Places and people named Beaufort

In France, at least a dozen towns or villages are called Beaufort. Literally, Beaufort means "beautiful fortress", and there was a time when France was studded with countless fortifications. So, it's not surprising that this name has survived, often associated with an ancient castle.

This weekend, representatives from many of these places named Beaufort were gathered together, a little like members of an international clan, in the tiny village of Beaufort in the Isère department, an hour's drive away from my homeplace. It's a superficial but amusing pretext for an international gathering, a little like the twinning concept. In a dynamic little community, like that of Beaufort in Isère, local citizens house the visitors in their homes, which makes the whole process simple and friendly. Meanwhile, the gathering is a platform for touristic promotion of the various Beaufort places.

The French name has been widely exported. There's a Beaufort Castle in Scotland, in Luxembourg and even in Lebanon. Towns named Beaufort exist in the USA (South Carolina) and in Australia (Victoria).

Yesterday afternoon, some groups of representatives organized stalls with specimens of their local products.

As for the Australian delegates, who brought along piles of photos and leaflets concerning their town, they got interviewed on regional TV. They told me that they had been inundated, since their arrival in France, by questions from French people about tourism in Australia.

Now, why would I personally be interested in places named Beaufort?

Well, in the course of my genealogical research concerning the Skeffington family, I discovered an ancestral line that descends from John of Gaunt and his children named Beaufort. [Click the image to download an article on the genealogy of Lewis Carroll.] The four children were so named after a castle in France where they were born.

In what part of France was this Beaufort Castle located? Most English-speaking authorities [Dictionary of National Biography, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, etc] indicate that it was in the Anjou region of western France, in the village now known as Beaufort en Vallée [see the photo of their stand, earlier on in this post]. This sounds like a reasonable suggestion, in that there were ancient links between English royalty and this region through Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou [1113-1151], patriarch of the Angevin dynasty, between the Normans and the Plantagenets. In fact, two centuries later, the Beaufort Castle associated with John of Gaunt had nothing to do with Anjou, for it was located in a quite different part of eastern France, in the tiny village of Champagne now known as Montmorency-Beaufort, whose representatives were also present at the gathering this weekend.

It's really quite remarkable that such a geographical error should continue to exist in the context of British royalty, which is surely one of the most highly-documented domains in the history of the English-speaking world. Maybe this error persists for the simple reason that the provincial facts would appear to be written, for the moment, solely in French. [I intend to publish an article on this question in the near future.]

Before leaving the festivities at Beaufort yesterday afternoon, I took this photo of a charming old stone house on the outskirts of the village.

Uninhabited for a century, this was the birthplace of Joseph Vacher [1869-1898], often referred to as France's Jack the Ripper, a notorious serial killer who was no doubt responsible for more than two dozen heinous cases of rape and murder.

As far as I know, the visitors at the Beaufort gathering were not taken on a touristic visit to this house.

A new story every day

Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be running France in much the same way that I write this blog. One tries constantly to imagine new themes, to tell new stories. Apparently, Sarko's communications specialists have convinced him that this is a good approach for a president of France who needs to convince the people that he's perpetually active, and doing something new. When I was a child, adults used to tell us: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. For Sarko, it's a story a day. Every 24 hours, with the help of his advisors, he invents a new tale to tell.

His latest theme is the history of slavery, as far as it affected France and her overseas territories. The president has decided spontaneously that this subject must be included in school curricula, and that the abolition of slavery will be commemorated annually, henceforth, on May 23.

French people recall the publicity of a celebrated department store in Paris: "A tout instant, il se passe quelque chose aux Galeries Lafayette." (At every moment, something happens at the Galeries Lafayette.) Nicolas Sarkozy behaves in the same spirit. But it's not at all certain that this behavior has made him popular. Nor is it certain that the challenges of France can be tackled ideally in this style.

Comfortable hollow for Sophia

I've known for ages that there are spots, in front of my house, where it's an exaggeration to speak of soil, because the ground is composed of dust and gravel, and nothing can grow there. So, I decided to intervene by scraping up the stony stuff in order to replace it by good soil.

This morning, in the middle of my work, Sophia made it clearly known to me that there was no point in pursuing the job any further, because she found that the dusty rocky hollow I had created was a perfect place for a dog who wants to bask in the sun.

Much of a muchness

When I first heard this silly riddle, long ago, I thought it was funny in a subtle way:

QUESTION: What's the difference between a canary?

Listeners will ask, of course: Between a canary and what? But the question must remain exactly as is: What's the difference between a canary?

ANSWER: There's no difference whatsoever between a canary, because it has two legs of exactly the same length, the right one a little bit more than the left.

In the political domain, when two individuals seem to be advocating identical strategies, observers often say: bonnet blanc, blanc bonnet, which might be translated as "the bonnet is white, it's a white bonnet". In everyday English: "six of one and half a dozen of the other".

In colloquial French, there's a neat way of saying that two things are the same: C'est kif-kif. Apparently, kif is a Maghrib term meaning "the same", and French people have doubled the syllable in the belief that kif-kif sounds more Arabic.

Now, if you want to be long-winded about saying that two things are the same, you can add on a popular term for "donkey": C'est kif-kif bourricot. And what's the role of the donkey in this verbal construction? Well, it would appear that, in North Africa, to indicate that two things are the same, people often say that they're kif-kif... like a donkey. Like a canary, for that matter.

Victory in Europe Day

Paris had been liberated from her Nazi oppressors during the second half of August 1944. Eight months later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. Then, on 8 May 1945, the official act of Germany's unconditional surrender meant that Europe could at last celebrate victory. In London and the USA (where Franklin D Roosevelt had died a month earlier), these victory celebrations were massive.

Recently, when my daughter Emmanuelle purchased a flat near the Place de la République in Paris, she obtained a couple of old photo albums that belonged to the lady (deceased) who had lived there. Among these amateur snapshots, there are three interesting images of Paris on May 8, 1945, which are no doubt published here for the first time. [Clicking a blog photo displays an enlargement.]

Five huge flags are suspended from the Arc de Triomphe. [Paris historians might be able to tell us whether the habit of flags under the arch dates from that epoch.] The army truck on the Place de l'Etoile has a white five-pointed star on the door. Is the Jeep a US or a French vehicle? There's a French policeman on a bicycle, surrounded by a couple of civilian cyclists and a midget automobile. On this 8 May 1945 at the hub of France, the ambiance is calm.

On the Place de la Concorde, the atmosphere is subdued. I have the impression that the couple in the foreground were the proprietors of Emmanuelle's flat. The man is wearing some kind of decoration in his lapel, whereas the woman seems to have purchased a poster. They appear to me as Gaullist patriots, happy to realize that Paris is once again their familiar City of Light. Everything in this photo indicates calm and sunny relief.

This photo was taken from the balcony of my daughter's flat in the Rue Oberkampf. The lady is probably the same person seen in the photo on the Place de la Concorde. The building is bedecked with five flags, including those of France, the USA, Great Britain and Russia.

The overall impression gleaned from these images is that Victory Day in Europe, for Parisians, was a solemn and subdued affair.

Poisonous books

Often, on the Franco-German Arte TV channel, an entire evening is devoted to a particular theme. Last night, a pair of excellent documentaries, aired for the first time, tackled the theme of two poisonous books: Hitler's notorious Mein Kampf and an abominable fake entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a good idea for Arte to deal with the two books, one after the other, because they can be thought of as complementary specimens of poisonous trash. In a nutshell: Hitler's opus was a terribly veridical document, in that it offered a precise account of all the horrors that were about to be enacted. But retrospectively, one has the impression that the world at large failed to take the book or its author seriously... otherwise, steps would have surely been taken to curb Hitler's demoniacal dreams. On the other hand, the ugly thing called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is exactly the opposite of a veridical document, since this book is a mindless fable. Curiously, though, hordes of silly people would still appear to be taking it seriously.


Once upon a terrible time, Hitler's My Combat was indeed a best-seller. Up until 1945, some 12 million copies had been in circulation. Today, the heritage of this literary and societal muck is characterized by two disturbing observations. First, the book is banned in Germany, as if the authorities were afraid that Hitler's ravings might still stir up Fascist enthusiasm. Second, it would appear that this antiquated book still has a significant readership in a nation that would like to become a member of the European Union. I'm referring to Turkey.

Click the image to see what Wikipedia has to say about this extraordinary and obnoxious fake document, which develops the crazy idea that planetary Jewry has been conspiring to take control of the world. Indeed, the Protocols might be considered as the grandaddy of all the conspiracy theories of the 20th century, right down to all the rubbish that has circulated concerning the events of 9/11.



A recent article in the excellent New York Times [display] drew attention to the fact that Putin has been favoring the Russian Orthodox church as a kind of unique Christian faith, at the expense of all others, particularly Protestants. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm quite happy to see that Putin's state apparatus aims to create a nice official kind of old-fashioned religious phenomenon, starring primarily, if not uniquely, the Orthodox church. Why not? This quaint time-honored image of saintly Russia will be good for tourism and public relations, not to mention foreign affairs of a political kind, and might help us to forget about Stalin. But things get more disturbing when we learn that the new generation of Russian ecclesiastics would appear to believe in, and propagate, the anti-Semitic shit promulgated by the Protocols... once authored by a Russian faker named Matvei Golovinski [1865-1920]. The circle is ignominiously closed.

Charming little town called Chatte

My favorite Leclerc shopping center is located on the municipal territory of a tiny town called Chatte (meaning a female cat in French), alongside St-Marcellin.

At first sight, Chatte appears to be a village, but the visitor soon discovers that it has all the trappings of a little town... such as a post office, for example, on a corner of a small square with a republican fountain with a tricolor-waving Marianne.

The town hall is currently decked out in German and Italian flags, because Chatte is twinned with towns in these two countries. Yesterday, the town received a bus load of Italian visitors. On the narrow pavements of Chatte, there's no room to swing a female cat, so I had to step onto the equally narrow road (where automobiles travel at twice the legal speed) whenever I ran into tourists.

It was sunny in Chatte, and the leafy trees around the church provided shade for bikers at lunch. As for the church, in spite of the influx of visitors, it remained shut.

Chatte was the abode of a future Catholic saint, who lived in a charming stone house across from the church.


The plaque informs us that Pierre-Julien Eymard [1811-1868] was the local priest for three years. [Click the portrait to visit a rich website concerning Eymard's ecclesiastic achievements.]




At the center of the town, a café is called, appropriately enough, the Café du Centre. A nearby place is marked hotel/restaurant, but I'm not sure whether it's operational. The only major tourist attraction at Chatte is a small park with a collection of model railways... but I've never been motivated enough to go there.

A tiny stream meanders gently through Chatte, past stone-walled yards of fruit trees and drooping wisteria. It surely has a source and a name, but I ignore these details.

Nearby, the imposing façade of a former spinning mill evokes an epoch, long before our modern age of outsourcing and globalization, when the villages and small towns of France hummed with industrial activity.

Up on a hill above the township, a nondescript stone building is referred to, by local people, as le vieux château [the old castle].

From this vantage point, the view extends across the rich plain alongside the Isère, with fields of walnut trees and colza, to the nearby Vercors mountain range [where my Gamone homeplace is located].

The town might appear to be somewhat drowsy, but it is actually quite a prosperous and progressive little community, with modern facilities such as this media library for young people.

Last but not least [in fact, the main reason why I've been drawn recently to Chatte], behind this children's playground on the central square of the town, there's an excellent service in physical education, equipped to take care of prostatectomy patients.

Christine and I once knew a lady who, whenever she traveled through French villages, would immediately search for the boutique of the local photographer who handles weddings, because she claimed that there's no better way of understanding the culture and general mentality of a community than to see how they get themselves photographed at marriages. Personally, whenever I discover a relatively out-of-the-way place such as the tiny town of Chatte, I'm always intrigued to know whether certain interesting individuals might have grown up there, because I take pleasure in trying to imagine how the environment might have modeled them, as it were, for their future prowess. This is a relatively straightforward exercise in the case of famous residents of a great city such as Paris, but one has to adopt a more subtle approach when you attempt to decide what influences might have been exerted upon adolescents in a place such as Chatte, motivating their later adventures and achievements.

Two local heroes are represented by bronze busts in alcoves in the façade of the town hall.


To the left of the main portal, we find an effigy of Clément Adrien Vincendon-Dumoulin [1811-1856], a hydrographer [map-maker] who sailed to Antarctica on the Astrolabe with Dumont d'Urville during the period 1837-1840. It's amusing to imagine a young man from Chatte in the following antipodean predicament:


In an identical alcove to the right of the portal, a bust depicts Alexandre Collenot [1902-1936]:

He was a daring aviation mechanic who flew constantly with the great pioneer Jean Mermoz before disappearing from the face of the Earth somewhere between Brazil and Senegal.

All in all, I like to think of Chatte, both past and present, as a typical small country town, with a little bit of everything. In saying this, however, I'm aware that the place I've just been describing, through a series of images and terse descriptions, exists primarily as a virtual entity in my head. To get to know the true town, you would have to stroll around there for an hour or so on a sunny afternoon, as I did yesterday.

Boot story

Computer users are familiar with the verb boot, meaning to restart the machine. The full term is bootstrap, which is a noun designating the small leather loops at the back of boots, enabling you to pull them on.

There's an old metaphorical expression in English, "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps", which means to take care of oneself, or get oneself out of dire straits, without the help of anybody else. It is said that the absurd image of pulling on your bootstraps in order to raise your whole body (into the air, say) was used for the first time in the apocryphal tales of Baron Munchausen, who apparently employed this technique to save himself from drowning in a swamp. I haven't been able to find any precise extract in the 1895 edition of the novel in English by Rudolph Erich Raspe, so I imagine that the anecdote appeared in one of the numerous literary remakes of the alleged adventures of Munchausen.

Meanwhile, I take this opportunity of pointing out that a new and complete edition of Terry Gilliam's fabulous film will be coming out shortly on DVD [I'm awaiting my copy from Amazon] to mark the 20th anniversary of its production.

Talking about boots, my room-mate at the La Parisière clinic in February used to operate his own shoe-manufacturing business in Romans, and he gave me the address of one of the only surviving small firms in this domain, started by an Armenian family in 1945.

Their tiny boutique is located on the river front, a few hundred meters up from the great church called the collégiale Saint-Barnard, where the Dauphiné province was handed over officially to the king of France in 1349. My friend had warned me that the range of shoes made by Tchilinguirian is narrow. But, if you come across a suitable model and size, you're able to purchase a product whose quality is likely to be far superior to what you find in ordinary shoes shops. I was lucky, for I found an ideal pair of boots:

Let's get back to the bootstrap metaphor, as used in computing. To understand what it's all about, we should think of a system that exists in one of two states. At the beginning, it's turned off, like an unlit lamp. Later, it's turned on, and ready to perform tasks. The general idea is that the system moves itself, as it were, from a state of total inactivity, to an operational state. And that transition is what we refer to as a bootstrap process.

Somebody suggested an easy-to-understand illustration of the bootstrap concept in the context of bridge construction. Imagine a ravine in the jungle, over which we would like to build a sturdy footbridge. How can we use a bootstrap approach to take us from the no-bridge state to the sturdy-footbridge state? The demonstration works most effectively if we imagine two men, on opposite edges of the ravine. One of them uses a bow and arrow to shoot the free end of a piece of string across the ravine. Once the string is secured, a lightweight pulley is attached to it in such a way as to make it possible to drag a rope across the the ravine. Then the rope is used in a similar fashion to drag a steel cable across the ravine. And so on, using increasingly heavier and stronger cables, up until there's a full-fledged footbridge across the ravine.

These days, one has the impression that a computer is turned on just like a light switch, so the notion of the machine "pulling itself up by its own bootstraps" doesn't really come across explicitly, let alone vividly. In the early days of commercial computing [in the late '50s and early '60s, when I worked as a programer with IBM in Sydney], we were truly obliged to understand the bootstrap concept, because the computer's memory would be totally empty, and we had to invent techniques for coaxing the machine to "swallow" fragments of code up until there was a complete executable program in its memory. In those days, the piece of string to be shot across the ravine took the form of a primordial instruction that we would spell out using switches on the machine's console. That instruction would ask the computer to read in, say, a punched card, containing further instructions, and so on. We could even sympathize with the poor machine straining to acquire a sufficiently rich stack of code to make itself useful.

Today, the bootstrap metaphor is often used in an unexpected context, of a far more profound nature than footbridges across ravines or programs in the memory of computers. The fundamental philosophical question posed by Leibniz—Why is there being rather than nothingness?—is essentially a bootstrap enigma. In the beginning, long before Darwinian evolution got into swing, what kind of a bootstrap process might have occurred to make possible the transition from apparent nothingness into somethingness? One thing is certain. In accordance with the bootstrap concept, this transition must have started in an amazingly simple fashion... because there isn't room for much complexity in the state we refer to as nothingness! So, this process couldn't possibly have been inaugurated by an infinitely complex entity of the "God" kind. That last sentence doesn't say much, and yet, for an atheist such as me, it says everything. In the beginning, "God" was certainly absent.

Source of the cheese industry

In the nearby town of Vinay, the old-fashioned façade of this modest white building, which looks like a reconverted house, is studded with air-conditioning units. In the driveway, the entry of a huge garbage-collection truck suggests that the activities carried out inside this building must give rise to a lot of waste stuff.

The name panel carries a single term, Danisco, with no further explanations. Old-time residents of Vinay are nevertheless aware of the industrial operations carried out by some 32 employees inside this unobtrusive building. This biochemical production unit, whose present owner is a giant Danish-based corporation, might be considered as the source of the cheese industry throughout the world. I hasten to add that not a gram of actual cheese is manufactured here on the Danisco premises at Vinay... although the town of Saint-Marcellin, whose name is associated with a world-famous cheese made from cows' milk, lies just a few kilometers down the road.

A century ago, a Vinay man named Joseph Carlin [who would later become the mayor of this small but prosperous Dauphiné city, at the heart of the walnut region] invented a process for extracting the milk-curdling enzymes found in the stomachs of young calves. The final product, called rennet [présure in French], is the ingredient that causes milk to curdle: the primordial step in the making of cheese.

To produce this magic potion, the biochemists at Vinay import huge quantities of frozen calf stomachs from New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Brazil. After being thawed out, they are ground into small fragments and pressed like grapes. The precious liquid obtained in this way from the tons of calf stomachs is finally subjected to a lengthy series of processes [whose exact nature remains a company secret] of filtering, purification, concentration and quality control. And Danisco's world-famous rennet products for cheese-making are finally exported from Vinay to more than a hundred countries [including China, Uganda, Yemen and Mauritius].

As indicated in the company banner [click to visit the cheese pages of their website], the Danisco recipe is not a total secret. They reveal, at least, its initial ingredient: First you add knowledge...

Understanding pictures

If you submitted the above pair of images to a computer equipped for visual processing, the machine should be able to determine that the thing on the left is a hedgehog, whereas the object on the right is a wire brush. Initially, the computer would exploit the hints provided by the image captions, "animal" and "tool". Then it would search through its databases to examine hypotheses about various wiry-looking animals and wiry-looking tools. But suppose we were to submit the images without any captions, as follows:

In this case, the computer would no doubt find it much more difficult to identify correctly the two images.

The point I'm trying to make is that computers have a hard job trying to perform various tasks that are trivially easy for humans. And tasks that depend solely on visual cues, with no linguistic hints whatsoever, are particularly difficult for the computer. A simple glance informs us that the thing on the left looks like an animal, in that the dark "holes" are surely eyes, and the rectangular bit that protrudes in the foreground is surely a snout. As for the object on the right, its sharply-defined contours reveal instantly that it's a manufactured artifact. However, it still remains an extremely arduous task to try to instill this kind of common-sense visual approach in computers.

As a child, I used to see my father shaving with an old-fashioned steel razor. One day, while being driven through the outback countryside by my grandparents, I saw a hillside whose trees had suffered recently in a bushfire, and I had the sudden impression that the dark stumps could be likened to my father's face when he was in need of a shave. I imagined that it might be possible to attach a giant steel razor to our automobile, enabling us to shave down the burnt trees. Some people might say kindly that I had a vivid imagination. In fact, I was reacting like a poorly-programmed computer, incapable of making instantly a clear distinction between hedgehogs and wire brushes. Since evolving into an experienced adult (?), I'm no longer inclined to associate an unshaved face with a hillside of scorched tree stumps. You might say that my childhood power of imagination has disappeared. On the other hand, I don't confuse hedgehogs with wire brushes.

When I started work in the research department of the ORTF [French Broadcasting System] in 1970, a TV producer asked me whether it would be possible to develop a computer program enabling the machine to "watch" old movie sequences, for days and nights on end, with the aim of extracting all the top-quality images, say, of trees. The fellow was concerned with the use of TV as an educational medium in certain African nations, and he felt that tons of existing images could be recycled to make excellent documentaries for African audiences. I disappointed him by pointing out that a computer would be incapable of separating images of people into males and females, so it was premature to talk about software capable of selecting attractive images of trees.

Google has been working for a long time on image-recognition algorithms, and two of their engineers have just presented a paper on this subject at a web conference in Beijing. Their experimental tool named VisualRank attempts to weight and rank web images that look alike... in much the same way that the familiar Google tool weights and ranks websites that would appear to talk about a given subject. It goes without saying that the practical exploitation of such a tool would be immense and profitable. Users interested in a certain kind of object or article (such as clothes they would like to purchase, for example) could expect to start with a rough visual outline of their goal, and go on to access pictures of relevant items supplied by the search engine.

I have the impression however that Google still has a long way to go before reaching that point. So, if you intend to use the web to purchase either a hedgehog or a wire brush, be wary about supplying nothing more than a vague image of what you're looking for. For the moment, it would be wiser to write down in words exactly you want.

God is an aircraft

My 700th post.

Two months ago, when I was getting my prostate ablated, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins provided me with ideal reading material. In the context of a hospitalized "survival machine" (an expression that made its first appearance in this book, which I've reread several times), there's nothing better than a dose of Dawkins to encourage you to survive.

Insofar as Dawkins considers that all gods—including one's favorite personal God, with a capital G—are a delusion, certain opponents would claim that the professor's atheistic philosophy might depress a sick person (or even a perfectly fit individual, for that matter) to the point of suicide. On the contrary, I've always found Dawkins elating. I look upon him as the finest scientific author I've ever encountered, and I'm convinced that there are no more noble philosophical questions than those—about evolution, genes and memes—tackled so brilliantly by this great thinker and writer.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins uses an unexpected title for his major argument against the existence of gods and God. He calls it the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, and it's such a delightful argument, simple yet profound, that I wish to describe it here rapidly... as a way of celebrating my 700th Antipodes post. Apparently, the English astrophysicist Fred Hoyle [1915-2001] once used an aeronautical metaphor to emphasize the extreme unlikelihood that life could have originated by pure chance on our planet... that's to say, without a divine nudge. He likened this probability to that of a hurricane, blowing in a junkyard, which just happened to assemble a Boeing 747. I'm convinced that most people who cling to the notion that Creation necessitated divine intervention justify their beliefs by a variant of this Boeing metaphor. In a nutshell: "It's unthinkable that a phenomenon as rich as Creation could have just come about by chance." Dawkins agrees totally with that last statement. The answer is certainly not chance. The explanation is Darwinian evolution. Getting back to the Boeing metaphor, Dawkins points out simply that the chance arrival on the scene of an "intelligent designer", God, is vastly more improbable than the idea of manufacturing Boeings with the assistance of hurricanes in junkyards. So, in this sense, God can truly be referred to as the Ultimate Boeing 747!

Imagine the following scenario. Suppose that you go out to inspect the damage after a terrible hurricane. In a junkyard alongside your house, you're amazed to discover that the wind has blown together bits and pieces in the form of a makeshift aircraft... a little like a cargo cult artifact. Why not? Intrigued by this extraordinary chance event, you climb up onto the neatly-assembled pile of junk and you peer into the cockpit. There, at the controls of the would-be aircraft, you're utterly astounded to find a well-groomed white-haired middle-aged gentleman wearing a pilot's uniform. Noticing the expression of amazement on your face, he says in a mellow voice: "Don't be surprised, my friend. I'm God. I just happened to get Myself blown together and placed here by that bloody terrible hurricane."

Fallen with the last rain

Compared to English, the precision of the Latin-based French language is splendid... and I often feel that this explains why French literature and philosophy—not to say French thinking in general—have a superior quality.

There's a delightful anecdote, maybe apocryphal, about the great French linguist Emile Littré, author of a celebrated dictionary that is still in use today. He was having a good time with a lady friend when his wife burst in unexpectedly upon the naked scene.

Madame Littré: I'm surprised!

Monsieur Littré: Not exactly. It's my lady friend and I who have been surprised. You, my dear wife, are merely astonished.

For readers who might not have seized the nuance: People are surprised when, like Littré and his female friend, observers catch them out doing something that might be judged as reprehensible. From a strict etymological viewpoint, surprise is the notion of being caught with your pants down. As for being astonished, that's merely a question of one's coming upon something unexpected.

A French expression of which I'm fond is "tombé de la dernière pluie". Fallen with the last rain. It's a synonym for naïveté (naivety).

On countless occasions, I've had the impression that Australia is a naive nation whose citizens are prepared to believe the latest information that the local media have fed them. The intellectual baggage of a typical Aussie fell down with the last media rain.

In the context of Anzac Day, the daily newspaper The Australian attempted (successfully, it would appear) to promote the idea that it would be more appropriate to put an accent on honoring the dead of the battlefields of France, where 46,000 Australians died in the Great War, rather than those of Gallipoli (original inspiration of Anzac Day). Fair enough. Why not?

A Sydney reader has reacted enthusiastically to this suggestion by referring to France in the following naive terms: "This is the forgotten front that people just don't know about." Hey, just a moment, Sir. You're talking about the Great War. Verdun, etc. Millions of mindless deaths. You, personally, may have forgotten (or never known) that this terrible conflict was fought essentially in Europe. But please don't generalize your ignorance. In the historical context of that appalling conflict, France has never been a "forgotten front". On the contrary. Pay attention to your dumb and offensive language, Sir.

As I said, I feel that much Aussie thinking fell down with the last rain.

Accessing old Antipodes posts

Ever since I started the Antipodes blog, on 9 December 2006, I've been aware that it's not necessarily easy to find an old post on such-and-such a topic. One might say that this is a non-problem, in that a blog is essentially a vibrant entity geared to the present, like a daily newspaper. Readers shouldn't normally be too concerned about past posts. For me, though, as a blog author, the question of past posts is primordial, for the simple reason that I would like my current posts to conform, more or less, with what I said on similar themes in the past. So, I've been constantly interested in the question of being able to look up easily my past posts.

Today, I'm happy to release a software tool named Accessor that lets you find old Antipodes posts by means of author-provided keywords.

In other words, it's me, William Skyvington, author of the Antipodes blog, who provides readers with keywords (referred to as keys) enabling you to access rapidly the posts that concern you.

As of today, I think my new system works OK, but there might still be technical bugs or operational things that should be improved. To meet up with the Accessor tool, you can click on either the above graphic or the logo in the righthand sidebar of the Antipodes blog.

Please be patient. The Accessor device will only function ideally when I've found time to index (manually, as it were) all my past Antipodes posts... and this will take a week or so.

Wet world

For a long time, swimming spectators in France were fascinated by Laure Manaudou. Recently, they've discovered an amazing muscle-bound phenomenon, Alain Bernard. For the moment, this friendly and lucid lad from Aubagne, near Marseille, is simply the fastest swimmer in the world.

These days, there's a lot of talk about high-tech swimsuits, which can account for precious milliseconds in the pool. The other day, for example, when Laure Manaudou was beaten in her favorite category, we saw her in tears on TV explaining that everything would revert to normal as soon as she could reappear in her new swimsuit.

In the swimsuit manufacturer's logo, the phallic arrowhead is in fact a stylized boomerang, because the Speedo company was born in Australia, a century ago, at Sydney's Bondi Beach.

When I was a kid, we grew up with navy-blue Speedo "swimming costumes" (as we used to say). They weren't yet exactly high-tech, but they had the charm of revealing as much as they concealed. In the following extract from his Unreliable Memoirs, describing his adolescent years in Sydney, Clive James evokes an insalubrious set of tiled swimming pools fed by sea water at Botany Bay:

The water in each pool would be green on the first day, orange on the second and saffron the third. The whole place was one vast urinal. But there were diving boards, sand pits and giggling swarms of girls wearing Speedo swimming costumes. The Speedo was a thin, dark blue cotton one-piece affair whose shoulder straps some of the girls tied together behind with a ribbon so as to tauten the fabric over their pretty bosoms. On a correctly formed pubescent girl a Speedo looked wonderful, even when it was dry. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.

I recall vividly the image of teenage nymphs in Speedos, and I agree retrospectively with Clive James when he suggests that, because of the Speedo phenomenon, various potential male swimming champions no doubt spent too much time on dry land:

Falling for — not just perving on, but actually and rackingly falling for — a pretty girl in a Speedo certainly beat any thrills that were being experienced by the poor bastards who were swimming themselves to jelly in the heats and semi-finals. So, at any rate, I supposed. Every few minutes you could hear the spectators roar as they goaded some half-wit onward to evanescent glory. Meanwhile I concentrated on the eternal values of the way a girl's nipples hardened against her will behind their veils of blue cotton...

In their current publicity [display], the Speedo corporation presents its latest fabulous swimsuit product, with an ingeniously sensual name: Fastskin. I wonder if the Scotsman Alexander MacRae — who started out in 1914 by manufacturing underwear, not to mention mosquito nets during World War II — realized what he might be unleashing in the way of watery dreams when he invented Speedo stuff.

Anzac pilgrims on the Western Front

After their calamitous initiation into warfare in Turkey in 1915, Australian troops were brought to the region in northern France that the Germans referred to as their Western Front.

Today, in a few hours, when the sun rises over Picardy, crowds of Australian visitors will be assembled for an Anzac Day celebration at Villers-Bretonneux.

The geographical heart of Anzac Day commemorations seems to be shifting from Gallipoli to France. By an amazing coincidence, the successful Australian action that liberated Villers-Bretonneux took place on Anzac Day in 1918: exactly three years after Gallipoli. But, between the events of Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux, by far the greatest number of Australian casualties on the Western Front had occurred in 1916 at Pozières: over 22,000 dead.

We must remember and celebrate solemnly these terrible happenings, but it would be a monstrous mistake to imagine for an instant that there might have been anything glorious or heroic, or even vaguely rational, in all that mindless butchery.

I feel ill at ease about the idea of a nice touristic "twinning" atmosphere between Australia and Villers-Bretonneux, culminating in the preposterous notion that people in that modern township might be expected to express some kind of gratitude to today's Australian war pilgrims. Obviously, the citizens of Villers-Bretonneux are unlikely to complain about this situation. Pilgrims are pilgrims, here as in Lourdes, and tourism is a business.

Premises of an ordinary crime

When you think about it (or even when you don't think about it at all), there's nothing more ordinary than an ordinary crime. That's to say: We have almost nothing to say about such everyday events. So, why shouldn't we say whatever there is?

At the moment I'm writing this blog post, like everybody else, I know nothing whatsoever about a certain 60-year-old notary public named Vincent Passebois who was gunned down yesterday evening in the delightful Provençal town of Carpentras. I imagine that friends and members of his family are devastated by this event, and would like to know how and why it happened... but, for the moment, we would appear to know nothing in this conjectural domain.

If ever the facts concerning the death of a human being were to be described as simple, then we might say that the facts surrounding the assassination of the notary public Vincent Passebois are indeed (at least for the moment) terribly simple.

The parents of Vincent Passebois were pharmacists. A single bullet killed him, around 8 o'clock last night, but there were no witnesses of the crime. A newspaper claims that he was "a man without problems, enthralled by his profession, married, father of children, who had never received threats and was unaware of enemies." In other words, I insist upon the fact that, for the moment, there is nothing whatsoever to say concerning the death of this man.