summary of the events described in the gospels concerning the ascension of Jesus. So, she resorted to mime, and flapped her arms and wiggled her fingers in such a way that we immediately understand that Jesus had in fact taken off like a bird.

Another of Christine's excellent mime acts concerned the illustrious writer Chateaubriand, shown here in a famous painting by Girodet:

He lived in a castle in the small Breton town of Combourg, not far away from Christine's childhood home in Saint-Brieuc. Well, to inform us Anglo-Saxons that she was talking about the writer, rather than the fat steak of the same name, Christine would resort to a mime act that consisted of waving her fingers at the level of her hair to simulate the appearance of Girodet's Chateaubriand contemplating the ruins of Rome. Much later on, Combourg would become one of my hotel halts during my annual bike trips from Paris to Brittany and back.

In exactly eleven days, the French economy will halting once again, on the final Monday of this jolly month of May, to celebrate the religious festival of the Pentecost (also referred to as Whitsunday). Initially, this was a Jewish holiday. Well, after the above-mentioned ascension, it appears that the Holy Spirit chose this festival day to descend upon the heads of the former friends of Jesus, accompanied by a huge gush of wind and tongues of fire, causing them to speak in new languages ("in other tongues"). I don't think Christine had invented a mime act for this complex affair. I guess she thought it was high time that we Anglo-Saxons, blessed by the Holy Spirit, got around to understanding a new language, which would greatly simplify our communications: French.

Elysian fields

In spite of their curious reputation of arrogance (akin to the ridiculous notion that they wear berets and eat frogs' legs), the French don't normally boast too much about themselves. Even though they might consider themselves the most intelligent people on Earth, the French rarely evoke nationalistic concepts such as lifestyle, pride and welfare to anywhere near the same extent, say, as Americans and Australians. If the French are indeed chauvinist, they keep this fact relatively quiet. They're a tactful people. It's not by chance that French has always been labeled the language of diplomacy. The sense of intellectual nuance has always impressed me greatly in this magnificent land of Descartes, Voltaire and Sartre. I love a subtle country...

In Greek mythology, Elysium was the homeplace of the gods. In France, TV journalists rarely resist the temptation of designating the Champs Elysées as "the most beautiful avenue in the world". In reality, it's a symbolic central axis of the French capital... like Oxford Street in London, or Martin Place in Sydney. The difference is that the Champs Elysées is not only symbolic and central; it's aesthetically splendid!

As I write these words, Nicolas Sarkozy is moving towards the "Elysian fields" of France to display himself (there's no other way of putting it) in front of the population of Paris. It's more than an image. It's a symbol.

Bye-bye, Jacquot

Tomorrow morning, the new president of France will be sworn in. So, this evening at eight o'clock, Jacques Chirac spent five minutes on TV saying Au revoir to the nation, and conveying his best wishes to Nicolas Sarkozy.

What will History retain of Chirac's twelve years as the head of the French Republic? Everybody praises Chirac for his honesty and courage in acknowledging retrospectively the criminal role played by the French government of Vichy during the Occupation. In a different domain, he remains admired for his opposition, right from the start, to the absurd war in Iraq. But there were failures in Chirac's presidency, notably the negative outcome of the French referendum on Europe.

Concerning Chirac's personal future, many news commentators have been borrowing the image of former US president Bill Clinton as a likely role model. That's to say, Chirac could well transform himself into a kind of itinerant ambassador promoting themes such as sustainable development [click here to see the Wikipedia page on this subject] and the economic evolution of Africa.

Unexpectedly, on the eve of the new presidency, there was some nearby rumbling of legal artillery concerning a dark era in Chirac's past, when he was the mayor of Paris. The National Division of Financial Investigations at Nanterre summoned Alain Juppé, Chirac's former right-hand man at the city hall of Paris, as a witness in the context of the affair concerning individuals who were paid a salary by the city hall while working in fact for Chirac's political party. Juppé was condemned for this affair in 2004, whereas Chirac himself has never been troubled up until now, because of his presidential immunity.

If ever this affair were to explode at the start of Sarkozy's presidency, it would create a delicate and embarrassing climate, to say the least. As we all know, judges throughout the world have no special respect for former presidents... even in the USA.

The winner is... a loser

The dictionary informs me that one of my favorite French adjectives, ringard, came into existence at about the same time I first arrived in France, at the beginning of the 1960s. Besides, its origin is apparently unknown. For the moment, I can't think of its exact equivalent in English, but I'll give you an idea of what it means in French, and maybe somebody might be able to suggest an appropriate English adjective. At a first approximation, it means old-fashioned, obsolete, anachronistic or kitsch. But it's a derogatory term, so its meaning is somewhat similar to the adjectives crude, tacky or trashy.

Let me give you a local example. In the village of Pont-en-Royans, the mayor decided to transform some old buildings alongside the Bourne into a museum devoted to the theme of water. He called upon a graphic artist to produce a poster for the museum. Since there are several multimedia exhibits, the artist thought it would be a good idea to combine the notions of water and electronic display screens. And this is the result:

Now, every time I drive past one of these billboards (which are scattered all around the region), the adjective ringard pops instantly into my mind. The mediocre creative thinking of the design artist reminds me of an anecdote back in a Paris software laboratory where I used to work. It was packed with computers, on every desk, in every room. An Algerian cleaning woman would turn up towards the end of the afternoon, when most of us were still staring at our computer screens. When she needed to dust a computer screen that was being used, the lady would apologize for disturbing the engineer: "Excuse me for a moment or two while I clean your TV." We were amused by the fact that she must have imagined that we had fantastic jobs. We were being paid to sit there all day and watch TV. Well, to my mind, the guy who created the poster for the museum at Pont-en-Royans was a bit like our cleaning lady. To represent visually the concept of the multimedia exhibits, he got hold of an archaic TV set and took a photo of it floating in a pool of water. Then he added fishes and the head of a female swimmer. Happily, the TV set is obviously so ancient that nobody would be silly enough to turn it on, and electrocute the underwater observer.

The reason I'm particularly interested in the adjective ringard is that I wanted to say a few words about the amazingly tacky and kitsch Eurovision song contest that takes place annually here in Europe. It's moving from atrociously bad to worse, but there are millions of TV viewers who love it. This year, France succeeded in achieving exactly the same position as last year: third-last in a field of two dozen competing countries. The French group was named Fatals Picards, and it was meant to be terribly amusing. This is what they looked like:

Their sound was worse than their appearance. Now, it would be unkind of me to suggest that this group was not elected in a valid manner to represent France. I don't doubt for a moment that there are sufficiently many musically-tasteless TV viewers in France to cast their votes for such a group. But the bush telegraph tells me that this group might have got a little help from friends who are financial administrators in the French TV world. You see, the winner of Eurovision becomes automatically a loser, because the number 1 country has to host the following contest, and this is an expensive bore, to say the least. The situation might be summed up in words often applied to great sporting events such as the Olympic Games. The important thing is participating, not necessarily winning. For France, winning Eurovision would be a costly catastrophe.

Sepulcher cult

Respect of the dead is one of the most ancient human principles that exists. In the splendid trilogy of films by Jacques Malaterre on the origins of humanity, there are reconstructions of the primeval impact of death at a personal level, that of the family and companions of the deceased. The notion of a sepulcher probably occurred in the beginning as a simple pile of rocks concealing the putrefying corpse. Much later, the concept of individual life after death was concocted, and the sepulcher cult reached an apogee in ancient Egypt. Along with the processes of embalming and mummification, and the erection of elaborate stone sepulchers, the Egyptians codified alleged happenings in their Underworld.

In this New Empire papyrus, the dog-headed god Anubis (whose head has often been described erroneously as that of a jackal) guides the deceased person to his judgment, which uses a balance.

Christians have taken over this Ancient Egyptian concept of a guide in their Saint Christopher, who is actually depicted in this image with a dog's head. Not so long ago, devout Catholic drivers used to attach a St Christopher medal above the dashboard of their vehicle, without realizing that the main role of the prototype personage consisted of guiding individuals into the afterlife! [What a pity that there don't seem to be any statistics revealing the proportion of accident deaths in which the driver was "protected" by a St Christopher medal.]

Getting back to the theme of elaborate sepulchers, I must admit, as a genealogy enthusiast, that I'm always happy to discover ancestral tombs, which are often a primary source of data. Sometimes, on the contrary, tombstones display less reliable information than what you can find in church and government records.

The raison d'être of my musings on sepulchers is to ask a rhetorical question: Should we, today, continue to employ traditional funerary rites that have come down to us from past epochs? Or should they be modernized? And the reason why this subject has arisen in my mind is the news item about a lot of folk having paid money to have a few grams of the ashes of some 200 loved ones sent into space aboard a telephone-sized rocket. The exact price: $495 dollars a gram. [Click here to see this story.] The capsule orbited Earth for two weeks, as planned, before floating back down to the surface of our planet by means of a parachute. But the hilarious aftermath of this afterlife business is that the parachute apparently touched down at a remote and rugged site in New Mexico, which means that the "ashstronauts" have not yet been found. Did the space vehicle and its dead occupants get damaged during their re-entry into the atmosphere? How long will they be able to survive in the harsh desert conditions if rescuers don't reach them soon? Will, in fact, they ever be found? These are terrible questions, which cannot yet be answered.

Personally, I'm convinced that it's high time to ditch all archaic concern for the material remains of the dead. We should realize that corpses are corpses, and ashes are ashes. No more, no less. I believe that much of the ugliness of death can be attenuated by facing up to the fact that a corpse contains no traces of the consciousness and personality of the individual we once knew. So, it's silly to think that the deceased person might, somehow or other, get a kick out of his/her posthumous ride through space.

I can imagine a far more logical spatial trip towards posterity, which could even be organized while the individual is still alive. This would consist simply of using modern technology to obtain a digital copy of his/her genome and then beaming this into outer space by means of a high-energy transmitter, which might be called a Life Ray (as opposed to the death rays of a Star Trek kind). To keep it company on its never-ending journey through space, the genome could be associated with a digitized account of the genealogy and earthly achievements of the deceased. And why not even encapsulate in the Life Ray's message a digitized illustration of Anubis or Saint Christopher? The more the merrier on this excursion throughout Eternity!

Papal samba

Talented journalists [of the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein caliber] work like successful detectives. They acquire piles of fragmentary data, of all kinds, and then they attempt to fit it all together like the elements of a jigsaw puzzle. And finally, if they're lucky, a Big Picture emerges from their synthesis.

Great scientists too, in the Richard Dawkins and Brian Greene category, work at times like journalists and detectives. I thought of that comparison last night when I was watching an excellent BBC special on the Adelaide-born fellow named Howard Walter Florey who played a major role in the invention of the pharmaceutical technology behind the production of penicillin, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Alexander Fleming and Florey's Oxford colleague Ernst Chain) in 1945.

Unfortunately, devout catholics in general, and popes in particular, don't operate that way. They concentrate all their attention on a tiny number of not-very-convincing speculations, often of a fanciful nature (akin to what ordinary folk would call magic), and they elevate these sundry things to dogma.

Take sex, for example. What the bloody hell (to talk like an Aussie creator of tourism publicity) gives this silly old guy the right to drop in on Brazil and tell the local folk that they must respect fidelity between spouses and chastity "both within and outside marriage"? Benedict XVI surely knows shit all about sex, marriage, fidelity, chastity, contraception, abortion, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, HIV, etc... just as I know nothing about the concepts of the so-called "Immaculate Conception" of Mary, the alleged virgin birth of Jesus and the incredibly mysterious notion of the Holy Trinity. Benedict, my boy, it's time to pull your finger out and admit that you should stick to your personal specialties, and not start to talk about things you ignore.

Or maybe, on the other hand, the pope should get stuck into studies of all kinds about sex, both theoretical and experimental, so that he could fit all the fragments together and provide us with an expert description of the Big Fucking Picture, in the style of a great journalist, detective or scientific researcher. Who knows? Maybe the Vatican laboratories could invent a powerful pharmaceutical product like penicillin (to be known by a short name such as "penis-kill") which would cause unchaste pricks to wither up and drop off.

But I must refrain from venting my irritation. Let me remain in the domain of facts. In the same Google news that tells us about Benedict XVI in Brazil, there's a serious medical article about possible links between oral sex and throat cancer. [Click here to see how Time magazine handles this subject.] I reckon that the Pope should look into this deep question and tell us how he feels about it.

Political couples

Back in the days of Charles de Gaulle, few people would have used the word "couple" to designate the General and his wife Yvonne. I can't imagine a neighbor in the Champagne-Ardenne village of Colombey-les-Deux Eglises phoning up Madame de Gaulle at La Boisserie and saying: "My wife and I would like to invite a few couples along to our place this weekend for a barbecue and a scrabble evening. Are you interested?" In any case, while Charles and Yvonne were of course a married couple, they were certainly not what you would call a political couple. According to a legend (maybe apocryphal), while the General was attending to the affairs of France, his wife spent most of her time knitting.

During the recent presidential election, we saw an extraordinary emergence of authentic political couples, the most famous of which was Ségolène Royal and François Hollande.

In spite of their electoral defeat, and Ségolène's decision to refrain from being a candidate in next month's parliamentary elections, the Royal-Hollande couple hasn't exactly gone into hibernation. On the contrary, they're on the front page of the news because of a book on Ségolène's recent campaign, called La femme fatale, which is about to hit the bookstands. More precisely, the Royal-Hollande couple is attempting to use judicial means to block the release of this book... which is naturally a godsend in unexpected publicity for the two authors: Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin. The bone of contention between the political couple and the authors would appear to be an anecdote concerning the possibility that François Hollande might have preferred Lionel Jospin, rather than his wife, as the Socialist presidential candidate. [Jospin was the man who was knocked out unceremoniously in the first round, in 2002, by the extreme-rightwing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.] According to the anecdote related by Bacqué and Chemin, Ségolène would have yelled out at her husband: "If you call upon Jospin to block me, I swear you'll never see your kids again." Nice story, particularly for the authors of a political saga, but a little bit too dramatic to be true. The book will surely be a best-seller.

In calmer waters, Jean-Louis Borloo, a political friend of Sarkozy, happens to be the husband of an excellent TV journalist named Béatrice Schönberg (who reads out the news on France 2)... who was axed for the duration of the elections.

Another victim of a similar kind was the brilliant young TV journalist Marie Drucker [I used to know her father back in my 1972 days at the Research Service of the French Broadcasting System], who had the misfortune of being madly in love with a minister of Chirac named François Baroin, who was actually called upon to replace Sarkozy when the latter stepped officially into the electoral arena.

One of the most famous political couples in France is composed of the Socialist ex-minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his journalist wife Anne Sinclair, who was for many years one of the most popular women in France.

At the present moment, of course, the most famous couple of all is Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Cécilia.

Nobody really knows (maybe not even Nicolas) whether Cécilia is prepared to step into the role of the First Lady of France. Personally, I would bet that she won't. In other words, I don't believe that Nicolas and Cécilia constitute a political couple. I don't see Cécilia staying at home, knitting like Yvonne. Nor do I imagine her collecting small coins for charity, as Bernadette Chirac has been doing for years. Sarko has promised us that, with his election, things are going to change, no doubt in a surprising manner. I'm convinced that one of the biggest surprises that awaits us is finding out what the hell Sarko's going to do with his wife.

Beauty and the beast

Up until a few days ago, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer Laure Manaudou and her trainer Philippe Lucas were a unique tandem in top-level sport. It was impossible to imagine one without the other. Indeed, the style and the look of Lucas (long blonde hair, ear-rings, metal chains and bracelets) made him an even more fascinating telegenic personage than his illustrious protégée. French TV viewers remember with amazement the first image we saw of this couple, at the time of the Olympic Games in Athens. During a training session, Laura had done something that displeased Lucas, and he scolded her harshly as if she were a naughty child. Clearly, Lucas was an iron-handed trainer, but there was no doubt about the efficiency of his methods.

A fortnight ago, the much-admired French TV host Michel Drucker succeeded in inviting the swimmer and her trainer to a popular Sunday-afternoon talk show, and viewers had their first opportunity of seeing Laure and Philippe together in a setting other than the edge of a pool. I was struck by the fact that lovely Laure looked much taller and sturdier than what you imagine when you see her in a swimming competition. As for Lucas, he came across as an exceptionally clear-thinking individual, capable of expressing himself simply and often humorously, with firm convictions about his way of handling Laure's training for the Beijing games. Then, last Sunday (election day in France), everything seemed to go wrong between them. After six years with Lucas, Laure left in a huff for Italy, and everybody imagined that she merely wanted to be closer to her Italian fiancé, the swimmer Luca Marin.

I'm not sure that the full details of Laure's decision have emerged yet, but it appears that she's fed up with the constraints of Philippe's methods, which involve swimming huge distances, day in, day out. She says she wants to "discover a new challenge", and that it's better to change trainers now, a year and a half before Beijing, rather than at the last moment. In speaking of Lucas, she said: "I know how he operates. I know Philippe well. I want to show him I can win without him."

Today, Philippe Lucas used vehement words in criticizing Laure's decision to train in Italy. He implied that, in the Italian move to entice Laure to Turin, there was big money at stake. In referring to the fact that Laure has just lost over a month of regular training, Philippe suggested that Laure is "running away from work". And he added: "When you see her [today], you have the impression that she's just spent six months on a cruise liner." Maybe Philippe, in using this image, might have been influenced by his view of Nicolas Sarkozy returning to Paris after three days aboard the luxury yacht Paloma.

Provençal excursion

A few weeks ago, my friends Natacha and Alain in Marseilles invited me and my dog Sophia for a three-day excursion in Provence. They drove us to magnificent places such as Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Les Baux-de-Provence, Gordes and Roussillon. I think the latter place impressed me most of all. Colorado in Provence. Not only do you encounter the unique pastel images of Provence. You also come upon the geology and chemistry of these pink and ocher hues. For the visitor, it's impossible to say where the landscape ends and art takes over. You turn your head and you have the impression that you're confronted with the colors of Van Gogh and Gauguin, not to mention Cézanne. Everything at Roussillon is a magic global fusion of Nature and Humanity. While Alain was taking care of Sophia, Natacha took this photo of me in this Provençal wonderland:

Click here to find my photos of this fabulous three-day excursion.

Machina sapiens

On February 26, 2007 I wrote a blog article whose title was What's in a name? [Click here to display it.] I mentioned the fact that, in 1976, I wrote a book in French called Machina sapiens on the subject of artificial intelligence. I went on to express my mild irritation concerning the fact that many people are now using that expression without ever acknowledging that it was the title of my book.

Many years ago in Paris, at a big international computer fair, I approached the stand of a Canadian company named Machina sapiens and asked them where they had dug up their name. One of their managers was pleased to offer me explanations.

Manager: "Some time ago, there was a best-seller named Machina sapiens written by a Frenchman."

Me: "Not a Frenchman. An Australian. I wrote that book."

The guy looked embarrassed, but I'm not sure he believed me. What the hell. I've never claimed that I own that expression. I believe that the true inventor of the expression was the distinguished biophysicist Walter Rosenblith [1913-2002], who was the provost of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I interviewed him in 1972 for my TV specials on artificial intelligence and brain research.

This morning, I received a friendly comment from a lady in Argentina who uses Machina sapiens as the name of her blog. At first, I didn't see why somebody would assume I knew enough Spanish to be able to read a comment in this language. Then I remembered that a translation of my book had been published in Buenos Aires in 1978.

Smell of violence

When you see the new dog basket without Sophia inside, it looks enormous. But in fact, it's just right.

I'm constantly amazed by the way in which Sophia uses her sense of smell as a source of information about places and events in the outside world. When I take her with me in the car, Sophia lies on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She rarely props herself up high enough to see out through the car windows, and yet she knows constantly the key zones in which we're located. If I drive towards the edge of the Bourne River at Pont-en-Royans, Sophia starts to bark with excitement, because she looks forward to scavenging for bits of food dropped by picknickers. On the other hand, if I park in front of the veterinarian's place, Sophia refuses to get out of the automobile, apparently because she detects the smell of some kind of canine anguish.

At Gamone, the donkeys and the billy goat are usually about a hundred meters up the hill behind the house, and they're often partly hidden by shrubs. So, Sophia and I don't normally have a clear view of them. In spite of this, Sophia knows instantly whenever a mild squabble has erupted between the two donkeys (in the form of a biting match), or when one of the donkeys is fed up with the goat trying vainly to get up its backside, and lets loose with a hefty kick (which Gavroche always succeeds in sidestepping). As soon as Sophia detects any violence of this kind, she starts to bark furiously and looks at me with an expression of alarm, as if she expected me to intervene, to calm down the animals. I can only conclude that she must be capable of detecting what I would call a "smell of violence" that is emitted on such occasions by the donkeys or the goat. Or maybe there's some other explanation...

The simple life

The morning after his election, Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa jumped on a private Falcon jet with his wife Cécilia née Ciganer-Albeniz, their 10-year-old son Louis and a few bodyguards, and headed for the Mediterranean island of Malta, where they immediately boarded the 60-meter yacht Paloma. The aircraft and the boat belong to a French millionaire named Vincent Bolloré, who's the brother-in-law of Sarkozy's close counselor Gérard Longuet. Paparazzi had to hire an aircraft to obtain photos of the family outing.

Certain politicians in France were irritated by the ostentatious style of the start of Sarkozy's reign. Nobody actually used the expression "nouveau riche", but it seemed to be hovering on their lips. Curiously, although many wealthy French people lead lives of luxury, there's a tradition of doing so in a restrained non-glitzy manner. I have a scary feeling that, sooner or later, Nicolas Sarkozy is going to run into big problems with certain profound French conventions. Either that, or he'll explode...

Squaring the circle

Tarts and pies, like pizzas, are generally round. So, it's not surprising that the ready-made pastry you buy in supermarkets is also circular. The other two ingredients in one of my favorite easy-to-prepare dishes also happen to be round.

The excellent cow's-milk cheese is a St-Marcellin, from the nearby town of that name. Out in Australia last year, I recall a celebrated local chef saying that he thought of it as one of the finest cheeses in the world. I wouldn't go as far as that, because there are many far more exotic cheeses in France than our everyday St-Marcellin, but it's certainly what you might call excellent basic cheese. I've always got a stock of them in the refrigerator, and I often devour a St-Marcellin between meals.

How do you go about using circular-shaped ingredients to make rectangular pasties? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to discover that it can be done by cutting the pastry into eight equal sectors and arranging the ingredients as follows:

You simply fold over the four edges to obtain a square-shaped pasty. After fifteen minutes in the oven, here's the result:

This is in fact a popular recipe from the town of St-Marcellin, where they refer to these pasties as marcellines.

Today, together, everything's possible

Click here to see the victory website of Nicolas Sarkozy.

A new page opens in France

An encouraging aspect of the final round of the French presidential elections was the massive turnout of voters (in a nation where voting is not compulsory): some 84% of eligible citizens. Clearly, few people heeded the instructions of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme rightwing ex-candidate who had asked his followers to abstain from voting.

The left, behind Ségolène Royal, was soundly thrashed. Most people who voted for François Bayrou in the first round did not choose the Socialist candidate in the second round. Will the left succeed in getting its act together before the parliamentary elections in five weeks' time? This is not at all obvious, because many Socialists will be tempted to blame Ségolène Royal for the present defeat, and this will tend to destabilize the left during the forthcoming campaign.

As for Sarkozy, he'll be literally going out of circulation from now until his investiture on 16 May. His speech this evening, after the announcement of his victory, was forceful and relatively reassuring, in that he underlined the need for national reconciliation and union. In words addressed to the USA, he insisted upon the fact that humanity's major challenge is the planetary combat against global warming. He also referred to the interesting theme of a Mediterranean Union, which would be a link between Europe and Africa.

In 1983, at the age of 28, Sarkozy became the mayor of Neuilly, an upper-class residential suburb to the west of Paris. Ten years later, by which time he had become an elected parliamentarian, Sarkozy broke into the news for his courageous role in handling negotiations with a crazy armed guy, calling himself Human Bomb, who had entered a kindergarten in Neuilly and taken 21 kids as hostages. I remember listening to news on this dramatic affair on my car radio as I crossed France in the summer of 1993, to start work in Grenoble. Finally, the elite police force known as the RAID [Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion] burst into the kindergarten while Human Bomb was dozing, and filled his skull with lead. I've always imagined that this affair symbolized the start of Sarkozy's ascension in the world of politics and police.

Death of a singer, birth of a legend

Popular French singer Grégory Lemarchal was 23 years old when he died a week ago of a terrible hereditary disease, cystic fibrosis, for which there is not yet any permanent remedy. In 2004 he was the winner of a French TV talent quest called Star Academy.

The sudden death of this angel-faced youth, which could well transform his brief glory into a legend, will hopefully play a positive role in the constant quest for body-organ donors, not to mention the collection of financial donations to aid in the on-going research in the domain of cystic fibrosis. [Click here to visit the Grégory Lemarchal website.]

Clean car, dirty thoughts

I seem to recall that a political leader stated recently that small business is the backbone of Australia's prosperity. In Queensland, the proprietor of a strip-tease joint concocted the brilliant idea of a car-wash service carried out by semi-nude women.

Car owner: "I'll just hang around while you're washing my car to make sure you don't run into any problems."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, if you hang around, you might be able to give me a hand."

Car owner: "No sweat. It's so bloody hot, I wouldn't mind a wash job for myself."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, I'll see what we can do. Just hang around."

The service is ecologically correct, since it uses recycled water. Besides, since the washing operations are performed in a closed shed, there's no problem of what is referred to in Australia as "public decency".

In Victorian London, there was an unwritten law that gave citizens the freedom to do almost anything they felt like doing, even if it infringed morality, provided they didn't do their naughty stuff in public, in the streets... "where it might frighten the horses".

That backside vision of the washerwoman astride her stick horse could indeed arouse the senses of nearby beasts.

Influencing people

During my trip out to Australia last year, I was thrilled to receive an unexpected gift from my young sister Jill. In an outdoor market, probably in the vicinity of her home town of Woolgoolga, she had come upon a copy of a book that fascinated me when I was a teenager: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was surprised that Jill, who's much younger than me, would have remembered that her brother had come in contact with Carnegie's famous book. Retrospectively, I imagine that my interest in this book stemmed from the fact that the very idea of trying deliberately to win friends and influence people was most exotic in the backwoods environment in which I had grown up, where quiet timidity, reticence and inhibition were our primary social qualities. My discovery of Carnegie's advice was akin to the parson's daughter opening stealthily a copy of Sex Manual for the Single Girl.

I've already pointed out in this blog [click here to see my Therapy post] that I'm an unconditional fan of the Dilbert comic strip, whose creator, Scott Adams, runs a marvelous blog. From time to time, Scott has alluded with enthusiasm to a book by Robert Cialdini, Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion, whose first edition appeared almost a quarter of a century ago.

Normally, these days, I'm no longer keen on this kind of psychological literature, since I've become more interested in science, computers and dogs than in people. But, based upon my assumption that anything that's good for the creator of Dilbert is good for me too, I ordered the revised edition from Amazon. It arrived yesterday, and my rapid reading confirms that this is indeed Dale Carnegie in overdrive: choice intellectual fodder, in fact a gourmet dinner, for a social critic such as Scott Adams. Cialdini's book is in the same heavyweight category as The Peter Principle. It reveals the ways in which smart individuals have unearthed rules of conduct enabling them to impose their will upon others, thereby achieving power of an economic, political or even religious kind.

If this blog were penned by an out-of-phase literary critic who waits a quarter of a century before deciding that a book deserves to be read, I would say that Cialdini's Influence is a must. In Carnegie's country, the cover says it's a National Bestseller. With a bit of time and perseverance, it could even become an international bestseller.

Time for Tzipi?

This 48-year-old woman (an Israeli lawyer, former Mossad agent, and a Likud member elected to the Knesset in 1999) has always impressed me greatly. I would describe her in Middle East parlance as a pragmatic dove. In the context of the current leadership crisis that has struck Israel abruptly (after the findings of the Winograd report on the misconduct of last year's war in Lebanon), observers suggest that Tzipi Livni is of the same mettle as the great Golda Meir [1898-1978].

Clearly, sooner or later, Ehud Olmert must leave the scene. The sooner the better (in my modest opinion). And Livni has had the courage to say so, even though it must have hurt her morally to speak out against her former political colleague.

These days, few people would be audacious enough to predict a great future (whatever that might mean) for the Israeli nation and the Palestinians, for there are so many gigantic problems that have not yet found even the beginning of a solution. But I would not hesitate in predicting a great future for this exceptional lady named Tzipi Livni.

Risk of turbulence ahead

I've already stated my opinion that the "tough guy" image of Nicolas Sarkozy could become a provocation for countless individuals in France, with nothing to win or lose, who would simply wish to stir up trouble in the streets. For many years, these people have been referred to by a vague generic term: the casseurs (literally, the "smashers"). They're well-organized. Often, they assemble on the fringe of authentic political demonstrations and go into action when everybody, including the police, is least expecting it. There's no sense in hiding the fact that these individuals exist, and that they see Nicolas Sarkozy almost as a sporting opponent, whom they're "out to get". As depicted in the following graffiti in a nearby village, Sarko is often relegated (unjustly, it must be said) to the role of a diabolical Fascist:

This morning, Ségolène Royal stated that Nicolas Sarkozy is "a risk" for France. She refers to her opponent as "the candidate of the hard right-wing", and warns that, if Sarkozy were victorious next Sunday, "there will be very strong tensions throughout the country". She added that Sarkozy's bid for power was "dangerous in terms of a concentration of power, of brutality, of lies".

The former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin has been equally explicit on the question of Sarkozy. He denounced "the violence of some of his words, his tendency towards demagogy and clientélisme (patronage), and the impression he gives of being constantly in overdrive".

There's no guaranty, of course, that "smashers" would be more conciliatory with Ségolène Royal, if she were elected. After all, she has been quite outspoken on youthful delinquency, and has even evoked the strange idea of calling upon the army to force some civic common-sense into the behavior of offenders. The big difference between Ségo and Sarko is that the lady is not generally looked upon explicitly as a symbol of provocation.

Rebirth of a new old nation?

Tony Blair has had no more luck in his bid to achieve a political victory in Scotland than in dealing militarily with Iraq. And the Scottish Nationalist Party of Alex Salmond, committed to national independence, appears to have made a giant breakthrough.

When you think about it, if Scotland were to gain independence, there would be fabulous retirement jobs in Edinburgh for Bush, Blair and Howard: respectively US, UK and Australian ambassadors to the new nation... unless, of course, by that time, they had already accepted similar posts in Iraq.

Eating nostalgically

From time to time, memories of dishes from my adolescence spring into my mind, and I try to recreate them. When I was working with IBM in Sydney, I often used to have lunch on my own in a Chinese restaurant at the corner of Castlereagh Street and Martin Place. In those days, I was unfamiliar with Chinese cooking, and I always ordered the same dish: curried prawns, served with celery. The other day, seeing a huge pile of prawns in the local supermarket, I decided to prepare this dish.

The result was quite tasty, although it's unlikely that my Indian curry paste (produced in the UK) is the same kind of product they used back in the Chinese restaurant in Sydney.

The next morning, in the sunshine, I was intrigued to discover orange stains on my fingernails, even though I had taken a shower. Worse, there were even small patches of orange on the towel that I had used, the previous day, to dry my hands after shelling the prawns. I phoned my daughter to ask her whether she thought it feasible that prawns might be colored artificially. And Manya suggested that I should look up this question on the Internet.

The Wikipedia results enlightened me, but they'll no doubt discourage me from getting back to curried prawns for a while. A chemical product named astaxanthin is responsible for the red color of flamingos, certain fish and cooked prawns. Synthetic astaxanthin is a food coloring, indicated as E161 in the European Union's numbering system. Unfortunately, I wasn't sufficiently well-trained in organic chemistry to conclude, as a result of this reading, whether the cause of my orange fingernails was natural and harmless, or whether there might be cause for alarm. In any case, I learn that my fingernails are nothing compared to the pinkish down of seagulls in the vicinity of salmon farms.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike out to my friend Keith Weatherstone's place at Eatonsville, to spend the weekend on their farm. Keith's mother told me that their hens used to eat a peppery weed growing on their property, and the effect of this was that boiled eggs we ate for breakfast were automatically peppered. I saw that as a fabulous concept, capable of revolutionizing the food industry. If only we could find the right weeds to feed to our hens, they might get around to laying us eggs for cooking cheese or bacon-flavored omelettes. If I understand correctly through my rapid reading about astaxanthin (which belongs to the large family of organic pigments called carotenoids), the food industry is probably already capable of providing interested customers with eggs to make salmon-flavored mayonnaise. How about prawn-flavored candy? Ideally, it should be able to glow in the dark. That will soon be happening to us humans, I reckon.

Shopping in Manhattan

I bought this gadget back in 1971, during my first visit to the USA, when I was making plans to shoot a series of TV specials in the domain of artificial intelligence and brain research. The day before my return flight to France, I wandered into a sleazy-looking shop on Times Square and purchased this device without knowing much about what it might be capable of doing. As far as I knew, it was a relatively sophisticated pocket calculator, with the possibility of loading mathematical functions from a plastic card. [Clive Sinclair's primitive ZX computers were still a decade away in the future.]

Now, a funny thing happened in that Times Square shop, at exactly the moment I had paid for my calculator, which was being wrapped up by a friendly young salesman. Four New York police officers (one of whom was female) strolled into the shop, walked behind the counter, drew out their pistols and promptly handcuffed an older member of the shop staff. All this happened so rapidly that I didn't have time to imagine what might be taking place, and why. I had been about to leave the shop, and the sudden irruption of the police wasn't a pretext for hanging around like a naive tourist. So, I walked out onto Times Square, doomed to remain ignorant of the reasons why the shopkeeper had been arrested.

Back in Paris, I tried to get my Times Square calculator to work. Impossible! I could get it to light up, but I couldn't coax it do anything whatsoever in the way of calculations. Little by little, I started to realize retrospectively why the shopkeeper in faraway Manhattan might have run into problems with the authorities. I soon got around to concluding that he had probably sold me a make-believe calculator: no more than a plastic box with a battery inside to make it light up. As for calculating mathematical functions, I imagined that it was no more capable of such tasks than a pocket lamp.

You might be wondering why I've never tried to elucidate this mystery, either by contacting the alleged manufacturer, or by simply smashing the thing with a hammer and taking a peek inside. In fact, I keep it intact as a personal souvenir of my first and last shopping excursion in Manhattan.

Now, why have I dragged this old story out of mothballs today? Well, a year ago, I bought an Epson color laser printer through the Internet, and I've never succeeded in making it work correctly. It prints stuff, but the results are deplorable. Besides, the documentation looks as if it has been written by a Zen poet. It refers to buttons that simply do not exist, and menus that seem to go around in circles. At times, I've been tempted to imagine that the Times Square dealer might have moved to France and started up an Internet business selling printers.

Finally, this afternoon, I found the address of an Epson repair shop in Grenoble. I phoned them, and I'm going to take the printer along to them tomorrow to see if they can fix it. Now, wouldn't it be weird, tomorrow, if a squad of French gendarmes were to burst into that repair shop just after I've left my printer there...

Electoral debate

To my way of thinking (which is biased, of course), Ségolène Royal was a far better performer than Nicolas Sarkozy in last night's grand TV debate.

She stared defiantly into the eyes of her opponent, and spoke with passion, whereas Sarkozy was often drooped over his notes, or glancing sideways at the journalist PPDA [Patrick Poivre d'Arvor].

Although polls maintain that Sarkozy is likely to win next Sunday, there are several positive signs in favor of Ségolène Royal. First, the Centrist ex-candidate François Bayrou has stated that he will not vote for Sarkozy... although he refrains from saying explicitly that he will vote for Ségolène. Today, Jean-Marie Colombani, director of the prestigious daily Le Monde, stated that Ségolène Royal was his preferred candidate. Colombani writes that Sarkozy's vision of politics is "American", and this adjective is interpreted by many of his readers as a condemnation. It's a fact that Sarkozy is on good terms with leading French capitalists such as Martin Bouygues, Arnaud Lagardère and Serge Dassault, who have high stakes in French media. As Colombani explains, Sarkozy appeals simultaneously to those at the top of society and to many of those at the bottom. He wants to make it easier for those at the top to invest their financial resources to create employment for those at the bottom. Sarkozy believes greatly in the old-fashioned work ethic according to which those who get up early in the morning will be winners, whereas society's jobless whiners are generally lazy losers. Needless to say, up until now, that kind of thinking has never been particularly widespread in France. Over the last week or so, Sarkozy has even dared to attack outrightly the social values associated with the legendary upheavals of May 1968. If Sarkozy wins on Sunday, I fear there'll be a lot of social turmoil just around the corner.

Trivial stuff

Often, I spend a good part of the day trying to solve some kind of computing problem. Subsequently, if somebody were to ask me, on the phone, what I've been doing all day, I find it hard to produce a plausible answer. Today has been one of those days. In fact, the day got off to the kind of start that might have suggested that there wouldn't be a lot of action. This morning, the sky at Gamone was overcast, and the weather was wet and chilly. I got into my car to drive to St-Jean. Fifty meters down the road from my house, I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a creature that was crossing the road. Readers will think I'm crazy. It was a big Burgundy snail. A few years ago, I used to collect such snails and prepare them for eating. Maybe that's what causes me to respect these creatures to the point of not squashing them with my automobile. It's a fact, too, that I make an effort not to run over toads on the road at Gamone. In that case, it's simply because I'm fond of these big clumsy animals, and I don't like to see them killed stupidly. You might say there's a little bit of Dalai Lama sensitivity in my attitude. A hundred meters further down the road, I slammed on the brakes a second time. This time, it was not for a snail or a toad but so that I could get out of the car and remove a football-sized rock that had fallen onto the road. So, I probably earned a few Brownie points before I got on the way to St-Jean. [In French, they talk of the "good actions" carried out by Scouts and Guides.]

The pharmacy in St-Jean is surely one of the nicest and friendliest pharmacies in France. (Well, at least that's how I've always seen it.) But, whenever I try to talk about anything serious with the pharmacist, I quickly put my foot in my mouth. This morning, I wanted to tell him that I sometimes feel that my GP [general practitioner] tends to be over-zealous by getting me tested for potential ailments that almost certainly don't exist. For example, a year ago, he took me through all the messy prostate tests, which turned out to be totally negative. And now I have the impression that he's itching to get me to go through it all once again. Trying to appear smart, I told the pharmacist (because I'd just read it on the Internet) that the current protocol concerning the possible presence of prostate cancer is flawed, resulting in an exaggerated number of unnecessary biopsies. When I mentioned that a new US protocol was about to go into action (frontpage Google news last week), the pharmacist naturally wanted to know all about it. But he might just as well have asked me to give him a rundown on the latest news about pig-farming in China. I promised to send him an e-mail.

Later on in the morning, at the supermarket parking zone near Romans, I was fascinated by a stunt pilot performing his acrobatics directly above me. When I saw he was making a big low circle in order to land, I decided to drive to the nearby airfield (less than a kilometer from the supermarket) simply to see what kind of a plane and pilot had been carrying out these amazing stunts. As I parked alongside the clubhouse, a female stunt pilot was about to take off, in an exotic blue machine, and the guy I had been watching was getting out of his equally exotic red plane. There are all kinds of people with whom I should never be tempted to strike up a conversation, because I never have anything intelligent to say to them. For example, apart from pharmacists: veterinary doctors (my attitude to animals is too sentimental, and vets must think I'm brain-damaged), farmers (they take one look at me and see I'm not one of them), police officers, priests, etc. Well, you can add stunt pilots to that list.

Me: "I've been watching you from over in front of the supermarket. I guess you're a professional pilot."

Pilot: "No, we simply like that kind of flying. [The "we" encompassed the lady who had just taken off.] But we don't get paid for it."

Me: "Is acrobatics a specialty of this aero club?"

Pilot: "No, we're from a club in Montpellier. I grew up here in Romans. I know the club well. We've just dropped in for a while."

Me: "Ah, so you've come all the way up here from Montpellier to say hello to old friends."

Pilot: "Well, it didn't take us long to get here."

Thankfully, an intelligent conversationalist turned up, enabling him to say goodbye to me, in the polite style of a stunt pilot.

On the way home, I dropped in at a farm to buy asparagus from a young farmer's wife who was busy tying up one-kilo bunches of this excellent vegetable. Now, you might add farmers' wives, particularly asparagus farmers' wives, to my list of bad conversational partners.

Me (after purchasing two kilos): "Maybe you'll give me expert advice on preparing them."

Farmer's wife: "Well, after you've peeled them..."

Me (in my seasoned journalistic style): "Ah, so they have to be peeled?"

Farmer's wife (realizing that she was dealing with an idiot): "Yes, it's best to use a little peeler [called, funnily, an économe in French]. You start at the top and you peel downwards to the bottom. Then you throw them into boiling water that has been salted."

Me: "How long do you let them boil?"

Farmer's wife: "Oh, about a quarter of an hour. Not too long, though, otherwise they turn yellow."

I was about to ask her what's wrong with the idea of eating yellow asparagus, if they're well-cooked, but I decided instantly that this question would be excessive.

Back home in front of my computer, I said to myself that it was reassuring (for me, in any case) to realize that my day had been well spent in solving a few technical problems concerning the creation of websites. What I mean to say is that, if the global worth of my day's efforts had been measured exclusively in terms of removing obstacles from the Gamone road and talking with a pharmacist, a stunt flier and an asparagus farmer's wife, then maybe I should have stayed in bed. The truth of the matter is that I've spent the day looking forward to this evening's debate between Ségo and Sarko. So, let's forget about my conversational inadequacies, and let me tune in to the Serious Stuff that's about to happen.

Dope in sport

In this dismal domain (primarily, dope in cycling), much has happened over the last year, and new events are still being revealed.

First, Floyd Landis is likely to lose his Tour de France title, because the presence of synthetic testosterone in his urine has apparently been confirmed.

Above all, we're still in the middle of the gigantic fallout from the so-called Puerto affair of May 2006, when Spanish police arrested sporting director Manolo Sainz and the doctor Fuentes, whose trial will be starting next June. [Click here to see a French-language website with the names of cyclists involved in this affair, or simply Google with the expression "puerto affair".]

The Italian rider Ivan Basso has just severed his links with Discovery Channel, and he has been summoned for a confrontation tomorrow with the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI). In the near future, he could well be caught out, like Jan Ullrich, by DNA testing.

Furthermore, the Italian Gazzetta dello Sport has just announced that 49 additional cyclists (whose names have not yet been revealed) must be added to the list of 58 already involved in the Puerto Affair. That makes a grand total of 107 professional cyclists who are indirectly suspected of using dope. So, it's not just a marginal phenomenon. It sounds as if a great part of the professional cycling system is rotten, but it's still too early to know what global effects this conclusion might have upon the sport, and the outlook of the general public.

When I read the nasty blood-bag tales of doping in cyclism, I'm nauseated. It's truly sickening, enough to make me want to put away in the attic all my spontaneous enthusiasm for the grand summer ritual of the Tour de France. Will this ugly medical mess ever be cleaned up?

Village festival

A month ago, I wrote a post about the pagan Plowmen's Festival in the nearby village of St-Jean-en-Royans. [Click here to see this post.] Last weekend, in the neighboring village of St-Laurent-en-Royans, there was a similar annual event known as the Reinage. Few French people understand this curious term. It sounds like the French word reine, which means "queen". So, people imagine that the word reinage simply designates a village festival during which a queen is elected... much like the annual Jacaranda Queen in my native Grafton. This is almost true, but not quite. In fact, the origin of reinage is the Latin term regalis (royal). It's not a purely feminine affair. In pagan times, both a "king" and a "queen", surrounded by "acolytes", were elevated to a brief state of glory in the village. It's not very clear why these fleeting honors were bestowed upon certain adolescents in the community, but it probably had something to do with the celebrated concepts of youth, fertility and (to call a spade a spade) sex, if not debauchery.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the Roman Church got around to edulcorating such pagan rites, the reinage concept was dealt with in a typically efficient religious style. The youthful "king", "queen" and their "court" were named either through merit, or because their parents had paid the Church for this privilege, much like present-day members of the aristocracy financing the coming-out of their daughters at balls for débutantes. Then these charming adolescents were expected to parade around the village collecting money, in the style of today's kids who participate in fund-raising days for charities. Normally, it was planned that this money should find its way up into the coffers of the Church, where it would be used for all kinds of noble purposes. But that's where things often got screwed up. The randy kids, with their hot grubby hands full of filthy lucre, would often redirect a tiny portion of their wealth to the purchase of liquor, just to cool off and sooth themselves after all their regal collecting efforts. And it could happen that things would get out of hand, and the reinage could be transformed into its archaic debauchery.

Be that as it may, at St-Laurent-en-Royans last Sunday, everything was sedate and ecclesiastically correct. The above float was manned by inmates from a local mental asylum. Initially, I thought that the two personages were Caesar and Cleopatra, but I wouldn't swear to that. It's a fact that the gentleman in the male role would often rise from his throne, while I was trying to photograph him, and hurl out "Ave Caesar!" As for his female companion, she was simply thrilled to realize that an unknown guy with a Nikon was intent upon photographing her. Incidentally, my former neighbor Bob, who works in this institution, was dressed for the Reinage parade as a Roman centurion. This was fine, since Bob, in real life, is a massive former rugby champion.

My daughter (who knows much more about France than I do, primarily because she's French) informed me that, nowadays, French youth don't actually give a screw about the cultural references I've brought into the present article (pagan rituals, Christianization, etc). Manya says they were brought up on three cultural pillars, which happen to be comic-strip characters: Astérix and Obélix, Lucky Luke and Tintin. Really, somebody should make me a king or a crazy emperor for a weekend, so that I can catch up on culture...