Guinea pig

An American couple from Massachusetts, traveling as tourists in the snowy wastes of Alaska, meet up with an Eskimo man and his wife, living in a primitive hut.

Eskimos: We've heard a lot about Massachusetts, because our eldest son has spent the last few years in the post-graduate anthropological research department at Harvard.

Tourists: Really? How marvelous! What exactly is he studying?

Eskimos: No, he's not studying anything. He's being studied.

Me, too, I'm being studied... by the prestigious French medical research organization called Inserm. A few years ago, after a strenuous incident that consisted of my dragging unaided my runaway ram out of the rushing waters of the River Bourne, I was the victim of a minor cerebral accident that manifested itself (and still does) by a slight numbness in the tip of my right thumb. I referred briefly to this affair in my article of 4 January 2007 entitled Best wishes for eternal health [display]. Well, ever since then, in the interests of medical research, I've been consuming a daily dose of two fat pills. They're wrapped in weekly packets, referred to as blisters, as shown here:

I have a huge supply of these packets in a cardboard box that I keep in my refrigerator, and I start a new packet each Monday. Throughout the week, I cannot possibly forget to take the pills, because they function as a kind of primitive calendar... which takes a bit of getting used to. For example, when I see that the two left columns are empty, that means that either it's Tuesday afternoon, or else it's Wednesday morning and I haven't yet consumed my daily dose. OK, it's not rocket science, but it's better than making notches in a stick. And I can always confirm my intuitive awareness of the current date by calling upon my faithful Macintosh. [Some readers are likely to wonder: Why don't you use your computer for this purpose right from the start? All I can reply to people who ask such questions is that they are obviously insensitive to the joy of the daily consumption of pills.]

Now, the hitch in my job as a guinea pig is that I don't really know what I'm consuming. Theoretically, the big yellowish pills could well contain omega-3, and the smaller reddish ones, a mixture of vitamins. But either of them might be placebos. So, I won't normally know the objective truth until the end of the experiment, scheduled to last for several years.

The most interesting aspect of this affair is that I meet up with a representative of the organization every summer, at a local hospital, for a kind of checkup. Whenever they phone me up, two or three times a year, the researcher (generally a female with an African accent) always seems to be surprised, first, that I'm apparently in excellent health and, second, that I haven't yet got fed up with taking their pills. Yesterday, I couldn't resist the temptation to invent reasons to explain to the lady on the phone why I've never missed out a single day of their pills:

"I'm not supposed to know whether there are active ingredients in my particular pills, or simply placebos. But I've been convinced for ages that you're giving me the real stuff, and that it's doing me good. For me, that knowledge is intuitive and mysterious, and I can't explain what's happening. It's as if I were to see a vision, say, of the Virgin Mary. But it's clear and certain in my mind. Sometimes, around midday, I feel slightly sick and drowsy. Then I realize that I haven't yet taken my daily dose. I only have to gulp down the two precious pills and, within twenty minutes, I'm back in perfect form. It's a true miracle."

During my forthcoming checkup, I imagine they might decide to scrutinize me carefully for advanced signs of dementia.

Meanwhile, in Sydney, Benedict XVI has just visited the memorial chapel of a local nun, named Mary MacKillop [1842-1909], who's on the fast track towards canonization. Click the photo to visit a web article about this humble individual, whose claim to fame is that she created a new order for nuns specializing in free Catholic education for country kids.

Apparently, she already has one cancer-oriented miracle in her posthumous curriculum vitae, but she needs a second one to acquire full-blown sainthood. I'm looking into the idea that maybe I could lend Mother Mary a hand through the above-mentioned pills revelation. It's an undeniable fact that the pills started to exert their miraculous effect upon me when I was out in Sydney in August 2006. I think I should start out by sending a friendly email on this question to the pope.

Tiny jewel

I was happy to find this ladybird in my garden this morning. In the domain of superstitions, these tiny beetles called coccinellids are thought to be good omens. Since ladybirds are predators of garden pests such as aphids, I'm hoping that this little creature will soon find a mate of the opposite sex and produce a big family of baby ladybirds to protect my rose bushes.

Colorful males

Often, civic authorities in the great harbor-side city of Sydney become agitated, flustered and indeed overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with a handful of foreign visitors. This was the case for the APEC summit [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] last year, as suggested in my article of 29 August 2007 entitled Sydney skies [display].

Once again, this histrionic behavior has characterized the present papal festival. On such occasions, normal life in the metropolis is shut down temporarily, and the citizens have to bide their time until the visitors leave. I find this weird. Sydney's a big place, and there should be lots of room for everybody. The local population should normally be expected to carry on calmly with their usual activities, instead of being drawn, by their mindless leaders, into a state of temporary trauma.

By comparison, look at Paris. Over the last few days, the city was host to some 43 heads of state, including a certain unwelcome individual, the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who could be considered as a huge potential target for assassination.

The City of Light was invaded by contingents of men and their machines for the great Bastille Day parade. But everything went over smoothly in a perfectly friendly atmosphere. And in the evening, beneath the Eiffel Tower, no less than 600,000 people attended a free concert, followed by a gigantic fireworks display.

By comparison, the events planned for Sydney this week will be trifling. There's only a single major foreigner in town, the pope, and everybody is supposed to love him. So, there's no point in disrupting the life of the nation to protect him... even though we cannot of course be certain that, in the midst of all those lovely young people who believe in magic, there might not be a fuckwit with a gun who would be thrilled to consider boring Benedict, for want of imagination, as a bull's-eye.

Compared with last night's excited concert crowd of 600,000 in the middle of Paris, there'll probably be no more than 500,000 calm Catholic attendees at next Thursday's mass... at Randwick, an empty racecourse located six kilometers from the famous harbor-side skyline of Sydney skyscrapers. So, what's all the fuss about?

I hasten to point out that the word "fuss" is no exaggeration. Believe it or not, back in 2006 (when I was last in Sydney), the NSW government actually voted an act of parliament dedicated to this forthcoming Catholic festival, which stipulated that it would be a crime to "annoy" future Catholic pilgrims. It's only today that we hear a lot about this absolutely insane legislation, at a propitious moment when happy hordes of anti-papal Sydney males are contemplating a naked parade through the streets with their pricks shrouded in fluorescent condoms, to protest against Vatican decisions that accentuate the ongoing Aids holocaust in Africa. Happily, a local court has just ruled retrospectively that the "annoy" clause in the Aussie law is bullshit.

Meanwhile, the Aussie papists have donned their brightest robes, and they're awaiting the emergence of the old white-robed German, who's currently biding his time in solitude, apparently playing the piano, in a rural estate on the outskirts of Sydney.

Another male—whom I admire immensely— is attired in a different color, and I'm delighted to learn that one out of three Australians is following this cycling glory, every evening, on local SBS TV.

Faces of great cyclists, who spend their daily existence in a state of physical agony, are often drawn and contracted, as if they haven't slept well. The facial features of Cadel Evans are stark, accentuated, like those of a Biblical shepherd or fisherman, with a mysterious sad smile. A French newspaper said that Cadel looked like an exhausted zombie. Was he really weeping, yesterday, when the yellow jersey was drawn over his injured shoulder? Were his grimaces expressions of intense inner joy? Tears of a wounded giant? In an instant of glory, we witnessed the frail human carcass of a champion who had been crucified momentarily, accidentally, upon the terrible slopes of the Pyrenées. Like a child, after the official ceremony, Cadel Evans hung on to the rag lion, mascot of the French bank that sponsored his yellow jersey. For a moment, the champion cyclist was all alone, with his warm felt animal and his cold solitary glory. But all the world was watching this fabulous hero. All Australia.

Over the next few days, the color of Australia will be neither red nor white, but yellow! Aussie action will be situated, not at Randwick Racecourse, but upon a mythical field of heroes in the south of France. Cycling enthusiasts in Australia will understand what I'm trying to say. Monsieur Evans, the entire nation is behind you, including those who are praying at Randwick. Go for it, Cadel!

Blue, blues

My second-favorite computing company has made a graphic effort to remind us that today is the 14th of July, Bastille Day.

Symbolically, this year's celebrations are dominated by the color blue. For the first time, soldiers of the UN Blue Beret peacekeeping force will be marching in this morning's military parade in the City of Light.

As the defense minister Bernard Kouchner just remarked, today's 14th of July will be considered exceptionally, in the future, as "the day after the 13th of July 2008". What he's saying, jokingly, is that statesmen were preoccupied yesterday by the summit meeting to promulgate the concept of the Union for the Mediterranean.

Finally, there's the blue of the flag of the European Union, of which France has just been assigned the presidency.

Alongside all this bright blue, however, there's a wave of military blues in France today. To call a spade a spade, between Nicolas Sarkozy and the French armies, the current relationship is as cold as an unfired cannon. Something seems to have gone tremendously wrong between the supreme commander and his troops. For many reasons (which are too detailed to be examined here, even if I were capable of doing so... which I'm not), the French armies seem to have lost confidence in their chief, and he in turn no longer knows how to charm his soldiers. This distrust came to a head in the context of the shooting drama of 29 June 2008 at Carcassonne, when a soldier accidentally fired real bullets into a crowd at a military festival, wounding seventeen innocent spectators. Many military representatives consider that Nicolas Sarkozy failed to handle the aftermath of that tragic affair in a just manner. A journalist claimed that feelings between the president and military personnel have sunken to the lowest level since the notorious putsch of French generals in Algeria against Charles de Gaulle on 21 April 1961. To put it mildly, on this Bastille Day, that's a sobering observation.

Tour heats up

Tour de France specialists had imagined that today's stage from Toulouse to Bagnères-de-Bigorre would be relatively uneventful, because riders would be saving their energy for the Bastille Day ascension, tomorrow, of the terrible Tourmalet. But there was a lot of significant action today, both negative and positive. On the sad side, it was hard to understand how a talented rider such as Australia's Cadel Evans, favorite for the final victory in this year's Tour, could crash on an ordinary wide bend in the road.

Maybe he slid on loose gravel. Evans (shown here receiving treatment from the race doctor Gérard Porte) had superficial wounds all over the left side of his body, but no broken bones.

The greatest surprise of the day was the spectacular performance of a lightweight Italian youngster with a nice-sounding name, Riccardo Ricco, who won a stage for the second time in the present Tour.

In an aerial style that reminded onlookers of the late Marco Pantini, Ricco seemed to fly over any riders he encountered on his dash up and over the final mountain in today's stage. Pantini, who was once a hero for Riccardo, was nicknamed Elefantino (little elephant) because of his large ears and frail body. Ricco has a more biting nickname, Cobra. Will he strike for the third time, tomorrow, on the heights of the legendary Tourmalet?

Union for the Mediterranean

It would be extraordinary, in many ways, if today's summit meeting organized by Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris were to be a prelude to success concerning the creation of a Union for the Mediterranean. Throughout history, this great sea in the middle of the planet Terra has been a place of violence.

As recently as 1962, when I first set foot in France, bombs were exploding in Paris as a final consequence of a terrible conflict between France and Algeria. Anecdote: I'll never forget hearing and seeing the outcome of an explosion, one February evening, opposite my hotel in the Rue des Ecoles, which destroyed a bookshop window into which I had been gazing a few minutes earlier.

For the moment, it's too early to guess whether Sarkozy's daring initiative might bear fruit.

On French TV this evening, Bashar Al-Assad was interviewed by the journalist Laurent Delahousse, and my overall impression was more positive than what I might have expected. The Syrian leader certainly sounds like a less bellicose man than his late father. Before the Mediterranean becomes a sea of peace, however, a lot of water will flow through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Pif, a constant visitor

As I predicted, right from the start, my neighbor Alison's friendly little black Labrador named Pif has become a constant visitor at my place. I should speak rather of Sophia's place, because Pif comes here daily like a pupil turning up for master lessons from his female guru, Sophia, in the advanced arts of dog behavior. The other day, I awarded him a red collar, which used to belong to Sophia.

Pif spends his time trying to impress Sophia with his attack techniques, but he's a bit on the light side. He tries to get at her from behind, or to jump up onto her and pin her down, but it's like a jockey trying to tackle a sumo wrestler. Most of the time, Sophia stands firmly on her four paws, whereas Pif is dancing non-stop all around his opponent.

Sophia's wide-opened mouth can almost enclose Pif's entire head. Whenever Sophia has had enough of Pif jumping all around her, and pinching her neck with his sharp little teeth, she snarls in an eloquent manner, and the little fellow understands immediately that enough is enough. In spite of all the bared teeth and growling, neither dog ever appears to inflict pain upon the other.

Towards the end of the day, Pif found an old magazine in my kitchen, took it outside, where light rain was falling, and tore it to shreds.

Alison is unhappy to discover that, as soon as she leaves home on her scooter (to work as a waitress at the caves of Choranche), her dog moves down here to my place. And Sophia and I are also becoming a little fed up with these regular visits. Although I generally find Pif adorable, it's definitely not a good thing for a dog to spend so much time away from home.

Boring Benedict

Once upon time, the human phenomenon known as religion used to deal with gigantic fundamental interrogations such as the meaning of our existence, the creation and destiny of the Cosmos, the concepts of good and evil, the mysteries of life, love and death, and the power of prayer. Religion was at least a noble human preoccupation, even though it has ended up getting pushed out of the way, first by philosophy, and now by science. As in the case of all entities facing extinction, future fossils are starting to form... and Benedict XVI is a pure still-living specimen. Excluding dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, few intelligent observers give a damn about what the pope thinks about anything whatsoever in the modern world, for the simple reason that this old man in white robes has never really lived in the modern world, and his knowledge of reality is surely akin to that of a backward adolescent, reared in a cocoon from which he has never emerged. So, what can we expect him to talk about during his visit to Australia? Well, of all things, he's expected to ramble on about the sexual mischief committed by priests, as if airing the Church's dirty washing were henceforth a major task for this archaic practitioner of magic. Yawn... When will this boring stupidity end?

Walnut wine

This afternoon, I started to prepare this year's walnut wine.

According to the traditional recipe for walnut wine, one should start to gather green walnuts after the feast-day of Saint John, which falls on June 24. Up here on the slopes of the Vercors, the fruit mature more slowly than down in the Isère valley. Today was the limit, though, because the wood of the future nut shell is starting to form.

I've figured out that, inside my plastic cask, there should be room for the walnuts in the wire basket and about three dozen liters of red wine. In fact, I use a volumetric ratio of 7:2:1 for wine, walnuts and (later) alcohol. More precisely, my intention is to macerate ten liters of walnuts in 35 liters of wine.

To measure out the chopped-up walnuts, I used an aluminium jug (in fact, a Greek implement for serving a liter of retsina wine). I had a rubber glove on my left hand, to hold the walnut while I was cutting it into four or five fragments, but my right hand, holding the knife, remained bare. Consequently, it soon looked like this:

These ugly brown stains won't disappear for a week or so. Throughout the region, one can easily recognize fellow walnut-wine makers.

[Anecdote: The first thing I did this morning, before even thinking about making walnut wine, was to lodge an application at the mayoral office in Choranche for my first French identity card. As required by law, the secretary took my fingerprint. She would have been surprised, I imagine, to encounter the fingers of a walnut-wine producer. Maybe such fingers are so cruddy that they can't even be printed!]

Tomorrow morning, I'll drive to St-Marcellin with the cask containing the chopped-up walnuts, and I'll purchase the required coarse 12-degree wine from a specialized bulk-wine dealer. Then it's simply a matter of allowing the maceration process to take place in my cellar at Gamone for at least three months.

Thai prawns

In the cooking domain, I often become attached to a particular dish for a certain period of time, which means preparing it at a rate of once every fortnight or so, say, with slight variations. For the last couple of months, I've been going through a Thai prawns period. Here's a photo of the basic ingredients:

Besides the prawns, shallots and garlic, the green stuff in the bowl comes from my garden: a mixture of finely-chopped parsley, chives, mint and coriander leaves. The French product called Maïzena is corn flour, the large jar contains powdered ginger, while the small jar contains red chili paste. One bottle contains Thai fish sauce; the other, Japanese sesame oil. Place the shallots, garlic and aromatic plants in a food mixer along with a tablespoon of cornflour, two teaspoons of fish sauce, a teaspoon of ginger and a small quantity of chili paste. When the mixture is homogeneous, add the prawns and mix for a few seconds. Place the result on a board covered in bread crumbs, flatten it into a rectangle and sprinkle the upper surface with sesame oil followed by more bread crumbs.

Leave the board and its contents in the refrigerator overnight, so that the paste coalesces into a solid slab. The next day, I sliced the past into small rectangles and cooked them slowly on the plancha plate of my Cuisinart grill.

I served up the prawn rissoles with pieces of baked red peppers and deep-fried rice noodles.

Ségolène in attack mode

The recent behavior of former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has been unexpected, indeed disturbing. First, when everybody was jubilating about the release of Ingrid Betancourt, Ségolène threw a spanner in the works by declaring publicly that Nicolas Sarkozy had played no role whatsoever in that operation. In fact, Ségolène's opinion was justified. Like many observers, I was shocked when I saw Sarkozy making a TV appearance with Ingrid's children in tow, just an hour or so after the message of her release was flashed on our screens. But Ségolène's outspoken opinion on this affair struck many people as "politically incorrect", since Sarkozy had been attempting constantly to obtain the release of Ingrid Betancourt, but with no success.

More recently, Ségolène shocked many people when she suggested that a couple of criminal intrusions into her Paris flat might be linked in a causal manner to her public criticism of Sarkozy's style of reigning over France. In speaking in this way, she did in fact come very close to blaming the Sarkozy clan for a misdemeanor, but without supplying any explicit proofs for such an accusation.

Some of Sarkozy's political associates have suggested that Ségolène has "blown a fuse", and lost control of herself... but I'm not convinced that her detractors really believe what they're saying. It's quite obvious that Ségolène, faced with the phenomenon of Sarkozy, has decided deliberately to step up her carefully-planned provocations and move into attack mode, so that French citizens see her clearly, from now on, as an aggressive opponent of the president. There are no limits, as it were, to the ways and means by which she seeks to vent her anger against Sarkozy. In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Ségolène's anti-Sarkozian outbursts are perfectly logical and politically sound. There would be no point in her trying to be nice and polite with a protagonist such as Sarkozy. In any case, she's unlikely to get hurt, from a popularity viewpoint, by adopting a strategy that consists of being systematically nasty with respect to the president.

Going digital

Ever since arriving on the planet Earth and acquiring fuzzy means [which I didn't even have to pay for] of comprehending vaguely what seemed to be happening around me, I can truly say that my most extraordinary observation in the Cosmos is that most folk appear to find this whole human-existence affair quite "ordinary". Some of my best friends, for example, have spent most of their latest years playing golf, intensely and profoundly, as if this were their ordinary God-ordained destiny. They would no doubt think of me as crazy or sick to even raise a doubt about the perfectly ordinary worthiness of their golfing preoccupations, as opposed to any kind of philosophical quest for enlightenment. Other close friends don't waste their time on Earth belting balls over globally-warmed fields, but they find me just as crazy or sick when I refer to science, quantum physics, the so-called "theory of everything", multiverses and the beautiful literary opus of Richard Dawkins. The friends in question are prompt in concluding that I'm a psychotic fraudster who hates his fellow men, sees himself egotistically but falsely as an elitist intellectual, despises his own children, and is doomed to die in sad solitude... which, incidentally, to me, sounds like a perfectly normal way to die. Sincerely, I conclude that it wasn't worthwhile getting married and having children, if one's closest friends end up thinking of me in such a way. But I really don't care, because I'm totally convinced, like a absolutist monk, that my philosophical judgment and my faith in science are correct. And I'm saddened by the narrow-mindedness of the critical friends in question.

Looking back on my existence, I find it extraordinary that my personal path has passed alongside many phenomena of a strictly digital nature:

— I started work with IBM Australia as a computer programmer in 1957, at the age of 17. It goes without saying that this was my grand initiation into the digital world... which was a largely unknown entity at that time.

— Much later, in Paris, I happened to become aware of the digital nature of music, and I wrote a vague article on computer music.

— For much of my adult life, I've been spending money to purchase delightful electronic gadgets of a so-called analog kind, only to discover, shortly after, that they're being replaced by digital equipment. In that losers category, I reckon I might be a champion... but I prefer to see myself as a mere innocent victim of change. My monument, at this level, is my Revox tape recorder and my Midi-based music studio... not to mention a lovely old super-8 movie camera recuperated—for old times sake, you might say—by my most-digital son François.

Today, of course, everything has become digital: not only machines, but life itself... ever since the momentous discovery of the double helix of DNA by Watson and Crick. In the same way that a celebrated French TV presenter sees himself and his generation as "children of TV", I envisage myself as a "digital child". My genome is a soulless series of numbers, and I'm happy to see myself as such.

I've just devised a French-language project that consists of writing my autobiography in this spirit. The digital title: One, two, three... many. Subtitle: A solitary voyager from the Antipodes discovers incredible worlds. Nice, no?

Military heritage

I came upon the stupid website mentioned in my previous post while I was searching for explanations concerning an exotic word: poliorcetic. No, in spite of the first five letters, it has nothing to do with the disease of poliomyelitis. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology indicates that the adjective poliorcetic, formed from the Greek terms pólis (city) and orkeîn (besiege), concerns the military art of sieges: both how to resist a siege perpetrated by your enemies, and how to besiege them in turn. This etymological explanation also guides you in the pronunciation of the term: poli-orcetic.

Without necessarily recognizing any of the names on this map, you might guess that these sites are significant from a military viewpoint, because they're all located on the hexagonal perimeter of France.

They are the spots where a 17th-century nobleman, military architect and poliorcetic expert, known as Vauban, encircled the land with a system of complex and finely-built defensive fortresses, most of which still exist today.

Prior to my arrival in France in 1962, I had heard of the failed fortifications designed by the politician André Maginot [1877-1932], but I must admit that I knew nothing of Vauban. In France, I've found that most people seem to have heard of Vauban, and many have actually visited one of his fortresses, or at least seen a TV documentary on this subject.

Yesterday, a dozen fortresses built by Vauban were added to the Unesco World Heritage listing.

Some of the great sieges in world history—such as those of the Crusaders, for example—were drawn out over excruciating periods of time. Three centuries will have elapsed before the universal recognition of the legacy of Vauban. As the computerized idiot mentioned in my last blog might say: That's a big seat!

Translations

Back in the days when I was working on the outskirts of Paris for the Ilog software company, my job consisted mainly of writing technical manuals in English. Since most of my colleagues were French, they described their software creations in their mother tongue, and I was often called upon to translate these raw descriptions into basic English, before beefing them up into clear didactic documentation. At that time, I disposed of numerous powerful computing tools, some of which exploited the Unix system [ancestor of Linux]. Today, in fact, my word-processing arsenal is even more powerful, and it has the advantage of sitting on my desktop in my bedroom looking out onto the mountains... so, I can't complain about the speed of technological progress!

During my Ilog years, from 1989 until my departure for the Dauphiné in 1993, I acquired a taste for Unix wizardry. Not only did I use a complicated word-processing tool named LaTeX [designed by Donald Knuth, above all, for professional typesetting of mathematical stuff], but I developed (and documented, of course) my own thing named CatMan, to assist me in translating from French into English.

Exploiting a huge collection of French segments and their English equivalents, and activated by Unix scripts incorporating commands such as sed and awk [which might be familiar to readers who use Linux], my CatMan approach did a lot of the basic translating for me, and provided me with a more-or-less understandable but atrociously disjointed pseudo-English text, which I then had to transform manually into correct English. Observers [including Pierre Haren, the Ilog chief] were never convinced, understandably, that my CatMan gadget was an effective translation tool, because it seemed to produce junk, but I always felt that, in the long run, it saved me time and effort.

This morning, while playing around with the web, I came upon a ridiculous website, allegedly in English, that proposes an explanation of what they call a "seat". Somebody has obviously used a computer to translate French into pseudo-English. To understand this article, you have to undo the translation by replacing "seat" by "siege". It's true that a siège, in French, can be a thing you sit on... but not in a military context. Funnily, the computer was so dumb that it didn't realize that you can obtain a perfectly plausible translation of siège simply by removing the accent. To be more correct, accusations of stupidity should be addressed, not to the computer, but to the people who dared to set up this idiotic website.

According to the Evangelist Matthew [26, 41], "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". A clueless computer once interpreted this as a comment concerning a Biblical tavern, and came out with the following paraphrase: "They serve powerful liquor, but their meat is insipid."

Back home from Brittany

The return journey in the TGV, with Sophia stretched out on the floor at my feet, was very comfortable. In France, the train is certainly a great way to get around. The only problem, for me, is that the gentle movement tends to put me to sleep, so I don't get through as much reading (of Dawkins, of course) as I would like to. Besides, as soon as the train gets down to the Burgundy region, I can't resist the simple pleasure of watching the glorious rural landscapes glide past the train windows, as if I were scrutinizing a TV travelogue. France is truly a beautiful country, and I remain enthralled by its splendors.

During this pleasant trip to Christine's place, it became clearer than ever to me that each of us is living in an ideal location: Christine in Brittany, and me in the Dauphiné. Each of us appreciates the other's home place, and admires its many charms, while realizing that it would surely be an error for either of us to try to live in the other's region. For me, Brittany is quaint, sturdy in a stony style, and ultra-folkloric. The people there appear to live on an island, and take pride in being Breton prior to being French.

The villages are often pretty in a quiet old-fashioned way, but many of them strike me as granite graveyards built around a gray church. Insofar as I have no time for archaic attitudes towards the dead, I find cemeteries both stupid and ugly. Once upon a time, I liked to crawl around in certain graveyards in the hope of discovering genealogical data... but written archives are infinitely more effective in that domain. Above all, I persist in considering that fragments of a decaying corpse, such as we might find them in a cemetery, bear no relationship whatsoever, "spiritual" or otherwise, to the deceased... whose soul resides henceforth in an ethereal territory that we might designate as InformationLand. Cemeteries are vulgar and uninteresting junkyards for mindless and anonymous DNA. Human society would lose almost nothing if all our cemeteries were to be plowed under and sowed with crops. Meanwhile, our dead are elsewhere...

Christine, who owns and lives in an ancient presbytery, possesses detailed documents on Gommenec'h priests, including a martyr who was struck down by silly revolutionaries. But this morning, while leaving the village, I was amused to discover that Christine hadn't yet stumbled upon the tombstone, fixed to the wall of the local church, of a 19th-century Gommenec'h priest who died at the age of 30. Who was this young fellow? As I said, words are lovelier and more effective than stones... even though the latter can be moving.

I agree with Christine that my beloved Dauphiné is a rude country, whose inhabitants often reside in ramshackle abodes. My analysis of the situation is as follows. Dauphiné residents live in the shadow of mountains, which are surely the most permanent entities on the surface of the planet. A Breton might build his home in stone as a reaction against the ephemeral waves and windy mists of the sea, whereas a Dauphiné peasant would look silly if he attempted to construct an artificial fragment of an eternal mountain. So, our Dauphiné artifacts are primarily simple shelters from the elements, bivouacs, not monuments. At an adjacent level, I would be tempted to suggest that Brittany may not even think in the same way as the Dauphiné... but that's an enormous subject, which I cannot approach within such a superficial context as my Antipodes blog.

Global warming

The latest scientific report on climate change in my native land, Australia, sounds grim. Concerning severe droughts and scorching temperatures, the prime minister Kevin Rudd evoked a "historical assumption" that such conditions only prevailed once every twenty years or so. Well, according to the report from Australia's CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation], this situation will arise, from now on, every one to two years. That's a hell of a big difference! The report also indicates that the area affected by such conditions will be doubled. Meanwhile, Australians appear to be concerned primarily by a recent report on climate change written by an economist, Ross Garnaut. This economic report states the price to be paid by Australians in order to combat global warming... and journalists have been getting a kick out of writing in-depth and would-be witty editorials about the Garnaut conclusions. Money seems to be a more meaningful and exciting "language" than science.

In the context of talk about climate change, there's a regrettable metaphor: greenhouse effect. In our everyday world, we imagine a greenhouse as a hot and steamy microcosm in which luxuriant foliage thrives splendidly as if it were growing in an equatorial jungle.

In physical terms, a greenhouse is an extremely simple affair. The sun's rays heat the air trapped inside the structure, and a current of moist air circulates constantly through convection.

On the other hand, the complex chemical mechanisms by which obnoxious gases such as carbon dioxide cause temperatures to rise on the surface of our planet have nothing whatsoever to do with the familiar convection currents in a greenhouse. It would have been preferable if this dangerous outcome due to the presence of excessive carbon dioxide had been labeled, say, the lethal furnace effect.

Readers of my blog have heard me referring to a brilliant fellow named Joseph Fourier [1768-1830]. He was mentioned in the following three articles:

— Prefects, 21 July 2007 [display];

— Becoming French, 19 June 2008 [display];

— and Curious trail, 27 June 2008 [display].

My hero Fourier started out his adult life by a short and unconvincing trial period as a Benedictine monk. After achieving fame as a mathematical physicist, an Egyptologist [colleague of the Champollion brothers] and a public administrator [at the préfecture in Grenoble where I was recently naturalized], he was made a baron. Well, Joseph Fourier was a specialist in heat flow, and he was in fact the discoverer of the notorious greenhouse effect.

Excursion into a fairytale land

Yesterday, we drove westward to visit Christine's brother Lan Mafart at his seaside tavern named Caplan & Co near Lannion.

[Click the photo to visit their French-language website.]

After lunch, we visited the church of St-Jean-du-Doigt, where the term "doigt" (finger) indicates that their treasure is a silver reliquary containing a knuckle of John the Baptist.

Today, it's hard to imagine that fire could break out in such a damp stone church... but this happened (for the third time in the history of the village) last century, and the stained-glass windows had to be replaced. The new non-figurative windows are extraordinary. One has the impression that we're observing the silhouettes of colorful vines and shrubs growing outside the edifice, with maybe the misty sea on the horizon.

In a nearby village, the church is dedicated to an exotic Breton saint named Melar. As you can guess from his golden crown, scepter and blue cowl with fleur-de-lis motifs, Melar was no run-of-the-mill pious villager. In fact, he was a prince. But a jealous and wicked relative cut off Melar's right hand and his left foot, in the hope that this would prevent the young prince from manipulating an épée and riding a horse, thereby making it impossible to accede to the regional throne. But lo and behold, Melar's artificial hand and foot, made of silver, soon functioned magically, even better than his original limbs... and it was obvious to everybody that they had a saint in their presence. I forget the rest of the story, which Christine read out to me while we were crawling around in the underground crypt where Melar was laid to rest at the end of his fabulous life.

I should point out, for readers who don't know so already, that Brittany is a place where all sorts of strange things happen.

Note for Nancy [private message]

Nancy: I receive all your emails from Australia, but I can't send you emails from France, because your computer won't accept them. I tried to do so a few days ago, but Big Pond wouldn't deliver it... or maybe couldn't, for technical reasons. So, this blog remains [as always] a convenient means of communication between us. You might look into the idea of using the comments facility. Your grandson could show you how this gadget works.

Enchanting vegetation

The day after my arrival in Brittany, Christine took me to a magnificent 42-acre botanic garden near Tréguier named Kerdalo, created during the final decades of the 20th century by a Russian nobleman, Peter Wolkonsy [1907-1997].

Peter became a specialist in dendrology, the science of trees, and his domain can be considered, first and foremost, as a celebration of great trees of many kinds.

A tiny stream enters the upper edge of the property, and its waters have been channeled into a series of pools of differing shapes and sizes.

The largest pool is in fact a small lake surrounded by giant tropical plants, masses of hydrangeas, reeds and rushes.

In the middle of the domain, a square array of splendid flower beds corresponds to what might be described as a "clergyman's garden".

Often, the pools are bordered by fountains and fanciful constructions.

On one edge of this tiny square pool covered in greenery, there's an Italian grotto whose walls are adorned by frescoes.

In certain places, there's an air of giantism, with roses climbing into the branches of huge trees.

When Peter Wolkonsy discovered the property, around 1965, the splendid residence was little more than an old farm house.

The far end of the domain slopes down into a magnificent estuary, with Tréguier across the waters.

Since the death of Peter, the domain has been evolving under the guidance of his daughter Isabelle and her English husband Timothy Vaughan, who's an expert horticulturist.