Hell's just across the street

Whenever the Tour de France runs into cold rain, icy winds, fog or sleet, you can be sure that a French cycling commentator, to describe the weather conditions, is going to drag out one of their favorite adjectives: dantesque, meaning "atrocious". The first time I heard this highfalutin epithet, I found it funny, because Dante Alighieri [1265-1321] was renowned for his vision of Hell, which we don't usually imagine as a cold damp place. Dante's literary Hell is in fact a terribly complex environment, with a little bit of everything in the way of horrible tribulations... including slippery slopes covered in wet mud.

In his play entitled No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the famous but misunderstood claim: "Hell is other people." He wasn't saying that other people drive us crazy, and that everything would be so much nicer on Earth if we were all alone. Sartre was merely making a two-step observation:

1. An individual constructs a representation of himself by "digesting" what other people seem to be saying and thinking about him. We tend to see ourselves in the "mirror" provided by the attitudes towards us of other people: friends, enemies, etc.

2. When the global assessment provided by these reflections from other people seems to be a real mess [I'm paraphrasing Sartre in crude terms], then it's as if these outside commentators have thrown us into a personal Hell. On the other hand, it might happen that other people are not formulating all that many bad ideas about you. What's more, you might not give a fuck about what other people are saying about you, be it negative or positive. In either of these two happy cases, Hell ceases to exist for you. As Sartre puts it, such fortunate folk are "condemned to be free".

I have the impression that the existentialist Sartre and the zoologist Richard Dawkins are saying much the same thing. God does not exist, so there is no divine plan for the essence of human beings. We might indeed be struck down by lightning, just as we might become the object of "evil vibrations" from other people who desire to impose Hell upon us. But our existentialist freedom to be what we wish to be remains untarnished. We are never obliged to assume a role of victims, neither of brutal Nature nor of Others.

Let's change the background. My birthplace, Grafton, Australia: a sleepy country town (locals like to call it a city) that's proud of its jacaranda trees and its aging bridge across the Clarence River. Let's nudge the background a little bit more, to talk of jails. Before Australia became a nation, it was a vast prison. In my July 2007 article History of my birthplace [display], I mentioned the excellent historical work by Robert Hughes entitled The Fatal Shore, which depicts starkly the terrible penal system that the British installed in the Antipodes. For many decades, Australia's early history was dominated by the abominable treatment of convicts and the continent's indigenous people. Later, the two strands of horror would flow together, in the sense that the majority of inmates in many Australian jails were Aborigines. [This was the case in Fremantle, for example, where I resided in the shadow of their jail in 1986-1987.]

The quiet town of Grafton erected an ominous jail back in 1893... even before they got around to building a town hall and council chambers.

The fortress is still there, inside the city, just across the street from the local hospital... where my brother was treated for a trauma after a horse accident in the 1950s, where my father died in 1978.

This jail in the heart of my birthplace has always been a striking example of an elephant in the living room. Graftonians were all aware that the jail existed, but nobody ever spoke about it. Visiting the hospital, we would make an effort to avoid looking across at the scene on the other side of the street, where the more docile inmates were working in potato fields, behind barbed-wire fences, with rifle-pointing guards observing events from corner towers. Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this kind of situation. Many great cities such as Paris and Marseille have giant prisons in their midst. This is no more shocking (indeed less so, in my opinion) than the countless Breton towns centered around cemeteries, as if the ideal motivation for building a dynamic society consisted of reminding citizens constantly that they were mortal. The only difference is that a cemetery concerns the dead, who no longer care about how they're being treated, whereas a jail inside a social entity such as a city concerns living human beings, whose treatment should remain the object of our vigilant attention. Unfortunately, at Grafton, we knew nothing about what might be happening inside the walls, and we cared even less, for this phenomenon failed to disturb our anesthetized and antiseptic sense of the distinction between what might be humanly acceptable or unacceptable in the outside world. Stupendous error: the "outside world" of tortured inmates happened to lie just across the street.

Meanwhile, I attended Latin classes with Tom Mogan, whose father was the governor of Grafton Jail. Tom was a devout Catholic, and I imagined vaguely that this might have something to do with his desire to learn Latin. After school hours, Tom never invited any of us to his home in Hoof Street: the governor's residence. So we knew nothing about our mate Tom... who went on to become a priest, working with Aborigines in Western Australian, before his premature death.

I attach, with no comments, a public document concerning the period during which I was a high school student in Grafton and the father of my mate Tom was governor of Grafton Jail:

Australian studies in law, crime and justice
The abuse of prisoners in New South Wales 1943-76

Published in:
Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector
P N Grabosky
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989 ISBN 0 642 14605 5
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series); pp. 27-46

The punishment of convicted criminals is an issue which has indelibly marked the two hundred-year-old history of European settlement in New South Wales. Indeed, a central purpose of the original colonisation in 1788 was to relieve overcrowded conditions in British prisons. For its first thirty years, the colony of New South Wales was little more than a military prison.

Although the severity with which the convicts were punished for various breaches of penal discipline defies precise analysis, such limited statistics as do exist depict a regime of grim brutality. Over 42,000 floggings (with an average of more than 40 lashes per flogging) and 240 executions by hanging were officially recorded for the period 1830-37 (Historical Records of Australia, vol. 1, no. 19, p. 654).

A century later, penal methods had evolved substantially - at least in theory. The beating of prisoners was proscribed by law. But well into the second half of the twentieth century, many ugly vestiges of British colonisation were still recognisable in the prisons of New South Wales.

Grafton

During World War II, increasing tensions in the state's prisons, and a number of serious assaults on prison officers, led the then NSW Prisons Department to use Grafton Gaol to house the state's most intractable prisoners. The penal methods implemented there over the following thirty-three year period were described by a Royal Commissioner as a 'regime of terror', '... brutal, savage and sometimes sadistic'. The Commissioner referred to the period in question as 'one of the most sordid and shameful episodes in NSW penal history' (New South Wales 1978, p. 108).

He concluded:

It is the view of the Commission that every prison officer who served at Grafton during the time it was used as a gaol for intractables must have known of its brutal regime. The majority of them, if not all, would have taken part in the illegal assaults on prisoners (New South Wales 1978, P. 119).

The practices in question consisted of the systematic beating of prisoners upon their arrival at Grafton, euphemistically termed a 'reception biff, and further physical assaults in the event of breaches of gaol rules during their subsequent incarceration there. In other instances, beatings were administered on a more or less random basis. In most cases, the assaults took place without violence or provocation by prisoners (Zdenkowski & Brown 1982, pp. 181-2 and 240-1).

Prisoners arrived at Grafton customarily attired in overalls and slippers, their arms strapped to their sides by a security belt to which their wrists were handcuffed. In the words of Mr Justice Nagle:

In some instances, the beatings began even before the security belt and handcuffs were removed. The beatings were usually administered by three or four officers wielding rubber batons. The prisoner was taken into a yard, ordered to strip, searched, and then the biff began. The word biff by no means describes the brutal beating which ensued. A former prison officer, Mr J.J. Pettit, described it: ,sometimes three, four or five of them would assault the prisoner with their batons to a condition of semi-consciousness. On occasions the prisoner urinates, and his nervous system ceases to function normally'. If most of the prisoners are to be believed, the officers had no compunction about beating them around their backs and heads; nor were they averse to kicking them when they were on the ground. They invariably abused them while they were hitting them, calling them 'bastards', 'cunts' and other abusive names. Sometimes they threatened to kill them (New South Wales 1978, P. 110).

The Royal Commissioner went on to quote a former Grafton prisoner, a local resident who had served a short term for failing to meet maintenance payments, and who was thereby spared violent treatment:

Later one afternoon ... I heard a commotion coming from an adjacent cell underneath in the 'trac' section. I could hear a lot of screaming and shouting and also the sound of thuds hitting against something. It went on for at least three minutes, I then heard the sound of a cell door slamming. The intense screaming then continued and its direction appeared to be moving. I then heard the same screaming coming from the yard. It lasted for some time further, and finally disappeared. The next morning at about 7.00 am I and other prisoners went into that yard. I saw what appeared to be pools of blood of considerable quantity on the concrete as well as on the path leading to the wood-heap.

He described the second incident in the following manner.

One afternoon ... I was marching through a walkover near a small yard, and looking towards the pound. I saw officer Wenczel and a prisoner, who was against a wall. Mr Wenczel was flogging him with his baton across his back and shoulders. I saw five to six blows, and the prisoner turned and was struck heavily across the head. Blood spurted from his forehead which was split. He fell on to the ground. The prisoner had his shirt off and blood was appearing on his body. I walked away from the scene (quoted in New South Wales 1978, p. 115).

It was clear, moreover, that the beatings in question were in furtherance of departmental policy; prison officers who testified before the Royal Commission conceded as much (Findlay 1982, p. 46). Departmental correspondence referred to the desirability of 'robust officers' to staff the institution, and for thirty-three years prison officers at Grafton were paid a 'climatic allowance' (New South Wales 1978, p. 108) - certainly an ironic euphemism, as the climate in the Grafton area is arguably the most equable in Australia.

Love me tender... or I'll destroy you!

I don't claim that Pif reasons like that. In fact, as an outcome of my daily training under the guidance of animal experts such as Dawkins and Pinker, I would no longer claim that Pif really "reasons" at all in our everyday human sense. But I believe that his brain functions just as perfectly, just as imperfectly, as mine. I have an immense respect for Pif's brain. And I would be delighted to think that the feeling is reciprocal. Loving Pif tender consists of stroking his belly and associated genitals while he lies stretched out on his back, like an upside-down client in a massage parlor. As for his destructive power, it consists of attacking such objects as wicker dog baskets, cotton and woolen dog blankets, etc. Extrapolating, I believe that Pif might easily destroy either an entire automobile or a rural residence if ever his lovely little mind were to decide that these human artefacts didn't love him tender, as they should. The solution to all these dire possibilities, of course, is to love Pif tender.

Maybe McCain's the father!

I'm aware that I have no grounds for making suggestions concerning the paternity of Mrs Moose's offspring. But there's an odd chance that I might go down in Internet history as the first blogger who hit upon the truth of the great US 2008 Vice-Presidential Affair. [Please keep a copy of this post, indicating the exact time at which it appeared on your computer screen... just in the case the Wikipedia or Guinness Book of Records people ask me for evidence concerning my revelation.]

Now, if ever John McCain were to attack me for drawing fuzzy conclusions about things I ignore, my lawyers would insist that McCain and all the leggy Moose clan must render public their DNA signatures. That would be a modern way of going about things. Public figures have always been expected to reveal the true details of their personal state of health... or illness, as the case may be. Ample DNA data would have the advantage of letting us guess beforehand what might possibly go wrong with the candidate. Now, don't try to tell me that personal data about a potential American president and vice-president concerns only the citizens of the USA. Even such a simple thing as the IQ of George W Bush turned into a planetary catastrophe that has affected us all.

Juicy publicity

Before this sexy ad was aired, few people were aware that all kinds of exotic creatures have a craving for orange-flavored soda water:



It makes you feel like saying: "Yes please, I would like to have some of the same stuff." Apparently, in Britain, this video was judged to be far too sensually explicit. In France, it didn't raise an eyebrow.

Childhood paradise

We all need a vision of Paradise, with a capital P, otherwise we would surely be tempted to step out of the rat race, in one way or another, politely if possible... like Amy Winehouse not turning up to sing in Paris. Return to sender, address unknown. Nobody's home...

Here's a fuzzy scene from one of my childhood visions of Paradise:

At the Mulligan's property at OBX Creek, among other things, I discovered a magic macadamia nut tree. There were three brothers in the vicinity: Athol, Stan and Norman. A small sawmill near the house had produced timber for the dinghy in the above photo, which had the sweet aroma of shellac. The brothers fiddled around with souped-up motor bikes that they raced on a dirt track at Bawden's Bridge over the Orara.

When I returned to Australia in 1967, with my wife and daughter, I was proud to cook dinner for everybody, in my parents' house at Southampton Road in South Grafton. I chose chicken. Athol Mulligan, observing the dish, said: "Billy, your chicken looks like it's been run over by a steamroller." And everybody christened my dish, instantaneously, Continental Chook.

Here at Gamone, in the company of Sophia, I still serve up Continental Chook from time to time... and I've often dreamt that the Mulligans of OBX Creek might drop in magically, one evening, as guests.

Nightmare: Mrs Moose governs the globe!

Here's a terrifying thought experiment. Hypothesis: John McCain is elected president. Now imagine: In the exciting high-altitude post-electoral atmosphere, while screwing over-energetically his golden girl Cindy, the 72-year-old war hero ruptures some kind of bodily aeronautical valve, fails to manipulate correctly the bail-out device, and crashes in flames to his death. Oh my God! It's youthful Mrs Moose, 44-year-old Sarah Palin from Alaska, totally inexperienced in worldly affairs and primed with primitive religious beliefs, who would then take the reins of the most powerful nation of the planet...

Let's be optimistic. In selecting Simple Sarah as his presidential running-mate (she strikes me as the sort of earthy backwoods creature who knows both how to run and how to mate), John McCain has surely removed all barriers on Barack Obama's highway to Washington.

Professional bias

The expression "professional bias" designates a mental conditioning brought about by the particularities of one's job. A contrived example is that of a race-car driver, say, who overtakes dangerously when he's out driving in the family automobile with his wife and kids.

Long ago, I started to suspect the existence of professional bias due to computer programming. I recall seeing a case of this, for the first time, in the conversational behavior of a colleague in Paris. He would periodically abandon the current topic about which he had been speaking in order to explore such-and-such an aspect in detail. Then, at the end of his detailed exploration, he would return to what he had been saying earlier on. On such occasions, he would inform his listeners that he was implementing the familiar programming concept referred to as a stack. He would do this by pointing out explicitly the moment at which he was about to "push down" (hide momentarily) the initial topic, and then, later on, the moment at which the hidden topic was about to "pop up" (reappear) once again. Insofar as a stack can be composed of multiple levels, which might be exploited in an irregular order, it can quickly become tedious for a listener confronted with a conversationalist with this kind of professional bias.

I soon realized that I myself was afflicted with this professional bias, which happens to infuriate my ex-wife and our two children. I have an even worse affliction due to the same causes. Faced with an ordinary real-world challenge such as building a kitchen cupboard, say, I tend to consider that the task has been satisfactorily completed as soon as I've convinced myself that I know how to perform the task in question, rather than when the intended outcome of the project has indeed become a reality. I conceal this strange outlook, unwittingly, behind a verb that also infuriates my ex-wife and children. I speak of "mastering a situation", which is a synonym for knowing how to do something. Inversely, whenever I'm reprimanded because I haven't actually done something I should have done, I get upset by the suggestion that I might not "master the situation" in an ideal fashion. In my mind, the fact that the job has not in fact been performed yet is of lesser importance than my conviction that I know how to do it. These reactions are of course pure symptoms of professional bias due to excessive immersion in computer programming activities, where the only thing that counts is the existence of adequate algorithms for performing tasks, no matter whether or not the algorithms in question have actually been applied to solve specific problems, or carry out particular computational jobs. I would be a hopeless boss of a small company (or a big one, for that matter). When the employees complained that they hadn't received their pay checks, I would say: "What's all the fuss about? Everything's in perfect order, and our computer can print out the payroll rapidly at the flick of a switch! "

Sometimes I felt a little ill at ease to realize that my mind might be warped by my work. I was reminded of a brief image in a film where you have a rear view of a sexton who kneels down piously on his right knee every time he passes in front of the altar. When the camera swings around to provide us with a front view of the dear man, we discover that he has worn a knee-level hole in the right leg of his trousers. I wondered whether excessive computer thinking might not have worn a hole in my mind.

Things have advanced rapidly since the time when I had such qualms. From one end to the other of a book such as How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, which is already over ten years old, the author—a professor psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—exploits the so-called computational theory of the mind, according to which everything aspect of human thinking can and must be explained in terms of computing-programming paradigms and machine metaphors. When I wrote Machina Sapiens back in 1976, I thought at times that I might be a bit reckless in imagining that computers might get around, one day, to "thinking" in a more-or-less human-like fashion. Today, on the contrary, I realize that I didn't go nearly far enough in suggesting that, since Man is a kind of machine, it is quite feasible to imagine machines that will end up behaving much like human beings. We realize, though, that the task will be extremely difficult, and probably take a long time, not because there's anything of a non-mechanical nature in a human being, but because Evolution has had an immensely long time to put together the spectacular machine called Homo sapiens.

This man, named Douglas A Melton, is a US researcher in genetics, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, whose goal consists of creating cells that are missing or defective in certain patients, particularly those suffering from diabetes. Yesterday, the journal Nature revealed that Melton's group has made a great step towards modifying the function of adult cells. This operation is designated, by means of a pure computing metaphor, as reprogramming the function of the cells. The Washington Post described the breakthrough as follows:

Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.

Here, the notion of molecular "switches" being "flipped" sounds like electronic engineering. In fact, it is computer talk, reflecting the fact that the DNA in a cell can be considered as a purely digital storage device, like the memory of a computer.

Up until last year, researchers in medical genetics were obliged to work with authentic embryonic cells, and this disturbed religious folk who felt that scientists were acting unethically. Then there was the welcome discovery that adult cells of any kind could be transformed into an embryonic state, enabling them to be coaxed into developing into any kind of desired cell for experimental work. The outcome of the Harvard work is that it will be possible to avoid the necessity of returning to the embryonic level, since adult cells will be reprogrammed in such a way that they actually become cells of a related kind.

For the moment, Melton and his fellow researchers have been working only with the cells of mice. So, a lot of work still remains to be done before the successful creation of a revolutionary branch of medicine that might be referred to as genetic surgery. In that future domain, based upon the notion of reprogramming human cell functions, it's likely that the technicians will talk among themselves, to a large extent, in the jargon of computer programmers.

No need for talk

In a recent blog post, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wrote:

As most of you know, I draw a comic featuring a guy who inexplicably has no mouth, who lives with a cartoon dog that inexplicably has no mouth. And I end up with Spasmodic Dysphonia, a condition that prevents me from speaking.

I'm reminded of an anecdote back at the time, thirty years ago, when I was writing a tourist guidebook about Great Britain. I asked for permission to use a comic strip [display] I'd seen in Paris-Match drawn by the French cartoonist Pat Mallet, who happens to be a few months younger than me. The authorization came by return mail, and the letter included a personal phone number. So I decided to phone up Pat Mallet to thank him. A friendly male voice told me it was a pleasure to collaborate in a book about the folk on the other side of the English Channel (known, in French, as La Manche).

ME: For months, I've been faced with the daily task of finding words to describe Great Britain. In the case of your comic strip, I'm terribly impressed by your skill in describing a typical aspect of London without using any words whatsoever.

VOICE AT THE OTHER END OF THE LINE: I must point out that you're not speaking with Pat Mallet himself. I'm his father, and I handle his phone calls. Pat himself has been totally deaf since the age of nine, and unable to communicate by speech.

I love this wordless cover from a Pat Mallet album of 1985, published by Glénat, called Ainsi est la vie (Such is life):

This marvelous drawing of a poetic dog admiring the sunset from the parapet of a luxurious seaside restaurant, while all the humans are lost in conversation, is a perfect illustration of the frivolity (at times) of speech. [And there I've gone again, adding unnecessary words.]

New school year for French diplomacy

The transition period from the end of August to the start of September is referred to, in French, as the rentrée: the return to work and serious affairs, after the summer vacation (for the fortunate few who can afford vacations). Certain observers might consider that diplomats, like retired employees (such as me), are on full-time vacation, in that they don't have to trot off to a dull office in a French city every weekday. Fair enough. You might recall that, in my Guinea pig article of 17 July 2008 [display], I joked about the fact that my weekly dose of experimental pills constitutes a primitive calendar. This morning, at my annual checkup at Romans, the Inserm guy asked me how I was coping with their pills, and I told him that story. He replied: "In any case, your entire daily existence is composed, now, of weekends." The poor bastard must be overworked.

Every year since 1993, the French Republic has been organizing an annual get-together in Paris of its 180 ambassadors and senior administrators of the prestigious Quay d'Orsay ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here's a photo of last year's class:

The 16th Conférence des Ambassadeurs has just got under way, and it will last for three days.

The diplomatic role of France in the world has been enhanced, since July, by the fact that the Republic has been presiding over the European Union. Obviously, the primary preoccupation of the present conference is the situation in Georgia. In his opening address, today, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted upon the necessity of Russia's immediate retreat from the occupied provinces of Georgia.

Meanwhile, the foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has a grand planetary vision for French Foreign Affairs. He would like to see the the Quai d'Orsay evolving into a "ministry of globalization". This change should lead to both modernization and cost-cutting in France's 158 embassies and 21 multilateral representations throughout the world. If and when these reforms are enacted, there'll be less glitter in French diplomacy. Ideally, the glamor, foie gras and champagne will be replaced by sound suggestions about making the planet a more peaceful and pleasant place for humanity. We'll see...

Black is tricolor

There's no doubt about the fact that France supports Obama. The blue, white and red colors of the French tricolor are designated in French as bleu, blanc, rouge. But, in the joyous days of France's soccer victory in 1998, a new color system emerged, designated as black, blanc, beur. What's this new color, beur? It's inverted slang for "Arabe". Effectively, French society today is a mixture of dyed-in-the-wool oldtimers named Dupont or Martin, or something like that, and all kinds of exotic newcomers from diverse backgrounds. A new melting pot has come into existence.

France is unlikely to retain fond memories of George W Bush and his old pal Donald Rumsfeld, searching for illusive weapons of mass destruction in their Axis of Evil. What stupidity, shared by Blair in the UK and Howard in Australia. The less said, the better...

Traveler with baggage

Even when the journey's only a couple of hundred meters long (the distance between our two houses at Gamone), the voyager will travel with his basic luggage. For a human, this might start with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. For Pif, it's his plastic "bone", which squeaks when it's bitten.

Our canine neighbor Pif, belonging to Alison, intrigues Sophia and me. For a start, he often runs around in circles trying to catch his tail.

Pif doesn't quite know what to make of the smelly billy-goat Gavroche, roughly his same size, when he drops in at the house for his daily dish of cereals.

The two animals share a common fascination for photographers, and look upwards with a view to understanding what's happening.

In such situations, Pif's floppy ears bend backwards, revealing their pink interior. There's no such problem for the rigid ears of Gavroche. Meanwhile, the great canine queen of Gamone resides calmly, as usual, in an ethereal domain, well above such trivial earthly agitation.

It's eleven o'clock on a sunny Monday morning, and Pif has just arrived at Gamone, full of smiles, and jumping (literally) with joy. There can be problems, of an evening, in persuading the delightful dog to go back home with Alison when she returns from work (as a waitress in the restaurant at the famous caves of Choranche) on her scooter. Let's say, to simplify, that Pif takes pleasure in having two homes. I'll be sad when Alison takes him away to Spain in a few weeks. It goes without saying that Pif will be traveling, as usual, with his squeaking bone.

ADDENDUM: Just after finishing the above post, I received an unexpected visit from my Choranche neighbors Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier, who stayed here for a delightful outdoors lunch in the shade of my giant linden tree. Among other things, they were able to observe the case of Pif at first hand. Their conclusions: It would appear that Pif has moved in at my place, heart and soul. And he seems to lead a joyful existence here. Be that as it may, we all feel that it would be unwise for Alison to set off to an unknown lifestyle in Spain, in three weeks' time, with Pif in tow. Tineke suggested that I should write a letter to Alison offering to hold on to her dog up until she gets settled in Spain, and is ready to receive him. I think I'll do this. On the other hand, I don't wish to appear dog-matic. Insofar as it's obvious that I'm fond of Pif, it would be incorrect to think that I simply wish to hang on to this little creature. On the contrary, it would be great if this dog were to discover the exciting atmosphere of a horse ranch in Spain. But it would be wrong if Pif were to be more or less abandoned by Alison in Spain, as has been the case at Gamone.

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