When I was a child in South Grafton, and my father was developing his initial beef-grazing activities at a nearby property named Deep Creek, I had the impression that he was obsessed by the challenge of building and repairing fences. I felt that, if my father were truly a cowboy, then he should be spending far more time on horseback. Instead of that, he was perpetually digging holes to plant eucalyptus posts, and tightening barbed wire. Today, my small property at Gamone has taught me a lot, retrospectively, concerning my father's preoccupations at Deep Creek. And I too, at my humble level, have often been concerned by the all-important question of fences.
Yesterday, I finally got around to using steel rods to support the electric fence, instead of wooden posts or plastic spikes. The advantages are their robustness and low cost, combined with the fact that they're easy to plant and move from one spot to another. By the end of the day, my two donkeys were fenced in behind a ribbon supported by steel rods. But I didn't have time to connect the electricity to the new fence.
In the middle of the night, I was woken up by Sophia's furious barking. Looking out the bathroom window, I distinguished the silhouette of a large animal in the dark, and I imagined that one of my donkeys had broken through the new fence. Later on today, I discovered that this was not the case.
Neither of my donkeys had broken out. On the contrary, a neighboring animal had broken in! This mare was tired of eating hay and being alone in a wooden cubicle up at Bob's place, so it broke loose and came down to visit my donkeys and dine on real grass. The animal belongs to a charming young lady named Angélique, who's a producer of goat cheese in Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne. She's wondering why her elegant mare would wish to join up with a pair of lowly donkeys. As for me, I like to think that this fine animal came down to Gamone in the middle of the night because it wanted to be there, as soon as the sun came up, to admire my new electric fence.
When the citizens of a great republic elect their president, the future first lady is part of the packaged deal, at no extra cost... particularly if the president himself has lots of wealthy friends with jet planes, luxury yachts and Mediterranean mansions. Normally, voters can't complain if they were to discover that the first lady likes to be photographed in all kinds of interesting situations.
In France today, there's a minor irregularity in the sense that voters had no idea that the president they were electing would be switching first ladies during his first six months in office. So, a disgruntled citizen might grumble bitterly: "We thought we would be getting lady X, and now you're forcing us to accept lady Y." But, as I said, only a miserly voter would lodge such a complaint, because the nation gets the first lady for free (in theory), as part of the global bargain.
There's another approach to this question. Few people would feel like leaving their children in the care of a couple who've never succeeded in keeping their own kids off the street. How should we feel about confiding an entire nation to a guy who apparently can't keep his female off the front covers? And a female who can't keep her clothes on?
In 1962 [the year I arrived in Paris], I was greatly impressed by a weird and notorious Italian movie, Mondo cane [dogs' world], which presented viewers with an anthology of all kinds of exotic and more-or-less shocking cases of human behavior throughout the world. Part of the charm of the movie came from its romantic theme music: the famous song entitled More[play].
It was in this film that I first heard of a fabulous belief system in the Pacific island of Vanuatu: the so-called cargo cult, whereby the natives had transformed their recollection and interpretation of recent military US military operations in the region into the foundations of a mythical religion. Their adoration of a mysterious American hero known as John Frum is amazing.
An article in Télérama reminds me that documentary films have been produced recently on this fabulous subject. The idea that the great US war machine could give rise to a religious cult, with all the appropriate symbols and iconic paraphernalia (including mock weapons and aircraft), appears to me as a modern page of Greek mythology.
A draconian plan for climate action was presented today in Brussels by the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. Basically, the proposed challenge will consist of a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases by the year 2020. Theoretically, the annual cost of achieving this result should amount to half-a-percent of the GDP [gross domestic product], but it is likely that the true cost will be double that figure. José Manuel Barroso stated that the plans proposed by Brussels constitute "the most complete package of measures in the world". Europe—the so-called Old World—wants to be the world champion in saving the world.
An inspired TV journalist once asked the Dalai Lama: "Can your beliefs in reincarnation and your unbounded respect for all forms of life be reconciled with the case, say, of a mosquito that's intent upon settling on your arm and sucking your blood?" The grinning Dalai Lama said he would try to shoo the creature away. The journalist insisted: "But what if the mosquito fails to go away, because it's determined to bite you?" The Dalai Lama broke into typical laughter and made it clear by a few unmistakable gestures that, in such circumstances, the creature stood a good chance of being squashed to death. I admired the Dalai Lama's suggestion that it's all very well to have lofty principles... but, if an alien creature is attacking you, then it's perfectly normal to exterminate the vicious little bugger. [On the other hand, maybe I totally misunderstood what the wise man was saying.]
I can't say I've ever felt the need to respect religiously all forms of life, because I grew up in an environment where it was quite normal to kill various animals: snakes, rabbits, hens, ducks, etc. It's true, though, that I was overcome by pangs of guilt for several days, at around the age of ten, after having shot an unsuspecting bird with a catapult. [Even today, I remain so marked by that anecdote that I recently wove it into my fictional biography of Master Bruno, the medieval hermit who founded the Carthusian order of Christian monks.] I'm not cynical to the point of saying that rules are made to be broken, but I believe that we have the right—and the obligation, at times—to stretch them to their breaking point... and what the hell if they snap! That's why I like the Dalai Lama's loose attitude towards offensive mosquitoes, as opposed, say, to the dogmatic outlook of many Christian prelates concerning aborted foetuses or human stem cells.
In a neighboring moral domain, I've never been an all-out pacifist, either. For example, I've always been horrified by the alleged "turning the other cheek" principle of Christianity [which, I believe, has rarely been put into regular practice]. If I had been a Christian in one of Rome's martyrdom arenas, I would have used every possible means at my disposal in order to kill the beasts before they killed me.
And that brings me to the subject of the present post: modern machines of destruction. I was happy to see that some privileged Australian military personnel have been undergoing training in France in the context of the purchase by my native land of several Franco-German combat helicopters of the Tiger class. Now, if you haven't seen these diabolical but fascinating beasts in action, you might take a look at the following spectacular video:
Jumping from helicopters to submarines [metaphorically], I feel obliged to add a few remarks concerning the subject I tackled briefly in my article of 2 January 2008 entitled Australian arithmetic[display]. Otherwise, I could be accused of expressing opinions and then leaving them hanging up in the air, without following them right on through. Let me repeat rapidly the essential points of my reflections concerning the high price of Australia's future submarines. The Australian press had announced that our country would be spending 25 billion dollars to build six diesel-powered vessels, and I made the remark that French nuclear-powered combat submarines of the Barracuda class can be purchased for 36% of that outlay: a billion euros per submarine.
At the same time that I made those remarks publicly in my blog, I got into direct contact with Ross Babbage, chairman of the Kokoda Foundation in Canberra. He's the man who actually signed the Kokoda paper #4 of April 2007, which was the main source of the media articles that had presented this submarine affair to the public, as explained in my article of 26 December 2007 entitled Australia's submarines[display]. Ross Babbage reacted kindly by sending me (airmail to France) a complimentary copy of his report, along with helpful explanations that clarify the situation considerably. Here are the precise words on this subject from the Kokoda paper #4:
... simply replacing the Collins Class submarines with a new class of six submarines would probably cost $12-$15 billion. Modernising and adapting Australia's total underwater capabilities to meet the needs of potential defence contingencies in the 2025-2050 timeframe would probably require expenditures in the order of $20-$25 billion.
In other words, we are down to a unit price of $2-$2.5 billion per vessel. Expressed in European currency, that's a unit price between 1.2 and 1.5 billion euros. It's still 20% to 50% more expensive than the ultramodern French nuclear-powered Barracuda submarine, but we're down to sensible figures. Incidentally, the expression "Australia's total underwater capabilities" includes, besides the six future submarines, such costly matters as RAN anti-submarine warfare capabilities and RAAF underwater-surveillance capabilities.
Now, the Antipodes blog is hardly the right place to get deeply involved in affairs of this kind. All I wish to say, by way of a conclusion, is that I was rather surprised by the relatively "lightweight" nature of the Kokoda paper, which is a tiny printed booklet of no more than 64 pages. I had been expecting that the so-called "paper" would be a dense fact-filled report stored, maybe, on a set of DVDs. On the contrary, it skims through the domain of submarines with no attempt whatsoever at attaining depth. Astonishing in the case of a report on submarines...
Imagine a skilled cabinetmaker who has always considered that the only way of installing good furniture in a new kitchen is to build each cupboard and table from scratch.
Intrigued by new kinds of hinges and drawers available in big hardware stores, he tries to incorporate them into his constructions, but something seems to have gone wrong. His cupboard doors no longer close correctly, and his drawers get stuck, because the woodworker is incapable of correctly integrating these new elements into his old-fashioned construction procedures. Then, one day, a friend invites the cabinetmaker along to an Ikea store, enabling him to discover a revolutionary approach to the installation of kitchens.
Today, concerning my operations as a Flash website developer [links], I'm very much in the same situation as the old-fashioned cabinetmaker. Since 2001, when I started to use Macromedia Flash, I've become quite proficient in the construction, from scratch, of websites based upon this approach. Meanwhile, the Flash tool has become considerably more complex. When I attempt to patch up certain aspects of my old websites, they refuse to function correctly in the new Flash environment. So, I tend to leave them alone, in their old operational state. Fortunately, today, there's an "Ikea solution" to problems of this kind. Instead of trying to patch up one of my antiquated tailor-made website elements, I can simply replace it by an off-the-shelf Flash component.
The reason I'm writing about this technical hitch [a non-problem, thanks to the concept of components] is that I've been held up recently, through bugs of the above-mentioned kind, in my preparation of two Flash websites that should interest Antipodes readers:
— One is an interface that will make it easier to access the Antipodes archives in a user-friendly fashion.
— The other will consist of free online access to my novel All the Earth is Mine, whose 16 chapters will be released on a weekly basis.
I'll provide precise details of these two services as soon as I've got them up and running.
Over the last few weeks, the French media have been reminiscing a lot about Simone de Beauvoir, because she was born in Paris exactly a century ago.
Countless female admirers throughout the world have described how Simone de Beauvoir's ground-breaking study entitled Le Deuxième Sexe, published in 1949, helped them become aware of their profound nature and feminine specificity. Indeed, it's so common to hear women extolling the merits of this female intellectual that observers might be lulled into believing that her celebrated book about women was intended exclusively for female readers. Well, as a male, I insist upon the fact that a mediocre American translation of Le Deuxième Sexe happened to be my unique personal guide book back in the days when I was an awkward youth in Sydney, striving constantly and somewhat vainly to gain insight into those exotic creatures known as "girls". Consequently, in the beginning, I naturally imagined naively that all females surely thought and behaved in much the same style as Simone de Beauvoir. By chance, at the age of 21, I left Australia and settled down in Paris. Not surprisingly, from my Australian viewpoint, many of the splendid young women I encountered in France were indeed not all that different to the mysterious creatures who had seemed to emerge, back in my Sydney days, from the pages of Simone de Beauvoir's guide book. So, all in all, I had the privilege of receiving a relatively coherent introduction to individuals of the First Sex.
Sunday, January 20, 2008 ADDENDUM
This is the amusing juxtaposition referred to by cm in her comment [see below]:
On the left, there's the actual front page of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Simone de Beauvoir is adjusting her hair in front of a mirror and a washbasin, while offering the photographer a charming view of her backside. The document on the right is a publicity poster of the kind displayed by French news agencies, designed to persuade people to purchase a copy of the weekly. The message of the ad is clear: If you want to read about two outstanding women (Simone de Beauvoir and Benazir Bhutto), then you should purchase the latest issue of Le Nouvel Observateur. In the poster, insofar as the graphic stuff concerning Bhutto is now hiding most of de Beauvoir's buttocks, the ad designer seems to be saying, too: The only way you'll get the full picture of Simone's arse is to buy the weekly. My own guess is that the publisher of Le Nouvel Observateur may have been a little upset to discover that so many observers expressed their surprise that such a serious (?) weekly would resort to the marketing strategy of putting the photo of a naked celebrity on the first page. In that case, the poster might be thought of as a last-minute attempt to attenuate the shock of Simone's bare bottom.
Normally, today, Benedict XV should have gone along to the Sapienza University of Rome as a guest of the rector. But he decided, two days ago, to stay at home, since a group of 67 teachers and researchers of the physics department had made it known that the pope was a persona non grata in their ivory tower of science. Why didn't the academics wish to welcome the head of the Catholic church? A spokesman explained: "Ever since the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633, physicists are particularly touchy about the Catholic church meddling in scientific matters." For staff members of La Sapienza, Galileo's trial is looked upon as a relatively recent happening, since their prestigious university was founded (by a pope) in 1303.
Now, scientists have had ample opportunities to express their opposition to religion in general, and Christianity in particular. So, why today's sudden surge of aggressiveness, in the Italian capital, concerning the latest pope? It gets back to Galileo. Delving into the declarations of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger long before he became pope, the physicists of La Sapienza have unearthed an oration in which he attempts to justify the trial of Galileo by a fuzzy reference to some kind of "greater rationality" than that of science.
Let us hope that the decision of Benedict XV to refrain from visiting La Sapienza will set a precedent. Popes, cardinals and tutti quanti would do well, from now on, to remain on their time-honored terrain: that of the Church, with all its wishy-washy thinking and bloody history. Today, in the citadels of science, there is no longer any room for those who persist in believing in antiquated falsehoods and childish magic.
Australian vice-prime minister Julia Gillard is right. It's a pity ("bad for the nation's image") that disturbing photos and video sequences of incidents at Australia's great tennis tournament have just gone all around the planet.
Seeing ordinary spectators (often bystanders with no links to unruly elements in the crowd) suffering from the after-effects of pepper spray, many bewildered potential tourists are likely to ask, in Aussie parlance: "What the bloody hell are they wailing for?"
My personal opinion about Aussie cops has never evolved much over the last half-a-century. For me, all too many of them act like brainwashed self-righteous zombies. I remember them above all in Fremantle, in 1987, for the America's Cup regattas. One evening, I was pulled over while driving away from a social event, and taken along to the station where I was asked to take my coat off, empty my pockets, etc. Half an hour later, one of their team told me I could put my coat back on, place my money and belongings back into my pockets, and continue on my way, for they had no reason whatsoever to keep me there.
Concerning the cowboy cops and their pepper sprays at the Australian Open, many observers have pointed out that police behavior of this kind would be unthinkable in most civilized countries... particularly since it appears retrospectively that the spectator disturbances that provoked the police intervention were perfectly harmless, indeed banal at a spirited sporting match.
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.
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.
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."
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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...
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Yesterday, I finally got around to using steel rods to support the electric fence, instead of wooden posts or plastic spikes. The advantages are their robustness and low cost, combined with the fact that they're easy to plant and move from one spot to another. By the end of the day, my two donkeys were fenced in behind a ribbon supported by steel rods. But I didn't have time to connect the electricity to the new fence.
Neither of my donkeys had broken out. On the contrary, a neighboring animal had broken in! This mare was tired of eating hay and being alone in a wooden cubicle up at Bob's place, so it broke loose and came down to visit my donkeys and dine on real grass. The animal belongs to a charming young lady named Angélique, who's a producer of goat cheese in Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne. She's wondering why her elegant mare would wish to join up with a pair of lowly donkeys. As for me, I like to think that this fine animal came down to Gamone in the middle of the night because it wanted to be there, as soon as the sun came up, to admire my new electric fence.
