My son's photos

My son and I recently started to build a website to display his photos. For the moment, only one of François' four basic categories contains photos: his billiards images. You can visit the website by clicking the following block, and then clicking the billiards photo:

François considers that it's undesirable, if not impossible, to create rigid labeled categories for his photos. He prefers to let them speak for themselves, as it were, rather than encumbering the website with words. So, that's why the site has a minimalist look and feel. On the other hand, we're happy to discover that any photo can be displayed on a broadband connection within a second or so. To attain this result, we've used a highly-modular Flash approach, which means that each photo is downloaded onto the viewer's computer at the last possible instant: that's to say, only at the moment that the photo is actually requested.

At present, François is preoccupied by an exciting documentary film project. So, he's not likely to find time to complete the photo website for another few weeks.

Gaza ghetto

At the outset, in 16th-century Venice, the term ghetto had nothing to do with Jews. The Italian verb gettare designates metal casting, and the Venetian Getto was simply the ancient neighborhood, which still exists today, where ammunition was cast.

Jews had been living in the Serenissima since time immemorial, but primarily on the island of the Guidecca (whence its name). Venetian merchants had always got on wonderfully well with their Jewish colleagues, experienced money-lenders, and it was normal that the latter should be offered the possibility of relocating their offices in the central Getto quarter. Only much later were Jewish quarters, throughout the world, referred to—often disparagingly—as ghettos. Then came the time of pogroms, and the terrible Hitlerian epoch of the ignominious Warsaw Ghetto...

Today, half a century later, there are no more Jewish ghettos on Yahveh's planet. But a Palestinian ghetto might well be about to spring into existence, spontaneously, in the Gaza Strip.

Now that all entries into, and exits from, the Gaza Strip are theoretically controlled by Israel, one wonders how anything whatsoever might transit into or out of this hostile enclave, apart from the basic life-sustaining commodities allowed by the Hebrew state. Sure, we know that there's a labyrinth of tunnels between the Egyptian Sinai and the southern frontier of the Strip. But there are limits to what might be transited by this itinerary, apart from arms.

In medieval times, the old-fashioned word siege designated the cutting-off of supplies between belligerents and the outside world. It's not unlikely that the filtering process brought about by the flight of Fatah people—leaving the hatred of Hamas all alone in Gaza—will give rise to such a siege, of an old-world kind, imposed by Israel. And the Gaza Ghetto might become, for ages, a symbol of senseless suffering.

Silly sendup of Sydney by French railways

Don't ask me why the French railway system, known as the SNCF, is using the Internet to peddle low-budget flight tickets to Sydney. Admittedly, if I were to purchase such a combined rail/air packaged deal, the SNCF would take care of the train trip to the overseas flight terminus, say in Paris. But I still can't understand what the French railway system has to gain by proposing round trips to such a faraway place as Australia.

Be that as it may, the reason I've brought up this matter is to show you how an apparently serious French organization such as voyages-sncf.com attempts to handle the case of Sydney and Australia in lowbrow web publicity that's meant to be funny. This might give you an insight into the way in which some French people imagine Australia... on a par with the Australian image of the French as arrogant frog-eaters wearing berets. But I warn you: this stuff is not particularly funny.

The publicity starts with a banner showing a wooden shed in the fields:

The sign on the shed, Salle des fêtes, might be translated as "festival hall". But the label in italics means "grand opera hall": a facetious allusion to Sydney.

The next banner shows male underclothes on a clothes line, labeled "kangaroos":

To appreciate the intended humor here, you need to know that the old-fashioned style of underpants with a pouch for male genitalia has always been designated in French as the "kangaroo" model of underpants. Subtle, no?

The third banner introduces a welcome sign to a French town called Cidenet:

Now, if you pronounce this alleged place-name in French [in reality, I don't think that any such place exists in France], it sounds a bit like the way that French people say "Sydney". Hilarious, no?

Finally, the fourth banner offers a return flight to Sydney for the low sum of 1014 euros, and it includes the name of the French railways website:

For the moment, I haven't checked to find out whether this low-cost offer is really valid. If so, it's certainly cheap.

Meanwhile, if you click on any of the above banners, you're invited to watch a mediocre series of filmed gags in the same spirit as the banners. The movie starts as follows:

We gather that the guy in shorts with a speleo helmet and lamp, on the outskirts of Cidenet/Sydney, is supposed to be a contestant in a TV game, receiving phone instructions from the organizers concerning a trial he's expected to perform.

Next, we see the contestant in closeup:

We learn that he's supposed to find his way, as quickly as possible, to the Great Barrier Reef.

Then we change to a side-splitting image (?) labeled "kangaroos of Cidenet", showing three individuals carrying their backpacks on their tummies:

The next nondescript landscape is labeled "gateway to the Cidenet desert" (which suggests that the movie creator imagines that the real Sydney is located on the edge of a desert):

Then we are offered an image of a building [no doubt altered by Photoshop] labeled "Cidenet opera house":

To appreciate the next two climactic scenes in this moronic movie, you need to know that the French refer to our Great Barrier Reef as the Coral Barrier. Now, the name "Coral" has been used for ages (I don't know why) to designate the old-fashioned trains still found in the French countryside. And the word "barrier" is used in French to designate a level-crossing. So, if you've grasped all that required background information, you might understand the sense of the image:

Here, the contestant is informing the organizers of the TV game that he has just arrived at the Coral Barrier, in fact a level-crossing on a country line where Coral-type trains run.

The following image then shows our hero wearing flippers and fooling around on a surf board, on the ground alongside the tracks, while the Coral train roars past:

Finally, a curious warning message informs us awkwardly that the film was made using trick cinema (?), and that we should not attempt to copy it:

Three aspects of this stupid presentation remain mysterious:

(a) What's it all about?

(b) Did French railways pay money to get this idiotic stuff produced?

(c) Is their low-cost flight offer valid?

A positive outcome of my encounter with this rubbish is that I now have a revised outlook upon the much talked-about Australian tourism publicity that concludes with an uncouth question: "What the bloody hell are you waiting for?" Not so long ago, I tended to be ironic about this advertising strategy. But, by comparison with the French parody about Sydney, that Aussie spot now appears to me as a pinnacle of refined intelligence, elegant language and sophisticated humor.

Italian cyclist Basso out for two years

Ivan Basso, winner of last year's Giro, admitted recently that he was involved in the so-called Puerto doping scandal. Consequently, he has just been suspended for two years by the Italian cycling federation. Basso's reaction: "I made a mistake, and I have to pay for it."

An interesting question (of a purely theoretical nature, with no practical consequences) now arises. As recently as March 2007, Johan Bruyneel, sporting director of the Discovery Channel team, persisted in trying to justify retrospectively his selection of Basso as a team member. Should we therefore believe that Basso simply never got around to informing Bruyneel that he was actually guilty of doping?

Three big election-evening surprises

From a political viewpoint, French TV was not at all dull this evening.

— The second round of the French legislative elections was certainly won by the UMP party of Nicolas Sarkozy. But, contrary to what most people had predicted, it was not by a huge landslide victory. In other words, the Socialist opposition will have an important role to play in the future parliament.

— Alain Juppé, the number 2 man in Sarkozy's recently-appointed government, was defeated in Bordeaux, and he will therefore be obliged to resign as a minister.

— For some strange reason, Ségolène Royal chose this evening to announce that she and François Hollande have ceased to exist, in everyday life, as a couple. As a result of this announcement, my recent blog article entitled Simple direct talk [click here to display it] is henceforth a little obsolete. Things move so quickly!

Nice TV spot

Areva is a large French state-owned company in the field of nuclear energy. They handle the three fundamental aspects of this domain: the processing of uranium, the construction of nuclear reactors, and the transmission and distribution of electricity. The president of this company, with 61,000 employees throughout the world, is a French woman, Anne Lauvergeon.

The reason I'm talking about Areva is that I love their TV spot, which presents an animated display of the entire energy production cycle. To see the TV spot, you first have to display the following box, then you click the button I've indicated:

So, start out by clicking the above image.

Snake oil

In my blog, I've already mentioned a couple of daring Aussie money-making inventions:

— first, half-naked female automobile washers [click here for article],

— then yesterday, oysters macerated in Viagra [click here for article].

In this exciting marketing domain, there's no reason why I shouldn't add a plug for the following Australian product [click the banner to visit their website]:

If I understand correctly, uncorking a bottle of this magic liquid in the presence of snakes creates an effect of repugnance upon them, filling them with a desire to get the hell out of the area. You might say it's a little like the effect upon humans when somebody stealthily lets off highly odorous wind in a crowded lift.

To be perfectly frank, I have to admit that I once purchased a French version of such a product. My son and his girlfriend, holidaying at Gamone, had informed me excitedly that they had glimpsed a terrible-looking reptile, with colored stripes, on the edge of my vegetable garden. Naively, I went along to a pharmacy in nearby Villard-de-Lans and asked them what kind of product I should have in my medicine cabinet, knowing that I was living in the presence of an unidentified but no doubt awesome snake. Actually, I was thinking vaguely of some kind of first-aid product: maybe a snakebite antidote. [I later learned that the use of such a product by anybody who's not a skilled medical specialist is no less dangerous than the snakebite.] Well, the pharmacist was delighted to sell me a big bottle of expensive yellow liquid labeled snake repellent, and I was out of the pharmacy and on my way home before I realized what a sucker I had been. I mean: What can you actually do with a bottle of alleged snake repellent in the case of a reptile that you haven't even seen, which is not likely to reappear spontaneously on your doorstop pleading to be repelled? Sure, you can squirt the stuff all around your property until the bottle's empty, then sit back waiting to check that the snake does not indeed reappear. But that's a bit like using a mixture of warm water and sugar to repel butterflies. The chances are that, if you get up early in the morning, and pour a cup of warm sugared water on the lawn, you won't see any butterflies there for at least an hour or so. There's a similar system of a flashing bicycle lamp, in the early evening, to chase away falling stars. To make things worse, my son and his girlfriend finally admitted, with great hilarity, that they'd hidden a rubber snake with green and purple stripes on the edge of my vegetable patch, in the hope of scaring shit out of me. Retrospectively, I can't recall ever having seen this object, which probably means that the rain washed it down into Gamone Creek, from where it might have floated down to Pont-en-Royans to frighten the tourists. As for my bottle of snake repellent, I finally used it in an attempt to repel mice in the attic, but it didn't.

Normally, with a bit of imagination and talented showmanship, it should be child's play to demonstrate that a snake repellent does in fact repel snakes. In the style of the late Steve Irwin, the master of ceremonies could arm a courageous child actor with a can of repellent spray, and then let loose a snake in front of the kid. One press on the button of the spray can, and the disgusted snake would go sliding back into its box. To make the demonstration more scientifically convincing, they could let loose a whole assortment of different snakes and the kid would repel them, one after the other, as if he/she were playing table tennis. If only the ShooSnake people were able to put up such a video on their website, they would sell tons of their product overnight... and the Aussie kid actor would be offered a fortune to star in Hollywood-produced ecological, environmental and wildlife films.

Towards a two-level Palestine?

In 20th-century geopolitical history, the phenomenon of a single people split artificially into two nations is familiar. The oldest case of such a two-level people is the coexistence of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (so-called Red China). Another example, of a notorious nature, is Korea. Germany, too, was a split people until the Berlin Wall was brought down. As of this weekend, in the vicinity of Israel, a new case of a two-headed people, the Palestinians, is coming into existence. Their respective geographical territories are Cisjordan (also referred to as the West Bank, controlled by Fatah) and Gaza (controlled by Hamas).

Many families with Fatah links are fleeing from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank (a distance of about fifty kilometers). Meanwhile, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has received a pledge of support from the so-called international quartet of Middle East mediators: Russia, the European Union, the US and the UN.

Certain observers have already started crying out that this is the worst possible scenario that Israel might have imagined, because the nightmarish possibility exists that the Islamists of Gaza might now invite their Iranian friends to use the Strip as a convenient base for attacking the Hebrew nation. And this kind of scary talk could even be used as a pretext by Bush to envisage more firmly the idea of actions against Iran.

Personally, I disagree with this talk about the "worst possible scenario". On the contrary, I see this sudden separation of the Palestinian people into two geographical entities as the possible basis of an imminent filtering process that should normally clarify the situation greatly. By "filtering process", I mean that totally reactionary Islamic elements will tend to coagulate in Gaza, where the daily realities of life are likely to remain appalling, since there are no obvious reasons why many nations would wish to send resources to these people, blinded by Islam, who are intent upon destroying their Israeli neighbor. On the other hand, the whole process of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the people of Cisjordan could accelerate dramatically in the near future. In other words, I would hope that the unexpected and rapid events of the last week, resulting in enormous bloodshed and destruction, might nevertheless be seen now as a possible preface to measured optimism.

Bloomsday

Today, throughout the world, admirers of James Joyce are celebrating the 104th occurrence of Bloomsday. The initial day, 16 June 1904, was the subject of the novel Ulysses: the day-long Odyssey in Dublin of Leopold Bloom. In reality, this was the day on which James Joyce himself had his initial romantic liaison with Nora Barnacle, a Dublin hotel maid who would later become his wife.

Ulysses remains one of the greatest works of fiction of all times, but it's a complex novel, reflecting the author's erudition. To appreciate Ulysses, the reader needs to be prepared by a text such as Stuart Gilbert's study.

James Joyce was the archetype of the expatriate writer living in Paris. He was invited to Paris by Ezra Pound in 1920, and stayed there for the remaining twenty years of his life.

Pet snail

In the course of my genealogical research, when I first heard of the plantations of Ireland, I had visions of vast cotton farms, or maybe banana plantations (as in Coffs Harbour, near my Australian birthplace). In reality, the Irish plantations were lands confiscated during the reigns of the Stuart monarchs (16th and 17th centuries) and given to Protestant colonists from Britain. In this way, the British Crown transplanted a whole new population into Munster and Ulster. Besides, I would imagine that my Irish ancestors named Kennedy, Cranston, Dancey and Adams were descendants of so-called planters from Scotland.

A fortnight ago, the image of transplanting a population from one environment to another sprung into my mind in connection with my snails at Gamone. There have always been two different communities of snails here: the relatively small brown creatures that hide in cracks in stone walls, and the much larger light-colored Burgundy snails. Well, when my daughter was last here, and helping me to build a fence around the lettuce patch [click here to see my article on this subject, entitled Building fences], I started to transplant a population of Burgundy snails from alongside my lettuces to the lawn in front of the house, normally inhabited by the community of small brown snails, where there's a good supply of clover. To keep track of my planters, I decided to draw numbers on their shells, preceded by the letter B for Burgundy. Well, to cut a long story short, all these transplanted snails seem to have shot through (disappeared into thin air)... except for the patriarch, labeled B1, whom I still run into regularly, in front of the house.

So, B1 (whom I photographed this morning on the lawn) seems to be the sole survivor of my attempted plantation program: the last of the Mohicans. I'm starting to regard him (her?) as a pet, and I've been thinking of giving him a more friendly name than B1. After all, I can't imagine myself standing in front of the house and yelling out "Come on, B1, food time!" No self-respecting snail would trot back to a master who had given it such a clinical name, more like a laboratory label. On the other hand, I must be careful not to get too emotionally attached to this creature, because there's a good chance that I'll walk on him one of these evenings, when I go outside for a pee in the moonlight. I've been wondering whether I might be able to install some kind of a tiny battery-driven flashing red light on his shell. Ah, life in the country is a constant flow of new challenges and problems to be solved.

Business imagination

We Australians can be imaginative in the business domain. On the central coast of New South Wales, oyster farmers have been putting a mixture of crushed Viagra pills and calcium in some of their tanks, and then canning the oysters. What I don't know is how long the oysters were allowed to lead a euphoric sex life before they were canned. Imagine an oyster with a huge erection chasing its hermaphrodite partners around the pool. No doubt many of the poor buggers died of physical exhaustion after a few hectic hours of this behavior.

Apparently the aphrodisiac qualities of these canned oysters are greatly appreciated in certain Asian countries where sex is the national sport. Note the subtle marketing language on the labels: sex in a can, hard down under, rock hard oysters... Poetry from the land that invented bare-breasted barmaids.

Water warnings and phone bugs

A few years ago, when I slipped on the wet slopes of Gamone and broke my leg (while carrying my midget billy-goat Gavroche to the sheep shed, to shelter him from the rain), I had to crawl back up to the house on my hands and knees. Once there, I was able to phone for help. Since then, the portable phone has become a reality, even in such a remote place as Choranche, and I try to remember to carry it with me whenever I leave the house.

People concerned by seniors who lead a solitary existence, even in urban environments, can find it difficult at times to know whether a mishap (accident or health crisis) might have occurred. In my own case, people have often found it difficult to contact me by telephone. When it's sunny here at Gamone, for example, and I'm fiddling around outside the house, I simply don't here the phone ringing. If I then leave the house to do some shopping in Valence, the duration of my telephonic absence builds up rapidly, and people are soon ready to imagine that there might be a problem.

Yesterday, the French TV news presented an ingenious solution to the challenge of being constantly reassured that such and such a senior is OK. The idea consists of attaching an intelligent electronic alert system to the water meter of the person in question. Normally, if he/she uses water several times a day [shower, WC, dish-washer, etc], everything's OK. But, if the system were to detect that the person has not used any water whatsoever for a significant period of time, this would trigger an alert signal, to be transmitted to local agents concerned with the welfare of seniors. I find this an ingenious idea, even though it wouldn't work in the case of an unfortunate individual who slipped while under the shower and suffered a knockout blow to the head.

I've been thinking about a computerized project in this field, which would be feasible using Apple's iPhone, provided that ordinary people like me will indeed be able to develop software for this gadget, as Apple chief Steve Jobs has just promised. My idea is simple. I program my iPhone to call me several times a day. If, for any reason whatsoever, I do not react to such a standard call [by responding with some kind of an OK message], my iPhone will be programmed to send out standard alert calls to various relatives, friends or neighbors, saying: "William is not responding to his guardian angel's phone call. It might be a good idea, if possible, to check that everything's OK."

Steve Jobs has often pointed out that a basic risk, in allowing independent developers to create software for the iPhone, is the possibility that their stuff might contain bugs. I agree entirely. I can easily imagine that my guardian angel approach could start to behave crazily, because of a fault in my iPhone programming, and start phoning up all my relatives, friends and neighbors, and scaring shit out of them when there's nothing really the matter with me.

To be fair, we must admit that the same kind of situation could arise with the water-meter approach. Imagine, for example, on a hot summer's day, that I forget to have a shower, that I drink beer instead of tap water, and that I decide to have a late-evening leak outside in the moonlight, instead of urinating like a serious citizen in my WC and pulling the chain that informs everybody that I'm still alive and kicking [well, at least, pissing]. In the middle of the night, a red fire engine might arrive at Gamone with its siren blaring, and a diligent fireman might wake me up and inform me: "William, everybody was terribly worried because you haven't consumed a drop of water all day." Naturally, if this kind of situation arose too often, I would of course get around to leaving a tap dripping permanently, to avoid getting woken up in the night by firemen. But there's an obvious flaw in that "solution". I'll have to do some more intense creative thinking.

State of emergency in Gaza

With enormous losses of life on both sides, the Islamist Hamas fighters are taking control of Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip, and the conflict appears to be spreading to the West Bank. If the president Mahmoud Abbas is literally overrun, will the world at large, and Israel in particular, simply sit on the sidelines and watch what is happening? Some observers might be tempted to ask: "If the Palestinians have decided spontaneously to murder one another, then why intervene?" I'm convinced that the people of Israel will never think that way. I cannot believe that the Israeli government will accept bedlam in Gaza. Inevitably, if necessary, there will be intervention. To what extent can there be meaningful intervention, however, in a territory that is already totally out of touch with human and social realities?

Visit from an old friend

I've just received a visit from my old Australian friend Barry de Ferranti, who worked with me at IBM in Sydney back around 1960. Barry and his wife Wendy are holidaying down in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and they drove up here to see me.

Between Barry and me, there has always been a mysterious and delightful alter-ego relationship. As soon as one of us mentions any subject whatsoever, from computing through to philosophy, including people and politics, the other has something new to say about this subject, as if we had been involved independently in similar preoccupations. We converse as if we were playing a friendly game of tennis... except that neither of us is aiming to win a point. So, today, we talked non-stop about countless friends and common interests, including our respective genealogical research.

While wandering around at Gamone, Barry was intrigued by a fruit tree:

It's a pear tree, but the fruit would appear to be growing upwards instead of downwards. I told my friend that it's an antipodean pear tree, with upside-down fruit. In fact, the fruit simply replace flowers, and it's perfectly normal for them to grow upwards. Later, their weight causes the pears to roll over into their "right-way-up" position.

In French, people often ask: "When two bike-riders meet up, what do they talk about?" The answer, of course, is: "Bikes." But, when two computing oldtimers such as Barry de Ferranti and me get together, we rarely talk about computers. If we were to stay together long enough, we probably would indeed end up talking about computers. But, before reaching that stage, there are so many other things that concern us.

Brink of civil war in the Gaza Strip

Here in France, when I started to write this post, it was 9 o'clock in the morning. In Israel, the time was one hour later. In the Gaza Strip, during these few hours since the sun rose this morning, six combatants already died in the fighting between partisans of the Hamas of prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and the Fatah of president Mahmoud Abbas. This brought the death count over the last four days of civil fighting to 53. That's a lot of victims for such a small territory, whose area is a mere 30th that of metropolitan Sydney, with a population of 1.4 million Palestinians. [The population density of the Gaza Strip is about 11 times the density of Sydney.]

It's tempting to ask a rhetorical question: How could such a people possibly seek peace with Israel when they are capable of such deadly clashes among themselves? A similar question might be asked concerning the unlikely possibility of Bush being able to set up a peaceful democracy in Iraq. I believe that such rhetorical questions are unfair, since they fail to look at the respective situations in an objective manner. These questions imply that Palestinians and Iraqis have a predisposition to violence, to killing for the sake of killing. That's absurd. It's like suggesting that starving people have a disposition to fighting for food. They weren't born to fight, no more than you or I. Events pushed them into this style of existence. Violence breeds violence.

Simple direct talk

Since last Sunday's results of the first round of the French legislative elections, which were unfavorable for everybody except the supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Socialist Party has been in a state of disharmony. Somebody said it seems to have two chiefs, with different strategies: on the one hand, the former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal; on the other, François Hollande, the party's chief secretary.

This double-headed state of affairs is all the more intriguing in that Ségolène Royal and François Hollande, in everyday life, form a couple, with a family of four. [Their union was officialized by a recently-created French contract known as a PACS: literally, a civil pact of solidarity. This is the same legal device that enables same-sex couples to officialize their union.]

Yesterday, Ségolène Royal proudly told everybody that she had left a phone message with the chief of the centrists, François Bayrou. The election results for Bayrou's supporters were even worse than those of the socialists. Since all the centrist candidates except Bayrou were knocked out in the first round, the party leader could now encourage centrist voters to support the socialists... which was, of course, the raison d'être of Ségolène's phone message.

Today, Bayrou said he isn't going to reply to Ségolène's message, because he doesn't wish to side with anybody, neither the socialists nor the Sarkozists. Meanwhile, several leading socialists—including François Hollande—have publicly reprimanded Ségolène because of yesterday's phone message to an "outsider".

The grand lady's reaction: "It would be nice, from time to time, if politics could be as simple a thing as making a phone call." Ségolène should know by now that politics has never been as easy as that. When she gets home this evening, I wouldn't be surprised if her companion were to yell at her for having made a remark that sounds as if it might have come out of the mouth of George W Bush.

In fact, the spirit of Ségolène's sense of simplicity and direct talk reminds me of Ronald Reagan's famous words to Gorbachev on 12 June 1987, exactly twenty years ago: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Only in Leopard

Coinciding with their annual developers' conference, Apple's website has been redesigned with a sophisticated black cosmic look. Above all, the site includes a lengthy description of the future operating system, named Leopard, which will be available in October. [Click here to display it.] It looks like a fabulous system, with several powerful new devices, such as Stacks [for partitioning projects on the desktop] and Time Machine [to find ancient stuff in personal archives, created automatically].

I have the impression that, next year, smart folk everywhere will be working and playing with a pair of machines from Cupertino: a Leopard-equipped Macintosh and an iPhone.

Safety shoes

In 1973, an audiovisual firm in Paris hired me to make a publicity product for a manufacturer of industrial safety shoes, Jallatte. The founder, Pierre Jallate, had set up his shoe factory in a splendid 17th-century military fort built by Vauban in the isolated village of Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the Cévennes, north of Montpellier.

I was given a selection of Jallatte products [which I would later wear, personally, for years], and my aim was to take photos of these shoes being worn in various working environments, particularly on construction sites.

Besides their functional role of protecting the feet of workers, Jallatte shoes have always been elegant and fashionable. So I tried to get this message across in my photos.

The French cartoonist Denis Dugas collaborated with me on the Jallatte project. He created montages in which photos of shoes were placed in humorous decors.

As you can see, we went to great lengths to illustrate the merits of Jallatte safety shoes. And I believe that the chief, charismatic 54-year-old Pierre Jallatte, was pleased with our audiovisual creation.

Recently, the new owners of the company [which has always remained a world leader in the manufacture of safety shoes] started to talk about delocalizing the Jallatte factory in Tunisia. Last Friday, 88-year-old Pierre Jallatte refused to accept the idea that local workers would lose their jobs, and that his famous factory in the ancient fort might cease to exist. In his home in Nîmes, he pointed a rifle at his head and pulled the trigger.

El Nino and global warming

In an email yesterday, my sister Anne informed me with joy that the drought had broken in NSW [New South Wales]. Today, I learn that a gigantic tempest has been blowing in on the NSW coast, accompanied by torrential rain on the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, and that five thousand people have been evacuated from their homes around Maitland because of imminent flooding. Eight individuals have already drowned in this sudden bad weather: the worst for thirty years.

A question springs to mind immediately:

— Could this exceptional weather be associated with El Nino?

Two complementary questions:

— Are Australians, in general, conscious of the El Nino phenomenon?

— Have Australian scientists envisaged the possibility of correlations between global warming and El Nino? More precisely: Could the former phenomenon have any effect upon the latter?

Big questions. Big risks.

Delay in obtaining the Talpiot book

On 3 March 2007, I wrote my article entitled Thomas time concerning the affair of the tomb in Talpiot. [Click here to display this article.] On the same day, I ordered from Amazon the book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb. Today, over three months later, I still haven't received this book, and Amazon has just informed me that they won't be able to deliver it for another two months. So, what's happening? I have no idea. I've never heard of having to wait five months for a new book from Amazon.

Happily, I've been able to read the excellent French translation of this book. So, I haven't lost any time in becoming familiar with all the fascinating details of the Talpiot affair. But I'm most curious to know why there's such a long delay in acquiring the original English edition. It's surely not a simple matter of running out of stock, for the publishing house would have had ample time to reprint it. So, I imagine that there must be more serious reasons for the delay. If anybody could supply me with information on this question, I would greatly appreciate it.

Neighbors who dwell in castles

Here in France, authentic ancient castles abound. And all kinds of manor houses and stately homes have the look and feel of castles. So, in countless villages, it's not unusual to have neighbors who dwell in structures that we might refer to as châteaux. During my recent excursion to Provence, I was particularly impressed (among many other surprises) by the mysterious white castle in Lacoste that once belonged to the famous Marquis de Sade.

Today, it is inhabited by the equally famous Pierre Cardin, genius of haute couture, who is both a familiar neighbor for the village people of Lacoste (including many US students) and the organizer of a summer music and theater festival.

Not far away from Choranche, in a village named La Sône, on the banks of the Isère, I recently visited a fairytale castle that belongs to a friendly ex-pharmacist from Avignon.

The adolescent novelist Françoise Sagan was a friend of the daughter of the former owner, and the present owner informed me that the novelist used the La Sône castle in 1960 as the setting of her play entitled Château in Sweden.

Talking of castles, believe it or not, back in my native Clarence River region in Australia, in the vicinity of Grafton, there's a kind of castle, called Yulgilbar, constructed by German craftsmen for wealthy cattle men named Ogilvie between 1860 and 1866. Historians of architecture would refer to it as a mock-Gothic folly, because it has crenellations of the kind that once played a role in defense.

Here's an old photographic glimpse into the courtyard of Yulgilbar:

During my adolescence, I often heard my father and his beef-cattle friends referring to the huge and prosperous Yulgilbar affair, owned by a great rural pioneer: Samuel Hordern [1909-1960], member of a wealthy Sydney merchandising family. Today, the immense Yulgilbar estate belongs to Hordern's daughter and her husband Baillieu Myer.

If I understand correctly, the original name of the rich land on the banks of the Clarence, belonging to the Bunjalung Aboriginal tribe, was Baryulgil, and the Ogilvie pioneers decided to invert the syllables to obtain a name for their huge property. Much later, in about 1940, descendants of this Aboriginal community were employed as laborers in local asbestos mines. And today, there is distress in this community because of asbestos pollution and poisoning.

Yes, sometimes we have rich neighbors who dwell in castles, while neighbors on the other side of the castle walls lead very different lives. It has always been that way with castles.

Things I don't wish to talk about

Towards the end of my recent post entitled Childhood myths [click here to display it], I said that I didn't wish to use my blog to publicize the moronic thinking of an Aussie expatriate named Ham in the USA who believes that Noah's Ark was a relatively recent reality, and that it carried dinosaurs. Likewise, after weeks of Internet boredom and fatigue due to constant descriptions of an empty-headed bird whose daddy owns big hotels everywhere (according to the latest news, she's now a jailbird), I've reached a state of extreme irritation in which I refuse to even mention the name of the fat-faced wig-wearing Aussie gangster whose story is nevertheless in today's headlines of The Australian. By the same token, I don't intend to comment upon his girlfriend who outsmarted French police, who were supposed to be tracking her, by leading them on a wild goose chase to Disneyland. [It's possible that the French police chief might not have assigned his most brilliant detectives to this international surveillance task.] I'm aware of the fact that no less a man than the prime minister of Australia, John Howard, has thought it fit and necessary to speak about the capture of this gangster, who in turn has thought it fit and necessary to speak about John Howard. As for me, I refuse to use my blog to speak about any of these individuals, not even the prime minister of Australia. In this whole mediocre arena of non-news, the only exception I'm prepared to make consists of guiding you to the latest Nicholson animation, excellent as usual, on the dumb jailbird. Just position your mouse on her stupid face and click as if you were giving her a slap.

High-technic's sign

In the category of pseudo-English words and punctuation used in France, this is one of my favorites. It's a sign for an industrial cleaning firm in the nearby village of St-Jean-en-Royans. The French word propreté means "cleanliness". I know nothing about the firm, but I would guess that the owner has purchased one of those huge cube-shaped floor-scrubbing machines on wheels, with revolving brushes, that you often see in supermarkets. This top-notch cleaning equipment was probably made in the USA (because I'm not familiar with any French manufacturers in this field), and the fellow surely paid a lot of money for it. So, he wanted to find a name for his firm that evokes the idea of high-tech cleaning. Knowing that a French word such as clinique becomes "clinic" in English, he imagined that technique becomes "technic". And, in case any ignorant French customers didn't know that "technic" is supposed to be English, the owner has thrown in a meaningless apostrophe-s for good measure.

To complicate matters, it's a fact that, if the owner of the French firm consulted an American dictionary (as he surely did), he would indeed find the nouns "technic" and "technics". But writers of good English would not normally apply these highbrow terms to the field of scrubbing floors in offices and factories.

Incidentally, there's an error in the French. Can you find it?

No trespassing

While surfing on the web, looking for information about recent Australian movies, I ran into the following site:

This is the first time I've ever seen a case of explicit geographical discrimination on the Internet. In fact, I didn't even know it was technically feasible.

Unplugged

You know how a stage magician, having levitated a woman who's stretched out horizontally, proves that she's floating in the air, with no strings attached, by passing a metal hoop around her body, from head to toes. Well, the following researchers at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] are in fact positioned in such a way as to prove that their demonstration of magic is genuine.

On the right, a light bulb is receiving energy from a metal coil. But the coil itself is not plugged in, by a cord, to any source of electricity. The coil on the right is in fact receiving electricity from the other coil, on the left. And, not only are the two coils physically unconnected, but the researchers are placed in such a way that some of them block the linear path between the two coils. It would be easy, after all, to use a laser to beam energy across to the light bulb, but that technique wouldn't work if individuals stood in the way. And the individuals in question would probably be zapped. In the case of the MIT demonstration, the electrical energy gets from the first to the second coil in a roundabout fashion, through so-called resonance.

Admittedly, the present demonstration is rather primitive, and a lot of research and technology will be required before we can power computers and communication devices, or maybe automobiles, in a remote fashion.

One day in the future, one of my descendants might come upon the blog article I'm now writing, and exclaim to his/her partner: "Isn't it weird to think that, at Gamone, poor old William didn't even have witricity!" [That new term is short or wireless electricity.] I nevertheless insist upon pointing out to those smart young buggers, here and now, that I do have a couple of sophisticated gadgets that provide me with an uninterruptible power supply when the electricity fails during a storm. I described this hardware in an article, Show me your machines, on 15 January 2007. [Click here to display that article.]

Forty years ago: a man named Moshé

On June 7, 1967, Christine and I, with our daughter Emmanuelle in a pram, boarded the Lloyd Triestino vessel Marconi at Genoa, on the northwestern coast of Italy. The following day, the ship called in at Naples, our last European port before sailing out to Australia. Here's the stamp in my passport, dated June 8, 1967:

We were heading towards the entry into the Suez Canal when an unexpected message over the ship's public-address system announced that we were about to turn around and head towards the Strait of Gibraltar, with the aim of sailing to Australia by the sea route around the tip of South Africa. In our hectic preparations for this trip to my homeland, Christine and I had not been following the news, and we were unaware that, over the last four days, the defense forces of Israel had annihilated the Egyptian air force and that, at that very instant, they were encircling the Egyptian army in the Sinai.

Insofar as the Suez Canal was theoretically accessible, even if the nation of Egypt was henceforth in a terrible mess, why did the captain of the Marconi make that last-minute decision on June 8, 1967 to change our route to Australia, resulting in a voyage that would be about a week longer than planned? It was only quite recently that I obtained, by chance, an answer to that question. And Christine and Emmanuelle will no doubt encounter the following explanation for the first time.

Here's a photo of a small US navy intelligence vessel named the Liberty, which happened to be operating in the eastern Mediterranean in June 1967:

At the same time that our Marconi was sailing calmly from Naples to the Suez Canal, a terrible naval drama was being enacted just a few nautical miles ahead of us. Tsahal fighter planes imagined mistakenly that the Liberty was an enemy vessel. They fired upon it, and Israeli torpedo boats got into the act, too. The combined air/sea attack killed 34 Americans, wounded 171 and destroyed the Liberty.

Besides this incident, the captain of our liner had probably learned, too, that a fleet of Soviet bombers had just landed in Alexandria, and that the conflict could flare into a global war if Israel carried on its rampage. Stunned observers would soon learn that, on the final two days of that famous Six Day War, Israel would capture the Golan Heights from Syria. By then, Egypt had lost the Sinai, and Jordan had lost its West Bank territories.

Meanwhile, a man named Moshé Dayan (shown here with generals Uzi Narkiss and Yitzhak Rabin) would lead his brethren proudly to a newly-bulldozed piazza at the base of the western wall of Herod's Temple in Jerusalem.

The actors of that epoch—Nasser, Dayan and Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol—died long ago, but the Holy City and much of the Palestinian West Bank territories are still occupied. And this state of affairs is likely to endure.

Tennistic Amazons

I'll bet you didn't even know, up until reading the title of this post, that a lovely adjective such as "tennistic" could exist. Well, it does. At least in French. And why not in English? No need to answer that question. I've just waved my magic racket, and I henceforth own the copyright of "tennistic" as an English word. If you disagree, I ask you to take me to your leader, particularly if she's a Serbian wonder woman such as Jelena Jankovic or Ana Ivanovic. My god, these ladies are fabulous Amazons, who seem to step right out of a Modigliani painting. They're both so beautiful, so physically female, so powerful.

Traces of D-day

June 6, 1944 was surely one of the most illustrious dates in 20th-century world history. Today, 63 years after the allied landings in Normandy, the five beaches retain the glorious code names they received from the combined US and British armies, under the command of Dwight Eisenhower: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

Traces still remain of the enormous determination of the Nazis to stand firm in Normandy. They placed astronomical quantities of sophisticated explosive devices along the shoreline. French minesweepers and mechanized beach crews are still working non-stop to eliminate this nasty stuff. As of today, it is estimated that a mere 15 percent of mines and unexploded bombs have been detected and destroyed. On French TV this evening, an officer in charge of this work said that explosives experts and naval frogmen will remain engaged in D-day cleaning-up operations in Normandy for another century.