Gift idea for a president

In May 2012, France will be holding its five-yearly presidential election. For the moment, we don't know whether or not Nicolas Sarkozy will be a candidate. In any case, I think it would be nice if people were to start thinking about the kind of gift we could offer the president to celebrate the end of his first five years in office. In fact, if I've brought this subject up today, it's because I've just had a good idea for a great gift, which wouldn't even be all that expensive, if we were all to chip in.

A month before the election, on 10 April 2012, the world will be commemorating the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, just four days into her maiden voyage, after she hit an iceberg.

I've just heard that a British cruise ship, the Balmoral, will be leaving Southampton on 8 April 2012 with the aim of following the itinerary of the Titanic, all the way to New York. The vessel will be carrying living descendants of victims and survivors of the disaster, and it will be halting for a while at the very spot where the great ship went down.

Now, Nicolas Sarkozy has always expressed his admiration for the New World, and even takes pleasure (so it's said) in being designated as "Sarko, the American". The Balmoral will be dropping in at Cherbourg (France) before setting out across the Atlantic. And this will be happening just a month before the end of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency. I simply suggest that we all get together and raise enough cash to offer Sarko a ticket on this voyage. If all goes well, and there are no mishaps during the trip (one never knows…), he would have ample time to get back to France before the election. In that case, the very idea of his having survived a reenactment (as it were) of the voyage of the Titanic would have a precious impact upon the president's future image and heritage.

Cheese production in Australia

As a fortunate Australian (from a cheese viewpoint) now settled in France, and living just a dozen or so kilometers from the prestigious cheese center of Saint-Marcellin, I feel it my moral duty to air the following video:



This campaign is being promoted by the following fine organization:

Sarkozy wounded by a word

In a recent issue of his Marianne weekly, the distinguished journalist Jean-François Kahn chose a very strong word to designate Nicolas Sarkozy. He referred to him as the "voyou de la République".

[Click the image to access the article, in French.]

This time-honored colloquial term is derived from the Latin via (street, road). A voyou is a hoodlum who hangs about on the streets, often a loutish delinquent.

[TRIVIAL ANECDOTE: In my French family, this word evokes a harmless verbal encounter, long ago, between my charming mother-in-law and me, at a time when my French was not very subtle. Feeling that her questions pried mildly into my personal existence, I reacted with a smile: "Madame, je ne suis pas un voyou."]

Kahn's harsh words concerning the president are motivated above all by Sarkozy's treatment of recent urban unrest in the nearby city of Grenoble. The police shot and killed a young bandit who had just returned from an armed attack of a casino in the region. Companions of the deceased bandit then assaulted police forces and behaved riotously for several days and nights. Apparently judging that the rioters belonged to families with origins in the Maghreb (prior to becoming naturalized French citizens), the president dared to evoke the notion that offenders of this kind might be deprived of their French nationality. Now, you don't need to be a expert in French and international law to realize that this idea goes against the grain of certain fundamental republican principles: above all, the legal equality of all French citizens, regardless of their origins. It goes without saying that any attempt to change this principle in France would immediately bring to mind the ugly epoch of Pétain and Laval, when the authorities made a distinction between "pure" French people and those with foreign origins…

In Sarkozy's reactions to the violence in Grenoble, he gave the impression that the killing of a French police officer is "worse", from a legal viewpoint, than, say, the murder of an old lady. If the first killer happened to be of Maghrebi origins, he could be condemned to a stateless existence, whereas the murder of the old lady would remain French. In his anger, Sarkozy even evoked the curious idea that parents could be punished for the delinquency of their offspring.

A few years ago, this same weekly, Marianne, contested strongly the idea that Sarkozy might be compared with George W Bush, as a dogmatic and sectarian ideologist. On the contrary, Sarkozy was designated as follows: "He is a pragmatic and talented Bonapartiste (the best candidate put forward by the Right for ages). He is capable, if he thinks it's in his personal interests, of stigmatizing the 'big bosses' or criticizing capitalism. However, the giant proportions of his swollen ego, the amplification of his self-adoration, and the force of his almost unlimited quest for power and control are close to madness. And they represent a threat for our conception of democracy and the republic."

The present article by Jean-François Kahn gives the impression that Sarkozy will be judged severely for his excessive reactions in the aftermath of the Grenoble rioting. It's important to understand that Kahn states unequivocally that the president is certainly neither a Pétainiste, a racist, a xenophobe nor a Fascist. No, he's simply an urban delinquent, a voyou. Here are Kahn's conclusions concerning Sarkozy, which I've translated freely into English:

"No ideological or ethical constraint ever reins him in. No transcendental principle or moral imperative ever affects him. No Freudian super-ego ever stops him in his tracks. To conquer and to stay in power, he is capable of anything. Absolutely anything at all… in the style of a suburban gangster. In fact, equipped with the talent that such a mentality requires, and the necessary sense of taking risks, Nicolas Sarkozy is a voyou. He is a suburban gang-leader, whose suburb happens to be Neuilly. [Neuilly is an elegant residential neighborhood on the Western outskirts of Paris.] Seen in this light, it is typical of Sarkozy to 'declare war', in all kinds of situations, against rival gangs!"

It was quite unusual that an August issue of a political weekly should have created such a stir, when most French people are away on holidays. I don't have the impression that things will quieten down soon for the president. Henceforth, in evaluating Sarkozy, there'll be two time references: before and after Grenoble 2010.

Daughter dated a Beatle

While writing my post about symbolic destruction, and searching through my personal archives for Beatles data, I came upon this old photo showing my daughter Emmanuelle surrounded by the Fabulous Four:

In our family, for reasons that should be obvious, we rarely talk about this fleeting romantic episode. The individuals involved have now grown older, and created new lives. To call a spade a spade, it's up to Emmanuelle alone (or maybe Ringo), to reveal—if they so desire—the exact circumstances in which this apparently tender relationship once sprang into existence.

In any case, as a father, I consider that it's none of my business to delve into the possible relationships that may or may not have existed between my children and various celebrities.

Americans fond of symbolic destruction

Personally, the only act of "symbolic destruction" in which I've ever participated was the elimination by flames of the previous owner's rubbish at Gamone in February 1991.

This operation was conducted expertly, in an ambiance of joy, by my son François and his friends Philippe and Boubeker.

A primordial association exists between burning and purification or cleansing. On the other hand, I draw the line at religious sacrifice, which I've always looked upon as one of the most barbaric and psychopathic concepts that the mixed-up mind of Man has ever concocted.

In certain contexts of delusion, the destruction of an old order is seen as a sacrifice to the new order. That was the spirit in which the Nazis burned books:



Yesterday, on French TV, I watched an excellent documentary on John Lennon, who has been thrust momentarily into the news because his killer's sixth attempt at parole has just been postponed until September.

Everybody's familiar with the scenes of mass hysteria that occurred in many places throughout the world when the Beatles were at the height of their fame. But we should not forget other frightening scenes of hysteria, in the USA, following Lennon's amusingly blasphemous remark about their being more popular than Jesus Christ. Hordes of American adults and children scrambled to burn everything they could find concerning the Beatles.



I've just come across a US invitation to burn a flag next September 12.

This is said to be a protest against the American Right's exploitation of racial prejudice for political gain, and the proposed flag-burnings will coincide with the annual Tea Party festivities. If you're motivated, please be careful. For God's sake, don't burn the wrong flag! To help you adjust your sights, here's the flag you're being asked to destroy:

The organizers of Burn the Confederate Flag Day suggest that participants might throw parties, dress up as clowns, and film everything for the web.

Ah, dear mad America. You ain't never learned nothin', and you probably never will. You've got burning in your brain, destruction in your DNA, a deadly amalgam of God and guns in your genes.

Roadside objects

I stumbled upon this intriguing photo on the web, in the context of the wonderful site of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science [access]:

It's a fabulous photo… with or without explanations. At first sight, the plastic bags look like rubbish, but that's the fault of our Western regard. They're certainly not rubbish. Indeed, the bag on the right would appear to contain a human being… maybe an adult female. As for the other bags, maybe they're personal belongings (associated within the hypothetical individual on the right), rather than trash (as western observers might imagine). In any case, it's a pretty trashy roadside photo, to say the least.

Is it thinkable that human beings might be mistaken for roadside objects, for trash? Yes, alas. That's why we must remain, not only vigilant, but active combatants (with possible loss of life) in the constant ongoing fight against the Taliban disease in Afghanistan.

Digging my way out

This is the northern end of the stone cellar at Gamone (the place where wine used to be produced):

Because of the massive tufa arch at the top, I imagined for a long time that this had been a northern doorway into the cellar (which had a similar alcove at the south, along with a big opening at the east into my house), and that it had been blocked up by earth in circumstances and at a time that remained unknown. I now know that this impression was false. The earth that obstructs this "doorway" has been there since the beginnings of time. Seen up close, it looks like this:

It's a dense structure of small stones and dry clay, with no signs of vegetation. Unlike the surface ground around my house, within this conglomerate, there can be no presence whatsoever of shards of roof tiles or fragments of tufa (otherwise my "theory" about this soil would be wrong). Indeed, it's quite moving (and tiring, too), at the level of the ground floor of my house, to be hacking into earth that has probably been there untouched since the end of the Miocene (5 million years ago), by which time the French Prealps had arisen, irregularly, and folded into the kind of wavy surface structures that we observe today. [If anybody wishes to challenge my geological explanations, I would be happy to hear their arguments.] That means that the stone walls of the cellar have in fact been built up against the original earth embankment, using it as a natural formwork.

The pick and shovel in the first photo indicate that I've recently started to dig my way up out of the cellar. In a nutshell, I wish to replace part of that archaic earth by a staircase, so that I can climb down into my house from the place where I park my car and store my firewood. I prefer to handle this task manually, at a snail's pace, rather than calling upon somebody with a mechanical shovel, because the ancient stone structures must not be harmed or weakened.

ADDENDUM: On rereading the above post, I realize that I've introduced a puzzle, and then failed to examine it. Why would the builders of this cellar have placed a "doorway" up against an embankment of solid earth? I see two possible answers.

(1) Maybe it was intended to be, not a doorway, but a simple alcove.

(2) Maybe it was indeed a future doorway, and the builders intended to do exactly what I'm starting to do today: remove the earth. But they simply never got around to finishing this task.

The first answer strikes me as strange, because I fail to see the possible purpose of such a massive alcove, backed up by bare earth (which extended further up beyond the level where we now see the daylight).

The second answer seems to be more plausible. But, in that case, why didn't they finish the job? Well, maybe they were prevented by harsh circumstances, of one kind or another, from finishing the doorway. In the history of the Choranche vineyards, there are two significant dates. 1593 marked the end of the Wars of Religion, during which Protestant invaders had totally destroyed the vineyards. 1789 was, of course, the date of the French Revolution, which put a permanent end to the time-honored role of the Church in the local wine industry. So, the wine cellar at Gamone was probably started at some time between these two dates. In the middle of this period, in 1709, the vineyards were destroyed by an exceptionally harsh winter. So, between the Protestant attacks, the harsh weather and the final death-blow of 1789, we can choose between calamitous events that could well have prevented the completion of the doorway. I would imagine, above all, that the winemakers became accustomed to a cellar with a single doorway (the one I use today), and the idea of completing the northern doorway, by removing all that earth, probably became less and less urgent.

Smoke gets in your Moscow

This splendid video, shot on a photographic camera by a certain Vitaliy Mendeleev, provides an aesthetic, almost romantic, vision of smoky Moscow.



It's well to remember that, on the spot, things are not exactly quite so nice. It's anguishing to hear that the fires have apparently touched the Chernobyl zone. Meanwhile, funeral services in the Russian capital are overloaded by the quantity of deaths due to the pollution.

ADDENDUM: A news item on French radio indicates that Russia, the third-largest wheat producer in the world (after China and the European Union), has lost a quarter of its cereal crops as a result of this year's heat wave. This information was provided by the president himself, Dmitry Medvedev.

Most boring day of the year

For the second year, the French web daily Rue89 has launched the concept of the Most Boring Day of the Year. It falls in the first fortnight of August, when many French people are on summer holidays, and the flow of interesting news events drops almost to zero. The exact date varies slightly each year, for technical reasons. This year, it happens to fall on August 11: today. And, since the early hours of the morning, observers have been astounded to discover that today is indeed an exceptionally boring day in France.

This morning, the media dullness got off to a good start with a perfectly boring video showing the French president Nicolas Sarkozy riding his bike down on the Rivera, and halting briefly to savor a dish of frittered courgettes (zucchini) at a roadside tavern… where a TV crew just happened to be ready to shoot the event.

The instigators of the Most Boring Day of the Year phenomenon were thrilled to find that their media colleagues on the other side of the English Channel apparently shared their enthusiasm for dull news by publishing a perfectly boring front-page story with a photo of the unshaven president and his wife.

For the moment, everything's going fine in France. All the news stories of the day (which I don't intend to summarize) have turned out to be incredibly boring. With a bit of chance, unless a major catastrophe occurs in the next few hours, the day will be a total success.

Naturally, I've been wondering whether this special day could be celebrated simultaneously, in the same exciting fashion, in the Antipodes. A rapid perusal of today's Australian press reassures me that it was a remarkably dull day Down Under. A splendid example was a story about a football player who got mixed up in drug abuse. A dull 30-second video trailer on this subject is said to be "sending shockwaves across the country". Another great front-page news item reveals that a white van hit a woman in Melbourne, injuring her seriously, but failed to stop. Then we were invited to enjoy another boring item of news: a fine specimen of Australian reporting about hugely wealthy individuals and their pricey possessions. We have here, on the front page of today's web edition of The Australian, a photo (accompanied by an article) of a flamboyant 10-bedroom house near Brisbane that can be purchased for just over 8 million dollars:

Now, the trouble with labeling a particular date "the most boring day of the year" is that the day in question immediately becomes interesting, precisely because it's claimed to be exceptionally boring. In the case of the lucky individual who saw that photo and immediately grabbed his checkbook to purchase that house, the 11 August 2010 will surely go down in his personal history as a tremendously significant date. And I would not be surprised if he were to get around to inviting all his friends along to the house for a poolside barbecue, every 11th August, to celebrate this most happy event.

Exiting in style

There's a nice story in the US media about a 38-year-old flight attendant, Steven Slater, who was totally fed up with the behavior of an unruly passenger at the end of a flight from Pittsburgh to New York. While the plane was still taxiing, the passenger stood up to fetch his luggage in the overhead rack. When the flight attendant intervened, the passenger refused to sit down, and confusion ensued. The flight attendant released his anger through a stream of invective over the aircraft's public-address system. Then, as soon as the plane stopped, the overwrought flight attendant activated the emergency-evacuation chute, grabbed himself a can of beer for the road, and slid down onto the tarmac, thereby terminating in an eye-catching flash both the flight and his airline career.

In this morning's French news, there's a banal story about the crash of an ultralight aircraft in the vicinity of Angers.

It's said that the pilot hit a tree before landing, and that he died instantly in the crash. When I saw the age of the pilot, 83, I imagined immediately that, like the flight attendant, it might be thought that he had made a spectacular and stylish exit.

ADDENDUM: Just after finishing this post, I came upon the case of a 94-year-old British gentleman, Wing Commander Ken Wallis, who gives the impression that he's hell-bent upon exiting in style. Or maybe he's just another charming British eccentric…

Click the photo to access the article by Patrick Barkham in the Guardian.

Antipodes is now being fed to Twitter

Today, I decided to start using an excellent service named twitterfeed that systematically feeds all new Antipodes articles to my Twitter account, named Skyvington. So, if you wish to be alerted to new posts, click on the Twitter icon, to follow my tweets.

Sophia's future companion at Gamone

In my recent article entitled Moshé's future companion [display], I mentioned my neighbor Sylvie from Presles: the girl who'll be selling me a young donkey in October. Her partner William had a few days off from his job in the Alps as a cattle drover (not a shepherd, as I said mistakenly), so he drove down to Presles with his canine companions: two adult Border Collies and their three pups. And, yesterday, I invited everybody to lunch here at Gamone.

This photo shows the male pup I intend to acquire, in about a month's time. He's sleeping with his mother Uana (a name derived from the Irish Gaelic word for "soul"), accompanied by Uana's own mother.

This year's dog names in France should normally start with the letter "F". So, with the help of my children, I began to examine a list of possible names. Happily, we soon reached a consensus. The pup will be named Fitzroy, which is a fine name for a dog in France. This is largely an allusion to the ancient ancestor mentioned in my article of December 20, 2009 entitled One of my ancestors was a bastard [display]. Having said this, I hasten to point out that, unlike my ancestor Richard FitzRoy [1186-1270], the little pup is not at all a bastard. On the contrary, he's a pure-bred animal, with the classical markings of a Border Collie. And surely, in his genes, he has an urge to round up animals of all kinds. Maybe, later on, to keep him occupied, I'll get around to acquiring a few ducks or geese.

Now I have to get to work building him a kennel, because Border Collies are outside dogs, all year round. It's too early to imagine the future relationship between Sophia and the pup. As soon as the adult females jumped out of the car yesterday, their snarls informed Sophia, in perfectly clear dog talk, that their pups were not to be disturbed. Sophia got the message instantly, and she spent most of the sunny afternoon on her own, inside the house, as if to say that she didn't give a damn about my guests.

Legendary bridge

This is a photo of Natacha and me standing on a legendary bridge over the Cholet in the nearby village of St-Laurent-en-Royans:

This massive archaic structure is known as the Pont des Chartreux: that's to say, the bridge of the Chartreux monks.

I heard about this fabulous bridge for the first time back in 1993, soon after I purchased the property at Gamone. A monography on the Chartreux monks of Bouvantes explained that they had owned vineyards in Choranche ever since the 14th century, and that they transported wine from Choranche down to their monastery along a track known as the Path of the Chartreux. The bridge over the Cholet was therefore an ancient element of this infrastructure. But I was often intrigued by the fact that such a huge "heavyweight" stone bridge was necessary to enable a few mules to cross a small stream.

I wondered, too, about the obvious question of how the monks might have built such a splendid bridge. They must have devoted enormous resources to this project. Seeking the Almighty day and night, through their non-stop prayers, didn't the monks have a sufficient density of divine preoccupations without getting involved in such an enormous worldly engineering task as the construction of this bridge over the Cholet? That's a line of rhetorical reasoning that I'd often used in my discussions with Natacha, while visiting splendid monastic sites.

I would imagine that I was trying to say something like that to Natacha on that beautiful day when we were strolling over the lovely old bridge.

Besides, for someone like me who suffers from vertigo, it was frankly weird that the monks would have built a bridge without parapets. OK, the height wasn't frightening… but I would have imagined that animals such as donkeys and mules might have balked at crossing a stream on such a structure. There's the question, too, of why the monks would have decided to build a bridge at this particular spot, which doesn't lie on the beaten track between, say, Saint-Jean-en-Royans, Pont-en-Royans and the Choranche vineyards.

As you can see on this map, the bridge is located on the edge of the vast forest of Lente. Last but not least: How could the monks of Bouvantes have obtained an authorization to carry out bridge-building on territory that simply didn't belong to them? (Saint-Laurent-en-Royans was the ancestral home of the Bérenger/Sassenage lords.)

There's another interesting question concerning the wine-making and wine-selling industry. Everybody knows that the monks didn't make wine at Choranche merely in order to satisfy their eucharistic needs. To call a spade a spade, only a tiny portion of their beverage was transformed regularly and miraculously into the blood of Christ. The rest was sold, maybe to remote clients, to make money enabling the monks to pursue at ease their life of meditation. Now, if they resided in a secluded mountain abode at Bouvantes, whereas their money-making vineyards were located in Choranche (where they owned comfortable premises), why would they cart their produce from Choranche up to their mountain retreat? That doesn't make sense. They would have done much better to drag their heavy barrels of wine down to the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans, where they could be floated to Saint-Nazaire-en-Royans and then placed on barges drifting along the Isère. The idea of moving these barrels up to the monastery in Bouvantes is totally illogical. So, no stone bridge at Saint-Laurent-en-Royans would have been required.

Faced with such doubts, one falls rapidly into the idea that the monks and the Holy Spirit operated surely in mysterious ways. Our humble interrogations merely accentuate the fact that marvelous operations were enacted in unbelievable, indeed miraculous, ways. So, let's keep our minds and mouths shut, and believe what we're told.

Today, I attended a wonderful regional-history colloquium at Léoncel organized in the context of the Cistercian monastery of Léoncel.

The star speaker was Michel Wullschleger, a celebrated professor of history and geography from Lyon, pillar of the Léoncel heritage community, whom I've known and admired for years. At the start of the afternoon session, he promised us that the day would end with a bombshell. Finally, it exploded:

"The so-called Chartreux Bridge was in fact erected by forestry engineers and workers during the Napoleonic era, at the beginning of the 19th century." The absence of parapets reflects the necessity of having to rotate bovine-drawn log wagons, on this delicate corner over the Cholet, without damaging the bridge.

I was startled by this unexpected announcement, because part of the charm of the meager history of Choranche has always been associated with the image of the monks and their mules traveling back and forth between their monastery and our village by means of the famous stone bridge over the Cholet. But the monks had disappeared from our region about a quarter of a century before this forestry bridge was built.

The day mankind went mad

August 6, 1945. It wasn't, of course, the first day that Man had played at being the Devil. A firestorm had destroyed Dresden on February 13, 1945. And before then, the Nazi extermination camps had been functioning for several years as expertly-organized death factories. The difference, in the case of Hiroshima, is that the event was staged as a purely evil show. It was a demonstration aimed at proving to onlookers that a large-scale massacre could now be envisaged as a quite Ordinary Happening. Those who did the killing didn't even need to get their hands dirty. And every villain on the planet Earth could henceforth dream of wielding such an arm to eliminate human beings whom he had decided to hate. Will Man's nuclear madness get worse? I would imagine so. In that domain, for the moment, I see little hope…

Bizarre events in Paris

In August, many regular residents of Paris go away on vacation, and the city is left to tourists. For a month, the banks of the Seine have been transformed into a vast beach, thanks to a fleet of trucks that dumped 1350 tons of sand on the macadam.

On the water, as at any self-respecting beach resort, there are canoes, kayaks, yachts, row boats and pedalos. But no swimmers, because the quality of the water is not yet fit for that… in spite of the promise made in 1977 by Jacques Chirac, when he was mayor of the capital.

This summer, the Seine has been the scene for two mysterious happenings. First, at the start of a warm evening, an empty Austrian tourist bus plunged spontaneously (or so it appears) into the river and disappeared from view. The next day, the carcass of the vehicle was dragged up into shallow water.

More recently, a big barge full of 355 tons of gravel (similar to the one you see, out in the middle of the river, in the following photo) suddenly sank in the same vicinity where the tourist bus had taken a bath.

Before the barge could be refloated, the gravel had to be removed. For the moment, I don't know whether or not this material has been used to extend the artificial Paris beach in a way that would no doubt appeal to English visitors (accustomed to gravel beaches).

Theories are arising concerning the possible existence of some kind of mysterious Bermuda Triangle effect in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. In particular, Paris authorities are worried (although they won't admit it publicly) that the celebrated landmark tower might decide to topple over spontaneously and take a dip in the river. In Seine…

Quackery

You may have heard of the kid who told his teacher that the equator was "an imaginary lion running around the Earth".

As far as imaginary lines are concerned, a famous system was invented by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes. He suggested that a flat surface could be crisscrossed by a set of evenly-spaced vertical and horizontal lines, enabling us to indicate the exact location of any point on the surface by a pair of so-called Cartesian coordinates.

Before the time of Descartes, geographic coordinate systems had been applied to the surface of the globe, materialized by circles of latitude and longitude forming a grid.

The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator [1512-1594] had even invented a handy trick for projecting these circles onto the surface of a cylinder, which could then be flattened out to give the illusion that the surface of our globe could be thought of as a big rectangle. And all that remained was for perspicacious Australians, located at the center of the world, to point out the sense in which this rectangle is to be viewed.

Now why—you might be wondering—have I got carried away with this pedantic talk about coordinate systems? Well, it appears that some people are even dumber than the above-mentioned school kid, because they seem to forget that a grid enclosing the globe is necessarily an abstract entity, which might be described as virtual, rather than a material structure on which you might bump your head. That aspect of the global grid would seem to be so obvious that it's hardly necessary to mention it… were it not for the fact that, some fifty years ago, a German physician named Ernst Hartmann posited the existence of a real grid, above our heads, composed of "naturally-occurring charged lines, running North-South and East-West". Today, naturopaths (individuals who believe in alternative systems of medicine) speak of the invisible Hartmann Net, and they are prepared to indicate the exact dimensions of this grid. I don't intend to pursue this subject in greater depth… for the simple reason that I have no idea whatsoever of what the hell these naturopaths are talking about.

I'm not sure why I seem to be targeted as a possible patient by a few French naturopaths. I once built an aviation-oriented website for a fellow who now works as a naturopath, and I created another website in an attempt to sell the ancient house in the village of St-Antoine belonging to a female naturopath. Those could well be the associations that led to my receiving a spam email this morning from a French naturopath who has apparently been operating in the small Swiss city of Yverdon-les-Bains, at the southern extremity of Lake Neuchâtel.

It so happens that Yverdon has a fascinating tourist attraction: a park of 45 prehistoric standing-stones, known as menhirs in French. Well, I'll let you imagine the excitement of our naturopath when he dishes up an exotic salad whose ingredients are the Hartmann Net at Yverdon and the "geobiological" effects of the standing-stones. Apparently, some of the menhirs happen to be located at "geopathogenic nodes" of the Hartmann grid, whereas others stand at "positive Hartmann nodes". Now, don't forget that the alleged goal of all this tripe is to provide patients with health treatment.

Funnily enough, the naturopath forgot to mention the origin of these menhirs. They were dragged there by a legendary beast, in the remote past, and installed at precise points on the Hartmann grid. Dragged there by what archaic animal, you ask? By the imaginary lion that spends its time running around the globe...

Earthshock

Back in 1980, when Christine was engaged in book layout at the Seuil publishing house in Paris, she gave me a work copy of their translation of the recent bestseller Earthshock by the British geologists Basil Booth and Frank Fitch, on the theme of colossal natural cataclysms such as the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Curiously, this well-written text depicting extreme terrestrial violence has always remained, for me, a friendly and soothing bedside book. The inherent devastating power of our planet belittles the frequent inhumanity and stupidity of its human occupants.

The Big One, however, is likely to arrive, not from the bowels of the planet Earth, but from the sky. This little video—which I found on the excellent Pharyngula blog of PZ Myers [display]—says it nicely:



Here again, there's something strangely soothing in the thought that such a calamity could occur. In any case, I hope that Google keeps copies of blogs in their vast databases, so that my Antipodes posts are not likely to be wiped out stupidly in one fell swoop, in the first cataclysm that strikes us. Besides, I really must distribute a few extra copies of my genealogical research, for "eternal" safekeeping. Maybe the soundest security strategy would be to beam up copies of all my stuff, by laser, to a handful of neighboring stars, judged to be safe. As my great-aunt used to warn me: These days, you can't be too careful…

Apple developer

These days, if somebody were to ask me what I do to while away the time in my mountain abode, I have a new and prestigious answer: I'm an Apple developer! This doesn't mean a great deal. In my personal case, it's hardly a professional activity, and certainly not a regular paid job (because I'm officially retired). It's more like a pastime… which might or might not give rise to pecuniary benefits, depending on how I go about things. Only one thing is certain: It's hard work to master the art of Apple software development! But I love this kind of intellectual challenge, because it keeps my neurons in good shape… and it's more fun (to my mind) than playing games.

In more precise terms, I've become a paid-up member of the Apple Developers group (more satisfying and worthwhile, after all, than joining the Australian Labor Party or even the French Socialist Party) in the hope of creating applications for the iPad.

The first and last time I envisaged Macintosh development was in 1987, when I was out in Western Australia working as a lecturer in computing at the Curtin University of Technology. I used the Pascal language to dash off a small software tool, which I named AC-DC [America's Cup, Data for Challengers], designed to help me predict the foreign yacht that would win the right to challenge Australia's famous Kookaburra for the America's Cup. I programmed my Macintosh program (running on the primitive box-shaped machine I had brought with me from France) to print out, for each of the twelve contenders, a scenario of the following kind:

Using these scenarios (which had simply "digested" the results of all the earlier match races), I quickly figured out that the victorious contender would be Dennis Conner on Stars and Stripes. The media center had organized a competition among journalists for the best predictions of the outcome of the challenger rounds. There were prizes (champagne and Louis Vuitton bags) for the top three results. Thanks to my Mac tool, I was awarded all three prizes! This meant that, for the remainder of my stay in Fremantle, I guzzled the finest French champagne like lemonade. As for the ugly Louis Vuitton bags, in red plastic, they're still stuck away, almost untouched, in a wardrobe at Gamone. But I'm becoming waylaid by nostalgia…

Today, what are my iPad projects? There are three zones of activity:

1 -- I've imagined a kind of "business card" concept for succinct identity apps (applications) declined for individuals, urban entities (French villages) and firms. I would like to make it so simple for me to design and build such a card that I could offer them dirt cheap.

2 -- An unfinished French version of my Tarot fortune-telling thing at

http://nutopia.free.fr/tarot

lets you find answers to all your questions about human existence. Maybe I'll produce an English-language version of this gadget for the iPhone/iPad.

3 -- I'm envisaging an iPhone/iPad version of my Accessor tool at

http://blogstuff.free.fr

designed to enable easy access to the archives of my Antipodes blog.

For the moment, I'm printing out the various relevant manuals, and I've bought a big plastic box to house them.

Little by little, of course, I'll need to get around to actually reading and mastering all this documentation.

Moshé's future companion

My donkey Moshé has been upset (disoriented ) by the recent disappearance of his old companion Mandrin.

It's a well-known fact that donkeys don't like to lead a solitary existence, so I immediately started looking around for an animal to keep him company. As of today, I'm happy to have found an ideal solution: a baby female donkey named Fanette who'll be available (that is, weaned) by the middle of October. This afternoon, Fanette's breeder, a young woman from Presles named Sylvie Rozand, introduced me to the beautiful little donkey.

In October, to get Fanette down to Gamone, Sylvie and I plan to walk down the slopes from Presles to Choranche. The road starts with a short but difficult section comprising a tunnel. Normally, donkeys refuse to enter tunnels, just as they refuse to cross streams. Sylvie has done this journey already. She tells me that Margot can be coaxed into entering this tunnel, while Nina and her daughter can be roped up behind and led along by Margot.

Fanette's father is a Provençal donkey owned by my Châtelus neighbor Jean-Marie Huillier (in fact, Sylvie's cousin), whose farm is located just across the Bourne from Gamone. By chance, I've been saying hello to this male donkey for ages, every time I drive across to Châtelus.

After leaving the donkeys, Sylvie invited me for a drink with her parents, in front of their old farmhouse in the village of Presles. My daughter Manya and I have known this couple for ages.

They're natives of Presles and traditional farmers, members of a race that has almost disappeared. Sylvie's companion happens to be a Welshman named William, whom I've not yet met. He's a professional shepherd, stationed for the moment in an Alpine context with a huge flock of sheep. In French, the operation that consists of a shepherd and his dogs leading their flock up to high-altitude pastures for the summer months is referred to as alpage. Then they all come down again to the valley as soon as the first snow appears.

This afternoon, I received an open invitation from William and Sylvie to drive up to spend a couple of days in their Alpine cabin, some three hours away from here by car. I hope I'll be able to accept this invitation, along with my dog Sophia. If so, a surprise awaits us. We'll be returning to Gamone with another companion, for Sophia: a pure-bred Border Collie pup.

Much older than we had imagined

Several Australians have become notorious for their Creationist beliefs. First and foremost, of course, there's the Queenslander Ken Ham, who went to the USA and founded a museum with exhibits that show our ancestors frolicking around with dinosaurs.

If you're a bit masochistic, and you would like to hear the voice of the Holy Ham in an auto-tuning context, then click here. Clearly, if this guy gets any loonier, he'll end up getting put away… or maybe elected by Creationist supporters as Aussie of the Year.

Another remarkably dumb Aussie is now well-known on the web. In March, when Richard Dawkins was out in Australia for the Atheist Convention, he found himself seated alongside a senator, Steve Fielding, whose utterances revealed that he was a so-called "young-Earth Creationist". That's to say, this elected pollie really believes that our planet was created less than 10,000 years ago. The amusing encounter of Dawkins and Fielding can be seen in the following video:



Apparently Dawkins said jokingly, later on, that the intelligence of Steve Fielding was surely akin to that of an earthworm…

Yesterday, a delightful anecdote was aired on the Pharyngula blog of PZ Myers in an article entitled Australians are learning what it means to have creationists in the classroom [display]. During a scripture lesson in a Queensland school, when the religious instructor evoked Adam and Eve as the ancestors of all humans, a student complained that such a narrow stock of original DNA would have led to catastrophic inbreeding. The instructor replied that, at the time of Adam and Eve, "DNA wasn't yet invented". Hilarious commentators were quick to point out the magical power of this kind of argument. One might imagine that all kinds of marvelous things took place, for example, before the "invention" of the laws of science, or even the "invention" of good old common sense!

At the same time that these specimens of brainless tripe are giving us a laugh, amazing progress is being made in the dating of animal life on Earth. The following photo shows us a small fossil that was found recently in Gabon by a French geologist, Abderrazak El Albani, attached to the university of Poitiers.

For many years, paleontologists have considered that the first multicellular animals of this kind appeared in the ocean some 600 million years ago. Well, that date will have to be readjusted greatly, because the above fossil was found in a rocky site whose age is 2.1 billion years!

Yesterday, French people were thrilled to learn that the fine city of Albi in south-west France—where the medieval Christian sect of Catharism came into being—has just become a Unesco world-heritage site.

The geologist El Albani, who has found that multicellular life is 1.5 billion years older than what we had previously thought, is intent upon getting the home of his fossil in Gabon honored as a Unesco world-heritage site. I find that a splendid idea, in the sense that it emphasizes the fact that scientific knowledge is a basic part of our cultural heritage.