Homemade furniture

My title is wrong. What I want to talk about is not exactly home-made, but rather home-designed, furniture. For example, I love reading in bed of an evening, before going to sleep. And this means that I need an ideal lamp, which can be oriented in such a way that it lights up my book but doesn't shine in my eyes. It's not exactly the same problem as computer lighting, which I've solved ideally by means of fluorescent U-tubes of the following kind:

This solution doesn't work well for reading in bed, because the lamp head can't be swiveled as much as one would like. So, I set out to find an ideal solution.

Parenthesis. To my mind, bedtime activities of all kinds are tremendously important. Personally, I'm afraid I seem to have moved beyond the stage of sexual gymnastics, unfortunately, for want of female partners in the Vercors wilderness. Half an hour ago, my lovely young neighbor Alison astonished me (I'm still under the shock) by revealing spontaneously that she sleeps with her dog Pif (which, incidentally, explains a hell of a lot of things), but that's not exactly what I had in mind when talking of bedtime activities. What I'm thinking about, precisely, is the possibility of snuggling into bed with a fine book by Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker, etc. Don't quote me as saying that it's better than sex. But almost...

Above all, I needed a bedside table. And I soon decided that the best solution (I've already adopted this approach for my computer desk) consisted of asking an expert tradesman to build me the steel frame of the ideal table.

Cost = 55 euros. Next, I needed a couple of walnut slabs. That's the point at which the design of furniture became a splendid quest for authenticity. I soon located a timber mill alongside the mysterious tiny village of Albenc, known to Nostredamus, described in my article of 10 October 2007 entitled Intriguing tourist [display]. I purchased an aged slab of walnut. Cost = 30 euros. I now await the cabinet-maker's trivial invoice for two finished walnut shelves. What I'm trying to say is that designing one's custom-made furniture can be—in the case of a simple bedside steel-and-walnut structure—an exhilarating low-cost experience... with warm repercussions, after effects, every time you snuggle into bed with a good book.

Inventor of the hang glider

This morning, in a villa on the slopes of the Chartreuse mountain range above Grenoble, I finally met up with a celebrated fellow-Australian, John Dickenson, who is recognized internationally as the inventor of the hang glider.

[Click the photo to visit the Dickenson website, based upon the remarkable
research efforts of an inspired New Zealander, Graeme Henderson.]

John and his wife are staying with a French enthusiast of aeronautical history, Stéphane Malbos, who was responsible for publicizing the Dickenson story, years ago, at a time when few Australians were aware that this revolutionary invention—giving humans the power to glide like eagles—had been made in 1963 in Grafton, New South Wales... which happens to be the rural town where I was born in 1940.

This weekend, Stéphane will be taking John Dickenson along to France's annual high mass of hang gliding: the Icarus Cup pageant in the nearby town of St-Hilaire-du-Touvet, which presents all kinds of exotic variations on the hang-gliding theme.

[Click the poster to visit their website. If you don't read French,
you can find amusing images of hang-glider specimens.]

This morning's encounter with John Dickenson was immensely moving. I sensed immediately that I was in the presence of a man of imagination, a quietly-spoken inventor of the Leonardo da Vinci kind. It's sad to learn that a tiny bunch of jealous loud-spoken usurpers, some of whom have money and influence, have been advancing empty arguments in an evil attempt to deprive John Dickenson of the honors in aeronautical history that are his due.

High-tech Pif

Not having seen Pif for several days, I was happy to glimpse his tiny black silhouette this morning. He stood strangely still at a corner of the road, gazing down towards Sophia and me.

I sensed immediately that there was a change in Pif's behavior, for he seemed to hesitate before coming down to meet up with us. But, after a few minutes, he finally dashed down.

I was amused to see that Pif now wears a nice little blue metal badge informing us that he has an electronic chip implanted in his body. For Alison to resort to such technology, I would guess that Pif has probably been doing a few disappearing tricks over the last couple of weeks.

After romping around with Sophia for twenty minutes or so, Pif was happy to gulp down the usual food I offer him whenever he visits us.

As always, he splashed his broad snout around in the bowl of water in front of the house.

Then, he surprised me by calmly trotting off back home, like a wise little dog. This behavior was so unexpected that I wondered, for an instant, whether Pif might not be under the influence of a mysterious high-tech homing device. A more plausible explanation: Maybe Pif has simply attained the canine equivalent of the age of reason.

PS As of this morning (Wednesday 17), I realized that my belief that Pif might have attained an age of wisdom was probably a false alert. The dog arrived here early this morning, as excited as ever, to race around madly with Sophia, well before his mistress left their house on her noisy scooter. And there are no signs yet that he's thinking of trotting back up home. Meanwhile, I've reminded Pif that, once he leaves Gamone and settles in Spain with his mistress, Sophia and I will expect him to send us a postcard from time to time.

I've just spoken with Alison Morin. She tells me they'll be leaving for Spain next Monday. I'm relieved to learn that Pif gets on wonderfully well with other dogs, and that he does in fact calm down and behave himself when he's in a new and unknown environment. In Spain, he'll be living with Alison in a house that is ready to welcome him. As for his electronic chip, Alison tells me that it was actually implanted several months ago, but she had only recently thought of attaching the badge to Pif's collar. Apparently, as of next year, all domestic animals (such as Sophia, Gavroche, Moshé and Mandrin) will need to carry such chips. Maybe I should ask the authorities if they can install one in me, too. Who knows? It might turn out to be useful...

Is there such a thing as French blood?

The question in my title is deliberately rhetorical and provocative, merely to draw attention. It's like a newspaper heading such as: Must man who bit dog wear muzzle? A more rigorous down-to-earth title for the present post would have been: Are there correlations between DNA and the geographical origins of Europeans? It would appear that the answer to that intriguing question is yes. In any case, what I want to do in this post is to summarize what I've understood—if anything at all—about this question, and about the answers provided by research assisted by the GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company. Maybe readers who are better versed in genetics than me might correct possible blunders in what I have to say... or they might consider that this subject is so fuzzy that it's better not to say anything at all.

Let's start at the beginning. We all know that the basic stuff of life, DNA, can be imagined as a lengthy "word" written by means of only four "letters". In the following fragment of DNA, I've represented the four "letters" by arbitrary colors:

Now, let me drop the inverted commas around "letter": a metaphor for nucleotide. From one human being to another, throughout the planet, 99% of DNA sequences are identical. But every now and again, for such-and-such a fragment of DNA, one of the letters might be different, as illustrated here:

As you can see, in the normal fragment of DNA, the third letter is green, whereas in the case of the individual we've just encountered, the third letter is red. If this kind of variation occurs for at least one in every hundred new individuals they examine, geneticists refer to the changed letter as an SNP, pronounced "snip". In the case of humans, potential snips are commonplace. They probably number around 3 million. But, as I said, for any particular snip, only a small proportion of humans will possess the changed letter. Concerning the vast majority of snips, geneticists have no idea whatsoever of the consequences upon an individual, if any, of the changed letter. On the other hand, certain snips have been identified as sources of possible health problems, meaning that they can be used as medical indicators... which is why snips are of interest to pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline.

Let's get back to the question of European geography. The research project was headed by Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at Erasmus University at Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Researchers were able to use a vast collection of European DNA samples that had been obtained by GlaxoSmithKline in the context of their constant hunt for genes responsible for side effects brought about by certain pharmaceutical products. Within the DNA sample for each European studied by Kayser's teams (including researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles), half a million snips were examined. When I say "examined", that merely means that the researchers noted whether each snip letter, for that individual, was normal or anomalous. The result of this analysis was a huge collection of yes/no snip data for each person being studied. Using conventional number-crunching methods, all this data was reduced in such a way that the individual's snip profile could be represented as a point on a two-dimensional graph. And the researchers added an elementary item of information to each point: namely, the place where that individual happened to be born.

Well, the results were astounding. All the points corresponding to individuals born in France formed a cluster, which was located alongside another cluster of the points corresponding to individuals born in Italy, and so on... In other words, the geneticists' graph of snip profiles was equivalent to a geographical map of Europe! Consequently, it's a fact that, if a new human candidate were to be examined, and his snip profile happened to fall inside the French cluster, there's a good chance that he's a Frenchman.

In fact, there's very little genetic diversity within Europe, because people have remained largely within their territorial borders. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the greatest diversity existed in Mediterranean Europe, whereas Scandinavian, British and Irish data was more uniform. Noah Rosenberg, a geneticist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, concluded: "A pattern in which genes mirror geography is essentially what you would expect from a history in which people moved slowly and mated mainly with their close neighbors."

It's important to understand that this research has little to do with chromosomes, genes and inheritance. It's simply a matter of the statistical analysis of snip data, correlated with geography. It would be crazy to imagine that the researchers are suggesting, for example, that there's a "French gene" that might be injected into an Englishman (Heaven forbid!) to transform him into a Parisian. That would be just as crazy as the idea of a "lipstick gene" for pigs.

Gamone rainbow

There has been so much rain in the region over the last week or so that I welcomed this late Sunday afternoon rainbow over the Bourne, with the sunlit Cournouze in the background. Talking of rainbows, the poetry-inspired book by Richard Dawkins entitled Unweaving the Rainbow [which I've mentioned already in Antipodes] is truly a masterpiece. I should say: yet another Dawkins masterpiece.

Virginity for sale

This charming US specimen of the female sex claims she's a virgin. Based upon that hypothesis, she's offering her body to the highest male bidder/screwer at a starting price of a million bucks. To me, that sounds like an absurdly expensive deal. And it also sounds a bit like what we old-timers used to call prostitution. But I'm sure there'll be takers. The bottom line [no pun intended] is that the young lady, whose code name is Natalie Dylan [Google with this name to obtain the whole "truth" concerning this affair], intends to use her ill-gotten gains to pay her way through university, where she would like to major in family and conjugal psychology.

It's a fact that males often insist upon the virginity of their future spouses. I've heard that, in certain societies, deftly-fingered gentlemen make a living out of patching up ruptured hymens so that maidens are as good as new for their wedding nights.

OK, some of you have guessed it already: I've been waiting for ages to have a pretext for telling one of my favorite dirty jokes. If you happen to be an under-age reader of Antipodes, please go to bed, so that we grown-ups can be left alone to enjoy our childish humor.

JOKE

Veronica knew that saintly Stanislas would be out of his mind if ever he discovered, on their wedding night, that she wasn't a virgin. So, she paid a specialist to install a high-tech AH [artificial hymen] system composed of a flexible nylon frame with an ultra-thin plastic film held in place by elastic supports: a masterpiece of AH engineering.

On their wedding night, everything appeared to be coming along fine. Gentle movements. Sighs. Thrusts. Soft groans of pleasure. Then a loud crack. Stanislas cried out in terror: "What the bloody hell was that?"

Veronica: "Stanislas darling, it was just my virginity that went pop."

Stanislas: "Un-pop it immediately, for Christ's sake. My John Thomas and balls seem to be entangled in a painful mesh of rubber bands!"

Wilderness, the key to Australia's future

I have just received a highly interesting email concerning yesterday's article about the Australian Outback. The author, John Thompson, has kindly authorized me to include this email in my blog. The photos, too, are included by courtesy of the Queensland-based tourism business operated by John and his wife: Nature-Bound Australia. They have two excellent websites:

http://www.natureboundaustralia.com
http://www.naturephotographyaustralia.com

Hi William,

I have just read your blog response to the media article portraying Australia as a failed state. I guess all media releases are drafted around drama and extreme "hooks" but behind this release there is considerable truth.

I have spent more than 30 years taking small groups of people into the Australian bush as a specialist tour operator. We are a boutique business, husband and wife, providing a highly personalised holiday experience and we focus on national parks and wilderness areas. On the side we are constantly in touch with people of the outback, tiny settlements, legend and history. It is true that there is a move by families and individuals away from the bush toward opportunities in the metropolitan areas along the coast. It is called a rural crisis. Banks and essential services and enterprises have vacated leaving small villages and towns in disarray, there are serious health service issues and the list goes on.


There are trends toward large scale property amalgamations being taken up and placed under corporate rather than family control. The plight of Aboriginals is an embarrassment and there are now serious issues revolving around global climate change, major rivers drying up, food production areas under threat and so on.

We have nearly two generations that are turned off from the wilderness on the strength that it is dangerous, uncomfortable, boring, nothing to see, a self perpetuating disease passed down by parents bent on wrapping their city children in care and comfort.

There has been a huge influx of Asian residents in our cities and they have no inherent connection with the outback, its spirit, legends or history and therefore no apparent interest. Tourism Australia has literally "flogged" the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Sydney, leading to massed mainstream visitations around tourist hubs to the detriment of wonderful regional and outback features and destinations, communities, family businesses, infrastructure and so on.

One of the major issues is politically we have no real visionaries who have the strength to see beyond their political careers, short term and to make some major milestone decisions. But there are a few positives to all this. The conservation movement is starting to gain teeth on issues like wholesale destruction of our limited old growth forests. Some 45% of Australia, the arid regions, has recently been highlighted as one of the world's greatest remaining wilderness areas and millions of American dollars by private foundations are going into enhancing this cause. Private not-for-profit nature conservancies are buying up large wilderness properties and positioning young scientists and managers on these in an effort to return the land to a pristine state and to assist endangered wildlife. There is no time to wait for national park departments and bureaucracies to initiate essential acquisitions.


There are of course incredible resources in Australia from coal, uranium, bauxite, sun, monsoonal rains, space and many controversial issues surrounding these. We are a country that simply extracts these resources and sells them to overseas companies which in turn are influencing control of our major companies, whereas some political strength might consider incentives which encourage Australian companies to value add to their resources and to develop their leading technologies before selling to the world. At present so many of our smart people and ideas have to go overseas for venture support.

I'm aware of one gentleman, a visionary, who has lobbied some 290 politicians in support of a major railway to run through the inland of Australia from Melbourne to Darwin to open up regional areas to new opportunities and development, bringing Australian goods readily to the Asian markets and taking huge numbers of large road transport off the major highways where drivers are under stress and tragic accidents are occurring regularly. Another gentleman who has made his wealth through technology has now applied his skills, contacts and wealth to buying up large traces of wilderness.

While the population is gathering in the south around cities and coast and these areas are under stress and threat from water issues we have a third of our nation largely unpopulated in the tropical zone where abundant water is available to be harnessed, for a whole new wave of food production if a visionary government could emerge.


It is real that other countries and funding could see and seize this opportunity through investment stealth (invasion) and have the Asian markets a short sea voyage or flight away.

My feeling is the governance of the country is not going to change and there is a case that we are too over-governed with three controlling stratas: national, state and local. We really need fearless visionaries with an ethical agenda, to take our great country by the throat and give it a good shake.

Our overseas guests on tour are absolutely wrapped in Australia and point to the natural history assets we have, the space and the people as wonderful. As we don't take tours into the city and theme parks etc they can only be referring to the Australian bush, so somehow it is a jewel worth saving.

We don't know how lucky we are but perhaps, as a nation, we are taking it all for granted.

Best wishes,
John


John Thompson
Managing Director
Nature-Bound Australia
PO Box 1209
New Farm Queensland 4005
Australia

Ask questions

It's fashionable for politically-correct observers to suggest that adepts of conspiracy theories of all kinds are necessarily deranged, or evil. Here in France, an accusation of this kind has just hit the comedian Jean-Marie Bigard, who may or may not have known what he was talking about when he suggested recently that the official 9/11 story might not be true. Personally, I know no more about 9/11 than Bigard or his critics, but I'm prepared to listen to all the evidence. The main reason why 9/11 continues to intrigue us is that George W Bush said it was a crime committed by Bin Laden, but nobody has ever succeeded in capturing the accused and bringing him to justice. Why not? Curious absence of action. As long as that unhealthy situation persists, we have the right—indeed the obligation—to be doubters.

Please sit down calmly, set aside your everyday beliefs about 9/11 and Bin Laden, click the following image and watch this didactic movie:

I cannot tell a priori whether the themes of this movie are plausible, honorable, factual or pure bullshit. It's not within my competence to reach conclusions on such matters, and it would be unacceptable if I were to express the least opinion of this kind. But I affirm that we all have the right and the obligation, in the context of such an extraordinary unfinished affair as 9/11, to examine all the available evidence and viewpoints.

Abandoned Australian outback

I was saddened by a recent press article that evokes a forthcoming Australian report according to which the remote Australian wilderness must now be looked upon as a "failed state". What a terrible expression! There's a sentence about extracted wealth that is not reinvested in local communities. I see the words "poor governance". The article speaks of "the failure of all levels of government to deliver basic services and halt the flight of non-indigenous people to more settled areas". Everything in this short article was frighteningly negative, even to the extent of evoking "possible invasion" from foreign nations. I have the impression that the great Aussie myth of the Outback is crumbling into dust, but I'm amazed that things could really be as bad as that. On the other hand, I've been wondering for ages what went wrong with Australia, and why there are no New Pioneers on the horizon to fix things up. Why aren't our leaders worrying about the Outback, and doing something about this tragedy? To guide Australia, it wasn't enough to be a fan of Donald Bradman, Elizabeth II and George W Bush. And it's obviously not enough to be a polite ex-diplomat who speaks English and Mandarin with the same lack of eloquence. Meanwhile, as I said in my recent article entitled My hilarious motherland [display], a NSW state minister has been dancing in his underpants. And the Outback has been dying...

Vain actors: politicians, priests and parents

Politicians are surely the most arrogant actors of all, because they see themselves endowed with a mandate, and they take themselves very seriously. Many politicians think they have a vision of an ideal future society, and their attempts to realize that vision are imagined as a mission. They seem to forget, or deliberately ignore, that society has evolved through the efforts, not of politicians, but of engineers, scientists, industrialists, businessmen, economists, researchers, teachers, farmers, laborers, etc. Politicians are often powerful in the sense that they can do a lot of harm, such as telling lies that start a war. They can act as dull chiefs, like George W Bush or Dilbert's pointy-haired boss. But they rarely have the necessary competence and resources to actually create anything worthwhile... apart from public service jobs. To take an obvious example, modern society is totally dominated by the ubiquitous role of computing and the Internet. Were these phenomena the achievement of politicians? Of course not. It appears that the Republican candidate John McCain is still incapable of sending an email!

As far as priests are concerned, their role in the modern world has dwindled to almost zero. In the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Benedict XVI urged French Catholics, pathetically, to stand up for their faith: "Don't be afraid! " But he's unlikely to bring about a surge in the recruitment of candidates for the priesthood. Meanwhile, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has annoyed many citizens by promoting a fuzzy kind of religious observance that he likes to call "positive laicism", which would seem to consist of encouraging the development of religion in French society without ever admitting explicitly that you're doing so... like a mercantile pimp who tells the police that he's merely helping his girlfriends to make friends in the lonely city. Fortunately, since 1905, laicism has become such a profoundly ingrained concept in French attitudes that little Sarko is unlikely to make much headway with his archaic scheming.

Whereas I've realized for ages that politicians and priests do not play significant roles in the modern world, it was only recently that I learned that parents, too, have little or no influence on the lives that their children are likely to lead. In other words, the noble concepts of motherhood and fatherhood are probably myths. Children are socialized and educated, not by their parents, nor by their teachers, but by their peer groups.

Funnily enough, there is nevertheless one domain in which children can be totally and permanently brainwashed by their parents. It's not politics, or anything of a practical nature... but rather religion. A child survives in this treacherous world by learning rapidly, often through trial and error, that Mum and Dad are not talking bullshit when they warn that fire burns, that it's a good idea to look both ways before crossing a street, that eating green fruit can give you a belly ache, etc. In the same way, countless kids seem to decide that the only sure way of surviving in a "higher realm" is to accept the religious advice of Mum and Dad. That's why many baby Christians become adolescent Christians, Jewish babies evolve into adult Jews, and Muslim kids adopt Islam for the rest of their lives.

It's not intuitively obvious that the pursuits of politicians, priests and parents are vain. Personally, it took me over sixty years to reach this state of enlightenment. Up until then, I had always tended to give these worldly authorities the benefit of the doubt, by supposing that they were performing worthwhile deeds. Today, I realize retrospectively that their actions are essentially pointless, indeed empty. The forces that determine our destinies do not emanate from human actors such as politicians, priests or parents. These forces come directly from the Cosmos, and can only be perceived, if at all, through Science.

Bullet head

Mrs Moose's style of hairdo was popular when I first arrived in France, in 1962. To designate it, my gay friend Richard O'Sullivan invented the expression "bullet head"... which is more than fitting in the case of the gun-toting pit bull from Alaska. In François Truffaut's landmark film entitled Stolen Kisses (1968), Claude Jade (seen here alongside Jean-Pierre Léaud) has a bullet head:

Besides, in Truffaut's following film, Domicile Conjugal (1970), Claude Jade with glasses has a distinct Sarah Palin look.

In a sketch on NBC's Saturday Night Live TV show, the comedian Tina Fey does a splendid job of impersonating Palin, alongside Amy Poehler playing Hillary Clinton.



I love the vision of global warming: "just God huggin' us closer".

Seriously, I agree with a journalist in this morning's New York Daily News that the best Obama strategy for dealing with a superficial but flashy phenomenon such as Palin is to simply ignore her.

Dream blogging

I was awoken early this morning by an amazing dream, in which I was actually putting together the elements of a blog article: in fact, the one that I'm about to write. I'll describe the dream in a moment. Before that, I need to provide two essential items of information.

First, I happened to talk on the telephone yesterday with Christine concerning my recent article entitled Virtual visit of places of my youth [display]. Although I didn't bring up this aspect of the Google Maps situation in that article, I was surprised that the municipal authorities in Grafton would allow such photos of private homes to be displayed publicly on the web. I haven't got around yet to examining this privacy question in a deeper and wider fashion. For example: Could Google fly around my house at Gamone in a helicopter, taking photos to be displayed on the web? In the interesting phone conversation that I had with Christine on this theme, she made a pertinent general remark. She said that most normal people would dislike the idea of regularly publishing quite personal stuff in a blog such as my Antipodes. The corollary is that an individual such as me is exceptional (in the same way that a porn star, for example, is exceptional) in getting a kick out of parading himself in public, as I do, by means of a personal blog.

The second item of pertinent background information is that, before falling asleep last night, I was engaged in thinking (as is often the case these days) about the related subjects of genealogy and genetics. Before switching off my computer, I even stuck up a piece of cardboard in front of the screen containing the enigmatic expression "no hurry", and an arrow pointing to the title of the autobiographical stuff I'm writing. This was intended as a reminder of an essential revelation that struck me last night (but not for the first time): namely, the gigantic periods of time taken by Darwinian evolution to forge us into the animals that we are today. Indeed, evolution has never been in a hurry.

In my dream, I was wandering around, a little lost, inside a giant ultra-modern passenger liner. I was particularly impressed by the fact that even the form of handrails on the staircases between the various decks had evolved, through technological progress, in such a way that it was now impossible to lose one's grip and fall down the stairs. I found myself guiding a woman with a baby. In one of the lower decks, I was pleased to be able to lead her to a big room that was fully equipped with all kinds of modern installations for baby care. This was no doubt an evocation of a sea voyage between France and Australia with my wife and baby daughter.

The scene then shifted to the Paris métro, where I needed to consult a métro map in order to find my way. This was surely an evocation of my use of Google Maps to visit my birth place in Australia... along with the fact that I've been using this tool a lot lately to obtain an idea of the mill town of Walton-le-Dale in Lancashire, where my O'Keefe and Dixon ancestors worked before immigrating to New South Wales. Curiously, in my dream, all the maps that I found on the walls of the Paris métro were in fact distorted and abridged maps of Australia! I couldn't understand why this should be the case, but I had the impression that it was some kind of complicated marketing affair of a touristic nature.

Then I suddenly found myself producing personal genealogical charts for a blog article that was designed to indicate why indeed I was "condemned" by my genetic makeup to be the kind of individual who takes pleasure in talking about himself in a blog. In an amazingly detailed fashion, I was convinced that I knew the precise nature and origin of the circumstances that had transformed me into such an individual. Let me describe the situation, exactly as it appeared to me in my dream.

— On my paternal side, I felt that I was born with a chromosome containing a "bookkeeping" gene, which caused me to have an obsessive desire to record everything that was happening around me. Although I had tended to forget this aspect of my grandfather and father, I realize that I was impressed by their very real bookkeeping skills and habits. Besides, it was my grandfather who introduced me to the use of a manual typewriter. Later on, one of the earliest software devices I developed on the Macintosh was bookkeeping software for my personal bank account, which I named Le Compte est Bon [the accounting figures are correct]. Obviously, it's a short step from bookkeeping to obsessional blogging. In my dream, I was convinced that neither my brothers nor my three sisters possessed this paternal chromosome containing the "bookkeeping" gene.

— On my maternal side, I had inherited a chromosome containing a "talkative" gene, which made me wish to tell stories constantly and publicly about myself and my life. The origin of this chromosome with its "gift of the gab" gene was the Irish convict Patrick Hickey, and it came down to me through his daughter Ann, her son and her grandson, both named Charles Walker, and finally my mother Kathleen Walker. Once again, I felt that there were prominent cases (such as my mother's sister, and probably my own brother and sisters) in which this chromosome had not been passed on to descendants.

— Here I come to one of the surprising technical aspects of my dream. My obsessional passion for blogging was a direct consequence of neither my "bookkeeping" gene, on its own, nor even my "talkative" gene, on its own, but of the mutual interaction of each gene upon the other. In other words, to become an obsessive blogger, I needed to possess both genes, each of which reached me autonomously in a distinct chromosome.

Last but not least, in my dream, I realized that I would need to make it clear, in my blog article on this subject, that the two genes, left to their own resources, would have never transformed me into an obsessional blogger were it not for the computing context in which I had been nurtured as an adolescent, from the age of 17.

So, there you have it. I've just written the blog, exactly as it was dictated to me in this morning's dream.

Rebuilt ruins

The main street of Pont-en-Royans, just before you reach the Picard Bridge over the Bourne, used to be narrow and dangerous. The situation improved considerably, a few months ago, after the removal of a couple of derelict buildings that used to form a blind corner. Last November, I took this photo of one of these buildings, built against the steep slopes of one of the two mountains that form a backdrop to the village of Pont-en-Royans.

Yesterday, I took a photo of the remains of the rear end of the demolished building.

As you can see, the stonemasons are quite expert at restoring ruins, to make them look as good as new. Obviously, this is not a mere matter of aesthetics, designed to fool passers-by into imagining that there might be a nice little room and balcony to rent up there (if only you could access the structure in one way or another). No, they've patched up the ruins, consolidated them and smoothed them over with fresh mortar (like the façade of my house at Gamone) for a practical reason. The presence of those old walls prevents landslides and falling rocks. So, what you see there is an excellent example of environmental sustainability.

PS I'm tempted, one of these days, to start spreading a rumor that, on certain wintry evenings, a ghostly female can be seen at the window, with a lit candle, reciting the names of the Huguenot soldiers who were slain by Antoine de Sassenage during the 16th-century Wars of Religion and then thrown from the nearby walls into the Bourne. From a touristic viewpoint, that's what's missing in Pont-en-Royans: a few good ghosts.

Favorite Dilbert characters

The latest version of the Dilbert website contains a growing collection of short animated sequences, some of which are excellent.

Among all the characters invented by Scott Adams, one of my favorites is the brilliant garbage collector, who has solutions for all the great social and philosophical challenges that Dilbert brings along to him, as if the garbage collector were a universal consultant. My sympathy for this personage explains, no doubt, my interest in the newly-appointed premier of New South Wales, mentioned in my recent article entitled Musical chairs in Sydney [display].

Another character of whom I'm fond is Ratbert, whose voice is spot-on in the animation. Basically, Ratbert is nice in an empty-headed way, but he thinks of himself as a dignified creature who deserves more respect than what he currently receives. In this morning's animation, Ratbert makes an audacious resolution: "I've decided to be one of those guys who says whatever is on his mind." Ratbert sits down calmly on the bed, to see what's on his mind, so he can start saying it out loud. Meanwhile, Dilbert is getting ready to leave for work. Seeing Ratbert sitting in silence on the bed, Dilbert asks him: "Still nothing?" Ratbert appears to conclude with amazement that his mind must be a vacuum: "Boy, this is a real eye-opener." You should drop in on the Dilbert website [click Ratbert] to admire this delightful little sketch in animation.

Bridge over untroubled waters

Chroniclers tell us that the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans once flowed red with blood during the so-called Wars of Religion of the 16th century... as if Man's quest for God and existential meaning might be a valid pretext for bloodshed (which I refuse to believe). Today, the Bourne is calm and peaceful, joyful like a young puppy, wise as a mountain monk, sparkling like a glass of bubbly white Clairette de Die (just to the south of the Vercors), musical in the quiet manner of a Gregorian chant, and as eternal as a molecule of DNA. I'm happy to live alongside such a lovely river. But old bridges fall down (except, apparently, in my birthplace, Grafton), and new ones have to be built (if finance is available... which might not be the case in certain badly-run societies).

Mechanical shovels have just destroyed the old bridge between the twin communes of Choranche and Châtelus. Meanwhile, the dainty blue Bourne dances between the old stones and the yellow monsters. We are temporarily stranded from our old-time left-bank neighbors... who can nevertheless drive down to Pont-en-Royans by an alternate route.

I'm tremendously moved when I see how my fellow citizens move mountains and build bridges. The ancient alpine spirit in action.

Smoothie season

The most exotic smoothies incorporate tropical products such as bananas, mangoes, passion fruit and prickly pears. Many typical French fruit, such as melons, contain too much water (in my humble opinion) to be integrated into smoothies. So, when I speak of the "smoothie season", what I really mean is the time of the year when ideal imported fruit start to appear, at cheap prices, in local supermarkets. And that time, in France, is now. A purely-French smoothies ingredient, on the other hand, is top-quality yogurt.

Today's smoothie is an elegant variation on the celebrated milk shakes of my Anglo-Saxon youth in Grafton. Once upon a time, my adolescent girlfriend invited me around to her place, unexpectedly, so that I could taste a drink she had just concocted, in her mother's Grafton pub, with another girl. It was a kind of super milk shake incorporating ice cream, chocolate, malt and crushed macadamia nuts. It was divine. My Aphrodite had served me up the nectar of gods and goddesses. A rival classmate once drew my attention to the interesting fact that the initials of my earthly blond divinity, written as Ag, were the symbol of silver... which was surely, in the case of such a creature, the least of things. I think of her constantly, especially when I get around to making smoothies.

Mysterious mate

One of my favorite jokes concerns a mate of the pope. And today is just the right time to tell this joke, coinciding with the arrival of Benny Sixteen in France.

Six months ago, when a renowned rabbi from Jerusalem was visiting France, he was received at the president's palace. He asked Carla Bruni: "Would it be possible for me to meet up with my French mate Albert Dupont? " Carla and the presidential staff were embarrassed, because they had never heard of Albert Dupont. The next day, after a lot of frantic investigations, they succeeded in tracking down this Albert Dupont: an obscure employee in a factory on the outskirts of Paris. They asked the factory manager for permission to take Dupont back to the Elysées Palace to meet up with the distinguished rabbi from Jerusalem. Dupont was still dressed in his blue workman's overalls when he got together with the rabbi. It was a friendly back-slapping encounter, as if the two men had known each other for ages.

Later on, the same kind of situation arose when the Dalai-Lama was visiting France. He said to Carla Bruni: "I would dearly like to see my mate Albert Dupont." As before, a presidential automobile dashed out to the suburban factory where Albert was working, and brought him back to a get-together with the Dalai-Lama. And, as before, onlookers had the impression that the two men were old friends.

Carla Bruni was intrigued. She asked Albert: "Monsieur Dupont, how come you're on such friendly terms with these two great spiritual leaders: the Jerusalem rabbi and the Dalai-Lama? " Albert was nonchalant: "Oh, they're just a couple of good mates I've known for ages. It's the same as the pope." Carla was surprised: "You don't mean to tell me you're a friend of Benedict XVI ? " Albert assured her that this was the case: "Just drop in at Lourdes during the pope's forthcoming visit, Madame Sarkozy, and you'll see for yourself."

More intrigued than ever, Carla Bruni drove down to Lourdes, disguised as a pilgrim. She found herself in the midst of an immense crowd of enthusiastic hymn-singing pilgrims. Suddenly Benedict XVI appeared on a balcony in front of the crowd. And, sure enough, his old mate Albert Dupont was standing alongside him, dressed as usual in his blue workman's overalls, and waving to the crowd, who were now in a state of religious fervor. An old lady in black, clutching her rosary beads, nudged Carla and asked: "Excuse me, Madame. Who's the old fellow in white standing alongside Albert Dupont? "

My hilarious motherland

Here in France, an old-fashioned model of male underpants, with a kind of pouch to accommodate the royal jewels and scepter, has always been designated as a kangaroo slip.

For the last 24 hours, the Australian press has been running stories about an MP [member of parliament] in Sydney who's labeled "the underpants MP ". As you might imagine, to earn such a title, our Aussie MP surely had to make a slight "kangaroo slip "...

A few days ago, my article entitled Musical chairs in Sydney [display] mentioned that the NSW premier had been axed because the state is in dire economic straits. The new fellow for the job, former garbage collector Nathan Rees, had to form a cabinet rapidly. For the role of police minister, he chose the youthful elected MP for Kiama, a certain Matt Brown. Well, just as Jesus took no more than three days to change his status dramatically, so did Matt. On the third day of his new job, the poor lad was fired by Nathan. And that's where it all gets back to underwear.

Recently, an innocent and ordinary party took place in the august chambers of parliament house in Sydney's Macquarie Street. One might imagine that parliament houses are not specifically designed for partying... but we must never underestimate the power of the Aussie urge for mateship on balmy alcoholic evenings. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened, apart from the fact that Matt was probably inebriated. There's talk about his stripping down to "very brief" underpants and dancing on a green leather couch in his office. It's even said that Matt might have simulated some kind of sexual encounter with the female MP for Wollongong, Noreen Hay. A simple case of making hay while the sun shines. Maybe we'll never know the hard facts. In any case, three-day Matt is out. Crucified in his kangaroo slip.

My native Australia is an ideal hotbed for the growth of spirited politicians... like Maurice Iemma, Nathan Rees, etc. The list is long. But we seem to be short on authentic statesmen, capable of transforming the nation into a serious republic. That's another kettle of fish. And, as the former garbage collector might have said, reminiscing about his rapidly hired and fired police chief, and indulging in topical planetary metaphors: You can put lipstick on a bad fish; it'll still smell.

Cognitive dissonance

The human behavior known as cognitive dissonance is terrible stuff... or maybe I should say terribly human stuff. The background for cognitive dissonance occurs when we screw something up because we've acted stupidly, or because we have stupid beliefs. Instead of admitting our stupidity, and deciding instantly to behave more intelligently, cognitive dissonance comes into action when we decide to defend and justify our initial stupidity by adopting a new approach that's even more stupid still. It's a matter of pushing stupidity to the second degree, as it were, because our first-degree stupidity didn't work. It wasn't stupid enough.

Let me give you a personal example, in which the stupid guy at the center of the cognitive dissonance is me. At Gamone, there's an irregular spring, up behind the house, which isn't really a spring at all, but simple a resurgence of subterranean water from time to time, usually after rain higher up on the slopes behind Gamone. Now, the waters of my spring are captured by a small concrete tank, and I could normally use that stock of water around the house. But I tend to forget that this water exists. Worse still, a couple of years ago, I burned off grass and weeds in that corner of the property, while totally forgetting that there was a plastic hose there, running down from the spring. OK, that was a silly error, but hardly a catastrophe.

Recently, the mayor of Choranche and the municipal employee suggested that it would be a good idea for me to drain away excess water from my spring, because water had started to seep out of the hillside with the possibility of endangering the stability of the roadway. That's where my cognitive dissonance got turned on. Instead of saying "OK, I'll install a new hose and bring the water down to my house", I started to argue absurdly: "No, the water that's seeping out onto the roadway is certainly not the same water that's piling up from my spring. They're surely two completely different underground channels. In other words, even if I were to install a new hose, water from the other channel would still seep onto the road."

The truth of the matter, alas, was that I was too bloody lazy to get into overalls, drag a ladder and tools up to the spring, cut away all the weeds and saplings, and install a new hose.

Finally, over the last two or three days, I pulled my finger out, as the saying goes, and performed the necessary work.

The hardest part of the job was climbing up onto the embankment and cutting away all the thorny vegetation that prevented me from getting near the spring.

I always have the impression that Sophia is happy to see me working outside, manually, instead of sitting in front of my Macintosh.

Once the spring water started to flow in the newly-installed yellow hose, about a hundred meters long, I had to do something with it, so I decided to start out by sprinkling my lawn... which doesn't really need to be sprinkled at all.

Above all, I'm obliged to admit that, as soon as water started to arrive down here at the house, the seepage onto the road up in the vicinity of the spring was reduced substantially.

Tomorrow morning, if I were a decent kind of a bloke, I would phone up the mayor and the municipal employee to inform them that I can be stupid and stubborn at times. But I'm sure they know that already.

Virtual visit of places of my youth

It's fascinating to be able to use Google Maps while sitting here in Choranche, on the edge of the French Alps, to visit virtually various places in the Australian town of Grafton where I was born. I must warn you now that the rest of this blog post is likely to be more boring than watching your neighbors' color slides of their latest vacation.

Here's the house in Waterview, South Grafton, where I spent the first dozen years of my life:

My Walker grandmother and uncles lived just across the road in this charming house surrounded by wide verandas:

One of my sisters said quite rightly that it was as if our mother, in marrying our father, had never really left home, because she could return to her mother, whenever she had a problem, simply by crossing the road.

This little grocery shop was already there when we were kids, just a couple of hundred meters down the road:

It sold us basic survival food such as peanut butter. And here's a second shop, closer to South Grafton:

It was run by a friendly young woman named Shirley Zietsch. Just opposite her shop, the Royal Hotel was the starting-point for Saturday afternoon cycling races:

On the other side of the Clarence River, this is the house of my paternal grandparents:

I would stay with them every Monday night, so that I could attend the Cub Scout meetings. Later my grandparents built a new house in Robinson Avenue:

Etc, etc, etc... I warned you it would be boring! But don't you agree that it's fabulous to be able to use computers, satellites and a planetary network to waste time looking nostalgically at childhood places?

Giant atom smasher

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene is one of the most beautiful and exciting books I've ever read, on a par with the masterpieces of Richard Dawkins. Published in 2004, Greene's book evokes with eagerness the possibilities of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] in Geneva, whose first beam will be produced next Wednesday. Results obtained from this giant atom smasher could have either a positive or a negative influence upon the willingness of physicists to accept the celebrated theory of strings.

A nice way of getting a feeling for the LHC is to watch the following CERN rap video:



The LHC is theoretically capable of generating microscopic black holes. Brian Greene writes: "These black holes would be so small and would last for such a short time that they wouldn't pose us the slightest threat (years ago, Stephen Hawking showed that all black holes disintegrate via quantum processes—big ones very slowly, tiny ones very quickly), but their production would provide confirmation of some of the most exotic ideas ever contemplated."

Various naive observers (including certain individuals who should know better) have been trying to create a state of consternation by proclaiming that our planet Earth might get sucked into one of these tiny black holes produced by the LHC. Click the logo to read the CERN press release on this theme.

To be perfectly frank, I quite like the idea of a little black hole in Switzerland that starts sucking up the surrounding territory: first the city of Geneva and its lovely lake, then the Swiss Alps, and so on. Ideally, stuff should slide into the "throat" of the black hole sufficiently slowly for onlookers to have time to appreciate the visual show, while knowing full well that they themselves will soon be victims of the gluttonous hole. Sooner or later, though, the fat little black hole would end up inevitably gorging itself, and it would then roll around sluggishly, maybe burping from time to time, incapable of downing an extra village or mountain. Literally, the hole has stuffed itself. A brave French gendarme could then simply creep up behind the groggy black hole and smash it to smithereens with a swift blow of a hammer... and humanity would be safe up until the next time.

Gamone Creek

For the last few days, it has been raining intermittently but strongly at Gamone. Even the Cournouze mountain has a drenched look, and the Bourne River has overflowed harmlessly, as usual, at Pont-en-Royans.

Around midday, I couldn't understand why Sophia insisted on going out into the rain, in front of the house, and barking regularly, as if there were a vehicle coming up towards the house. As soon as the rain eased down, I went out to see what was troubling my dog. Once outside, I heard a regular whirring sound, and I expected to see an approaching vehicle. Suddenly I realized that it was the sound, not of a vehicle, but of rushing water in Gamone Creek. So I wandered down there (fifty meters below the house) to take a closer look. As for Sophia, she calmed down as soon as she understood the cause of the noise of the phantom vehicle.

Gamone Creek is what they call a torrent, in that it only flows when it's draining off rainwater from up on the slopes. And since the catchment area above Gamone is not extensive, the torrent is only active for short periods, several times a year... which explains why Sophia was unaccustomed to the noise of rushing water. Although I've never been outside at exactly the right moment to see and hear such a phenomenon, I believe that "packets" of water arrive here punctually, maybe twenty minutes or so after heavy showers further up on the slopes. So I suppose it's the sudden noise of rushing water that disturbs Sophia from time to time.

On my father's bush property outside South Grafton, a small waterway, rarely running, was nevertheless called Deep Creek. I'm happy to have a similar kind of creek at Gamone.

Vista blues

The first video in Microsoft's new publicity campaign, named Shoe Circus, aimed at popularizing their Vista operating system, is dull and meaningless. Unbelievably bad. Judge for yourself:



On the other hand, I found that one of Apple's recent videos on this theme is charming:



The difference in style and content between the two videos reflects the differences between Vista and Leopard.

Musical chairs in Sydney

Europeans who were up at dawn this morning [such as me], browsing through the latest news, would have learned that a political game of musical chairs is going on Down Under in the state parliament of my native state, New South Wales. Insofar as this subject is hardly world-shaking, it now seems to have disappeared from my Google News screen, but the Aussie press continues to talk about it. Here's the cover-story photo from the Sydney Morning Herald:

This banner is bad, incomprehensible, but I'll explain it as best I can. The guy with a contented grin is the new premier, Nathan Rees. The title indicates that this former garbage collector has swept away the old guard, meaning the ex-premier Maurice Iemma, and is ready to shower his total ignorance and inexperience upon the government of NSW. Big deal! As for inset in the banner showing rear views of three or four fellows, I have no idea of its sense, no doubt symbolic.

The wording is revealing about Aussie mentality. How would you feel about a title such as: From garbage collector to brain surgeon? Normally, running a nation should be no less complex than brain surgery. But Aussies seem to see the rise of Rees as a local lad who's just won the premiership lottery. But what a miserable lottery!

Since returning to France from my native Australia two years ago, I've often felt that I've been talking to a brick wall whenever I expressed naively my opinion that what I had seen of NSW in general, during my brief visit, and of Sydney in particular, had an antiquated run-down look and feel, as if it all needed to be rejuvenated with a few new roads, new bridges, new railways, etc. I've never felt like being too explicit about my painful disappointment with Sydney, because a lot of my dismay centered around the observable fact that this great Victorian city seemed to have been transformed overnight (?) into a dull Asian metropolis. I'm convinced that this transformation was, and will be, a lethal ethnic error... but I don't really care about the consequences, because I'm no longer a resident of the Sunburnt Country.

In any case, it would appear that the poverty of the Australian infrastructure is just as bad as what I thought. Here's an excerpt from this morning's Australian press:

Iemma's resignation after three years in power follows months of intense criticism from political opponents, media and the public over the state's creaking transport, infrastructure and hospital systems.

It continues:

The New South Wales government is unpopular after more than 13 years of Labor rule and as the state's aging infrastructure shows signs of wear and tear.

The underlying problem with NSW government is that the potential people to do the job are simply not there. Why not? Because the current sociopolitical environment doesn't bring such individuals into existence. There are no traditions of serious political education in Australia. We have no political academies, no experts in economics and political science, no great orators, no authors who have set out their visions for the future of Australia in books, etc. So, we call upon clowns... such as Michael Costa, who didn't even believe in the planetary dangers of global warming. And now, NSW is calling upon a former garbage collector. Garbage in, garbage out.