Barriers to my zeal

Readers of the Antipodes blog will have noticed that my enthusiasm for the ideas of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins is such that I have a tendency towards evangelism: a constant wish to spread the Good Word. Well, at times, I've run into problems. Recently, in the course of an impromptu lunch-table conversation with Natacha and Alain, I drifted unthinkingly into a spontaneous presentation of the basic facts of Darwinian evolution. I chose an unlikely creature as the hero of my demonstration: the parasitic tick that attaches itself to mammals such as dogs and humans, and sucks blood.

A friend once told me about tick behavior. Since then, I've remained fascinated by the strange lifestyle of this creature, whose destiny appears to be invested in the tick equivalent of a perpetual grand lottery of a Zen Buddhist variety. More precisely, a young tick has a one-track mind, and that track leads to the tip of a branch of weed where the creature sets up its residence. There, it hangs upside-down, motionless, day and night, with its outstretched claws facing the heavens, like a religious hermit in a trance, waiting for a godsend: namely, the chance arrival of a warm-blooded mammal to which it can immediately attach itself, to suck blood. If such an animal arrives on the scene, then the tick can survive, indeed thrive. If not, it dies. Now, from a Darwinian point of view, that sounds like a good story. But Natacha (whom I had imagined naively as a Darwinian) turned out to be reluctant to allow me to pursue joyfully my storyteller's role.

NATACHA: "William, have you ever actually been in close contact with a tick, in the kind of situation you're describing?"

WILLIAM: "Well, not exactly, because the ticks are out there in the open fields, perched on their weed stems, waiting for a beast to pass by. But we can't necessarily see them."

NATACHA: "You seem to be describing a horde of goblins…"

The bottom fell out of my didactic presentation of a tick-oriented Darwinian case study. It never took off. The ticks are still waiting there, patiently…

Later, I was under the charm of the Dawkins presentation of dam-building beavers, which constitute a spectacular case study in The Extended Phenotype (which the author seems to think of as his major scientific publication). Basically, the general idea is that a beaver's genes result in the existence of dams in exactly the same way that my friend's genes, say, produced her blue eyes. There's an obvious difference, one might object. The blue eyes are actually an intimate part of my friend, whereas nobody would seriously suggest that the gigantic log constructions are bodily appendages of their beaver builders. Dawkins astounds us by saying no, there's no essential difference. The beaver's determination to build dams and my friend's blue eyes can both be considered as phenotypes of the individual's genetic heritage. The fact that the color of my friend's eyes is inside (her body), as it were, while the presence of the beavers' dam is outside (their bodies), changes nothing. The blueness and the "damness" are perfectly comparable consequences of the phenotypical effects of genes.

Well, in much the same way that I had wished to transmit my Darwinian enthusiasm to Natacha, I found myself obsessed by the challenge of telling my son François about the wonders of beaver dam-builders, as explained by Dawkins.

WILLIAM: "François, imagine a young beaver who gives the impression that he's about to decide what he's going to do with his life. Is it imaginable that he might be in a position to choose between a traditional dam-building existence and some other lifestyle that has nothing to do with building dams?"

Retrospectively, I realize that the wording of my rhetorical question was silly, falsely naive, indeed awkward and wrong to the point of offering my son an invitation to produce the following delightful scenario, entitled The Emancipated Adolescent Beaver, which annihilated instantly my zealous didactic pretensions:

FRANCOIS: "Yeah, man, I'm a young beaver, and I decided I don't have no time for all that old shit from my parents about buildin' dams. They been doin' it for ages, but it don't get them nowhere. Ain't no sense in it, believe me. They been doin' that out in the wild country. Me, I moved into the city. Shit, man, on a Saturday night, do you see me tellin' the brothers and sisters that I ain't gonna stay with them, coz I got a mother-fucken dam to build? Fuck that, man. I'm an emancipated beaver…"

Obviously, I'm in need of better Darwinian/Dawkinsian examples.

Special spire

In the village of Choranche, our church is humble but ancient. It was one of two churches in the commune of Choranche, mentioned for the first time in a financial assessment [pouillé] carried out by the diocese of Grenoble in 1104. In that document, the village church was referred to in Latin as ecclesia Beata Mariæ de Chauranchis : the church of Saint Mary of Choranche.

The stone structure that we see today has resulted, no doubt, from numerous modifications to the primitive church over the centuries. The square church bell-tower, of a distinctive Dauphiné style, is surely quite ancient. Its squat red-tiled spire is surrounded at the base by four short stone pillars, standing like sentinels at the points of the compass. Now, you have to walk around to the other side of the church to discover that this red spire of the tiny church of Saint Mary of Choranche has an unexpected feature that maybe makes it unique among all the countless village churches of France.

As you see, the spire of our ancient church has a square skylight, of the modern velux variety, to let in the light of the Holy Spirit. Tineke tells me that the decision to install this roof window resulted from a municipal vote that was carried out a couple of decades ago, when the mayor of Choranche was Jean-Louis Salazard. But nobody, today, seems to be able to throw light upon the precise technical purpose of this velux. As far as we know, the spire has never been the abode of a dwarf Quasimodo. So, we have no idea why the municipality decided, once upon a time, that light was needed in this remote extremity of the ancient church. Let's call it a Christian mystery.

God said: "Let there be light."
And there was skylight.

Australians in action

Over the weekend, the world has witnessed three splendid victories of Australians. First, there was the arrival in Sydney of 16-year-old Jessica Watson, who had just sailed non-stop around the globe.

Then there was the impressive victory of world champion Cadel Evans in a stage of the Tour of Italy.

Finally, there was the stunning victory of Mark Webber in the Grand Prix of Monaco.

In each of these three domains, the hero/heroine was backed up by solid sponsors with tons of cash, but their achievements were nevertheless heroic at a sporting level, and they deserve our admiration. Besides, one has the impression that, for each of these three exceptional individuals, even greater victories await them…

Tineke's portrait of Sophia

From time to time (but not often), I've met up with gifted artists capable of creating portraits. On such occasions, I've always wondered naively: How do they do it? This skill has intrigued me greatly in the case of my Choranche neighbor Tineke Bot, with whom I've had countless fascinating conversations about the ways in which she perceives the world around her. I've had opportunities of noticing, often in trivial contexts, that Tineke's awareness of the physical environment of forms and colors in which she exists is surely many times more subtle and sensitive than my own vision of these same things. At times, she reminds me of the proverbial Eskimo with his dozens of words for all the many kinds of snow. The other day, on the telephone, I was deploring the fact that the current abundance of wetness and scarcity of sunshine at Choranche have given rise to a uniformly green environment in which there are not yet any colorful flowers (apart from yellow buttercups in the fields). In this context, Tineke exclaimed her enchantment upon the discovery of such a vast array of subtly different kinds of greenness, forming a magical mosaic all around her.

As an accomplished artist (sculpture, painting, drawing, etc), Tineke demonstrates constantly that, not only does she see the world with fine sensitivity, but she can transmit her special visions through the works she creates… even in the case of a hastily-sketched portrait of my dog Sophia.

This morning, I took this photo of Sophia's head in about the same position as for Tineke's portrait:

Tineke obliged Sophia to participate in a sitting, as it were, as she needed to have the dog directly in front of her, staring up at her while she was executing her drawing. I was amused to find that Tineke's husband Serge has apparently become an essential collaborator in this kind of animal portrait project. He crouched alongside Tineke and distributed little bits of bread to Sophia throughout the sitting, in order to keep the dog more-or-less fixed in the necessary spot. If I understand correctly, Serge became patient and proficient in this technique with sheep, back at the time that Tineke was creating little masterpieces such as this one:

In the animal domain, Tineke has also done fine sketches of horses.

The brown horse, momentarily endowed with Tineke's colorful vision of the landscape, seems to be saying to itself, in amazement: "Wow, the Vercors is truly extraordinary today!"

We're alright, Jack!

Once upon a time, up until quite recently, there was a semblance of mutual concern, at a political level, between elected Australians and their counterparts in our dear "mother country". Over the weekend, the Aussie media has been enthusing about the budget joy of Laborites down under:

And they've been saying sweet fuck all (well, what might they say?) about the woes of their theoretical brethren in Britain:

This, to my mind, is as it should be. So, I won't cry crocodile tears and complain. Let me just shed a tiny nostalgic tear about the foregone era when we Leftists "of British blood" (please note the presence of my inverted commas) both mattered, together.

Views from the village

I don't spend much time in the village of Choranche, because it's a couple of kilometers up in the "wrong direction". What I mean to say is that, when my destination is Pont-en-Royans or Saint-Marcellin, not to mention Grenoble or Valence, I'm obliged to turn my back on the village of Choranche. Besides, there's not much to do or see there… unless, on rare occasions, I need to visit the municipal office. But I often drive into the village of Choranche out of curiosity, to see if anything has changed. In general, needless to say, nothing has changed there. I lay my head willingly on a block in saying that nothing could ever change in the village of Choranche. A village observer has the impression that everything stopped, long ago, with the following image:

Today, the village offers us a magnificent view of my magic mountain, the misty Cournouze:

In the opposite direction, we have the fabulous cliffs of Presles:

And, between these two geological masterpieces, there's a humble but beautiful stream, the Bourne:

From my lookout up on the slopes of Gamone, I sense constantly the mystical tellurian presence of these three great entities that dominate our landscape: the fairy-tale mountain to the south, the stark cliffs to the north, and the river in between. But it's a fact that Choranche village is a good place to take photos of these geological giants.

Nice key ring, noble NGO

I've always liked this key ring, which was given to me by my daughter Emmanuelle soon after I moved into Gamone and invited the young donkey Moshé (born in a neighboring valley) to join me.

At that time, this key ring was associated with a French-based NGO [nongovernmental organization]: Veterinaries without borders.

Recently, a reference to agronomists has been inserted into the NGO's title. [Click the banner to visit their French-language website.] Their noble goal consists of using agronomic and veterinary know-how in the planetary combat against hunger.

The donkey is an excellent symbol for the quest for durable solutions… if only because the beast itself might be thought of as a kind of living "durable solution" that has come down to us intact from African prehistory. Admittedly, here at Gamone, my two donkeys happen to be living in an exceptional environment, where there's always something to eat… even in winter, when there's half a meter of snow on the slopes. For their ancestors in parched lands, life was surely much harsher.

Out of line

In general, the weather here is not too bad, but there's a tendency towards dampness. Admittedly, we don't live in a monsoon zone, fierce storms are rare, and we don't have the kind of nonstop drizzle that characterizes, say, Brittany. Nevertheless, it's rare, at this time of the year, to be able to work outside in perfectly dry conditions for more than a few hours. I realize now that the only way of accomplishing a reasonable amount of outdoor work at Gamone consists of being constantly prepared, like a conscientious Boy Scout (that's to say, primarily, being dressed permanently in working clothes and boots, even though I might be seated in front of my computer), and dashing into tasks as soon as there's a break in the wetness.

[At the moment I was writing that last sentence, while dressed in muddy green overalls, I suddenly heard the sound of a wall of rainwater beating down upon Gamone, punctuated by flashes of lightning and claps of thunder. The electric power went off. Since I could no longer do anything useful here, I decided to drive into town to buy food at the supermarket. On the way, I saw places where torrential rain had washed away roadside embankments, and formed vast puddles of water. At two spots, emergency road crews were already in action trying to clean up the mess. Truly, I should have never written the above paragraph!]

Over the six months or so, much of the preparation of my garden has been carried out in such conditions, by taking advantage of suitable time slots before or after falls of snow or rain, and when it's not freezing cold. Consequently, certain operations were performed hastily, sometimes too hastily. Yesterday, Bob pointed out to me that the square garden plot in the far right-hand corner is not in precise alignment with its neighbors. He claimed that it's some 5 centimeters in advance of its correct position. Now, up until Bob's remark, I had never noticed this, although I recall that I had a lot of trouble with this last plot, mainly because I was adjusting it in poor weather conditions. (It's convenient to be able to blame the weather, rather than my incompetency.) Well, in the wake of Bob's criticism, I found the error sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb. Yesterday, every time I glanced down at my garden, I was aware of this alignment discrepancy. Finally, during a calm slot in the weather, I got to work digging, with a view to bringing the wooden frame into correct alignment. Here's the present situation:

But it's still too wet to pursue the job...

Awards to ingenious inventors

Everybody in France has heard of the Concours Lépine, which has become part of popular (people-oriented) French culture. Started in 1901, it's an annual competition aimed at promoting ingenious inventors. Louis Lépine was a lawyer with extensive experience in regional administration. Appointed police prefect of the Seine in 1893, he created several fundamental entities that still exist today. For example, he organized the first service for handling lost-and-found objects. He inaugurated a unit of river police in boats on the Seine, and a unit of police on bicycles. He imagined the excellent idea of equipping Paris policemen with a white baton and a silver whistle. He installed hundreds of emergency phones enabling the public to contact firemen and policemen. He invented one-way streets, just as he was the founder of a forensic police service and even a police museum in Paris (where I was able to carry out interesting research into a notorious English personage named Clotworthy Skeffington, held in debtors' prisons in Paris until his escape on the eve of the storming of the Bastille in 1789). As for the idea of starting a competition for inventions, Lépine was motivated by the necessity of doing something to revigorate the lethargic state of the manufacture of toys and small hardware items by Paris craftsmen.

This year's award acclaims a device named Top-Braille whose purpose is so praiseworthy that it's strange it wasn't invented ages ago. It's possible that the idea has always been in people's minds but, to make it a reality, inventors needed to wait until the necessary technology was available. The device simply scans written text and translates it either into Braille dots or an audio version.

Great inventions that were initially award-winners at the Concours Lépine include the ballpoint pen, the two-stroke motor, the steam iron and contact lenses.

Disconnected tomorrow, Tuesday, May 11

A couple of young guys just dropped in to inform me that, all day tomorrow, the electricity will be cut in the neighborhood while they clear tree branches that could fall onto the electric cables. The main threat of this kind at Gamone is due to a group of four or five aged walnut trees, which have been withering away for ages. I asked the guys if, instead of merely lopping off branches, they would be prepared to cut down the entire trees in question. That suits them fine, so long as I clean up the mess afterward. No problem. I'll be able to do that with my chainsaw as soon as the weather's dry, then I'll burn the wood.

So, tomorrow, I'll be without Internet and telephone.

Snail mail

In last Saturday's article entitled Sophia photo update [display], I explained that I had found a colony of baby snails a hundred meters up the road, and that I've been bringing some of these tiny creatures back to a place near the house. Well, my Swedish friend Eric M Nilsson has just sent me an email in which he reacts with astonishment to this news. Here's my translation of Eric's email:

So, you've been bringing snails back to Gamone! We've got lots of them in our "garden", thousands of them, and it's impossible to get rid of them. They proliferate by impregnating themselves! King Gustav III introduced them into Sweden, at Drottningholm Palace, more than a hundred kilometers from where we live. By now, the snails have invaded the entire southern part of Sweden. It's said that ducks of a certain race eat snails. As for the snails, they eat everything.

Eric's email gave me a lot of pleasure, in that I suddenly saw myself engaged in the same majestic preoccupations as a great Scandinavian monarch. On my last snail excursion, I imagined myself accompanied by a throng of sexy blond Swedish maidens who were dancing with joy at the head of the great snail procession, alongside their noble king and his gracious dog, Lady Sophia.

I should explain that what I've been doing could well be illegal, since a French law prohibits the collection of Burgundy snails during the breeding months of April, May and June. Apart from the fact that I'm not sure that these are indeed Burgundy snails rather than the ordinary garden variety (but I think so), I've been checking that there weren't any gendarmes at Gamone during my excursions. Besides, I'm not really collecting these snails. Most of them were wandering around on the macadam or roadside gravel, and I've been simply moving them a hundred meters down the road, to a nicer environment.

I take the opinions of Eric very seriously, because we've been collaborating and agreeing about almost everything since over 35 years ago. Besides, Eric knows my Gamone property quite well. He even made a short video here back in December 2004, at a time when my billy-goat Gavroche was still alive and Moshé was my only donkey.

[Click the photo to view the Nilsson video on Gamone.]

Finally, there's an interesting technical point. It's true, as Eric suggests, that snails—which are hermaphrodites—can be impregnated indiscriminately by any other snail. But there's a limit to this notion of indiscriminate impregnation. A snail can only be impregnated by the sperm of another snail… but never by its own sperm! Otherwise, just imagination the turmoil. Every time a solitary snail happened to derive innocent pleasure from a bit of masturbation, it would suddenly find itself pregnant!

POST-SCRIPTUM: I've already spoken of snails in my articles of 2007 entitled Busy Sunday [display] and Pet snail [display].

Morals

I know this is going to sound silly, but I'll say it all the same. Ever since my youth, I've been intrigued by the philosophy of morals. A child's first introduction to the notions of right and wrong is based largely upon punishment. It's wrong to poke your tongue out at an old man, even though he looks like a scarecrow. So, if the child does so, it's normal that he's likely to be spanked by his mother or father. It's also wrong to play with safety matches, but the punishment is of a different kind. Instead of a spanking, your fingers get burned. Although both actions—making fun of old folk, and playing with dangerous devices—are things that a child "should not do", the child soon starts to feel that there's a difference between these two categories of bad deeds. In the first case, the wrongness consists, as it were, of doing unto another something that you maybe wouldn't wish to be done unto yourself. In the second case, it's simply a matter of not accepting sound advice from experienced oldies who've already made those same mistakes and paid the price in pain.

Within the territory of right and wrong, good and bad, there are a striking number of loopholes, or rather patches of no-man's-land, particularly when other partners step into the picture: social customs, the influence of peer groups, the law of the land and, above all, religions. The territory is transformed into a vast muddy field, where youthful adventurers soon get bogged down… particularly when sex raises its naughty head. For example, young people generally feel that fornicating is good stuff, even when they haven't yet reached the so-called 'legal age" for acts that were referred to, in Australian law, by a delightfully exotic and erotic expression capable of giving a young man an erection: carnal knowledge. Screwing was not explicitly forbidden in the Ten Commandments (except in the form of adultery). Admittedly, if the partners in such a timid crime happened to forget about contraception (often because they didn't know what it was all about), then it could resemble the case of innocent children playing with safety matches.

For all these reasons (and many more), I signed up for a course in moral philosophy at the University of Sydney, in the context of my science studies. There, the naive 16-year-old country boy from Grafton was confronted immediately and inspired immensely by a wise old man from the past named Socrates.

After asserting that "the unexamined life is not worth living", he was put to death for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. Clearly, there were diabolical dimensions in the quest for the truth about morals… if such a truth existed. This became more and more obvious to me when I finally had a chance of looking at what had happened in Auschwitz… which had never been a noteworthy event, curiously, back in my hometown circles.

The classes of an obscure professor of moral philosophy named Alain Ker Stout [1900-1983] were an intellectual catastrophe, because he didn't have much to say, and his way of saying it was sadly comical. Funnily, though, I've retained, not only most of the little he told us, but also three of the books upon which his teachings were based.

They still carry my antiseptic ex libris, which looks as if it were written by a lad fresh out of Sunday school… which was in fact the case.

The philosophy of so-called utilitarianism is even dumber than the term used to designate it. Apparently, we should strive to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of good people. (I'm simplifying.) What does that have to do with utility? Today, only somebody with a mind like that of George W Bush, say, would find this idea "philosophical". To be truthful, I don't know whether or not Bush ever studied John Stuart Mill [1806-1873].

G E Moore [1873-1958] was a brighter analyst… whom I respect for his associations with my two greatest philosophical heroes: Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] and Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]. But he, too, seems to end up telling us that he doesn't really have anything more profound than common sense to tell us about right and wrong, good and evil, and that stuff.

The well-written little book by Patrick Nowell-Smith [1914-2006] has been a primer for countless readers (Penguin sold more than 100,000 copies) who were intrigued by the idea of a logic-based approach to the philosophy of morals. (It would be more correct to speak of logical positivism rather than logic in a broad traditional sense.) But the interest of this book, today, is mainly historical.

So, what are we left with? Well, unfortunately, we're left with a widespread opinion that, somehow, you need to believe in religion before you even have the right to talk about morals. The antiquated enemies of secular thinking attempt to spread the notion that society would disintegrate into a vast anarchic cesspool of savage depravity if ever the little gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were to be removed from the current scene. It goes without saying that these rumormongers are stupid liars, who seek to bully innocent folk into accepting religion in order to save society from barbarian turmoil. But it's the evil liars who are the New Barbarians.

Basically, thinkers such as Richard Dawkins remind us constantly that human nature is what it is, for the better and for the worse, and that the alleged existence of a deity is a totally irrelevant speculation. It's not because the god Jupiter went out of fashion that assassination attempts upon mothers-in-law, say, suddenly spiked. On the contrary, people are starting to believe, these days, that if the gods were finally stacked away in wardrobes with all the other skeletons of human history, there would surely be a drop in crime statistics ranging from raped schoolkids up to kamikaze operations.

In this general context, the brilliant US atheist Sam Harris has succeeded in surprising many of his friends by suggesting that there might indeed be objective links between science and morals. In February 2010, he spoke on this subject at the prestigious conference known as TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design].



In the face of many reactions, Sam Harris has just clarified his thinking in an article entitled Toward a Science of Morality [display]. I like to think that Harris might be onto a good goal: the idea that, somewhere deep down inside our inherited structure of thought, there are inbuilt neuronal circuits (or something like that) that work nonstop at promoting the principle that Auschwitz and countless other barbarian acts were wrong, and that helping little old ladies to cross the busy street in bad weather is a morally good act, for which you deserve to win brownie points. [Remind me to tell you the joke about a pub artist who plays a miniature piano.] For the moment, I would conclude that Harris is not necessarily wrong, but that he nevertheless doesn't need to be right in order for societies to evolve morally in a "well-behaved" fashion.

Sophia photo update

Yesterday, my dog complained that it's ages since I last spoke about her or included her photo in the Antipodes blog. (Well, a fortnight.) Sorry about that laxity, Sophia. Here's a formal portrait:

Over the last few days, Sophia has been accompanying me on snail excursions. What, you ask, is a snail excursion? Well, a hundred meters up the road, at the level of the shed where Bob's daughter Alison used to house her horses, I discovered a colony of newborn snails, apparently of the Burgundy variety (though I may be mistaken). I've been collecting them and bringing them back down here to my compost heap. In the following photo, the snails are roughly the size of peas.

Will they thrive here? I have no idea, but it's worth trying. As for my dog, she can understand a man who prepares dishes of cassoulet, and bakes walnut bread, and buys the very best Isigny butter and cream. For Sophia, however, the idea of collecting tiny snails by the roadside and bringing them back to the house in a plastic saucer is quite crazy… just like growing roses and peonies. But she seems to find it fun to accompany me in these operations.

Photos from my time at Cap France

My friend Yves Tallineau has just sent me a couple of photos dating from 1969, when we were working together in Paris in a software company named Cap France. More precisely, we were operating an in-house training department, located in the Avenue du Général Foy (near the St-Augustin church), aimed at teaching groups of fellow employees of Cap France how to program the IBM 370 computer.

In those days, programmers usually told computers what was to be done by recording programming instructions in the form of punched cards. These were produced manually (generally by the programmers themselves) on IBM card-punch machines. Here we see one of our trainees punching cards for her program, which was probably developed in the Cobol language.

As an extra task, Yves and I once produced a couple of audiovisual presentations concerning the company's two software products, called Autoflow and Sysif. In the following photo, I'm using scissors and adhesive tape to edit an audio tape on a Revox tape recorder.

In fact, at that time, I was attending evening classes organized by Pierre Schaeffer in the musique concrète studios of the research service of the French Broadcasting System. That explains how I had become proficient in audio tape editing.

A few months after the time at which this photo was taken (towards the end of 1969), I decided to leave Cap France and accept an offer to work as a salaried engineer with Schaeffer. As a result of that change in my professional existence, I soon became involved in computer music, television production, artificial intelligence and writing. But that's another long story.

Spanish strawberries and Norman dairy products

A few days ago, a short break in the wet weather gave me a chance to remove as many weeds as possible from my strawberry patch.

The bushes appear to be quite vigorous, so the yield should be good… like last year. But there won't be any strawberries for a while yet. Meanwhile, I couldn't resist the temptation of buying 2 kilos of giant Spanish strawberries at St-Marcellin this morning.

As expected, they're too big to be particularly tasty. One has the impression that they're full of water, and not very sweet. But they're refreshing, a little like eating freshly-picked fruit that hasn't yet been warmed up by the sun.

Last night, there was an interesting TV documentary about the phenomenon of butter in France. Often, I think back to the excellent butter that was produced in the Grafton area when I was a kid. At our annual agricultural fair, called "the show", private producers submitted their butter for judging. I recall fondly the view of lines of wooden boxes, full of dark cream butter, neatly labeled on handwritten cards with the names and addresses of producers, along with a mention of any prize they had won. The lid of each box was removed, allowing visitors to admire the producer's name and logo, embossed on the surface of the butter, with a patched-up wound where samples had been removed for the tasting and judging. As a kid, I liked butter, but I still couldn't imagine how people would actually judge the respective qualities of all these specimens. Funnily, I still remember that the contents of a box of butter weighed exactly 56 pounds. (I think we must have learned that at school.) There don't seem to be any good photos of Australian butter boxes on the web, but here's a Canadian model, which appears to be identical to those of my childhood.

In yesterday's TV program on French butter, a producer belonging to a cooperative named Isigny Sainte-Mère, in the Norman town of Isigny-sur-Mer [display website], went into a euphoric state when he learned that their butter had been awarded the first prize. This morning, out of curiosity (but no doubt with childhood recollections of Grafton's agricultural fair in my mind), I bought a small block of Isigny butter.

Recalling that I had just bought a box of strawberries, I also reached for a jar of Isigny cream.

As you might gather, I'm a compulsive consumer when it comes to foodstuffs. But those dairy products from the cooperative of Isigny Sainte-Mère are indeed delicious.

Neanderthal genome has been sequenced

Researchers have finally succeeded in using tiny samples of powdered bone, 40 thousand years old, to sequence the Neanderthal genome. The team included the Swede Svante Pääbo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig), the American Richard Green (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Hernán Burbano (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá).

This achievement—whose conclusions have just been published in the journal Science—comes a decade after the successful sequencing of the human genome, and five years after the publication of a draft genome sequence of the chimpanzee. It's henceforth possible to compare the three genomes, to determine which genes are shared, and which genes are found uniquely in Homo sapiens.

It's particularly fascinating to find genetic evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals. This lends weight to the idea that we might be two subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, rather than two distinct species. This, of course, is good news for observers who like to imagine (as I do) the use of cloning techniques to bring Neanderthals back into existence.

Neanderthal clones might enable old men leading solitary lives in the mountains to find charming female companions for Scrabble on winter evenings in front of the fireplace. But this wishful thinking could well be illusory.

The ladies would insist on using old-fashioned Neanderthal spelling, and arguments would soon break out…

Separation of church and state in the USA

It was the archaic evangelist Billy Graham, a sort of circus mesmerizer of crowds, who succeeded in convincing the US Congress, in 1952, to establish a National Day of Prayer. I once listened to him out in Sydney, when I was a boy, and I remember feeling embarrassed, as if I had sneaked into a throng of idiots ready to be hypnotized by a snake-oil salesman.

America's official day of prayer is clearly an unconstitutional absurdity, which should have never come into existence. It's as if there were a special day on which the common folk of the nation were expected to attempt to perform miracles upon their fellow citizens, or to chase out devils from their souls, or some other absurdity of that religious mumbo-jumbo kind.

The Secular Coalition for America, whose executive director is Sean Faircloth, represents atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers in US politics.


Their advisory board includes outspoken intellectuals of international renown such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker and Salman Rushdie.

Click the photo to see their video concerning the urgent challenge of revoking the ridiculous National Day of Prayer.

Cournouze weather report

All France has been damp and dismal for the last week. In my recent article entitled Wet world [display], I explained that the Cournouze mountain in Châtelus, seen on the other side of the Bourne from my house at Gamone, is a kind of barometer concerning the current and forthcoming weather situation. Well, here's what the magic mountain has been looking like this morning:

It's only at rare moments like this that I can distinguish the cute little pointed hill that lies just above the white blob of the church and municipal hall of Châtelus. At my home in Choranche, it's not yet the right moment to envisage eating lunch out on the lawn. Meanwhile, in my garden, with all the moisture that has dropped upon Gamone, the foliage is getting greener and more abundant, but the rose and peony bushes have gone on strike, refusing to blossom in such conditions. I wouldn't say they're exactly hot under the collar, merely fed up with the chilly wetness. I must try to calm them down and cheer them up, if I can, with a few warm words.

Onion News Network

There's some nice funny stuff on this website. Click the banner to see a great piece of live reporting concerning a landslide in the Philippines.

Exotic elsewhere

I've always been intrigued by the way in which the curious mammals of the species Homo sapiens, known for their almost hairless skins and their bulky brains (whose weight obliges them to walk upright), often imagine their brethren who live elsewhere on the globe. When art was the only means of recording visions of Antipodean creatures, it was inevitable that a degree of weirdness should creep in. Here's how a European imagined a Tahitian couple:

An indigenous couple in the conquered territory of America merited better treatment than this:

Photography, when it arrived on the Antipodean scene, should have normally made things better. Sometimes, alas, the outcome was worse.

The cropped hair, fancy clothes, woolen stockings and shiny boots of these allegedly "wild Australian children" (in fact, a pair of microcephalic female adolescents) reflect the fact that equally monstrous specimens—unscrupulous and immoral businessmen—were exploiting these unfortunate individuals lucratively in the USA, in the late 1860s, as circus freaks. As they say in the classics: It takes all sorts of people to make a world.

Girt by sky

The Dutch airline KLM has been operating commercial flights between Europe and Australia since before World War II.

Judging from its graphic style, I would imagine that this ad dates from the late 50s… at a time when air hostesses looked a bit like this:


Six years ago, a merger took place between Air France and KLM. Europeans still visualize Sydney as a place with a vast harbor and a big bridge. But a new visual icon has slipped into the picture. Incidentally, there's an aspect of Sydney's Opera House that has always amused me. When tourists see a spectacular structure such as the Notre-Dame Cathedral or the Tower of London, they usually imagine stepping inside it for a visit. But I'm not sure that many tourists in Sydney would envisage buying tickets to see an opera!

In Sydney, visitors wander around the opera house in order to look up in admiration at the bridge, just as they walk over the bridge in order to be able to gaze down upon the opera house. It's a closed circuit.

I have frequent opportunities of confirming that French folk continue to imagine Australia as an exotic wonderland on the other side of the planet. Countless people tell me they dream of going there… but it's a bit like saying they want to take a ride in a hot-air balloon, or go on holidays in a horse-drawn caravan, or cross the canal system of France in a houseboat. It's something that people say they want to do, while rarely going one step further and deciding to actually do so.

When I look at the nice old-fashioned KLM poster, I'm convinced that this graphic style would still be perfect for modern publicity concerning Australia, because foreigners like to imagine it as a picture-book land. And Australians are surely happy to believe this, too. Indeed, the tourist authorities could attempt to persuade the municipality of Sydney to paint the arch of the bridge blue, the pylons pink and the waterside buildings yellow. Boat-owners would be encouraged to adorn their craft with dozens of brightly-colored flags. And the opening line of Dorothea's Mackellar's celebrated poem could be slightly modified to reflect our wishful thinking:

I love a colorful country.