A professor named Dawkins

It's abnormal that the achievements of a relatively youthful Oxford professor named Richard Dawkins [well, six months younger than me] should be celebrated, while he's still a living crewman of Planet Earth [excuse my topical America's Cup language], through a book of praise such as this. Abnormal, but perfectly appropriate. Let me set aside my computerized pen [my Macintosh keyboard] and take a deep breath before pronouncing solemnly the following carefully-weighed words: The man named Richard Dawkins, born 66 years ago in Nairobi, is a 21st-century genius!

Why? In his revolutionary book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins changed "the way we think". He dethroned forever us humans from any claim whatsoever to using our intelligence to reign over the Cosmos. We have never been, and will never be, the Masters of Creation, nor even the subsidiary Princes. Not even the Judeo-Christian Yahveh can assume that role. The Kingdom of Creation does not belong to us poor human beings. We are cerebral insects. Our gods are our genes.

The pill is bitter. But it will do us good. As for the pharmacist Dawkins, he's my eternal hero.

BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants

The behavior of this Australian ISP [Internet service provider] with respect to French users is outrageous. Over the last few years, when my email address was sky.william@orange.fr, BigPond refused to deliver my emails to any of their customers. Since then I've changed my address to sky.william@free.fr, and I've just found that BigPond still refuses to deliver my emails to their customers. These French ISPs, Orange and Free, are two of the largest and most respected organizations in this domain, and BigPond's crazy idea of blacklisting all French customers is scandalous. It would be interesting to identify the BigPond employee who's behind this strategy.

I intend to lodge a formal complaint with the international email authorities concerning this curious BigPond behavior, which is not in keeping with the spirit of the Internet.

Here's the precise technical data [in which I've obliterated part of the email address of my intended receiver] confirming the blacklisting:

s***y@bigpond.com: host extmail.bigpond.com[144.140.90.13] said: 451 Mail from this IP address blocked due to DNS block list. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; postfix2-g20.free.fr
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: EE6C213E75DF
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; sky.william@free.fr
Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:45:37 +0200 (CEST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; s***y@bigpond.com
Action: failed
Status: 4.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host extmail.bigpond.com[144.140.90.13] said: 451 Mail from this IP address blocked due to DNS block list. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

America's Cup

Tomorrow, in the opening race of the 32nd America's Cup in Valencia, the Swiss defender Alinghi will be meeting up with the Kiwi challenger named Emirates Team New Zealand. From a purely sporting viewpoint, in this millionaires' hobby based upon the notion of mano-a-mano match racing, there's an intriguing flaw. Whereas the challenger has just endured an arduous series of races, acquiring practical experience out on the water, the defender has been sitting on the sidelines and merely watching, as it were. [This was not entirely true, since the defenders have been constantly match racing among themselves.] So, the New Zealand team will arrive at the starting line with their muscles flexed and their tactics tested, whereas the Swiss boat will normally need a little time to adapt itself to the atmosphere of combat. In the boxing domain, where there's a similar dissymmetry between the defender of a title and his challengers, the former has an opportunity of analyzing the weaknesses of his future opponent. In yachting, the situation is hardly comparable. Consequently, I feel that the Kiwi boat is the hot favorite, at least for tomorrow's first race.

My box of souvenirs holds my press card for the America's Cup regattas in Perth, which started in October 1986, with the finals being held in January 1987. At that time, my son and I were crew members aboard a local twelve-meter yacht, Zigeuner, and we had friends in the teams French Kiss and Challenge France. That was a short but exciting sunny sea-sprayed season in my life. At the height of the regattas, I helped the owner/skipper of the Zigeuner, Charles Russell-Smith, in the organization of a gentlemanly race between fourteen old-time boats that happened to be berthed at Fremantle during the America's Cup season, including several magnificent multi-masted vessels. Here's a newspaper photo of our own boat competing in this race, in which we ended up coming third:

In the context of our planning, one of my tasks had consisted of meeting up with the captain of the visiting Italian cruise ship Achille Laura, berthed at Fremantle, to provide him with precise information about our regatta, informing him that our old boats would be racing on a certain course, at a certain time, so that he would avoid maneuvering his vessel in ways that could interfere with our event... which was to be watched by spectators on countless small craft. Well, the captain of the Achille Laura was a smart bugger: smarter than me, in any case. With the aim of giving his passengers a closeup view of our regatta, he used the information I had given him to anchor his bloody big ship, in the early hours of the morning, right in the middle of our course!

Another happy memory of that season was my winning the journalists' prize for predicting the winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup for challengers, and the average winning margin. I used the Pascal programming language on my little cubic Macintosh to create a software tool enabling me to record and compare the results of all the early races, and this helped me guess the final outcome with remarkable precision. The media-center organizers had proposed a first, a second and a third prize for this prediction competition, and my entry was so precise that they awarded me all three prizes! I've still got a couple of ugly reddish-plastic prize suitcases at Gamone, with the following label:

At our flat in Fremantle, the prize also enabled my son and me to drink M&H champagne for a few weeks.

Simcha's silence

My subject line might be misleading. I'm incapable of saying whether Simcha Jacobovici, revealer of the Talpiot tomb, is deliberately silent, or whether the evolution of events obliges him to keep a low profile. In any case, I still don't have an answer to the question posed in my article of 10 June entitled Delay in obtaining the Talpiot book [display]. But I'm starting to have a few ideas on the subject, and to make a few guesses.

— My major guess is that experts quoted by Jacobovici and/or Pellegrino in their book have complained that they were misquoted, and that they're effectively blocking the marketing of the book.

— Another guess is that the beliefs of Jacobovici and/or Pellegrino have evolved over the last few months, since the book was published, and that they themselves are deliberately blocking further marketing of the existing book, while preparing a new edition.

— Yet another guess is that there is some kind of a legal problem concerning an affair that is being handled by Israeli justice: namely, the possibility that the so-called James ossuary—associated, according to Jacobovici and Pellegrino, with the Talpiot tomb—might be a forgery.

For the moment, while awaiting further enlightenment, let me say a few words concerning the latter guess. To start the ball rolling, here's the cover of BAR [Biblical Archæology Review] dated November/December 2002, which broke to the world the amazing news of the existence of a bone box inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus".

The ossuary, displayed in Canada, was hailed by many as the first material object ever unearthed that evoked explicitly the historical Jesus.

Sadly, the events that followed this Canadian excursion read at times like a cheap crime novel. To cut a long story short, the owner of the ossuary, a Tel Aviv antiquities dealer named Oded Golan, was accused of forgery. More precisely, it is claimed that he acquired an authentic bone box inscribed "James, son of Joseph" and that he added the final phrase: "brother of Jesus". Israeli police who raided Golan's apartment in Tel Aviv took this surrealist photo of the alleged James ossuary posed upon a grotty WC:

Now, there was no reason whatsoever, a priori, why this murky affair concerning Oded Golan and his bone box should be linked in any way to the Talpiot question. But, in saying that, we're underestimating the enthusiasm and detective-like intuition of Simcha Jacobovici. Everybody knows that, back in 1980, ten ossuaries were found in the Talpiot tomb. But one of them disappeared overnight. Well, again, to cut a long story short, Jacobovici and Pellegrino suggest forcibly that Golan's object is in fact this missing bone box. In other words, they are opposed to the claim that Golan was a forger.

In their book, Jacobovici and Pellegrino seem to suggest that the analysis of various patinas [the surface appearance of objects due to aging] proves that the James ossuary did in fact repose for a long time in the same environment as the nine remaining bone boxes of Talpiot. In other words, they are affirming that the James ossuary was indeed the missing tenth bone box of Talpiot. But many specialists disagree with this conclusion.

Finally, a few days ago, the eminent BAR editor Hershel Shanks—who remains a great friend of Simcha—published an editorial that reveals his basic incredulity concerning Jacobovici's theses. However Shanks remains elusive, and he admits that he is neither a statistician nor a DNA expert [which you need to be, to appreciate Simcha's claims]. On the other hand, he has interesting suggestions concerning the reasons why the Talpiot affair has created a storm throughout the world: "One reason for this flurry of attention is that if the Talpiot ossuary once contained the bones of Jesus, this would disturb the religious faith of millions of Christians who believe that Jesus was bodily resurrected and ascended into heaven (to say nothing of his mother Mary, who was also bodily assumed into heaven)." Shanks considers, however, that the whole affair will blow over rapidly, and soon be forgotten. I am not so sure.

Personally, for the moment, I remain open, intuitively and objectively, to the possibility that Simcha might be on the right tracks. In other words, I have not yet encountered any serious arguments that would appear to prove that Jacobovici is trying to lead us all on a wild goose chase. For example, Shanks explains: "If Jesus already had a family tomb in Talpiot, there would be no need to bury him in a temporary tomb, despite the onset of the Sabbath. It’s little more than a half-hour’s walk from Golgotha to Talpiot." To my mind, these words are stupid. I find it hard to imagine, on that fateful Friday afternoon, a group of friends of the executed disturber carrying his body all the way to Talpiot... and I challenge Hershel to perform this trek while carrying, say, a bag of cement.

But I believe, too, that we might never know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth concerning the Talpiot tomb. A times, we might feel that this affair, as presented by Simcha, is handled in a high-tech style. In fact, the Talpiot affair remains entrenched, to a large extent, in the boggy swamps of religion and legends, and we would be naive to expect total enlightenment. Besides, everybody has already made up their minds, long ago, on the issues at stake.

Canon dog

I like this French Canon publicity featuring a multicolored dog. [Click on the banner to display it.] It's crazy but lovely, like a multicolored dog.

Heroines

I've just been looking back over recent articles on famous females:

— Christine Lagarde
Powerful French woman [display]

— Hillary Clinton
US presidential campaign [display]

— Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet
Same name as Australian mountain [display]

— Anne Lauvergeon
Nice TV spot [display]

— Ségolène Royal
Simple direct talk [display]

— Jelena Jankovic
Tennistic Amazons [display]

— Laure Manaudou
Beauty and the beast [display]

— Tzipi Livni
Time for Tzipi? [display]

A psychoanalyst, observing the way in which I've selected and talked about these women, might be tempted to come up with interesting ideas (?) concerning my general attitude towards the female sex. It's a fact that the eight above-mentioned women appear to share common attributes. They're all powerful individuals in their chosen domain. Nothing to do with the wishy-washy notion of females as passive creatures prepared to be dominated by males. Maybe our psychoanalyst might believe in the paraphrase of a familiar dictum: Show me the women who fascinate you, and I'll tell you who you are.

Be that as it may, I must point out that, with one exception, these are not in fact the kind of ladies whom I would be tempted to invite along to Gamone for an extended weekend. [I can hear Bill Clinton heaving a sigh of relief... not to mention Hillary herself.] The fact is that I've always admired women who are capable of acting like men, but this admiration doesn't mean that such females attract me in a more global sense. I remember precisely the moment in my existence when this admiration first manifested itself. I had just married Christine, in 1965, and I was working as a technical translator with a big company named CSF, located near the Place de la Porte de Saint-Cloud in the chic quarters of Paris. There, my boss was an elegant lady with a training in technology. I had never before encountered such a phenomenon. Normally, in places where I had worked previously (mainly at IBM, in Sydney, Paris and London), creatures of that soft and superficially fragile kind were employed as secretaries, prepared at all times to obey their male superiors. But here was a lovely lady with a mind of her own. Besides, she was theoretically my boss... except that she didn't know enough English to intervene in any way in my work.

My work? Among other things, I used to write the English-language speeches of the CEO [chief executive officer] of that multinational company. In doing so, I had my first experience of getting paid to be a lapdog... not with respect to the lovely lady, unfortunately, but for the CEO. I would slip tiny excuses into his speeches, such as: "Excuse me for speaking English in such an atrocious fashion. Please understand that my management activities leave me with little time to improve my knowledge of Shakespeare's language." The guy got a great ego-thrill out of reciting such words, in perfect English, at the start of his speech. So, I was already a kind of gigolo. For the wrong boss.

Memory of the world

That's a big formula: Memory of the world. What's it all about? Well, Unesco has decided to register a certain number of outstanding historical documents as a permanent testimony of the human story of our planet. I'm enchanted to learn, for example, that the choice of US documents is neither the Gettysburg Address nor even the Watergate tapes, but a whimsical Judy Garland movie that charmed me infinitely as a child: the Wizard of Oz.

In the case of Sweden, Unesco has registered two sets of family archives: those of Alfred Nobel [1833-1896], founder of the prize, and those of the 88-year-old cineast Ingmar Bergman.

Concerning France, Unesco has selected the tapestry of Bayeux.

This fragment shows the Conqueror's half-brother Odo wielding weirdly a massive shaft at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. I've always liked to imagine, not very objectively, that he might have been a nominal forebear of my 13th-century ancestor Odo de Scevington [literally, in Saxon, place of the shaft], owner of a manor in Kent with the lovely name of Dolce. In any case, if future researchers use a computerized network to look up the Bayeux tapestry, they might find their way to my Skeffington typescript [click here to find it straightaway].

In the case of my birthplace, Australia, the Unesco Memory of the world project is perfectly explicit. The documents to be registered for posterity are our convict archives. Here's a treasured personal fragment of this memory:

This is the famous ticket of leave indicating that my Tipperary great-great-great-grandfather Patrick Hickey [1782-1858] was transported to New South Wales in 1829, and even spent time on notorious Norfolk Island. Today, I get a kick out of thinking that the future world, as envisaged by Unesco, will remember my maternal family and me, not for the pioneering efforts in Braidwood of Charles Walker [1807-1860], probably the elder brother of the whisky inventor Johnnie Walker, nor for smart hotel founders named O'Keeffe, nor for northern Irish Protestant pioneers named Kennedy and Cranston, nor even for any of us living folk (including my two Smith cousins, Australian doctors, who were indirect recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to Médecins Sans Frontières a few years ago)... but for a vulgar and no doubt lovable Irish cattle-poacher whose son William Hickey [whom I'm researching] was an early bushranger.

Personally, I'm not troubled by this strange filtering process that determines what might, and what might not, be remembered. On the other hand, I was disappointed by the fact that, during my one-month visit to Australia last year, I was unable to visit Braidwood, the territory of Patrick Hickey. He got there easily in 1829. My ancestor Charles Walker, too. But William Skyvington never made it. Modern Australia was incapable [because their public transport is shit] of letting me visit the region of one of my major ancestral memories.

Powerful French woman

Back at the time I lived in the heart of Paris, I would often—of a Sunday morning—ride my bike out in the direction of the Vincennes woods, to the east of the city, where the old vélodrome was located. [I even did a season of track racing there, in 1972.] If it was sunny and I had time on my hands, which was generally the case, I would often be tempted to ride lazily along the cobblestones of the Bercy quarter, past the ancient wine warehouses.

Sadly, all this quaint old-worldliness was soon to disappear, making way for two landmark constructions. First, the Bercy stadium is big enough to house windsurfing demonstrations and motor-cycle races.

Then there's the home of France's treasury ministry, on the right bank of the Seine. It's a curiously-shaped building, like the start of a bridge that had to be abandoned, maybe because they ran out of funds. I often used to think that this building is designed in such a way that, if ever a treasury minister were to act in an unskilled way that forced France into bankruptcy, he would be able to put an end to his disgrace, effortlessly, by wandering to the end of the upper-floor hallway and jumping out the window into the noble river of Paris. His body would then float down past the Ile de la Cité where the people of Paris, thronged around the great cathedral of Notre-Dame, could hurl invective upon the corpse of the minister as it passed by. An event of that kind would indeed be very Parisian.

As of today, a brilliant woman named Christine Lagarde is holding the purse strings of the French Republic in her hands. In this role, she ranks fourth in the hierarchy of the French government. Prior to becoming the first woman to occupy this position in France, the lawyer Lagarde, with a natural gift for oratory, was accustomed to being a very big chief. In 1999, she had been placed in charge of the major US law firm, Baker & McKenzie in Chicago, with 2,400 associates. Not bad for a French female!

What exactly was it, in the profile of Christine Lagarde, that persuaded Nicolas Sarkozy to hand over to her the "reins of Bercy" (to employ a metaphor that's often applied to this ministry)? Well, she's something of a Martian in France, where the political milieu is not accustomed to the idea of a woman who evolves in the English-speaking world like a fish in water (as the French saying goes). It's a fact that we shouldn't expect this grand lady to ever set foot in such-and-such a French village to see if the local vineyard or cheese-making firm is getting along well, but she will surely be a precious diplomatic asset for France at the next World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2008. In other words, Christine Lagarde might be seen as a symbol of the desire of Sarkozy to move away, once and for all, from the false but enduring image of France as a land of wine, cheese and economic frivolity.

US presidential campaign

Click the banner to hear Hillary Clinton's campaign song: You and I by Celine Dion. It's funny, Celine's voice in this song reminds me of the intonation of another singer I adore: Shania Twain. Or am I imagining things?

Same name as Australian mountain

France's newly-appointed 34-year-old State Secretary in charge of Ecology has the same name as Australia's highest peak (2,228 meters), whose official spelling now includes an unpronounceable letter "z": Mount Kosciuszko. The mountain was climbed for the first time in 1840 by a Polish explorer and geologist, Count Strzelecki, who named it in honor of Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish military hero.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet [often referred to as NKM] is a descendant of this man. In fact, she comes from a distinguished family on the recent French political scene. A graduate of the famous Polytechnique, she specialized in biology, and then trained as an engineer in the national school of rural management, rivers and forests. Attached to the super-ministry now attributed to Jean-Louis Borloo [who replaced Alain Juppé, who resigned after his electoral defeat], NKM is an experienced militant in the ecological domain.

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.