There is indeed evil

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

It might work for monkeys... but there's no way in the world that this approach can be adopted by those who see themselves as followers of Jesus, men of God. The church of Rome is crumbling, not because it has been attacked by infidels, but through its own internal forces of decay and destruction. And Captain Ratzinger will probably (hopefully) go down with his rotting ship.

Click the photo of Benedict XVI to discover a scathing article by Christopher Hitchens entitled The Great Catholic Cover-Up. His subtitle is eloquent: The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it.

Singular happenings

In my novel entitled All the Earth is Mine, the young mining engineer Jacob Rose has to transport equipment (including a small helicopter) and a handful of colleagues from Western Australia to Israel. So, he decides to use company funds to purchase

[...] a splendid sixty-foot deep-sea trawler, built five years ago at the Fremantle dockyards for an over-optimistic shrimp merchant who went bankrupt because he operated systematically in the wrong waters. Named Black Swan, this vessel was in perfect shape, since her owner had never been fortunate enough to have an opportunity of subjecting the trawler to the wear and tear of harsh seasons of shrimping. Jake, of course, was not interested in catching seafood. He intended to travel to Israel in this vessel, and to use it there both as a floating home and as a supply ship for his forthcoming operations. Prior to purchasing the trawler, Jake asked the owner to move the vessel to the Fremantle dockyards so that it could be inspected with a view to being fitted out with living quarters for six people. Jake also wanted to install a steel deck over the hold where nets full of shrimp were meant to be dragged into the vessel, enabling him to envisage folding the blades of his Ecureuil, hoisting the helicopter aboard and tying it down securely, under tarpaulins, for the trip to Israel. There would also be room underneath the tail section of the helicopter to stack a small Zodiac on the deck. In this way, the Black Swan would be an ideal mother ship for future operations at Caesarea. Fortunately, it would be possible to have these transformations carried out in a remarkably short period of time, meaning that Jake would be able to envisage their departure within about two months.

Here's my vision of Jake's converted trawler after its transformations in the Fremantle dockyards:

It wasn't particularly original of me to imagine the name Black Swan for Jake's trawler, since this creature is the celebrated symbol of Western Australia.

When I was a child, I remember hearing that the black species of Cygnus was found only in Australia, but this information didn't impress me greatly, for two obvious reasons: (1) I had never seen animals in any other natural environment beyond Australia, and (2) there are so many strange creatures in Australia that we have become blasé concerning adjectives such as "exotic" and "unique".

Recently, our famous bird acquired a new symbolic status through a best-seller entitled The Black Swan by the Lebanese intellectual Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He considers that certain unexpected happenings, of a spectacular nature, can be designated as Black Swan events [BSE]. They are defined by three characteristic features:
(1) BSE are totally unexpected.
(2) BSE give rise to profound effects with vast consequences.
(3) Such events can indeed be explained... but only retrospectively.

We can see why Taleb refers to black swans. In earlier centuries, it was thought that black swans simply did not exist. Then, in 1697, a Dutch navigator discovered that such birds did in fact exist in Western Australia. Consequently, the notion of a black swan came to designate something that went through these two phases, from total disbelief to astonished belief, followed by an a posteriori process of rationalization.

The culmination of my novel (which was completed several years before the publication of Taleb's book) is the transformation of Israel into a giant vessel that sails around the world. Funnily enough, this is a splendid example of a BSE! More realistic examples of BSEs, proposed by Taleb, are the Great War, personal computers and the Internet.

A fortnight ago, an interesting article entitled America, the fragile empire appeared in the Los Angeles Times [display]. Written by a Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson, the article had an even more eye-catching subtitle: Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast? The gist of this short article is that the USA is a relatively fragile entity, which is capable of disintegrating unexpectedly and rapidly. In a nutshell, Niall Ferguson imagines that the fall of America could take the form of a Black Swan event.

Here's an excellent video in which TV host Harry Kreisler talks at length with Niall Ferguson about his book entitled The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World:



I must admit that I know little about the reputation of Ferguson among his peers, but I find that his style and assertions are startling, to say the least. But isn't that the very essence of a BSE?

Voting in France

This afternoon, for the first time ever, I voted in a French election. The voting booth was located in the municipal hall of the village.

Apart from the man and woman in charge of the voting, I encountered two other citizens. But that's not surprising, because there are only a hundred or so residents in the commune of Choranche. In other words, from a percentage viewpoint, my vote is likely to have a non-trivial impact upon the political landscape of Choranche. In this photo, I'm actually casting my vote:

The seemingly disgusted expression on my face gives the impression that I've just picked up a smelly dog turd in a Kleenex, and I'm putting it in a trash can. In fact, that's simply the way I look when I'm serious.

Cosmic cheesiness

David Pogue (with over 1.3 million Twitter followers) has pointed us to this masterpiece, billed by many as the most cheesy video of all time:



Carl Lewis is no doubt in the process of losing his record to the Trololo Man, whose moving performance can be appreciated here thanks to English subtitles:



There's a rumor that this great Russian musical artist will be setting out soon on a gigantic world tour.

La montagne - Jean Ferrat

Gazing up at the Cournouze mountain, above the villages of Choranche and Châtelus, I'm often reminded of this song by Jean Ferrat:

During the '60s and '70s, when I was living in Paris, there were three renowned poet-singers: Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré. Alongside that prestigious trio, Jean Ferrat could be thought of as the Fourth Musketeer. The TV host Michel Drucker, learning of Ferrat's death today, referred to him as the Last of the Mohicans.

Enemies of the Internet

[Click the banner to access their website.]

The highly-reputed French association named Reporters Without Borders describes itself as follows:

Reporters Without Borders is present in all five continents through its national branches (in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland), its offices in New York, Tokyo and Washington, and the more than 120 correspondents it has in other countries. The organisation also works closely with local and regional press freedom groups that are members of the Reporters Without Borders Network, in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burma, Colombia, Democratic Congo, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Russia, Somalia, the United States and Tunisia.

Reporters Without Borders is registered in France as a non-profit organisation and has consultant status at the United Nations.

In 2005, the organisation won the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Today, March 12, happens to be their World Day Against Cyber Censorship.

[Click the poster to access their description of this event.]

The association has just published a report entitled Enemies of the Internet. Here's a paragraph that mentions Australia:

Among the countries “under surveillance” are several democracies: Australia, because of the upcoming implementation of a highly developed Internet filtering system, and South Korea, where draconian laws are creating too many specific restrictions on Web users by challenging their anonymity and promoting self-censorship.

Browsing through the complete report (available on their website), we're obliged to admit that Australia is not exactly in nice company: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.

BREAKING NEWS: The story about so-called "enemies of the Internet" has been reproduced widely in the French press, accompanied by the following map:

Impossibility

Early in the 20th century, when the general public started to hear about statistical thermodynamics, science writers became interested in finding striking metaphors for impossible happenings. They were motivated in particular by the need to say just how unlikely it would be for a glass of water, on the kitchen table, to suddenly freeze... in spite of the theoretical possibility that this could happen.

In 1913, the French mathematician and politician Emile Borel proposed the metaphor of a million monkeys typing for a year and producing by chance a copy of all the books in the world's greatest libraries. Recently, wags have observed that you only have to examine the blog phenomenon to discover that humanity can't expect too much from millions of naked apes armed with keyboards.



In The Blind Watchmaker [pages 47-52], Richard Dawkins proposed a variation of the monkeys-and-typewriters metaphor in which the goal consists of producing a single line of Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. If you use an algorithm that examines periodically the monkeys' output and retains, as a new point of departure, only the line whose letters are closest to those of the target, then the goal is reached quite rapidly. But I always thought it a pity that Dawkins should introduce this twisted version of the metaphor, because it might cause adepts of so-called "intelligent design" to imagine—for a misguided instant—that Dawkins is suggesting that evolution operates with a target "in mind"... which, of course, is nonsense.

In The God Delusion [page 113], Dawkins introduced a new metaphor to illustrate quasi-impossibility: that of the Ultimate Boeing 747, borrowed from the English astronomer Fred Hoyle [1915-2001].

[Click the photo to see a Dawkins video that mentions the Boeing metaphor.]

The basic image is that of a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, which just happens to blow together various bits and pieces in such a way as to build a Boeing 747. People who believe erroneously that evolution is a theory of chance and random constructions consider that this metaphor illustrates the absurdity of imagining that a living animal could be the outcome of the random shuffling of its components. In fact, they're spot on. That would indeed be a stupid way of looking at Creation of any kind, with or without a capital C. Fortunately, Darwin's theory of evolution never calls upon processes of that absurd kind. On the other hand, Dawkins points out that something like the Ultimate Boeing 747 process would have been required—at some eternal instant in the Dreamtime (that precision comes from me, not Dawkins)—in order to create the kind of mysterious entity known as God.

[Click the photo to see the encounter.]

A week ago, in a funereal setting in Melbourne, Dawkins was interviewed by a local journalist named Robyn Williams... who seems to have a sound reputation in Australia. I make that last point because I was rather horrified by the stupid way in which this fellow tried to get the ball rolling. He had invented his own silly and fuzzy little metaphor for impossibility: something to do with the chance that all the people in the audience might find their correctly-numbered seats, by pure chance, if they were to sit down in a random fashion. A lesser man than Dawkins might have asked: "What the fuck does that have to do with Darwin's theory of evolution?" But Dawkins is, of course, an unruffled gentleman... and he put Robyn Williams back on course in a polite and even pedagogical manner. It was a truly beautiful example of the Dawkins style.

Associative thinking

Most serious individuals concentrate upon one thing at a time. I'm not suggesting that they have what might be called "one-track minds". I'm merely saying that, when they decide to talk about X, they deliberately leave Y locked up in the wardrobe... which makes for nice easy-to-follow conversation. As for me, I'm not like that. Whenever I'm talking about X, I find myself searching constantly for associated pretexts that might enable me to liberate Y from the wardrobe. This makes me an impossible conversationalist, because my listeners find it hard to pin down what I'm talking about. In polite terms, one might say that I practice associative thinking.

Over the last few days (since the death of my uncle Ken Walker), I've been browsing through old family photos.

The bikes leaning against the fence of the Walker home in Waterview (South Grafton) are Malvern Star track machines, manufactured down in Melbourne. And, in the late '30s, one of the most famous members of the Malvern Star team in Australia was the French champion Charles Rampelberg.

This postcard was pasted in my childhood bible: "Cyclone" Johnny Walker's big brown-paper scrapbook of press cuttings. A native of northern France, Rampelberg was racing out in Australia when World War II erupted. His name appears in records of the six-day races at Sydney in 1938 and 1941. Seriously injured in a fall when his head struck a wing-nut of his front wheel, Rampelberg was obliged to end his cycling career. Unable to envisage a return to his war-stricken homeland, he decided to get into business in Australia as a delicatessen. Later, having made a fortune through this activity, Charles returned to Paris and worked as a marketing representative for his brother Emile Rampelberg, who was renowned as a graphic designer in the textile field, with family links to the great house of Boussac from northern France.

Prior to his career in Australia, Charles Rampelberg had won a bronze medal in the kilometer time trial at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Back in France, this celebrated track cyclist had surely raced at times (although I've found no records that substantiate this speculation) in an indoor cycling stadium in Paris known as the Vélodrome d'hiver (winter velodrome), located near the Eiffel Tower. I've attended fabulous six-day track-cycling events in both Paris Bercy and Grenoble. The following photo (unidentified) gives you an idea of the hallucinating atmosphere of such places.

Today, we have no authentic images of the Paris velodrome, known familiarly as the Vel d'Hiv.

It was located not far from the spot where Australia's embassy now stands. In fact, while the champion cyclist Rampelberg was recovering from head wounds out in the Antipodes, and setting up his delicatessen business, horrific events were taking place back in the cycling stadium in Paris. On 16-17 July 1942, this place was the focal point of a horrendous roundup of Parisian Jews, destined for extermination in the Nazi camps of Poland. And the most amazing aspect of this terrible affair was that it was carried out, not by German Nazis, but by Frenchmen!

On TV last Tuesday evening, there was much talk about this terrible site and this ignominious event, known now in French, for all Eternity, as the rafle du Vel' d'Hiv (roundup of the winter velodrome). This page of modern French history is darker, even, than the notorious Armistice signed by a fuddy-duddy Philippe Pétain. One of the frightening items of fallout concerning this disgusting affair is the fact that one of its prominent French instigators, René Bousquet, remained a personal friend of François Mitterrand.

These days, countless Francophiles such as myself have been striving to fathom these events. In a sense, we've succeeded, as demonstrated by the immense pride with which I shout out on the rooftops my unbounded admiration and love for the fabulous Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle. But don't think of us as dupes. We know that there were dark days... which will continue to take a lot of explaining. That's what I mean by associative thinking.

Scandinavian nuts and bolts

A recent article by Florence Williams in Slate [display] reveals apparent differences between Danish and Swedish males concerning the respective volumes of their genital resources.

Should the world at large be fascinated by this Swedish victory in the Prick and Balls Olympic event? The answer is no doubt yes. If things can shrivel up to such an extent between two neighboring nations, then we should try to understand what has happened... because the same sort of thing might just be happening in our own backyard, maybe even between neighbors with differing lifestyles. There's no smoke without a fire. So, there must be some set of underlying reasons why Swedes would appear to be getting it up better than Danes. It can't be the ambient climate, because it's much of a muchness. And it would be hard to imagine that cultural and lifestyle factors might account for this difference. There's no way in the world that you'll convince me that reading the delightful tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and eating Danish pastry, might have stealthily diminished the size of my John Thomas... and that the only way of getting things back to normal would consist of a strenuous acquaintance with the plays of August Swinberg and the films of Ingmar Bergman, combined with a massive daily intake of crisp bread and fermented fish, consumed in an Ikea environment.

Seriously: What exactly is it that might have influenced the respective qualities of the procreative devices of Danes and Swedes? That's an interesting question, but we don't yet know the answer. As they say in the classics, there will surely be a next episode...

More snow

On Saturday, the annual lunch for senior citizens of Choranche and Châtelus took place up in the restaurant at the entrance to the famous limestone caves of Choranche.

There you see some of my neighbors. The fellow on the left is Gilles Rey, mayor of Châtelus. Then there's my neighbor Madeleine. The woman in red is Bernadette Huillier, alongside her husband André, whose property is located on the opposite side of the Bourne with respect to my place. Finally, at the end of the table, there's Georges Belle, who resides in the old dilapidated building that was once the residence of the Chartreux monks who made wine at Choranche.

This man in a red pullover is Bernard Bourne, a farmer: the mayor of Choranche. The woman is Monique Rancoud-Guilhon, whose late father was once the mayor of Choranche. These are the two oldest families in Choranche. Their Bourne and Rancoud-Guilhon ancestors have lived here since before the French Revolution. Every time I see Monique, she asks me to send her all the most recent printed results of my research into the history of the commune. As for Bernard, when he saw me taking these photos, he asked me to send a few of them to the local newspaper... which I did, this morning. The journalist at Pont-en-Royans was happy, because I'd done his work for him.

After this lunch, snow started to fall again. It continued throughout the night. Early Sunday morning, the donkeys managed to burst through the damp electric fence, and I found them knocking on my kitchen door. I gave them a generous supply of oats. Besides, the snow was so powdery that the donkeys had no trouble brushing it aside and devouring the grass on my lawn. Then they took advantage of their relative freedom (since I couldn't patch up the fence in such conditions) and wandered all around the property... which meant that I had to install rapidly a barrier to prevent them from going down into my future rose and peony garden.


The next thing I knew, they had discovered the seeds for wild birds, just below my bedroom window. I was surprised to see that, within reasonable limits, the presence of the donkeys didn't deter the finches and tits from dropping in to get seeds. Later, I noticed that the three suspended balls of fat had disappeared. By that time, the donkeys had strolled down to the former sheep shed, to settle in for the night. And this morning, I was finally able to get them back into their paddock and fix up the electric fence. So, everything is back in order.

Cheese power

Whenever my lovely friend Corina decides to put up a video on her blog, I'm inevitably delighted, and tempted to steal her suggestions. [I've spent the last few weeks trying vainly to liberate myself from the haunting tenor voice of the Scorpions' vocalist.] I think Corina and I share the same sort of appreciation of humor, music and other things. Here's her latest delightful choice:



This video is all the more relevant in that Corina tells me that she's thinking of settling down in this cheese territory.

Bye Bargy

My uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker—known variously as "Farmer", "Ken" or "Bargy" (baby talk for the word baby)—was the last male of the branch of the Braidwood Walkers who settled on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales.

I was in regular phone contact with him over the last few years, but his degraded hearing made it hard to communicate.

I received from my dear uncle Bargy, a few years ago, a signet ring that belonged to our Irish ancestor Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934]. On that occasion, I promised my uncle that I would do my best to perpetuate the memory of our Irish ancestors named Kennedy. Today, I repeat solemnly that pledge.

See my blog and website concerning my maternal ancestors.

I'm sad that Bargy has left us (at an advanced age), because he was one of my primary links with the past, and I had imagined that I might meet up with him again, one of these days, out in Australia.

Bye Bargy...

Revised top ten

This is excellent Hitchens:

Autosuggestion

This seemed to be the word I was looking for, but maybe it isn't. I'm thinking of the process by which an individual attempts to bring about a certain situation simply by wishing intensely that it should arise. My Swedish friend Eric M Nilsson is, without a doubt, an individual to whom all sorts of fascinating and less enchanting things have happened in the course of his existence. Funnily enough, Eric has told me that, whenever he would like such-and-such a situation to come about, the best approach is to refrain completely from hoping explicitly that it will happen. The best example of this situation occurred long ago when Eric (a filmmaker) would have liked to shoot some kind of particularly spectacular event in Stockholm. But, the more he hoped to come across a spectacular event, the more he found himself faced with totally boring situations. So, in a fit of apparent craziness, he decided to abandon all his conscious desire to find an interesting scene. In concrete terms, he achieved this absence of intentionality by getting up very early in the morning, at a time when almost nothing could possibly be happening in the city, and simply pointing his movie camera at an empty square. The video camera had been recording nothingness for a few minutes when, all of a sudden, a little man in an overcoat emerged from a hole in the ground (a subway exit), looked around stealthily to make sure that nobody was watching him (he hardly noticed the presence of Eric and his camera), then took out a can of aerosol paint and sprayed a message on the wall: something along the lines of Screw all cops! Then he disappeared back down into the subway, and Eric shut down his camera. In refusing to search intentionally for an event, Eric had simply found one. Or was it rather the event that had found Eric?

Over the last few days, I've been involved in informal conversations about homeopathy and its corollary, the so-called placebo effect. This morning, on the phone, Christine pointed out (if I understood her correctly) that the tiny white pills of homeopathy serve as a focus for an act of intense autosuggestion, and that this situation is vastly superior to the alternative solution of consuming authentic pharmaceutical products whose effects are not necessarily totally positive. I think that Merisi [click here to visit the beautiful blog of this Viennese photographer] was saying much the same thing. Although I dislike all forms of quackery, I'm obliged to realize that there are intelligent observers who disagree with the combat against homeopathy that is being fought by outspoken scientists belonging to what we might call the Dawkins School.

To my mind, things such as prayer, astrology and homeopathy work most efficiently, if not exclusively, when the autosuggestion process is based upon a solid thick layer of impenetrable ignorance.

For example, Bernadette Soubirous probably needed to be exceptionally simple-minded and unschooled in order to persuade herself that she had encountered a lovely lady in blue who just happened to be the virgin mother of Jesus. And today, I would imagine that sick pilgrims who flock to Lourdes with hopes of being cured miraculously also need to be endowed with a profound gift of ignorance and gullibility. I hope that readers understand what I'm trying to say. I don't claim that "miracles" never happen. But I'm saying that their existence necessitates a process of autosuggestion founded upon an ample layer of simplicity and cluelessness. The smarter and more informed you are, the less chance there is that you'll give your powers of autosuggestion sufficient liberty enabling you to pull yourself up into the air by tugging on your shoelaces.

The thing I find difficult to understand is how intelligent and educated individuals, knowing full well that homeopathic substances are practically devoid of active molecules, could nevertheless assemble within themselves a sufficiently intense field of autosuggestive forces to instigate a self-healing process. Maybe such individuals have a kind of poetic vision of the notion of the absence of active molecules. That's why I referred recently to the anecdote about a French scientist who had claimed, a few years ago, that ordinary water might be capable of retaining memories of past events. Maybe, their imagination is so vivid that they can succeed in convincing themselves that infinitesimal quantities of an active substance can remain concealed in the interstices of the diluted product. Maybe, they end up believing that the more you dilute the product, the more these tiny gremlins of active substances are obliged to become defiant, hiding ever more deeply within the obscure matrix in order to save their tiny souls from getting washed away. And the more defiant they are, the more powerful they become. Finally, when there's only a single gremlin left, he's as proud and defiant as hell, and he's sufficiently powerful to cure people of their ills. In any case, if certain individuals are capable of thinking that way, then maybe they're in an excellent state of mind to unfold their personal forces of autosuggestion. Honestly, I don't know if that's how things work, because I've never been capable of believing truly in minuscule gremlins or sprites.

Alternatively, maybe some people have the vague feeling that the active molecules in a homeopathic product have been transformed mysteriously into some kind of bacteria. After all, it's not so long ago that people believed in the spontaneous creation of living organisms. When I was a child, I seem to recall that somebody tried to make me believe that tadpoles came into existence miraculously, out of pure moisture, up in the clouds. Insofar as the microscopic world is indeed mysterious, and infinitely more so if you care to soak up a few notions of modern chemistry, then people might well be prepared to believe that their homeopathic pills do indeed contain infinitesimal organisms, of a mysterious kind, that are capable of doing them a lot of good. And, once they believe that, they're in an ideal state to set the autosuggestion ball rolling.

What I've just been saying is very much like religious belief. Since nobody can ever prove that God or the Great Spaghetti Monster don't exist, many people carry on leaving a tiny place open in their mind, ready to welcome a friendly divinity if ever he came along looking for a warm bed for the night. We become incapable of accepting the idea that nothing means nothing. Instead, nothing (like the quantity of active molecules in a homeopathic preparation) is interpreted as meaning "extremely small" but possibly "extremely powerful".

In my recent article entitled Health-giving drugs [display], the word "placebo" made an appearance, but I believe that my article and this term have generated confusion. So, I'll make a rapid attempt here to rectify the situation. The experimental situation in which I found myself is described as a double-blind trial. That means that the guinea pigs are divided into two groups, known as the experimental group (receiving the active molecules) and the control group (receiving a trivial substance that I would refer to, not as a placebo, but simply as powder). The expression "double-blind" means that neither the experimenters nor the guinea pigs know in which group each guinea pig is located. Why do they do this? That's where the word "placebo" enters with its correct usage. If a guinea pig knew that he was in the experimental group, receiving the active molecule, then he might become like a believer taking homeopathic pills, or praying at Lourdes. That's to say, his health might improve through autosuggestion, regardless of whether or not the active molecule was in fact efficient. So, to discourage guinea pigs from becoming over-confident in the positive effects of the active molecule, everybody is kept in the dark, right up until the end of the experiment.

I wrote the above-mentioned article as a kind of joke. (I even included the keyword "offbeat" at the end of the article.) So, much of what I said was in mirth: a case of my slightly weird sense of humor. For example, it's not true at all that the length of my penis increased through my confidence in a mythical molecule, and it's not true that I was struck by nausea when I forgot to take the tablets. I think my readers realized that the article was basically a joke. To be perfectly truthful, I was constantly aware of an almost comical aspect of this kind of double-blind test: namely, the fact that, for the needs of scientific objectivity, certain guinea pigs were obliged to consume inert powder, assiduously, every day for several years. I find this situation highly amusing, and this brought out a kind of playful but evil streak in me. The experimenters were constantly asking us whether it was boring to take the tablets every day. Then, towards the end, they even asked each one of us whether we had imagined that we were taking the active molecule or inert powder. In telling a lie and pretending that I was utterly convinced that I was being cured by a miracle product, I was viciously aware that I was being a bad boy, as it were. For, if it had turned out that I had in fact been receiving the active molecules, the experimenters would have had lingering doubts about what had actually kept me alive. Was it because of the authentic power of the molecules, or because of a placebo effect (my autosuggestive self-healing)? In a similarly playful spirit, I used to amuse myself during their annual medical visit. It included an Alzheimer test in which you're asked to give the names of animals for twenty seconds. A normal person will reply, say: lion, tiger, elephant, giraffe, camel, etc. An Alzheimer candidate will reply: horse, cow, horse, calf, cow, etc. I liked to give them my special list of animals (all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small): cockroach, toad, worm, wasp, eel, flea, rat, jellyfish, louse, etc. It amused me to glimpse the startled expression on the face of the nurse.

In fact, the metaphor that often came into my mind when I thought about the experiment was the notorious bet imagined by Blaise Pascal. He said that since you've got nothing to lose by believing in God (even though he might not exist), and everything to lose by not believing in him (if he did in fact exist), then it's a sound gambling approach to decide to believe in him. Incidentally, I was amused by the disgusted reaction of Christopher Hitchens in God is not Great [display], who declares that Pascal's "theology is not far short of sordid". Hitchens says that, if he were to find himself face-to-face with God, he would say: "Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars." I'm inclined to agree with Hitchens. God has always appeared to me as a kind of gentlemanly chap, no doubt brought up in refined circles and educated in a good school for boys.

My Pascalian gamble in the case of the alleged tablets of omega 3 and vitamins was that I had nothing to lose by thinking of them as miracle molecules (even though they might be inert powder), whereas I would have egg on my face if I said they were powder and then discovered that these powerful little tablets had in fact saved my life. So, like a Christian who goes to church solely as a good bet on eternal bliss, I pretended at times (when I had nothing better to do, or when I took pleasure in making fun of the experimenters) that my tablets were indeed the body and blood of my Savior.

Aussie espionage downs an Israeli bike

A few hours after their arrival in Tel-Aviv to investigate the use of Australian passports in the recent assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Australian federal police agents in a silver Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle apparently ran over a female cyclist and failed to stop. For the moment, there are no indications that the Mossad might have played a role in this incident. And no innocent lives were lost... although the woman claims that one of her bike wheels is totally fucked up beyond repair. Could this be a disguised and disgruntled act of Australian retaliation against the Hebrew nation? No diplomats were on hand to answer that troubling question.

Pathetic Palin

America is a sick nation.



Let me rephrase my opening line. Some of America's would-be leaders are silly, sad and sick creatures. Seriously, can you imagine for a nightmarish instant that this dumb female jerk might be put in charge of the USA?

Health-giving drugs

Here's the gist of a trivial personal health problem that arose almost five years ago, which I've often described. My huge ram had escaped from Gamone. A neighbor phoned to inform me that the animal had apparently fallen down an embankment alongside the Rouillard bridge over the Bourne, and was now stranded, in a state of shock, on a narrow ledge about three meters above the surface of the river. I finally decided to walk into the water, throw a rope around the ram, and simply make him topple down into the water. Once he was next to me in the running river, I attached the rope securely, then we half-scrambled and half-swum to a spot some twenty meters downstream, where I made a superhuman effort (the sort of thing you can do in emergency situations) to drag him up onto dry earth. Unfortunately, the ram had apparently received internal wounds, maybe through being hit by a motor vehicle, and he died at Gamone a week later. Meanwhile, I woke up the next morning with a strange numbness at the tips of my right-hand thumb and index finger. A few weeks later, a brain scan revealed the presence of a tiny white dot, sign of a vascular accident. The brain specialist with eyes sharp enough to detect the spot told me that the national health research institute would be thrilled if I were to help them as a guinea pig in their testing of a new treatment based upon a mixture of omega 3 (fish oil) and vitamins (folates and vitamins B6 and B12). I agreed to join up. This meant taking two tablets a day for a period of several years, and having a detailed checkup, once a year, with a visiting nurse.

I took this stuff assiduously, even when I went out to Australia for a month in 2006. Their dietetic advice was always sound, and vaguely helpful, and their annual checkups confirmed that I was in perfect shape. The only thing I regretted concerning this entire experience was that I forgot to ask for the name and phone number of the splendid African girl who received me for the first visit at the hospital in Romans. (She was replaced by a dull guy.) In my mind, there was no doubt whatsoever that all this omega 3 and vitamins was truly doing me a hell of a lot of good. It made me feel in fine form. Inversely, if ever I forgot to take the tablets in the morning, I would soon be overcome by an unpleasant sensation of nausea, and the only solution was to rush into my bathroom and gulp down the precious tablets, whereupon I would perk up almost instantly. Not long after starting the treatment, I decided to create this blog, and I'm convinced that the omega 3 and vitamins actually affected me positively at a cerebral level, and were indirectly responsible for many of my best blog articles. There's no doubt whatsoever that these miracle drugs provided me with the energy enabling me to build my rose pergola and prepare the garden (which is now emerging cautiously but splendidly from winter). Although I can't actually swear to it, I have the impression that the daily dose of omega 3 and vitamins has produced another unexpected consequence (which the research institute never mentioned): they've increased the length of my penis by two or three centimeters.

Well, the experiment is now terminated, and I'm left with a small stock of unconsumed tablets.

People who know me are aware that I'm a good Christian, oozing with altruism and constantly trying to imagine charitable deeds that would render the lives of my fellow men more happy, or at least less horrible. I said to myself that I've received my fair share of these wonder drugs, and there's no reason why I shouldn't offer the left-over tablets to a less fortunate soul than me. Normally, they should be kept in a refrigerator. So, it might not be a good idea to send them to a distant land such as Australia. I was thinking that, maybe, among my blog readers, there's somebody who's planning a trip to the North Pole. There would be no problem about keeping the tablets cold. At the normal rate of two tablets a day, the available stock would be more than ample to provide the necessary energy supplement for reaching the North Pole and then getting back home again.

This morning, I received a final letter from the research institute. It's in French, but you'll recognize the Latin name of the miracle molecule upon which this treatment is based.


If you click the above image, you can see the entire letter. The female director of the laboratory was kind enough to point out in this letter that, if I want to receive a genuine dose of vitamins and omega 3, then I should eat cereals, fruit, vegetables and fish such as salmon, mackerels and sardines. Truly, those folk just can't stop doing me good.

Australia's choice of fighter planes

I started my professional life in France, in 1965, as a technical writer concerned with the Cyrano radar system of Thomson-CSF for fighter aircraft. Later on, I worked in audiovisual production with my friend François de Rivals, former Dassault test pilot.

Last Thursday, February 25, 2010, a surprising article appeared in The Australian, signed by Cameron Stewart: Scientists warned defence department against Joint Strike Fighter [display]. The gist of this fascinating scoop is that a study carried out ten years ago by the internal group known as the DSTO [Defence Science and Technology Organisation] warned the federal government of the risks that would be incurred through a choice of the US aircraft known as the JSF [Joint Strike Fighter]. In spite of these warnings, the government of John Howard signed an order in 2002 to purchase a hundred JSFs for $16 billion: the biggest Australian defense purchase in history.

Today, I would not be particularly dismayed, retrospectively, by this secretive Aussie style of doing defense business were it not for the fact that the DSTO study contains scathing criticism of the other available options if Australia were to reject the JSF choice. These options included, in particular, the US F-15E and the French Rafale. According to the article in The Australian, the study concluded that the French aircraft had weaknesses described as follows:

— "France's Rafale had an unreliable and weak engine."

— "Rafale has short-term shortfalls in engine and radar performance."

Insofar as the virtual JSF product, at that time, existed only on paper, it can be said retrospectively that Australia plunged blindly into the US program, inspired primarily by Howard's attachments to his time-honored protector. Today, it's too late to change things, but the publication of last week's revelations in Australia demands an informal French reaction concerning the unjust criticism of the illustrious Rafale fighter, which is a proven masterpiece produced by Dassault Aviation.

Last December, during a giant international encounter organized by the United Arab Emirates, the Dassault Rafale, in spite of its "unreliable and weak engine" and its "shortfalls in engine and radar performance", proved itself a superior killer. Today, the only aircraft that is in fact technologically superior to the Dassault Rafale is the American F-22. But it costs three times the price of a Rafale, and it's not a polyvalent aircraft capable of air/ground and air/sea actions.

Meanwhile, the American JSF project seems to be moving head-first into a brick wall of technical and financial problems... whose consequences will be felt inevitably, sooner or later, by Australia.

Believe me (or rather, believe Dassault and the facts):
There's nothing wrong with the Rafale!

Adjani

I've always imagined naively that the great Isabelle Adjani would be the ideal French actress to play the role of Abelone in my recently-completed movie adaptation of a celebrated novel of Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. That's to say, I've been duped deliciously into thinking that this 54-year-old lady could indeed play the role of an Abelone who's more like half that age. That's the magic of Adjani: she's ageless... like the Germanic nymph Ondine in the play by Jean Giraudoux, in which the presence of Adjani mesmerized me back in 1974.

A year ago, I started a second blog, French Leaves, focussed upon French literary themes. Lazily, I got no further than an article about Adjani playing the role of a distraught school teacher [display]. This role has just earned her the César award for best actress.

Great Viking god

As I've often pointed out, Y-chromosome tests have revealed that my haplogroup is R1b1b2a1b5, which means that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool European. Unless there was an adoption somewhere up the track, my Skyvington surname surely takes me back to a Norman companion of the Conqueror, whereas my grandmother's Pickering surname takes me back with a high degree of certainty to the Conqueror himself, in person. Although I've always enjoyed reading about the fabulous myths of Egypt and Greece and the profound legends of Judaism and Christianity (and still enjoy this recreation), I've never really "felt"—at a gut level, you might say—that my elders belonged to the tribes who produced such stuff. Never was this feeling stronger than when I used to visit Israel regularly, in the late '80s and early '90s. With respect to all the various peoples and cultures on the edge of the Mediterranean, there's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I'm a total outsider. I've devoted a lot of energy to studying both Modern Greek and Hebrew, and I would love to imagine that one of my ancestors might have been a Sephardic Jew who studied algebra in the great library of Alexandria, before moving across to teach the Kabbala in Thessaloniki. But I know that such thoughts are fairy tales. Noel Coward used to sing that "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". Seeing the way my skin turns crimson on such occasions, it's obvious that none of my ancestors used to hang around the Mediterranean or the deserts of Arabia and Northern Africa. As people in France might say: Billy and the Bedouins are two distinct entities.

Now, I've only navigated for a year or so in a wooden sailing boat (the Zygeuner, out in Fremantle), and I've never got around to plundering villages and raping maidens. Still, I often feel as if I have a Viking soul (if ever these fellows had such things). And a corollary of this feeling is my spontaneous admiration of the exploits of a good old Norse god such as Thor.

So, you'll understand why I was so thrilled to come across an excellent article on this subject written by a bright Scottish lass named Muriel Gray [display]. Insofar as my pagan heart still stirs to the soothing roars of thunder, maybe it's a mistake for me to describe myself as an atheist. I'll have to check whether there's maybe some kind of church in America that worships these archaic gods. I'm sure there must be. On the other hand, when I was working on the typescript of a novel about Master Bruno (founder of the Carthusian monastic order), I once tried to acquire a basic understanding of the legends of the Germanic Nibelungen (in which young Bruno, in medieval Cologne, was no doubt bathed), which strike me as the most confused shit I've ever encountered. So, maybe it would be wiser if I were to remain a pious old-fashioned atheist, devoid of fancy ribbons and bows.

Free Tilikom!

The most fitting operation that could be performed as a tribute to celebrate the life and marine loves of the veteran Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau, drowned by a captive orca on February 24, would consist of releasing the huge animal into the ocean. An interesting article entitled How to free a killer whale written by Naomi Rose, a US marine mammal scientist, explains how this complex operation could be carried out [display].

Cassoulet update

In my article of 7 November 2009 entitled Memorable cassoulet [display], I mentioned my enthusiasm for the preparation of this traditional dish from south-west France. Then, in an article of 24 January 2010 entitled Handmade French ovenware [display], I described my discovery of a pottery firm that produces the traditional ovenware for cassoulet. All that was missing was a typical photo of my own cassoulet preparation served up in a handmade Digoin dish. Here, at last, is the missing photo:

You might ask: What persuaded me to prepare a cassoulet dinner? Well, last Friday evening, French TV offered us a live transmission from Cardiff of the rugby match between France and Wales. Since I've always associated cassoulet with rugby, I decided that this match provided me with an excellent pretext for inaugurating my ovenware. It was also the first time I tasted my home-cooked duck confit... which is excellent.

Gamone spring

[This article, intended for a small subset of my readers, concerns a technical problem at Gamone.]

In my article of 23 October 2009 entitled Waiting for water [display], I described the overflow pipe I had attached to my spring, up above the house at Gamone. As I said, I would have to wait until there was a sufficient quantity of water in the pool before knowing whether or not the installation was totally successful.

Well, a week or so ago, after all the snow on the slopes above Gamone had finally melted, I was able to get a clear picture of the situation. Water has continued to flow nonstop through the overflow hole:

And it emerges from the red tube as a strong and steady stream:

However, an equally strong and steady stream flows along the U-shaped steel gutter that crosses the road:

Clearly, the diameter of the overflow hole is not nearly large enough to empty out all the water that is backed up in the pool, seen here:

The following photo shows both the surface of the pool and the start of the red tube that takes water away from the overflow hole:

The pool and the red tube are separated by a dam wall, a meter high, made out of thick limestone blocks. The rectangular steel lid can be lifted to provide access to the overflow pipe. As you can gather from these two views of the pool, a huge mass of water needs to be evacuated. And some of this water is seeping out over the upper edges of the pool and giving rise to the stream that crosses the road.

Solution? Next summer, when the pool is once again almost dry, I'll have to widen considerably the diameter of the overflow hole in the limestone wall, so that a greater volume of water flows into the red tube. To do this, I'll need to rent a powerful electric jackhammer of the following kind:

Since the drilling will be horizontal, I'll need to rig up some kind of overhead support with a chain capable of bearing the weight of the jackhammer. I can sense already that this is going to be a heavyweight task, but it's the only way of solving the problem.

Building for the birds

When the sun is shining at Gamone, I love to work outside at manual tasks. Think of it, in musical terms, as a counterpoint melody with respect to the hours I spend in front of my computer. My everyday Gamone fugue is 50 percent intellectual, 50 percent manual.

Judging from the quantity of tools, this job looks like a big project.

By chance, I received a visit from one of the fellows who recently restored a corner of the roof of my house. When he saw my sturdy style of construction of a nest box for mésanges (great tits), he burst out laughing. "There's no way in the world that the birds are going to kick that box apart... not even if they turn out to be ostrich eggs." I explained that I was simply following construction principles that I had discovered on the web. I agree: I've probably used twice as many screws as are really necessary. On the other, it's not the thigh muscles of the baby tits that worry me, but rather the combined effects of rain, wind and sun. I can't even paint the nest box, because wild birds don't like painted surfaces. In any case, here's the finished object:

The diameter of the entrance, 30 mm, corresponds theoretically to giant tits. I'm proud of the genuine slate roof (half of a single slate tile purchased at Castorama for 4 euros), which I've glued to a hinged plywood lid. This roof can be opened for annual cleaning. The interior "balcony" will be used by the parents as a convenient platform when entering or exiting the nest box. As for the nest itself, to be built by the birds, it will be located down in the depths of my box. The final object is quite heavy (because of the slate), and shouldn't normally be blown apart by the first tempest at Gamone.

I've anchored it firmly against a stout vertical branch of one of my linden trees. In April, by which time the box will have merged into the setting, the moment of truth will arrive. Will Monsieur et Madame Mésange decide to move in and procreate in my nest box? We'll see...