Homo faber

Man the tool-making animal. Here in France, "faber" has given rise to the surname Fabre and its variants. In medieval times, blacksmiths received this name. They could be thought of as inheritors of the Greek god Haephaestus (Vulcan for the Romans).

Homo faber was one of the favorite expressions of my mentor Pierre Schaeffer. He liked to imagine that God had made Man "in his own image", as a maker, so that imaginative individuals would spend their time on Earth inventing tools to make more and more things, as a kind of end in itself. It doesn't really matter all that much what you actually make (with obvious exceptions such as nuclear weapons, anti-personal mines, etc). The important thing is to become a maker, a tool-wielder. I often thought that Schaeffer looked upon his invention of musique concrète (musical compositions made by assembling real-world noises) as a pastime for obsessional makers.

In recent times, we've discovered that humans are not the only creatures capable of using tools. Chimpanzees and their sex-obsessed cousins the bonobos learn from their elders how to use stones to crack open nuts, or sticks to catch termites.

You might imagine that, by now, human inventors have come up with every possible tool that could possibly be imagined. I only have to open a kitchen drawer to find all kinds of simple but marvelous tools. Here, for example, is the world's finest corkscrew:

You would never guess the purpose for which the following exotic implement (roughly the size of a small spoon) was invented:

It's a spoon of a special kind, used for soaking a cube of sugar in absinthe liqueur. Don't ask me why its form should be so complicated. Maybe all spoons get to look that way after you've imbibed a few glasses of absinthe.

My daughter recently gave me a tiny German instrument designed for opening walnuts:

One of these days, I really must remove the silver key from its card and get around to trying it out. For the moment, like an ape, I carry on using one of humanity's most ancient inventions for this purpose: the hammer. Maybe the Munich invention could be used to open oysters, which would be really great.

Talking about walnuts, I've probably said already on this blog that I often produce a delicacy using a recipe from the Australian pioneering days: pickled walnuts.

In that context, I'm in need of a tool that hasn't been invented yet. I'm thinking of a device to facilitate the initial step in the recipe for making pickled walnuts, which consists of piercing the green fruit to produce dozens of punctures. Why do we need to puncture the walnuts? In the next step of the recipe, the pierced walnuts are soaked in brine for a fortnight, and the holes allow the liquid to seep deep inside the fruit, to neutralize their toxicity. For the moment, to puncture the walnuts, I use a primitive method: a steel-spiked dog's comb.

You can imagine that this technique is inefficient, because I have to hold the fruit in my left hand while piercing it with the comb held in my right hand, then I have to withdraw the hard fruit from the spikes to repeat the operation from another angle. I do this about half a dozen times for each walnut, while trying to avoid wounds to the fingers of my left hand. What I need is some kind of device to pierce the walnuts rapidly and efficiently. Now, whenever I evoke the desired tool, people invariably react by saying that it should be easy to invent such a device, and they start talking about a pair of spiked rollers, or maybe spiked plates. But the problem is more difficult than what it appears, for the simple reason that the walnut, when pierced, tends to stick to the spikes. So, in the case of spiked plates, there would have to be an associated pair of metal plates with holes, which could be used to withdraw the walnuts from the spikes. Then there's the problem of ensuring that each walnut is pierced all over its skin. This would necessitate some kind of "intelligent" system for turning each walnut around so that it gets pierced all over. This is surely possible, in theory, but we're likely to end up with blueprints for a complicated device. So, is it worth it? Maybe the dog's comb can still look forward to a long and healthy future existence.

There's a second tool that I need at Gamone. It concerns my latest kind of electric fence, seen here:

The fence is composed of a steel rods surmounted by white nylon insulators, referred to as pigs' tails, to hold the electric ribbon:

Periodically, I need to withdraw the stakes from the ground so that I can remove the grass and weeds, and then I might decide to change the location of the fence. In the rocky earth at Gamone, it can be difficult to remove such rods. I need a tool of the following kind:

Here, the clasp would need to grasp the stake securely, enabling me to use the tool like a lever in order to unearth the stake.

No sooner had I drawn this diagram than I invented a way of using successfully a heavy-weight wire-cutter and a sledgehammer (the same tool I use for fixing the stakes in the ground) to unearth stakes.

Admittedly, this solution is imperfect, because it's hard to exert downwards pressure on the outstretched wire-cutter while squeezing the arms together in order to grip the stake. There's still room in the modern world for Homo faber.

Messy road-cycling situation

As a former adolescent cyclist of sorts in my home town of Grafton (back in the days when bicycles had only recently been invented), I've always been interested in the Australian cycling world. A few days ago, I received an email circular from the organizers of Australia's Tour Down Under, and I promptly dropped in on their website.

Next January's scheduled event in Adelaide is part of the so-called ProTour circuit, under the auspices of the world-level body that governs professional cycling: the UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale]. The Tour de France, on the other hand, is organized by the Amaury group, owners of the newspaper L'Equipe (which angered the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe not so long ago).

The director of the 2009 Tour Down Under assures us that everything "is on track and on schedule". He explains that the UCI has confirmed that the South Australian event "will remain in the top echelon of world cycling. We have also spoken to the elite teams who rate the event highly and plan to be in Adelaide in January 2009."

These reassuring words surprised me somewhat, because the news from France, just after Bastille Day, was that 17 ProTour teams competing in the Tour de France had decided to refrain from taking out ProTour licences for 2009. The Australian website includes a menu concerning teams for the Tour Down Under, but the data is obsolete. The 19 teams that are listed are those that competed in last January's event, rather than those that will be turning up in Adelaide in 2009. So, what gives? Would the organizers of the Tour Down Under be jumping the start in persisting in talking as if it's business as usual?

Today, speaking from Beijing, UCI president Pat McQuaid revealed a plan that his body intends to submit to the Amaury people in France, in the hope of resolving the conflicts that have existed over the last few years. I have the impression that today's UCI press release is full of good intentions, but we know nothing, for the moment, concerning possible reactions of the Tour de France organizers. I feel that South Australia is excessively optimistic in suggesting that they can calmly and confidently begin the countdown to the 2009 Tour Down Under. It would be more realistic if they were to inform potential spectators explicitly that international road cycling is still in a global mess.

Happiness is a friendly computer

We computer enthusiasts are not hard to please. It's easy to make us happy. All we ask for is a friendly computer. That means, of course, a subtle bag of goodies. To start the ball rolling, the machine itself must be sufficiently powerful, reliable and easy to use. No problems at that level; I'm a Mac user. Next, the Internet connection must be fast and stable enough to make you forget that you're even linked to this planetary behemoth.

[If you're interested in following up the origins of the curious terms Behemoth and Leviathan, evoking chimeric Biblical creatures, click the painting by William Blake to access the Wikipedia article on this subject. I hasten to add that, like Bigfoot, these archaic animals are not described in The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.]

One of the basic challenges in the quest for happiness as a computer user consists of finding the ideal software tools for the kind of work that concerns you. These days, in many everyday computing domains, the competing products are much of a muchness. For example, I've got into the habit of using the Firefox browser rather than Apple's much lauded Safari, but I wouldn't attempt to justify my choice objectively. Once upon a time, I used to think that nothing could be better than the Eudora application for email, whereas I now find that Apple's Mail tool suits me fine. Obviously, this "much of a muchness" aspect breaks down if you're reckless enough to start comparing Ferraris with aging pickup trucks. The differences between, say, the latest Mac OS and a veteran Windows system, or even a Linux thing tied together with bits of string and wire, are not purely a matter of taste and familiarity. There are objective tests for determining whether or not one solution is better (more efficient in a friendly way) than another. Above all, the "much of a muchness" judgment is no longer pertinent when Internet users are obliged to devote money and energy to protecting themselves constantly from spam and viruses, or wondering whether such-and-such a service provider is indeed delivering their emails.

The reason I'm rambling on about such things is that I wish to say a few words about one of the time-honored tools of personal computing: word processors.

Over the years, I've used many different kinds of word processors, including one that I built myself, named Irma (Intelligent Rewriting Tool for Authors), with which I produced the conference proceedings, published in 1980, entitled Videotex in Europe. For me, the most exotic wood processing software of all was surely the LaTeX system, implemented on the Macintosh as a tool named Textures. On a high-resolution laser printer, it produces truly beautiful output, like a finely-printed Bible, but it's diabolically complex. About half the author's energy and imagination are used up in determining what the printed output should look like, and only the other half in what it might contain in the way of words. That's to say, it's an esthete's toy for would-be printers. As for Microsoft Word, described in typical French invective as a "gas factory", I've always hated it. I'm convinced that it would have never become widespread were it not for the early business strategy of encouraging (or at least not discouraging) its unpaid acquisition... like distributing free cigarettes and alcohol to teenagers. One of my favorite word processors, up until it went out of existence on the Macintosh, was FrameMaker, which was a truly friendly and well-documented tool for authors. To replace it, I tried my hand at InDesign, but I've never succeeded in mastering it intuitively. Even such an elementary task as inserting half a page of text into a chapter, and moving an illustration, seem to be unnecessarily complicated, particularly when you're not using the tool on a daily basis.

So, why am I happy today? Well, I've just decided to drop InDesign for my genealogical documents and get back to Apple's nice Pages tool, which is amazingly simple to use.

It might sound trite to say so, but I'm convinced that an author who's well-equipped with friendly word processing resources (including on-line access to good dictionaries) finds it so much easier to be inspired, find ideas, and express them optimally.

Disappearing trick

As everybody knows [well, let's say, everybody with a good Catholic education], a strange event once took place on August 15. Mary took off skywards, literally, clothes and all, in what must be classified as the second case in world history of gravitational escape... not counting the flight of pterosaurs and phoenixes, and setting aside the hordes of angels and other heavenly creatures such as fairies, pixies, winged sprites and Irish leprechauns, goblins, hobgoblins, witches on magic broomsticks, etc. As everybody knows, prior to the so-called Assumption of Mary, there had been the equally spectacular Ascension of her son.

Compared with such happenings, the disappearing trick that occurred yesterday in the website of a high-quality Australian newspaper was a trivial stunt, but it's nevertheless interesting. Unless I happened to have been momentarily bewitched (which is not impossible, but rather unlikely), I claim to have witnessed with my own eyes a fascinating article, of a highly critical nature, on Australia's defense system. Now, this is an interesting topic that I've already mentioned in my blog:

• Australia's submarines, 26 December 2007 [display]

• Australian arithmetic, 2 January 2008 [display]

• Expensive, aesthetic and nasty, 21 January 2008 [display]

I made a mental note of yesterday's article, saying to myself that it might be a good subject for a blog article... in spite of the fact that, these days, I no longer have much to say about my native land. Well, today, when I tried to find this article, I was surprised to discover that, overnight, it had completely disappeared into thin air, leaving no traces whatsoever.

In a neighboring domain, I have a trivial but significant Australian anecdote to relate. There's a web forum that gathers together Australian bloggers. A few weeks ago, I submitted a short calmly-written post concerning a question that has often interested me, particularly since my trip to Australia in 2006. Why does a supposedly prosperous nation such as Australia, with immense riches in the earth, continue to suffer from a relatively underdeveloped infrastructure (roads, railways, bridges, telecom, defense system, etc) ? I imagined that, since bloggers are supposed to be talkative and well-informed folk, I would get some worthwhile factual answers to my question. What I wanted to learn, in a nutshell, was the amount of tax from mineral sales that is actually invested in the Australian infrastructure. Alas, a forum moderator sent me a polite email to say that they were not prepared to publish my post.

Your discussion related to infrastructure comes very close to crossing the line relating to what is fair game on the Forums. We do not allow political discussions. I encourage you to steer readers to your blog if you wish to start a discussion in this area. I do not think that it would take long for any discussion along the lines that you have started to get political.

Will there be medals in Beijing for catching up with China in the time-honored game called censorship?

Amazing American discoveries

Few observers would deny that the most fantastic American discovery of all time was the Book of Mormon.

[Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.]

Maybe the word "discovery" is not quite correct, because the golden plates upon which the original document was inscribed were actually handed over to Joseph Smith in 1827 by the angel Moroni. What I'm trying to say is: Can we seriously use the term "discovery" in the case of a holy gift from a heavenly creature? Long ago, there was a good old English word, derived from the Latin noun inventio (the act or faculty of discovery), that served perfectly well for great findings of this kind. For example, after Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in the year 327 and unearthed the true cross of Jesus (along with the crown of thorns and some nails), her amazing exploit was referred to formally as the Invention of the Cross. Since then, this usage of the term "invention" has become obsolete. So, there would be a danger of being misunderstood if one were to speak of the invention of Moroni's document.

A few decades after the Moroni event, reports of another miraculous American discovery started to appear in the press... and they still do. I'm referring to sightings of an extraordinary creature known today as Bigfoot. [Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.] Superficially, Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, looks like a large hairy ape, but there are strong arguments for considering this humanoid creature as a cousin of Man: a kind of surviving Neanderthal.

Yesterday, at Palo Alto in California (site of the prestigious Stanford University), there was an extraordinary press conference about the latest Bigfoot sighting.

[Click the photo to access an article about this amazing press conference.]

It's all rather secretive, in the sense that the three men behind this press conference did not actually bring along any biological samples of the Bigfoot corpse they claim to have discovered... which remains stored in a refrigerator at an unidentified location.

Various aspects of this latest Bigfoot affair seem to fall into place once you visit the shopping section of the trio's website [click the lapel pin, which can be purchased for $6.50, or a dozen for forty bucks]. It would appear that the three discoverers are associated with this commercial affair. In any case, two of them turned up wearing Bigfoot caps... priced $24.99 on the website. It goes without saying that this website would become a tremendous money-making affair... if only a real specimen of the legendary beast were to be found.

Incidentally, reading between the lines of his excellent The Ancestor's Tale, I have the impression that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in Bigfoot. That's hardly surprising. Dawkins doesn't even believe in God.

As for me, I think that we should believe in both of these great American discoveries: the angel Moroni and the ape man Bigfoot. Clearly, if God didn't intend us to believe in these creatures, then why did He put them on Earth and allow them to be discovered? That's the solid line of reasoning I used in my decision, long ago, to wear glasses... along with the fact that they help me to see things better. If God didn't intend us to wear glasses, then why did He provide us with a nose and a pair of ears?

Amazing Aussie powers

I've always known that we Aussies are not just a pile of crap. We have hidden talents. Look at this awesome demonstration:


Mass Spoon Bending - Click here for more amazing videos

There are two reasons why Aussies are different (I mean superior) to ordinary humans such as Americans, Europeans and Eskimos. First, the fact that we're born in the antipodean magnetic flux of the Southern Hemisphere has a lot to do with our mysterious powers. Second, we're perpetually immersed in a whole lot of spiritual energy fallout from the Aboriginal Dreamtime, which causes the typical Aussie mindset and psyche to evolve in exciting new ways. It's a pity that there aren't more revealing TV documentaries in this domain. I really must make a suggestion along these lines to some of my professional friends in French television.

August 15 in Tinos

The stark eyes of the old ladies in black, disembarking at Tinos, are fixed upon the church with the sacred icon. They will crawl on blood-stained knees up to the grail. It's the theckapende avgoustou.


It was an ordinary day, in 1965, for tourists such as us.



Tinos, today, remains my mythical backyard.
My Garden of Eden. My eternal paradise.

Dead wood from a windmill in Tinos

The wobbly weathercock of Grecian winters
will no longer indicate the pale blue meridian
from Asia to Africa.
It lies on the arid ground between rocks and snakes.
Alongside, three aged teeth in black oak
will never more bite the Etesian winds, full of salt,
during their long seasons of wild wheat
on the burning slopes of archaic Tinos.
This sacred soil once offered water and bread
to Poseidon and Amphitrite.
The Cyclades filled the sails of Ulysses and made
the warm bread rise, covered in seeds of sesame.
Old toothless windmill, memory of the Aegean.

Retirement preoccupations

What a delightful blog title and simple banner:

For readers who might not be aware of personal facts concerning George W Bush, Crawford is the Texan municipality where he owns a ranch. If I understand correctly, it's not absolutely certain that Bush will in fact retire there when his presidential mandate ends... on 20 January 2009.

Actual countdown clocks are now displayed on the web:

They stopped counting long ago!

Articles and blog posts are also starting to appear concerning the possible nature of Bush's historical legacy. Most specialists consider that he will not be considered as the worst president in US history, because the competition for that title is pretty tough in God's Own Country. But he stands a good chance of being thought of as "one of the worst", at least in the modern era. All I hope, when these historical "honors" are bestowed, is that some of the Bush infamy rubs off onto his old mates in the UK and Australia: Tony Blair and John Howard. I don't know whether these guys—along with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and all the others—ever lose sleep thinking about all the chaos and bloodshed for which they're directly responsible in Iraq. How do they remember their condoning torture ?

In the Dawkins book I'm reading [see my previous post], my Favorite Author brings up a fascinating topic concerning the planet Earth: collisions with large meteorites or comets. An awesome impact wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It hit Mexico at a place now named Chicxulub, leaving a crater with a diameter of 180 kilometers.

Devastating collisions with heavenly bodies continue to be a threat. The big difference now is that earthlings should be able to foresee imminent dangers of this kind, and even deploy gigantic futuristic technology capable of saving our souls. Dawkins sees this as a potential challenge for determined statesmen such as Dubya and the late great Ronald Ray-Gun.

Politicians who invent external threats from foreign powers, in order to scare up economic or voter support for themselves, might find that a potentially colliding meteor answers their ignoble purpose just as well as an Evil Empire, an Axis of Evil, or the more nebulous abstraction 'Terror', with the added benefit of encouraging international co-operation rather than divisiveness. The technology itself is similar to the most advanced 'star wars' weapons systems, and to that of space exploration itself. The mass realisation that humanity as a whole shares common enemies could have incalculable benefits in drawing us together rather than, as at present, apart.

Indeed, it would be marvelous if George W Bush, once retired, were to spend his time and resources in transforming Crawford into a fabulous planetary fortress destined to detect and counterattack threats from the heavens. Everything's imaginable when you've got God on your side.

ADDENDUM

I'm not happy with the grammatical laxity in the above countdown clock. The word "quicker" is an adjective, not an adverb. I complained... and received the following friendly reply:

Hi William.

Thanks very much for the note. I am not kidding when I say this has been a running argument between me and my fiance for the last four years!!!!

I do realize that the text is grammatically incorrect, and for a short time we did have the proper wording in there. But it was just a bit too much of a mouthful, and as I'm sure you know, most Americans don't even know the difference. They prefer the vernacular over the grammatically correct.

Thank you very much for the note and we hope you enjoy the weekend!!!

All the best,

Vince and Merry

Exotic pilgrimage

In a book I've been reading over the last few days, I was delighted to come upon an outline of an activity that used to interest me greatly (and still does, as an aficionado): Macintosh programming.

The Mac has a toolbox of routines stored in ROM (Read Only Memory) or in System files permanently loaded at start-up time. There are thousands of these toolbox routines, each one doing a particular operation, which is likely to be needed, over and over again, in slightly different ways, in different programs. [...] If you look at the text of a Mac program, whoever wrote it, in whatever programming language and for whatever purpose, the main thing you'll notice is that it consists largely of invocations of familiar, built-in toolbox routines. The same repertoire of routines is available to all programmers. Different programs string calls of these routines together in different combinations and sequences.

Jargon such as that last sentence suggests that the writer is more than a mere user of computer products. Clearly, this didactic author is not in the same basic ballpark as the countless millions of lucky folk who perform their daily work with the help of a Macintosh. The writer would appear to have gone a big step further, and actually gotten his hands dirty in writing Mac software. In an earlier paragraph, he had explained in modest terms his relationship with this machine:

The computer I happen to be familiar with is the Macintosh, and it is some years since I did any programming so I am certainly out of date with the details.

Who is this former adept of Macintosh programming? And why is he is writing about his technical experience in this domain?

In The Ancestor's Tale, published in 2004, Richard Dawkins calls upon the paradigm of Mac software to demonstrate the functioning of a genome. More precisely, he's trying to explain why we should not be alarmed to learn that the human genome is no bigger than that of a mouse: some 30,000 genes. If you were to compare the architectural blueprints of an Olympic edifice at Beijing with a rough drawing I once made of the future shed at Gamone for my donkey Moshé, you would see immediately which of the two construction processes was designed by a planetary people capable of generating artificial fireworks, and which one was sketched by an Aussie hillbilly. In the same spirit, why shouldn't a human genome and a mouse genome, placed side by side, be vastly unalike?

The answer is simple. Genomes aren't blueprints; they're computer-like programs. Over the last day or so, front-page news stories have described Apple's ire at discovering that a proposed iPhone program is pure bullshit. Expensive to acquire, this iPhone application does nothing more than display ostentatiously the fact that the purchaser is apparently wealthy. [This kind of second-degree gag amuses me immensely.] Well, if you were to take out some kind of magic magnifying glass and examine this bullshit program, you would probably find that it "looks" more or less the same, in terms of digital volume, as any of the more brilliant iPhone applications. The difference is not in the vulgar quantity of bits, but in the way they are organized to form a complex computational entity capable of performing big things.

I could ramble on for ages about this brilliant book by Dawkins, but the best thing, dear reader, is that you should buy it and absorb it slowly and languidly, as if you were seated at a table of rare venison and unworldly wines, served by medieval Botticelli maidens against a sonorous background of Monteverdi... or something like that. The brilliant idea of Dawkins consists of leading us on an exotic backwards pilgrimage towards the dawn of creation, in which we meet up with all our genealogical cousins: chimpanzees, gorillas, etc... right back to the origins of life on the planet Earth. This magnum opus by Dawkins is yet another specimen of beautiful writing, fabulous literature and magnificent science. His literary style was inspired, of course, by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Replacing vast phylogenetic trees of Earth's animals by my own humble genealogy, I think of my father. He went through life burdened by a pair of ridiculous Christian names: King Mepham. I explained the first element in last year's article entitled November 11 [display]. As for the second name, it all gets back to Kentish ancestors at a village named Meopham [website], associated with an ancestral Simon Mepham who was an early archbishop of Canterbury [1328-33].

In the cosmic Dawkins saga, the intrinsic "value" of a Mepham forefather on the ancient road back through Canterbury might be likened to that of our concestor [a Dawkinsean neologism for "common ancestor"] who witnessed the disappearance of the dinosaurs. None of these creatures [including probably the archbishop] was the kind of clear-cut individual you might have invited back home to meet up with Mother, let alone Father. They were tiny inconsequential but lovable minuses, like all of us. We can't even imagine what they might have looked like. But we know they existed. Meanwhile, I've spent hours trying to determine what an ancestor of me and my dear cousin Sophia—a descendant of wolves—might have looked like. I have my ideas...

MacMissionary

As I watched last night's US/China basketball match, I felt confused. On the surface, it looked like yet another conventional Olympic ball game between two nations. But I soon sensed that there was more to it than that. It seemed more like some kind of a weird religious process in which zealous missionaries were teaching a company of recently-ordained converts how to conduct the sacred rituals of a sect. As befits this kind of ceremony, enhanced with subtle symbols, the ancient priests wore white. Even their names were written in white letters on a white background, as if they weren't really meant to be read, but merely imagined... like the pronunciation of the holy name of Yahveh. The Chinese spectators encouraged their players by crying out the English word China. This same word appeared on their ritual garments.

In the congregation, George W Bush and his wife watched the proceedings. Earlier in the day, they had attended a protestant church near Beijing's Forbidden City, where the Chinese worshipers sang Amazing Grace in English and Chinese. Afterwards, the US president declared: "Laura and I just had the great joy and privilege of worshiping here in Beijing. You know, it just goes to show that God is universal, and God is love, and no state, man or woman should fear the influence of loving religion." The preceding day, he had already taped a message on this same theme: "This trip has reaffirmed my belief that men and women who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their God are no threat to the future of China. They are the people who will make China a great nation in the 21st century."

It goes without saying that these people will need to learn how to play basketball, eat hamburgers, drink certain ritual beverages, go to church on Sundays and express themselves in English.

Unwarranted anguish and misunderstandings

It's four days since my last news concerning our charming little black neighbor Pif, seen here this morning (with an elegant silver chain around his slender neck) in the company of Sophia.

I'm aware that people all over the planet will soon be crying out for an update on events. But first, a little French joke, whose relevance will soon become apparent. Although it's not exactly a politically-correct joke, it's quite innocent. Nothing to do with mindless insinuations about an arriviste lad, say, thinking of changing his religion with a view to becoming rich.

Little Mustapha lives in the Maghreb quarter of town, but the educational administration sends him to a nearby school, on the other side of the river, in a posh Catholic neighborhood. The diplomatic school mistress introduces Mustapha to his new friends.

School mistress: Mustapha comes from across the river, and you might be tempted to imagine that he's different from us. But this is wrong. To prove that Mustapha is a little child who's no different to all of you, I suggest that we change his name. We'll christen him Michael.

That evening, back home in the Maghreb quarter, Mustapha informs his parents, excitedly, of his first day in the Catholic school.

Mustapha: I'm no longer Mustapha. My new name is Michael.

Father, slapping his son in the face: Stop your bullshit. We called you Mustapha when you were born, and that's your name forever.

Mustapha: No, I assure you, Father. I've become Michael.

Mother, slapping her son in the face: Your father told you to stop this bullshit. Your name's Mustapha.

Mustapha receives a few more blows from his parents, for good measure, to remind him that his name is not Michael. The next morning, at school, his face is covered in bruises, as if he had been boxing.

School mistress, alarmed: My poor little Michael, whatever happened to you?

Mustapha: Nothing unusual, Miss. Last night, back home in the Maghreb quarter, I got beaten up by a couple of crazy Arabs.

Yesterday morning, when Pif turned up stealthily in my kitchen, something was wrong. The little dog's face was disfigured by swollen lips, and he was unusually lethargic. I was alarmed, wondering immediately if Alison might have whacked her dog too hard, to punish his recent disobedience. I didn't know how to react best. I phoned up Bob, to ask him whether it was possible that his daughter might have been excessively violent with Pif. Bob assured me that this was unthinkable. So, I got around to imagining that maybe Sophia had bitten Pif's snout in a sudden fight, during my short absence the day before yesterday. Finally, I wandered up to Alison's place, on the off-chance that she might be at home.

She was. As soon as I drew her attention to Pif's disfigured mouth, Alison understood immediately what had happened: "He has been bitten, maybe by insects or a snake! " This was a good analysis of the situation. We've noticed that Pif likes to go off onto the slopes on his own, where he's liable to meet up with bees or wasps, not to mention snakes. Alison added that she had noticed that something was wrong with Pif, the previous evening, when he had disappeared into a nearby field, as if he wanted to be alone. She reassured me that she was going to keep Pif at home all afternoon, and look after him, ready to take him along to the veterinarian if any more troubling signs appeared.

Today, the crisis is over. Pif is in perfect form. As usual, he has moved back down here and immediately dragged Sophia's rugs out of her wicker basket and onto the lawn. Clearly, Pif's a survivor. It's less clear whether he intends to survive up at his place, with Alison, or down here at Gamone with Sophia and me.

Memorable day

I'm not likely to forget the opening day of the Beijing games. It's the day I picked up my new French identity card.

I hope the data is blurred enough to discourage forgers and fraudsters. [UPDATE October 11, 2011: Intrigued by frequent visits to this blog post, and worried that somebody might be trying to steal my identity, I've blurred the image even more.]

If only I'd thought of it earlier, I would have made arrangements to get married today, like countless couples in China. Apparently all the 8s in today's date are a happy omen for people in love. [story] With my new French identity card, it goes without saying that I'm empowered to whisk away a bride in less time than it took for the Aussie rugby man Sonny Bill Williams to abandon his Bulldog mates in Sydney and join the Toulon club in France. But I was faced with a few obstacles:

• I had no way of knowing beforehand that the French authorities would enable me to pick up my identity card today, 8 August 2008, at the mayor's office in Choranche.

• I'm not really sure I want to get married.

• Surprisingly, there's no waiting list of female candidates.

This afternoon, therefore, instead of curling up on the couch with a new wife, I'll curl up all alone in front of the TV and watch the opening ceremony at Beijing.

Nice guy with an infectious smile

Many years ago, when I took my son to New York for a short vacation, we were greatly amused by the way in which a sordid crime had become the non-stop theme of TV news during the first day or so of our stay. A Mexican resident, Tony Gonzalez, had murdered several innocent people in a brutal fashion, and none of his former friends could figure out what might have made him act that way. Journalists succeeded in tracking down all kinds of people who knew Gonzalez well, and their comments were unanimous: "Tony's such a nice guy. I can't understand what came over him, to make him commit those murders. He's always so kind to his mother and sister, and all his friends saw him as a happy guy who was incapable of hurting anybody. Tony always speaks with such a lovely quiet voice. Etc. Etc." My son and I found this stuff hilarious. We felt that Gonzalez should be released immediately from police custody and awarded a certificate for fine citizenship and good-neighborly conduct.

I'm reminded of Tony Gonzalez when I see the way in which the US anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins has been presented by various colleagues since his suicide. He was described as a churchgoer with a friendly disposition, who did a juggling act at community get-togethers, composed humorous songs that he performed on guitar or piano to farewell colleagues, and never seemed to have "any particular grudges or idiosyncrasies".

Alas, it's only today that we learn from hearsay that a psychiatrist had described Ivins as "homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions". To go to the trouble of posting envelopes containing powdered anthrax spores through the mail, the perpetrator would indeed need to be sociopathic with clear intentions.

Today, we can finally read the emails of Ivins. It's a little too late, of course, since the nice guy with an infectious smile has committed suicide. I can't help thinking, rightly or wrongly, that any run-of-the-mill computerized spy should have been able to intercept these emails, which are poems of evil pulsations.

Verily, I say unto ye that Americans are fabulous fools (whom I often admire enormously, nevertheless, in the domains of science and technology). They proclaim the existence of an evil axis on the other side of the planet, but they can't necessarily detect the smelly crap exuded by their own assholes.

Risky valley of the Bourne

I'm about to talk about a geographical entity, the valley of the River Bourne, which runs below my home place, Gamone. I assume you're at ease using browser keys to move forwards/backwards with respect to my blog. You might click the following photo of a typical corner in our road to see a local map of places I'm about to mention.

As you can see, Gamone lies between Pont-en-Royans and the village of Choranche. Just to the south of these three places, you see the road (in yellow) that leads eastwards to the winter ski resort of Villard-de-Lans. And a thin blue line indicates the River Bourne, which flows just below the road, in an east/west direction. That's to say, Choranche, Gamone and Pont-en-Royans are located on the right bank of the Bourne. As the crow flies, I'm quite close to Villard: some 20 km. It's a delightful little town, with good restaurants and bars. I rarely set foot there, however, because I'm daunted by the narrow mountain road that runs through the Gorges of the Bourne.

During the ski season, particularly of a weekend, hordes of vehicles from the Valence region and the Ardèche department use this itinerary. It's a magnificent scenic road, but there are many places where vehicles have to halt to allow the passage of those traveling in the opposite direction. For me, driving in such circumstances is strictly unpleasant... no doubt because I never got accustomed to this kind of environment when I was younger. So, I stay at home.

For many years, we've been aware that we live alongside a rickety road that's often disturbed by fallen rocks. When I purchased Gamone, in 1993, I proudly informed my family and friends that I had found a rare place devoid of rocks that might fall onto our heads. And that state of affairs remains perfectly true today... as long as I stay at home. If I go out driving, that's another kettle of stonefish.

This morning, we received a surprising publication from the local authorities, revealing the results of a recent study of risky places along the road up to Villard-de-Lans. You might click the photo of work at the level of the home of my great friends Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier to see a graphical outline of these dangerous places, marked in orange or red.

I learn with delight but stupefaction [even though I'm not bothered unduly at a personal level] that the Isère departmental authorities have decided to invest in a huge 14-year project, costing 15 million euros, aimed at saving our roadway along the valley of the Bourne. The only problem is that this road will be closed for five months every year. So, I'm less and less likely to spend sunny afternoons and balmy evenings soaking up the Vercors atmosphere of Villard-de-Lans. What the hell. My Gamone descendants will...

Ads you won't see

From time to time, we hear of publicity campaigns that get totally screwed up by current events even before they're launched... as distinct from the achievement of the John McCain crew, who needed to actually launch their latest anti-Obama campaign in order to get it screwed up.

In France, a creative genius in an ad agency had a brilliant idea for a campaign concerning a new automobile. The idea is that Dad has just purchased this vehicle, and he's driving his kids to school. But he's so infatuated by his new car that he simply forgets the kids on the back seat and just carries on driving for hours, absentmindedly. The planned tag lines were:

7.42 am: Your kids are on the back seat, ready to be driven to school.
3.37 pm: Your kids are still on the back seat.

What a great idea for an amusing ad. The only trouble is that, over the last few weeks, there were two separate cases of a French parent simply forgetting their child in a parked automobile. And the kids in question died as a result of the suffocating heat.

More recently, in Canada, the Greyhound bus company was about to lunch a campaign centered upon the relaxed atmosphere of overland bus travel. [I agree with their good intentions. Around 1985, I had the thrill of crossing Australia in this way on two occasions.] Sadly, their planned tag line evoking the absence of "bus rage" was ruined at the last minute by a crazy guy with a big knife and a taste for human flesh. So, I guess we'll never know the exact nature of the "reason" that the Greyhound folk had in mind.

ADDENDUM

Talking about things that might not be brought to the attention of readers, I'm wondering whether my compatriots in Australia have heard about a 39-year-old psychopathic Frenchman who's accused of having murdered, apparently in a fit of insanity, an 11-year-old boy. Here are police drawings of the accused fellow and his 49-year-old female companion:

At the time they were captured, a couple of days ago, they were trying to spread the message that they were "Australian pilgrims" who had come to France on a mysterious mission of destruction. My neighbor Madeleine, who doesn't necessarily bother to digest news stuff she picks up on TV, asked me yesterday: "Did you see that story about an evil Australian couple who murdered a child not far from here? " I had trouble convincing Madeleine that the suspected murderer and his lady friend are untraveled natives of France, with no links whatsoever to Australia, except maybe as hallucinations in their distorted minds.

It's a little spooky that diabolical fuckwits of this kind [caught out by a DNA analysis] might imagine Australia—which, most probably, they totally ignore—as a plausible origin. Where could they have picked up the idea that Australia is a likely place from which "pilgrims" might decide to set out on a satanic mission to France? One guess is that this association might be based upon recent Catholic Youth ballyhoo they glimpsed on TV when the pope was visiting Sydney. Or maybe they've been watching too many exotic Aussie travelogues.

Backfired

In the wake of Barack Obama's precisely-planned trip to Europe and his speech to a vast crowd on Kennedy territory in Berlin, were John McCain's campaign people really dumb enough to believe they could get away with referring to the dynamic presidential candidate as a celebrity, and compare him for an instant with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? We see today that the whole thing has blown up beautifully in the face of McCain. Not only have the parents of Paris Hilton complained about how their Republican favorite has used his financial resources (which include a donation from the senior Hiltons), but their daughter—for once in her life—has done something that's both funny and intelligent: she has made a delightful parody video.

[Click the photo to see it.]

Meanwhile, Barack Obama must be getting a kick out of all this negative noise surrounding McCain.

Crossing the Rubicon

Pif is basic dog... in the same sense that the celebrated 2-horsepower Citroën used to be described as basic car. You get your money's worth, but there are no extras. Canine critics might say that his ears are too floppy, his tail too massive, and that he's too high on his rear legs. His rectangular snout and wide mouth remind me of a dredge used to remove mud from a river. As for his education, let's just forget about it. In spite of all these faults, or maybe because of them, I find Pif adorable. It's a pleasure, every morning around nine, when I hear the tinkle of his paws on the wooden stairs leading up to my computer. He darts into my lap, and licks my face rapidly, then he scrambles down to the ground floor to initiate a new day of intense and profound bodily and mental contact with Pif's guru goddess: my dear Sancta Sophia.

All this would be nice and orderly except for the fact that Pif started acting yesterday, in the late afternoon, as if he might be contemplating a kind of crossing of the Rubicon. To put it bluntly, Pif indicated explicitly to his mistress, Alison, that he was quite happy down at my place, with Sophia, and that he didn't particularly wish to go home.

This evening, the same thing happened. Alison bowled in on her scooter, as usual, and ordered her dog to follow her back up the hill, to their home. But Pif didn't agree. He stayed put at Gamone. I suggested to Alison that, if she were to accept the idea of Pif wearing the red collar I gave him a fortnight ago, she might be able to lead him calmly back home. But it was Alison who started to get hot around the collar, declaring sillily that it was intolerable that her dog didn't obey her. The truth of the matter, of course, is that Pif is perfectly happy here, on our soft clover lawn, in the company of a wise and adept female [Sophia], not to mention a kind meat-eating friend [me, the alpha dog], and that he's smart enough to figure out that little can be gained by trotting back up to the stark house from which his mistress Alison is usually absent.

Finally, I told Alison that I would try to "launch" Pif on the homeward journey. She would start off back home on her scooter while I would race alongside with Pif in my arms. Then her dog would run alongside us, attached to a lead. Finally, in mid-action, I gave the lead to Alison and the two of them went trotting off home together, successfully.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm aware that the scenario is likely to be similar. Be you Caesar, or be you Pif, once you've decided to go beyond a point of no return, you don't look backwards. What I'm hoping is that Alison might be smart enough to park her bloody scooter, walk down here, take up Pif in her arms, kiss him fondly, carry him back up to her place and treat him to a nice welcome-home dish of raw meat.

Now, there might be Freudians in the audience who imagine that I see myself in the role of Pif. No way. Through her skills with horses and her behavior, Alison is indeed a splendid specimen of what we used to call a tomboy back in rural Australia. Amused readers who knew me as an adolescent might well imagine superficial associations with my marvelous Graftonian friends Anne F [a celebrated horsewoman, deceased in 2006] and Alison G [my first female object of adoration and desire]. No, sadly, Pif and I, not to mention my neighbor Alison, are truly not in the same ballpark as these mythical female creatures of my youth, of another age.

Ultimate travel

It was particularly hot yesterday. Towards the end of the afternoon, when Pif had reluctantly gone home (after ten minutes of persuasion from his mistress Alison, who wasn't happy with her dog's new behavior), I took Sophia down to Pont-en-Royans for a swim in the Bourne. Lots of people had gathered there for the annual Wood Festival... which is not very exciting. Hearing the sound of a lawnmower above my head, I looked up and saw a fellow flying a paraglider above the village.

An engine was attached to his back, with a propeller housed in what looked like a big silver bicycle wheel. In this way, he was able to fly/glide at a constant low altitude. He made it look as easy to get around in the sky as riding a bike. You could almost imagine him using this contraption to fly down to St-Jean-en-Royans to buy his groceries.

Entertaining information

As I've pointed out already, French people can be intrigued when they hear me talk. I've got a slightly strange accent, which people can rarely pin down, whereas my French grammar is fine and I use a good vocabulary. So, I'm often asked, politely, where I'm from. As soon as I say Australia, people are more intrigued than ever. First, there aren't many of us here in France, so we're rare birds. Second, there has been so much hype over the years about Australia being an exotic earthly paradise that French people are frankly surprised that any Australian citizen would decide to dwell in such an everyday place as France.

Last night, on prime-time TV, I watched a two-hour documentary about Australia. I make a point of watching such stuff because it's generally entertaining. Besides, the next time I'm called upon to tell a French person where I come from, he or she is likely to enhance the conversation with facts from this latest TV documentary about Australia. So, it's a good idea for me to keep abreast of such background information.

What amused me, yesterday evening, was that the French producer used a simple recipe that tricked viewers (and even the Télérama critic) into thinking that we were watching an original travelogue. He had simply unearthed half a dozen more or less exotic video sequences in remote corners of the continent. Then he concocted a map in which we see an animated kangaroo hopping from one place to the next, while the human presenter talked as if he and his camera crew were actually traveling along the same itinerary as the kangaroo, in a vaguely east-to-west journey across Australia. To make it look like an authentic travelogue, the presenter did in fact get himself filmed, two or three times, against a conventional Australian background. For example, there was a short conversation between the presenter and an old Aborigine seated on the ground alongside Uluru, doing his TV duties, who trotted out all the standard banalities: legends from tribal elders, the sacred rocks, the Dream Time, etc. In reality, I had already seen most of the video sequences in this allegedly new production, since some of them were four or five years old.

The show opened with shots of the boxing troupe of Fred Brophy in Queensland.

When I was a kid in Grafton, that was a popular attraction during the three-day agricultural show. I liked to watch the presentation of the boxers outside the tent, and the manager's call for challengers, enticing them with the promise of monetary gains. The proceedings were accompanied by the clanging of a brass bell and the pounding of a bass drum, which combined to produce a kind of martial music. Inside the tent, once the show actually got under way, the atmosphere was sweaty and spartan, almost sordid, since there was nothing like a real ring.

The TV kangaroo then hopped towards a remote place where we were able to see the Outback postal service in action.

Curiously, the aircraft was carrying three paying passengers: tourists doing the round trip with the postman. At one stop, as they waited in the shade of a tree, brushing flies from their faces, these one-day visitors expressed their astonishment that people could actually live permanently in the places they were discovering.

The next sequence was frankly surrealistic. It showed preparations for an open-air desert ball at a spot named Curdimurka. You might think of it as the Outback equivalent of an opera weekend at Glyndebourne in England, or maybe a small-scale reincarnation of a remote Woodstock. Since this get-together was taking place in Australia, where distances are vast, the future dancers arrived in private aircraft, with their ball attire in suitcases. All the images were dominated by signs of heat, dust and wind, with the promise of showers under punctured food cans wired to overhead taps. TV viewers might well wonder whether these people were really having a ball, as the saying goes... but let's suppose so. At the scheduled time for the ball to get under way, a terrible sand storm blew up. The TV documentary didn't really tell viewers what happened after that unexpected intrusion of the elements. By searching on the Internet, I learned that the sand storm stopped the dancing in the desert back in 2004, and the concept of the Curdimurka Ball, imagined as a regular two-yearly event, died too on that hot windy evening.

Next, the documentary skipped to a presentation of the Aboriginal star David Gulpilil, first on stage for his one-man show at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2004, and then at his home place in the Northern Territory.

Seeing this charming fellow [looking much younger than in the above photo] strutting around behind the jawbones of a crocodile or the skull and horns of a buffalo has much the same effect upon me as watching Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin in filmed action. A little bit goes a long way.

At one point in the documentary, we saw this celebrated pub on the Oodnadatta Track. The guy in charge looked a little like a wanted Serbian war criminal in disguise.

It must be bloody uncomfortable to have a big beard like that, in the dust and heat, particularly when you've also got into the habit of wearing a hat indoors... but maybe it plays a positive role in keeping the flies away. And you can drink beer non-stop to keep cool.

There were countless other exotic anecdotes in the two-hour documentary. We saw an Aboriginal chef collecting witchetty grubs in the bush and cooking them for customers of his fashionable city restaurant. We saw fellows wading through a crocodile-infested swamp to obtain eggs for a local farm that breeds salt-water crocodiles for leather. We saw helicopters being used to round up cattle and camels. Etc, etc.

All in all, it was a worthwhile evening of entertainment for me. The next time French people, hearing my accent, ask me where I'm from, I'm determined to spin a hell of a good yarn. I'll tell them that, while flying on a Qantas plane from my camel ranch near Darwin for a weekend opera outing in Sydney, my seat dropped out through a big hole in the floor of the Boeing, whereupon I landed in a swamp full of crocodiles, with dingoes roaming around on the shore. I've still got to work out how I got safely from there up to Paris, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Maybe, for inspiration, I need to watch a few more good Aussie travelogues of the "made in France" kind.

China's promises

People who are about to fall into a state of TV enthrallment during the Olympic Games might take a few minutes off to reflect upon what has happened in China since 2001, when Beijing was designated as the host city for 2008. I'm thinking, not of air pollution, but of the promises of a political nature made by the Chinese government.

Concerning access to the Internet, Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC [International Olympic Commitee], claimed recently that there would be no Internet censure in China during the Games.

Today, on the contrary, the IOC admitted that it had always known that China would never remove Internet restrictions for foreign journalists covering the Games. Even the websites of the celebrated Falun Gong spiritual movement, with millions of adepts in China and throughout the world, are outlawed. [Click the logo to visit their information center... unless you happen to be located in China.]

Concerning Tibet, the current situation is hard to analyze. On the one hand, it's a fact that China recently sent two senior Communist officials to meet up with Tibetan negotiators. On the other hand, reports from the exiled Tibetan government in India claim that over 200 people have been killed in violence in Tibet over the last four months.

Finally, in the domain of human rights, there is no more eloquent statement of China's broken promises than the Amnesty International report on this subject. [Once again, unless you happen to be located in China, you can access the Amnesty website simply by clicking the following banner.]

We read, on the first page of this report: Regrettably, since the publication of Amnesty International’s last Olympics Countdown report on 1 April 2008, there has been no progress towards fulfilling these promises, only continued deterioration. Unless the authorities make a swift change of direction, the legacy of the Beijing Olympics will not be positive for human rights in China.

New kind of news tool

No sooner had I informed my friend Corina [the cultivated young lady who signs her perspicacious Antipodes comments as cm] that I was contemplating the creation of the French Leaves blog than she told me, by return email, that she was working in a similar domain, with a rather different approach.

[Click the banner to access her new website.]

In examining Corina's approach, I realize that we're all looking for ways of assimilating, organizing and digesting the stream of challenging messages we receive every day through the Internet.

Incidentally, in case you're wondering why there's a bat in the banner, I'll give you a hint. Corina is Romanian. In fact, I would be happy if Corina were to realize that her notorious 15th-century compatriot is no longer the most batty vampire-oriented personage who has ever existed. In chapter 2 of his brilliant book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins describes these delightful animals in such a lovable in-depth way that I've developed an intense admiration for these tiny creatures, who are my constant friends at Gamone.

New blog

For a long time, I've been aware of the fact that my Antipodes blog is a relatively personal affair, which tackles a broad and heterogeneous range of topics, often in an undisciplined style. The Antipodean notion is bipolar. For Europeans, the Antipodes is Australia and New Zealand. For an Australian like me, when I was a youth, my exciting vision of the Antipodes was an unknown land named France on the other side of the planet Earth. In my blog, no doubt, there are traces of these two complementary attitudes. If so, I would like it to stay that way.

On the other hand, I've often been tempted to concentrate on a more precise objective: namely, an English-language presentation of various French themes in domains such as politics, culture, science and technology, sport, etc. So, I've finally decided to launch a second blog, with that aim in mind.

[Click the banner to access a prototype version of the new blog.]

The web address of this new blog is http://skyvington.com

Normally, my articles should be more objective and less personal than those in Antipodes. Also, the rhythm will be considerably slower: maybe a new article every three or four days. You won't, of course, find anything in this new blog about Gamone, Sophia, my donkeys Moshé and Mandrin, my billy-goat Gavroche, Richard Dawkins, etc. And there probably won't be many references to my native land, Australia.

For readers who might be interested in this kind of French-oriented blog, I beg you to be patient. For the moment, I'm trying to master the new software tool, called WordPress, which is a total do-it-yourself thing. So, I'll need some time to get accustomed to this new challenge that I've set myself.

POST SCRIPTUM

I've made a Blogger-based version of this new blog at http://frenchleaves.blogspot.com

Between the WordPress and Blogger versions, which is better? As far as I'm concerned, it was a thrill to build my own WordPress system, but I suspect it's more efficient and rapid to stick to the Blogger environment. I'll have to think about it...

New search engine

Today is the launch date for a new search engine named Cuil, pronounced cool, built by former Google employees.
[Click the image to access the tool.]

For people accustomed, like me, to using Google, Cuil is a little weird, primarily because it churns out astronomical quantities of links. In the case of an author of a book, for example, Guil indicates every imaginable website that mentions the book. My first impression is that this might be overkill. But it's preferable to play around with Cuil for a while, and give it time to eliminate any teething problems, before forming a judgment.