Tech marvels

Apple aficionados were thrilled as usual by the announcements made by Steve Jobs in yesterday's keynote presentation at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. After last year's introduction of the revolutionary iPhone, many observers weren't sure that the Apple CEO would be able to surprise the world in a comparable fashion today. For me, the most striking aspect of today's keynote was the emergence of a coherent and integrated approach to computing, multimedia and the Internet that might be designated as the wireless philosophy. To see what this expression means, let's start with the most spectacular product presented today: the world's thinnest notebook, called MacBook Air. Steve Jobs actually extracted a specimen of this amazingly compact silver computer from an interoffice Manila envelope.

Much could be said about several splendid qualities of this machine: its LED-backlit display, its black backlit keyboard, etc. [Click the image to visit Apple's site, where you can find a lovely ad concerning this product, along with a guided tour of the new laptop.]

But I prefer to draw attention to a familiar component that is totally missing in this computer. It has no CD/DVD drive! At first sight, that sounds pretty crazy, because we've all become accustomed to using removable disks on our Macs to install new software, perform backups, play CDs and DVDs, etc. You can, of course, attach an external CD/DVD drive, but the absence of an inbuilt device sends out a new message. As far as the all-important question of backup is concerned, Macs running Leopard will henceforth be able to get backed up constantly and automatically by means of the extraordinary Time Machine software tool, which will store our precious data through a wireless connection on a delightfully simple piece of hardware called the Time Capsule:

This new approach to backup will be truly a godsend for a Mac user such as me... who has been struggling with the ugly Retrospect tool for too long.

As for other exciting announcements made by Steve Jobs, such as the possibility of renting movies through the Internet, they affect a spectators' multimedia universe that doesn't really concern me greatly. Maybe I'll end up giving in to the gadget charm of the iPhone, whose new software will make it possible to ascertain the user's geographical location by means of an ingenious system that has nothing to do with GPS. [See Apple's website for details.]

Right from the start, back in the early '80s, I became a fan of Apple products for the simple reason that they were usually ingenious, powerful and friendly. Over the last few years, I haven't been too astonished to discover that Apple's imagination and superiority are soaring exponentially. I can understand perfectly why Steve Job is looked upon, throughout the planet, as an exceptional visionary.

Warm penguins

I find this image beautiful and moving, but terrifying. In the penguin domain, I'm an ignoramus... but I have the impression that those poor animals on their melting iceberg are just as puzzled as me concerning the future of their domain, and the planet Earth.

It would appear that Antarctica, due to global warming, is dissolving into the sea. I'm aware that these beasts know how to swim. So, if and when their flossy island disappears into the depths, they won't drown. But where will they swim to? Up until now, the penguin paradise was named Antarctica. For penguins, there's no other El Dorado. For us humans, it's more or less the same thing.

Liberation of two Columbian hostages

The release by the FARC of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez was, to a large extent, the outcome of the intervention of Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.

Fabrice Delloye, the former husband of Ingrid Betancourt and the father of Mélanie and Lorenzo, has indicated publicly that the French president Nicolas Sarkozy also played a role in this event. On the other hand, Alvaro Uribe, president of Columbia, appeared to be absent from the context in which this liberation finally took place.

Personally, I find it hard to understand Chavez when he suggests that the FARC should be considered, not as a terrorist group, but as a "true army". Normally, legitimate soldiers don't kidnap hundreds of hostages and kill civilians with roadside bombs.

Clara Rojas judges severely the organization that held her captive in the jungle for six years: "Taking hostages is a crime against humanity. I am most worried by the fact that they call themselves the people's army, and that we see them training people for kidnapping."

Valley on the move

Yesterday afternoon, the wind at Choranche was strong enough—as they say in French—to blow the horns off a cow. At six o'clock, I told Sophia, settled snuggly in her huge wicker basket on the kitchen floor, to "guard the house". That's our code phrase (in French) informing my dog that I'll be absent for a moment. Then I left for the annual January get-together of the citizens of Choranche in the municipal hall.

The mayor told us that 2008 will be a year of vast projects within the commune: a new sewerage system for residents on the eastern side of the village, a totally-reorganized village square and even a new bridge over the Bourne between Choranche and Châtelus. For a commune of about a hundred individuals, that's not bad. In this electoral year (for municipalities), we're a valley on the move, and you can't stop progress!

In a corner of our municipal hall, alongside tables heaped with food, drinks and even multi-colored sweets for Choranche's rare kids, a tiny group of concerned individuals talked enthusiastically about political strategies and possible technical methods for bringing the Internet to the totality of our citizens. I even met up with two new neighbors: a dynamic and intelligent administrator who works in the ski country up on the Vercors plateau, and his charming Brazilian wife, who teaches marketing. Yes, at such rare moments of conviviality, I do indeed have the impression that the valley is moving.

After a period of a few wet and chilly weeks, the sudden arrival of warm rays of sunshine makes the valley "boil", as it were. Huge steamy clouds ascend rapidly from the damp vegetation and disappear into the sky. In astronautical terms, you might refer to this spectacular phenomenon as a thermic shock. And the oldtimers know that such a happening is likely to leave traces in the valley. Like this:

At about the time I was talking with my fellow citizens about Internet in the valley, a rock fell onto the road below Gamone. This uncouth and uncommunicative mineral mass didn't even bother to send us an email announcing its intention to abandon its archaic location and slide a few meters down onto the road. It just fell, spontaneously. And woe betide the occupants of an automobile that might have been driving at that instant along the one-kilometer stretch between Pont-en-Royans and Gamone. In this case, nobody was present when the rock fell.
Mindless rock, rolling without spectators! You must have made a big noise when you hit the road, but nobody was there to hear you. Your big noise disappeared into nothingness. A waste of audio resources. We might pose a fabulous philosophical question that intrigued me when I was young and silly: If nobody was actually present to hear the sound of your fall, do we really have the right to assume that such a sound did in fact shake the hills last night? We think so, but how do we know? What proof persists of this hypothetical audio event?

Neighbors with whom I've spoken on the phone this morning feel that Choranche might indeed be entering into a permanent rock 'n' roll age. When I was taking the above photo, I looked upwards and realized in an instant that the worse is still to come. We have seen now that rocks can fall, not only from the summits, but from primordial contexts just a few meters above the road. There are violent falls, and there are gentle falls. There are obvious falls, and there are unexpected falls. But, when a rock falls, it falls... and the potential damage depends, not so much upon the rock's height and weight, but upon the unfortunate presence of folk whose itinerary happened to intersect that of the rock. Mathematical, my dear Watson.

Tineke Bot, an artist and a philosopher [visit her website] said: "William, we must not look upwards in anguish towards the rock-strewn summits. We must stroll through our valley like children, looking solely at the road ahead of us." Through our moving valley.

Old house in Brittany

[This happens to be my 600th post in the Antipodes blog.]

Christine has always been so much in love with her ancestral Brittany (in a simple but profound paternal family fashion that has no apparent links with silly Celtic folklore) that it's only right that she should reside there today in a beautiful house.

Christine's splendid dwelling is an ancient presbytery: that's to say, the residence, once upon a time (when the Church was rich), of the village priest. The least that can be said is that her house (which I know quite well) has a soul. The question, of course, is: What kind of soul? Breton Catholic? Celtic? Maybe even Druidic? Now, I don't expect that my ex-wife will necessarily agree with me... but I'm totally convinced that, whatever old souls might have been hanging around there up until recent times, in the ancient stones of this delightful village, Christine has finally chased them away and replaced them quietly and calmly by an intriguing new soul: hers.

Neighboring department and village

As soon as I leave Choranche and drive to the south, I move from the Isère department into the Drôme. The first village, just over the border, is Sainte-Eulalie, whose simple church looks down on nearby Pont-en-Royans, on the opposite side of the River Vernaison.

At first sight, it looks like an old construction of Romanesque style. In fact, it's a relatively modern church, completed in 1859. Opposite the church, there's a municipal laundry trough, whose non-stop gushing fountain receives water from a vigorous mountain spring.

With its elegant roof of flat scallop-shaped tiles, the wash house looks as if it's straight out of the Middle Ages. The fountain, trough and cylindrical columns may well date from the early 20th century, when local folk really washed their clothes in public. As for the timber-framed tiled roof, it took about a week to construct, and it's exactly a fortnight old. I was able to follow the work with interest whenever I drove past on my way to the small supermarket at Saint-Jean-en-Royans.

Village records are much more ancient than the church and the public wash house, since Sainte-Eulalie was first mentioned in 1086.

Ever since Napoléon, France has been divided into about a hundred geographical and administrative areas known as départements. When you drive over the border between one department and the next, it's a little like changing states. For example, although Sainte-Eulalie is no more than a couple of kilometers below Gamone, I have the impression that I've left the Alps and moved into southern France. Today, if I'm somewhat nostalgic about this notion of departments, it's because a brilliant intellectual named Jacques Attali has just published a white paper, for Sarkozy, suggesting that this old-fashioned breakdown should be abolished.

Zealous missionary spirit

For ages, we white Australians have been going through a puzzled period of repentance concerning the terrible phenomenon of the so-called stolen generations of Aboriginal children who were removed from their families by government agencies for over a century, up until 1969. Missionaries of the most zealous (and dangerous) kind believe that their vision of the world is not only pure and perfect but unchallengeable, a dictate of faith. This is a nasty narrow-minded criterion, even in the best of circumstances. And stealing generations of indigenous children can hardly fit into the "best of circumstances" category. It was a national crime. A state-perpetrated crime. And national apologies to the Aboriginal people are long overdue.

In France, a fuckwit group of missionary zealots named Arche de Zoé, managed by Eric Bréteau and his mindless blonde bird named Emilie Lelouch, decided that any pretext was justifiable for extracting certain African children from their parental village environment and marketing them out to wealthy but naive French bourgeois do-gooders.

Late last night, an excellent TV documentary revealed the details of this affair. The proverbial truth of the matter, as I see it today, is that various zealots such as Bréteau and his accomplices were convinced that the current African environment in the vicinity of Darfur was essentially Bad, and that everything in metropolitan France was necessarily Good. So, the only way of easing the difficulties of African children was to airlift them into paradisiacal France. Now, not everybody (not me, in any case) would agree with this analysis. Most normal observers are convinced that African kids will be best brought up in their native Africa, even if they've lost parents and relatives through fighting.

Next week, the French judicial system will examine the case of these illuminated Arche de Zoé would-be life-savers of lives that were never crying out to be saved.

Old blog articles

Within the concept of blogs, there are weaknesses.

— In particular, while it's relatively easy to see what the blogger has just said recently, it's harder to follow him back in time. For example, if the author of a typical blog such Antipodes wre to talk today about a heroic person such as George W Bush, readers throughout the planet might cry out for specimens of the way that blog author spoke of this same hero in the past. How has the adoration of Bush aficionados evolved from one Iraqi event to another, from one catastrophe to the next?

— Another problem. Blog readers don't necessarily realize that there might be interesting discussions going on in the recent past between the blog author and commentators.

I am currently working on a possible solution to the first problem: an adjacent Flash website that would enable visitors to explore easily the archives of a blog author. Naturally, I'll talk more about my project as soon as it materializes.

Concerning the second weakness, there's no better solution than the duplication of all that occurred. My article entitled Fragile existence [display] provoked a reaction from a certain Anne Skye:

If this does not convince you of "His" existence, then nothing will, dear Bro. Next time you have a bug in your blog, try NOT doing the Hail Mary's and see what happens. Just kidding, you can't apply double blind control trials or any sort to the existence of "God", 'cos it's all a matter of a quantum leap of faith. But... I still can't help thinking, when I read your powerfully moving story, how "He" moves in such mysterious ways!

I replied as follows:

Anne Skye: I was relieved when you corrected instantly the suggestion that we humans can verify the effectiveness of Hail Marys by performing two tests upon identical situations, one with Hail Marys, and one without. The stumbling block, of course, is the concept of "identical situations". As Heraclitus said: "You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you." And he sums up his vision of constant flux with one of the most profound and lovely declarations ever made by a mortal: "The sun is new every day." Between the initial test, with Hail Marys, and the following one, without Hail Marys, time has passed, and the world is no longer the same place. Even God has grown a little older. To put it roughly, He's no longer the same man He was a little earlier on. Has He grown wiser? Or has He maybe shown the very first symptoms of some kind of divine Alzheimer's? Has He simply changed His mind, for reasons that are known only to Him? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that God no longer repaired computer bugs of any kind, for moral and business reasons, because He realized that His interventions of this nature were unfair competition with respect to human specialists who depend upon fixing computer bugs to buy bread and shoes for their poor children. So, I see no way of testing the Hail Mary solution in a sound scientific style.

Now, your metaphor of a "quantum leap of faith" is another kettle of fish. I hasten to add that I would be disappointed to learn that you were using the expression "quantum leap" merely as a synonym for "big"... which it isn't, since quantum leaps are infinitesimally small, between one shell of orbiting electrons and a neighboring one, either up or down. Within the context of David Deutsch's fascinating conception of parallel universes, founded largely upon a certain way of interpreting quantum physics, it's perfectly conceivable that an individual's decision to have faith in God could be the outcome of a certain quantum value. [Don't get me wrong. I'm talking merely of an individual's having or not having faith in God. I'm certainly not talking of the hypothetical existence of God.]

Finally, you evoke the sentiment that our Cosmos behaves "in mysterious ways". I couldn't agree more with you. For a long time, up until the arrival of quantum theory, the scientific outlook on things was rigorous, logical, austere, Cartesian, cold, calculating, etc. In a nutshell, relatively simple for an agile mind, but as boring as hell. Then quantum theory upset the old Newtonian apple cart. Quantum theory is so extraordinarily bewildering that I wonder constantly whether I've truly understood the first word of it. Be that as it may, overnight, science became a synonym for Lewis Carroll's wonderland, since it encouraged us to explore the weird nature of things as they are seen through the looking-glass provided by intellectual tools of a new kind. Today, the challenge of scientific researchers, scholars and thinkers who wield these new tools consists of attaining what they often refer to as the theory of everything, referred to by the acronym TOE. I consider your "quantum leap of faith" as nothing more than the use of slightly different letters: GOD. But there's a significant detail: Those who talk today about TOE know what they're talking about...

Foreigners in France

In the current French political climate, I often feel that, every time I dare to throw the term "naturalization" into my Antipodes articles, it's as if I were pronouncing a nasty four-letter word. The naturalization of foreigners is not exactly, at the present Sarkozian instant, the most glamorous topic in France. I don't know whether there are opinion polls in this domain, but I would say, as a guess, that the question of naturalization has a global popularity rating in France down around the level of subjects such as genetically-modified shit, nuclear wastes and global warming. Somebody with my background and accent would normally score much higher in present-day Sarkozy Land by saying "I'm a compatriot of Nicole Kidman" than by indicating that he hopes to become a citizen of France.

Be that as it may, it would be appalling if my only hope of receiving a French passport were to admire Sarko and his methods. No, in that case, I would prefer to sell Gamone and move out to Queensland. One of the countless things that stops me pursuing this line of reasoning is that it would be unthinkable for me to return to Australia without my dog. So, it's Sophia who's playing ceaselessly a silent role in holding me in France. Sophia probably doesn't realize this, but she's an everyday living symbol, for me, of everybody from Vercingétorix up to Yannick Noah, without forgetting Joan of Arc or Charles de Gaulle. Then I have another French heroine, intimately responsible for my presence in France:

Christine celebrated her 65th birthday yesterday.

Above-the-limit Labrador

My daughter Emmanuelle cares for the well-being of our Labrador Sophia with the same kind of intensity and love as for me.

An ad hoc principle is accepted by the world's medical highlights: When a dog's fine, so is the animal's master. And vice versa.

In Austria, a three-year-old Labrador named Dingo was recently found to have 1.6 grammes of alcohol in its blood. The veterinary said that the animal emitted the smell of an alcohol distillery. Normally, it should have been dead. It was merely dead drunk. Why? Dingo had consumed inadvertently—insofar as a dog is capable of devouring anything in a supposedly inadvertent manner—no less than half a kilo of fresh baker's dough, prepared by her master, a baker. And baker's dough, in the belly of a dog, is rapidly transformed into something with the effects of prime whisky. Now, I hope and pray that Dingo survived this ordeal.

Let me be quite clear about this whole problem of canine inebriation. If ever my Sophia, for one reason or another, were to attain the same alcohol reading as Dingo, it goes without saying that there's no way in the world I would allow her to take the wheel of our old Citroën.

I have a theory

I love this deliberately-distorted image (by Jason Reed) of the Democratic candidate Barack Obama campaigning at Exeter High School in New Hampshire on January 6, 2008. He's aspiring to great heights, like a Gothic cathedral.

Yes, I have a theory... not just a dream. America might at last be fed up with dynasties... like the Ancient Egyptians, once upon a time. The Kennedy clan. The Bush father and his mentally-inadequate son. Now the legal wife of the big Clinton fucker.

Obama appears to us all as a new message from our primordial land of Africa. Personally, I love and admire the guy. He sounds solid.

French love song

Do you believe that Bill Shakespeare, before penning his great love tragedy entitled Romeo and Juliet, took the trouble to verify that the son of Lord Montague and the daughter of Lord Capulet had indeed been linked in an amorous relationship? I don't think so. I would consider that the Bard of Avon simply pulled this particular couple out of his magic hat because he imagined they would be great personages for a love story. I find it difficult to visualize Shakespeare in the role of an investigative journalist, peering in through bedroom windows in order to be absolutely certain, before daring to say so publicly, that the Capulet nymph was indeed getting laid by the randy Montague lad. William Shakespeare was such a good story-teller that spectators were willing to believe his tales without even bothering to ask whether or not they were factually true. Wow, what an artist! These days, I would say that the only cultural creator who gets anywhere near Shakespeare is Steven Spielberg... or maybe George W Bush back when his public performances used to refer to weapons of mass destruction.

In an adjacent domain, should we waste time trying to determine whether Nicolas Sarkozy and Rachida Dati [present minister of Justice] have really been lovers? Or maybe still are?

Even without a factual Department-of-the-Interior-type answer to this question, French art and culture will continue to evolve. I'm persuaded that French creators, deprived of nitty-gritty dirty details about Nicolas and Rachida, can still produce romantic masterpieces. Here's the proof:



The artists, Alec and Clément, are known as Beaubourg, and this exquisite lyrical composition belongs to a series entitled La chanson du dimanche [Sunday song]. Don't worry if you can't catch the subtle meaning of the words. Just let yourself drift into a marvelous romantic world like that of Romeo and Juliet, and imagine a utopian setting in which Nicolas and Rachida might indeed be Shakespearean lovers.

Friend on the rock

Bruce Hudson is no ordinary Australian friend. During my childhood in South Grafton, although our respective educational establishments were strictly antipodean [Bruce at prestigious Knox Grammar School in Sydney, and me at the public school in South Grafton], I got to know and admire this fellow as if he were a friendly icon of urban civilization, with profound attachments to my family, and a symbol (with the help of his father and uncle... with maybe a little push from my own father) of the great old-fashioned pioneering spirit of Australia. Bruce became my mate and hero. Meanwhile, he also turned into an authentic man of the bush. What I'm saying is not idle poetry. Bruce learned to live in the bush, and he has stayed that way. Today, he and his wife Debbie are operating three hundred acres of beef-cattle land out near Young.

Bruce Hudson has just sent me a fabulous series of photos of Australia's sacred rock, Uluru.

The aerial nature of these shots reminds me that Bruce's splendid father Eric Hudson [businessman, town councilor of South Grafton and great friend of my father] once invited me to fly, for the first time, in his Tiger Moth aircraft at South Grafton.

Australia's sacred mountain is a mystery. A rock that just happens to have appeared there in the distant past, in the middle of nowhere, like the black slab in Kubrick's Space Odyssey. Like my modest but magic Cournouze, opposite Gamone [see the photo at the top of my blog], Uluru changes color in a mysterious manner.

Several years ago, when talking with my friend Natacha Boudoul about the fabulous mountain of Mary Madeleine alongside Marseille, I evoked the crazy idea that sacred sites of this kind might communicate with one another, as it were, through some kind of terrestrial radiation. In receiving Bruce Hudson's images of Uluru, I'm convinced that this magic mountain-to-mountain radiation does in fact exist. And it functions perfectly. It's called the Internet.

Super-sacred rock

I warn Antipodes readers that you won't necessarily understand much, if anything, of what I'm about to say. First, it's in French. And second, even I don't grasp the theme of things. But, here goes...

Recently, a distinguished French newspaper, Le Figaro, displayed a quiz on its website [display] comprising twenty questions designed to test your awareness of French political happenings, generally at an anecdotal level, over the last twelve months. The 14th question was perfectly topical: a simple matter of identifying the personality who said: "I'm reminded of words from the Bible: Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." Many people in France know the answer to this question. The Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal dared recently to talk like Jesus when she was criticizing certain elders of her party, designated in colloquial French political talk as "elephants". [Our metaphors start to get terribly mixed if we try to imagine Jesus talking of jungle beasts.]

What intrigues me is: Why did the French graphic artist of Le Figaro decide to illustrate their question by an image of Australia's Uluru?

Has Ayer's Rock ever been a specifically Christian symbol? I don't think so. Would it be a symbol of folk who deserve to be forgiven because they don't know what they're doing? Surely not. Finally, I end up believing that the employee of Le Figaro chose this image of Uluru for the simple reason that this sacred rock strikes us all as being terribly Biblical, like the words of Jesus... whatever that means. Funny, no?

Exceptional document

In my genealogical research over the last quarter of a century, I've collected all kinds of so-called BDM certificates [births, deaths and marriages], but I had never before seen anything quite as exotic as the latest version of my Australian birth certificate, in the form requested by French authorities for my naturalization application. And, if I introduce such a subject into my blog, it's because I've always been fascinated by records, archives, genealogical documents and all the official human stuff intended to inform us who we are, where we come from, and—maybe, as an afterthought—what we've all been doing during our brief stay on the planet Earth.

In concrete terms, there is now a second sheet of paper, supplied by the Sydney office of the federal department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, referred to as an apostille, attached to the old certificate by means of a green ribbon. And, on both sides of this second sheet of paper, there's a red seal. The following image shows how they've punched a hole in one corner of the old certificate, and run the folded green ribbon through this hole:

Here's a fragment of the attached sheet, the apostille, showing a seal and the signed stamp of the authorities:

On the reverse side of the apostille, as seen in the following image [which is greatly reduced so that I can fit it into my blog], the two extremities of the green ribbon holding the two sheets of paper together are glued onto the apostille by means of a second seal:

The raison d'être of all this elaborate craftsmanship is, of course, to discourage forgers. If somebody attempted to undo the ribbon so that the apostille could then be attached to a fake birth certificate, observers would normally detect traces of the subterfuge.

In fact, it took me no more than a minute to imagine an elementary technique for the delicate removal of the original certificate, and the subsequent attachment of the apostille to a fake birth certificate concerning another individual, maybe even a fictitious personage. No, I don't intend to explain my discovery here and now, because one never knows if it might be useful, one day, to have the details of such a secret technique tucked away in a corner of one's mind. Let me put it another way. For the moment, while my modest financial resources enable me to lead a simple but pleasant existence, I don't intend to try to make a fortune by getting involved in the international forgery business.

Seriously, with today's computers and instant communication possibilities, wouldn't you think that the authorities of advanced nations such as France and Australia would have moved beyond the stage of depending upon quaint old-fashioned stuff such as pretty green ribbons and red seals [for which I've been obliged to pay a non-negligible sum of money, along with a certain waste of time and effort] to confirm that a poor inoffensive bastard named William Skyvington was indeed born in Australia 67 years ago?

Let me conclude on a positive note. As I explained yesterday in Children's itinerary [display], I had to drive along treacherous mountainous roads in order to post off my green ribbon and red seals to the naturalization authorities, who happen to be located in the Atlantic city of Nantes. Well, there's a fabulous French system called Chronopost [which isn't exactly cheap] that enables you to use the Internet to follow the transport of your package as it crosses France... or indeed the planet. Here's what I learned today:

Once my green ribbon and red seals had crossed the Vercors mountains in my old Citroën, they were deposited in the fabulous cheese town of St-Marcellin [it's the cheese, not the town, that's fabulous] and then conveyed to Grenoble, where their presence was recorded at 19:23 yesterday evening. By 05:13 this morning, the ribbon and seals were in Nantes... but they won't actually be delivered into the hands of my friendly naturalization lady named Cécile Guillas [even red tape is a highly personalized affair here in France] until Monday morning. The only thing that worries me now is that Cécile, in using a pair of scissors to extract my lovely birth certificate from its protective plastic envelopes, might inadvertently damage (cut) that lovely green ribbon or the equally lovely red circular seals, which would be a great pity. I'm attached to that document... like an apostille.

Labyrinths

The theme of labyrinths has always interested me, and I built websites [display] that simulate those of Chartres (France) and Lucca (Italy).

Google Maps has just provided a link to an excellent video presenting an anthology of labyrinths throughout the world:



It's a pity that they speak, not of labyrinths, but of mazes. To my mind, a maze is merely a confusing entity capable of trapping visitors, like streets in some of the poorly-designed housing allotments that spring up these days on the outskirts of cities. [I'm thinking, say, of the north of Valence.] A labyrinth, on the other hand, is a carefully-planned system of paths designed to make it difficult to move either from the outside to the inside (in the case of a treasure), or from the inside to the outside (in the original Ancient Greek sense of a prison).

Children's itinerary

In French, there's a nice expression to designate an itinerary that's considerably longer than normal: chemin des écoliers [children's path]. The idea is that kids leaving school at the end of the day are often in no great hurry to get home. So, they take the longest possible path, enabling them to meet up with friends and maybe get involved in unexpected adventures.

This morning, I had an important letter to post: the final documents completing my application for French naturalization. Following last night's fall of a rock, the road down to the village of Pont-en-Royans was closed to both vehicles and pedestrians. So, to get to a post office and back, I had to take a long and often dangerous itinerary.

At one stage, for several kilometers, I was obliged to drive slowly along this steep and narrow road on the flanks of a mountain. Fortunately, I only met up with a single automobile moving in the opposite direction. Before backing up, I was forced to stop and walk to the rear of my Citroën to ascertain the width of earth that separated us from the precipice. When I finally emerged from this small road, I had a clear view of my home down in the Bourne Valley.

On the road down the slopes, I noticed that the postwoman had stopped at the house of my Macaire neighbors. I pulled up too, so that she could give me my mail. Madame Macaire promptly invited me to lunch.

Paul Macaire is a least a third-generation native of Gamone.

Their ancestral family home was a stone house like mine, two hundred meters up the road from Gamone. When the Nazis invaded the Vercors, they set fire systematically to every residence whose front door was locked, considering that it might house Résistance guerrillas and stocks of arms. The Macaires' house happened to be locked, so it disappeared in flames. The front door of my future home was wide open, and the house survived.

The Macaires told me that the road from Presles down to Choranche had been macadamized a mere half-century ago. Before that, most residents of Presles and the Coulmes plateau would visit the markets of the Bourne Valley on horseback or in carts drawn by bullocks. In the early days, only five residents of Presles were prosperous enough to own automobiles, and the Macaires rapidly learned to recognize the distinctive noise of each of these five automobiles, as well as the direction in which it was traveling. So, without rising from their dinner table, Paul Macaire would be able to say to his young wife, for example: "Hey, Chabert is returning home early today. I'll bet his old woman scolded him last Friday for drinking wine with his mates down in Pont-en-Royans." Today, on the bitumen, all the automobiles sound the same, and there are too many to be recognized individually. But I often have the impression that folk like the Macaires know everything that's happening in the commune... often before it actually happens.

Down at Choranche, the road was opened up at the beginning of the afternoon. I ran into my neighbors Dédé and Madeleine, who had wandered down there on foot, with their delightful dog Briska, to inspect the traces of yesterday's rock fall.

Like the Macaires, the Repellins are Nth-generation natives of this extraordinary but erratic region where I'm settled, where you can be obliged at times to drive for hours over dangerous roads in order to post a letter. When I think of these friendly old-fashioned neighbors, there's an adjective that springs into my mind immediately: authentic. This doesn't necessarily mean that they provide you with facts and objective judgments whenever they open their mouths. On the contrary, the veracity of their every declaration has to evaluated instantly, as it were, with respect to the advantages they might reap if ever what they're saying were true. This means, for example, that it's pointless to ask for their opinions concerning the ongoing conflicts between local farmers and the rock-climbers who throng to Choranche, for the Macaires and the Repellins cannot easily disentangle themselves from past epochs when their ancestors would have been scandalized to find city people encroaching upon their precious farmlands. But they are authentic in the sense that, even if the land at Choranche no longer belongs exclusively to them, they certainly belong to that soil.

Bright stuff

Today, society can appreciate retrospectively the revolutionary effects of the widespread use of the elegant adjective "gay", starting in the 1960s, to designate individuals who are attracted physically to people of the same sex. It was a great invention, for many reasons. First, it wasn't really an invention at all, since the old French word "gai", of Gothic etymology, had existed since the Middle Ages. The term "gay" has a positive ring, like describing somebody as lively, dynamic or simply happy with life in general. The adoption of this new old-fashioned adjective enabled people to abandon the antiquated derogatory terms that had been used too often to stigmatize gay folk, just as it did away with excessively clinical adjectives such as "homosexual". Above all, in its modern sense, "gay" has never been an insiders' code word... such as the silly adjective "camp", which gay men were accustomed to use in designating themselves back in Sydney when I was a teenager. So, all in all, I believe that the invention of this adjective has been a highly successful linguistic and sociological operation.

These days, individuals who have succeeded in moving intellectually and morally beyond the antiquated domains of religious belief systems (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc) are in dire need of a similar adjective, enabling them to perform publicly their "coming out" in a simple and elegant fashion. Well, a US philosopher named Daniel Dennett has recently provided us with exactly the word we need: bright.


For an easy-to-read introduction to all things bright and beautiful, I recommend Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Not surprisingly, Dennett is a disciple of Richard Dawkins, who seems to like the "bright" word. Admittedly, atheism is not exactly the same kind of phenomenon as homosexuality, and it would be silly to suggest that homosexuals and atheists of the world should join their hands in a big common combat against bigotry and intellectual intolerance. Having never been implicated in the struggles of homosexuals for ordinary human rights, I have no knowledge of gay attitudes towards religion and atheism... if ever we were to generalize in this manner.

After saying all this, I'm determined to conclude this article by means of a grandiloquent declaration that would have surely shocked my grandparents and parents if they were still alive. But, before that, a joke:

Mary, a pretty Irish girl, went across the waters to work in Liverpool. With her pockets full of money, she returned to Dublin and visited her Catholic aunt.

Aunt: And what have you been doing in Liverpool?

Mary: I can't tell lies, but I'm ashamed to answer you...

Aunt: Come on, Mary. Tell the truth. God alone will decide whether you've sinned.

Mary: In Liverpool, I became a pro..., a prosti... No, I'm to ashamed to pronounce the word.

Aunt: Mary, you must tell me.

Mary: I became a prostitute.

Aunt: Thank the Lord and the Blessed Virgin. For a terrible moment, Mary, I thought you were going to tell me you'd become a Protestant.

Well, here it is. My coming out. I'm bright!

Fragile existence

A few hours ago, I drove down to the village of Pont-en-Royans to drop in on my local physician, Dr Xavier Limouzin. He was as proud as a successful angler to have guided me wisely, over a period of several years, into an expert medical context in which early traces of prostate cancer have been detected. At a practical level, this means that I'll no doubt endure an operation in the near future. My youthful mustached doctor (a distinguished member of the local fire brigade, and an amateur of antiquated motor cycles) leaned back in his armchair and allowed himself to be carried away by the apparent beauty of such a surgical intervention: "It's an amazing two-man team effort. The urologist operates with a colleague. They showed me a fabulous video that demonstrates how it's done." In watching Dr Limouzin describe with enthusiasm the work of his specialized colleagues, I had the impression that I was maybe missing out on some kind of superb Spielberg production, and that I should order immediately the DVD through Amazon. "The only access they need is a tiny set of holes in the lower abdomen. Once they've got their tiny instruments inside, in the prostate region, it's beautiful to see the way they operate, as a team." OK, we're surely talking about a couple of Olympic ice artists such as Torvill and Dean, or maybe a Russian/American pair of astronauts repairing their space station. Maybe, I thought, this expert couple fiddling around so aesthetically in the region of my old-fashioned sexual apparatus might be attempting to create an artificial offspring, possibly a monster.

After bidding farewell to my adorable doctor, I was halted by a minor catastrophe at the exit of the village of Pont-en-Royans, on the road up to Gamone.

While I was chatting about prostate surgery with Dr Limouzin, a giant rock had fallen down from the Baret mountain (which I observe from my bedroom window). After the impact, which would have surely squashed any automobile that happened to be moving up the road at that instant, the rock disintegrated into several fragments, one of which halted on the other side of the road, while the others jumped over the parapet and descended into the Bourne. As my friend Natacha put it, with what I see as a Marseilles sense of judgment, when I told her this anecdote on the phone: "Obviously, for God, your hour of doom has not yet come." Thanks Natacha, thanks God.

Seriously, life is fragile. Isn't it? Beautifully fragile. That's what makes the whole thing so amazing... whichever way you look at it. Meanwhile, if I were serious, I would start to think about looking at things from the point of view of those two surgical artists whose skill consists of being able to eliminate the bugs and other cellular intruders in my lower belly.

Shit, when I think about it, if Limouzin's conversation had bored me, and I had left five minutes earlier, my fucking prostate might now me some kind of French pâté spread out over the macadam on the road from Pont-en-Royans up to Gamone.

I love life! It's so unpredictable. Lively, as they say.

Australian Internet censorship

Is Australia an adult nation?
It's so long since I lived in Australia for an appreciable length of time that I prefer to refrain from stating my hasty and uninformed personal opinion on that interesting question. But I've just heard about a Labor project that would consist of blacklisting various websites whose content is judged to be dangerous for the angelic minds of Aussie kids.

In the above sentence, the banal adjective "various" is significant, in the sense that only a random sampling of such websites would appear on the blacklist, for the simple reason that websites grow like weeds in your backyard, and you can no more blacklist all the offensive websites of the planet than you can eradicate noxious plants. The authorities can do little more than bow down symbolically to a lobby of wowsers and do-gooders who know fuck-all about the technicalities of contemporary communications of the web kind.

For almost two years, my personal email communications with Australia have been plagued constantly by some kind of a fuckwit blacklist maintained by Big Pond, designed to prevent the delivery of messages emanating from the French national ISP [Internet service provider] named Orange, ostracized as an alleged producer of spam [an absurd accusation].

In spite of all my efforts, I've never succeeded in eradicating this annoyance, and making sure that all my French emails would be delivered systematically to my relatives and friends in Australia. Often, I had the impression that trying to solve a problem of that kind was like attempting to nudge the Australian Way of Life. That's why I decided to create this blog, so that my relatives and friends in Australia would be able to see what I was doing and thinking in France. So, now that my blog is a thriving offspring, well over a year old, Antipodes says: Thank you, Big Pond fuckwits!

Today, when I start hearing talk about projects to censor the Internet in Australia, I'm itching to answer my opening rhetorical question, at the start of this article. For the moment, I'll force myself not to do so.

Change of attitudes and words

Not so long ago, many people in France were intrigued by the dynamism, exuberance and energetic determination of the newly-elected president... without necessarily admiring his actions and operations, or taking the man seriously. Nicolas Sarkozy was new; he was young; he was different... Political observers accustomed to the time-honored and relatively austere traditions of French politics of the Fifth Republic—from de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard and Mitterrand through to Chirac—were initially astounded by this Speedy Gonzales with a finger in every pie. He seemed to be operating almost everywhere, simultaneously, and people soon understood that he would not be calling upon the services of his submissive prime minister... or any other minister, for that matter. Why should he? Sarkozy's wife Cécilia turned out to be more efficient than even a French minister of Foreign Affairs in liberating the female hostages in Kadhafi Land. But she ended up running away.

I have the impression, though, that the dashing French prince, presently enamored of an Italian fashion-model princess, might be moving into the treacherous midnight zone of Cinderella, when the champagne bubbles can burst, and beautiful people can turn into toads. What I'm trying to say is that I sense that more and more French people are irritated by the Sarkozy style, and that the fairly tale could end rudely at the drop of a magician's hat. [I'm aware that I might have mixed up a few images and metaphors in this paragraph.]

Sarkozy's new-year message to the French nation was disappointing. For inexplicable last-minute reasons, instead of having his message video-recorded in a professional style, Sarkozy decided to deliver his speech live, in a stilted formal fashion, prompted by means of an idiot board. Then he threw in a weird allusion to a personal vision designated as a "politique de civilization", which left people startled and confused, primarily because nobody seems capable of grasping what this expression might mean.

Certain popular young Frenchmen are frankly angry.

France's favorite personality, the celebrated tennis player and singer Yannick Noah, is scandalized by Sarkozy: "Everything shocks me. His attitude, his tone and his arrogance shock me. The display of wealth and his cynicism shock me. The disinformation shocks me." Noah ends up borrowing the image of Louis XIV at Versailles: "He's the king with his court, and the sycophants are down on their knees before him."

In a slightly different register, another outspoken young Frenchman, the leftist politician Arnaud Montebourg, has decided to attack Sarkozy in an indirect manner.

He has aimed his fire at his former Socialist colleague Bernard Kouchner, enticed by the siren song of Sarkozy into becoming his minister of Foreign Affairs. Montebourg has declared vigorusly that it's high time for Kouchner to simply resign from a presidential context that brings to mind "the Ancient Romans of the decadence". For those who need more than a metaphor to understand his criticism, Montebourg accuses Sarkozy of "moral bankruptcy", and throws in nasty expressions such as "betrayal of electoral promises", "fiscal injustice" and "diplomatic fiasco".

The criticism of both Noah and Montebourg can be described as fighting words. What will Sarko try to invent, to defend himself? Maybe, like Forrest Gump, he should run like hell.

Same procedure as every year

The French-language blog named Jour après jour [Day after day], written by a regular Parisian reader of Antipodes known as cm, informed me of the existence of this hilarious English video, which is apparently a Xmas-time cult show on German TV:



If I understand correctly, in Germany, Xmas viewing of this sketch is a yearly ritual of the same order as our tuning in to the pope's Urbi et Orbi message or the performance of Strauss waltzes from Vienna. In France, curiously, TV channels are convinced that Xmas and New Year audiences are expecting hours of what they called bêtisiers, which means anthologies of media howlers: TV journalists and comedians who can't carry on because they've got the giggles, studio decors that collapse on the heads of participants, politicians who make stupid remarks while imagining they're not on camera, celebrities who slip down staircases, etc. It's a fact, I believe, that French mentalities (whatever that might mean) are geared to laughing at this kind of rubbish. Maybe there are students in French sociology who might find it worthwhile to carry out doctoral research in this domain.

Australian arithmetic

During my short trip to Australia in 2006, I was shocked to discover that there were no trains to a couple of NSW towns that I wished to visit (Braidwood and Byron Bay), and I was further surprised to find that the only way of crossing the river at Grafton was by means of the antiquated bridge over which I used to pedal my bicycle when I was a boy.

Since then, I've got into the habit of asking naive questions about Australia's infrastructures. Why do Australians never stop boasting about the fabulous wealth of their land, while still tolerating old-fashioned infrastructures that are often like those of a developing nation? A friend tried to tell me recently that the respective infrastructures of France and Australia cannot be compared because... there are three times as many tax-payers in France as in Australia. This analysis is rubbish, of course. When Australia sells a mountain of precious minerals to foreign purchasers, her potential income from the deal has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of Aussies paying taxes. It's a matter of complex political, economic and business considerations that determine what percentage of such wealth will return to Australian citizens, and how much will be left in the hands of greedy international capitalists. It's childishly naive to imagine that the quality of Australia's roads, bridges and railway lines depends necessarily and exclusively upon the financial resources resulting from income tax paid by Aussie wage-earners. That is not only bad arithmetic; it's bad politics. And you can't run a country on such idiotic principles. If indeed the mountains of minerals that we're peddling to foreign buyers don't enable the citizens of Australia to take advantage of decent infrastructures, then our nation's leaders should halt immediately the sale of these mountains of minerals, while we do some serious thinking about what has gone wrong.

Let me turn my attention to another kind of infrastructure. In my articles entitled Australia's submarines [display] and Nuclear energy [display], I referred to an aspect of Australia's future defense system that has given rise to articles in the local press over the last few days. All these articles repeat the same huge investment figure: some 25 billion dollars for six future submarines. Now, this is typically the kind of situation in which a citizen, instead of believing naively what he hears, has the right and the possibility to do some independent thinking. Let's talk in euros. The unit cost of each of Australia's future submarines amounts to 2.75 billion euros. And what is Australia going to receive for this sum? An old-fashioned vessel that runs on diesel oil. My God, that's a lot of cash for a diesel boat!

By way of comparison, let us look at the production of one of the world's most advanced nations in the field of nuclear-propelled submarines: France. It just so happens that France, like Australia, is currently planning to renew its fleet of six attack submarines. The future model is known as the Barracuda, and it will be constructed in the Cherbourg shipyards in Normandy.

The Barracuda vessels will, of course, be propelled by nuclear energy. So, they will be intrinsically far more sophisticated than Australia's classic vessels. And the Barracuda's unit cost price? One billion euros. In other words, Australia's classic submarine, to be delivered in 2025, will be 2.75 times as expensive as France's avant-garde nuclear vessel, to be delivered eight years earlier, in 2017.

Is there something wrong with my arithmetic? Or is there maybe something wrong with Australia's political thinking about the nation's allegedly high-priced infrastructures?

Happy new year

I take this opportunity of conveying my best wishes for 2008 to readers of the Antipodes blog. Over the last few weeks, I've been more absent-minded than usual (primarily because of a relatively banal health problem that suddenly hit me), and I somehow or other forgot completely that my friends Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier had invited me to spend the evening at their place. So, last night, I was curled up in front of my fireplace trying to digest the rather indigestible words of Nicolas Sarkozy's new-year greetings to his compatriots, when the phone rang. It was Serge informing me that they were waiting for my arrival. Now, while it's embarrassing to turn up late in such circumstances, it was suddenly fun to jump into my automobile, abandon the solitude of Gamone and find myself (a few kilometers up the road) in the warm atmosphere of my friends' home. After expressing my muddled apologies for forgetting about their invitation, I listened to a delightful anecdote from Tineke, which I shall summarize briefly. Several years ago, I built a small website [display] for Tineke. Well, recently, a Dutch scientist and his wife discovered this website, and they immediately dropped in on Tineke at Choranche in order to acquire one of her sculptures. This proves that the website is effective from a professional viewpoint, as it were, which is reassuring. But the anecdote doesn't stop there. The scientist is a computer specialist, aficionado (like me) of Apple products, and he's also a talented photographer. What's more, he has a sense of humor, for he left a gift for me with Tineke and Serge: a copy of his latest book, entitled Windows for Beginners.

Contrary to what might be imagined, this delightful little book has nothing to do with Microsoft's operating system. It's an anthology of excellent images of real-world windows in many corners of the planet.

Recently, in this blog, I proposed a small selection of Tineke's photos concerning the demolition of the rock overhanging the road at Choranche [display]. Last night, I had an opportunity of seeing the entire set of photos, presented in an elegant large-screen montage. In the context of this presentation of massive aspects of our mineral world of the Vercors (dark humid cliffs, jagged fragments of rocks, icy slopes and frozen valleys), I was impressed, above all, by the faces of the various human actors in charge of this demolition project: the serious regard of the elected represented of the region (whose troubled expressions reflected the recent horror of finding the occupants of an automobile crushed by a huge boulder that had slid down the slopes of Choranche), and the strangely nonchalant attitudes of the young helmeted climbers, attired in colorful garments and encumbered with ropes and chains, who were often obliged to scramble over the cliff face in the light of projectors, in the middle of the freezing night, adjusting steel rods and holes for dynamite in the fragile rocks.

Tineke's photos reveal the regard of an artist. She's not only a sculptor, but a painter too. Like her, I was fascinated, a fortnight ago, by the presence of heavy frost at Choranche, enclosing every element of vegetation on the slopes and in the valley of the Bourne. Well, Tineke ventured out into the cold with her camera and produced an amazing series of images of this exceptional frost. She also produced a remarkable series on a simple but wonderful theme: brilliantly-hued roosters and hens wandering around contentedly in a local farmyard. Here at Gamone, I've often had fowls (including peacocks and ducks), and I've always considered them as immensely beautiful creatures, whose mere presence can have a strangely soothing effect upon human observers... like fish in an aquarium, which dentists used to install in their waiting rooms, in the hope of attenuating the stress of patients.

When I was about to leave for home around 1.30 this morning, I found my Citroën covered in ice. Serge suggested that I wait a minute while he prepared an antidote: a plastic watering-can full of boiling water, which removed the ice instantly. This morning, the cold has conquered my automobile once again [I don't yet have anything that might be described as a garage], and the traces of the boiling-water method have given rise to beautiful crystalline forms on the windshield and bonnet. I said to myself: If Tineke were to see my old Citroën in this striking visual state, she would surely either take a photo of it, produce a painting of the subject, or maybe even create some kind of gigantic Martian-like metal and stone structure, on our slopes of Choranche, entitled William's automobile. You never know what surprises you might get from authentic artists. Like an unexpected phone call, at the start of a wintry evening, which drags you out of your silence and solitude and into a universe of warm light, splendid colors and strange forms.

Gigantic news from Down Under

It's still 2007 here in France, whereas the new year is already an hour and a half old in my motherland. And the following dramatic story has already been transmitted across the planet on the Internet by Reuters, accompanied by an image:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian newlyweds kissing on the backseat of their hire car were unaware their chauffeur was street drag racing, until a police siren broke their romantic bliss and ended the race. The chauffeur, clocked at up to 130 kph (80 mph) racing a young driver in a rental car, was fingerprinted on the side of the road and the hire car confiscated. "It's alleged that as the traffic light turned green both the (cars) accelerated harshly from the intersection and continued to travel at speed along the highway," police said in a statement. Both drivers were taken away by police, while newlyweds John and Laina Tauranga were escorted home in a police car.

Shit! Fuck me! Stone the crows! Can this really be true? Was this vehicle truly racing at 130 kph while the innocent newlyweds were kissing on the back seat? Thank God that the Australian police force is constantly vigilant, to detect frightening happenings of this kind, and to attenuate the consequences of such barbarian acts upon innocent victims. What a terrible atmosphere of drama in which the newlyweds John and Laina are going to start their married life. I hope they'll receive appropriate psychological counseling to recover from this ordeal. Unbelievable...

The new year, as I said, is less than a couple of hours old in my motherland, but I can sense already that dramatic Aussie stories are going to amaze me more and more throughout the coming months.