Best and worst places in Europe

The British organization named uSwitch.com defines itself as "a free, impartial online and telephone comparison and switching service that helps you to compare prices on a range of products and services including gas and electricity, heating cover, home phone, communications, insurance and personal finance products".

They've just produced a report, based upon their so-called uSwitch Quality of Life Index, which concludes that "the UK and Ireland are the worst places to live in Europe, while France and Spain are the best".

I succeeded in living in London for a few months, back in 1962-1963, whereas I've never set foot in Ireland. As for Spain, I once hitchhiked there long ago, and I have great memories of the warm atmosphere. In any case, the results of the uSwitch study don't surprise me greatly.

Gamone friends

Sophia is getting along fine with her new friend Fitzroy. The marvelous little Border Collie pup has the privilege of being able to do crash courses in canine behavior—often of a violent nature—with the wise old mistress, who knows every trick of the trade.

Naturally, Sophia often seems to wonder what it is that drives Fitzroy to run around crazily all the time, instead of sitting calmly on his backside and meditating.

Meanwhile, Fitzroy uses his little snout and sharp teeth to pick up, and maybe tear apart, anything he finds, such as this lavender bouquet.

Leaves (in no shortage at Gamone) are interesting light-weight acquisitions.

My ex-neighbor Bob is impressed by the apparent happiness of Fitzroy. As my former rugby-player friend puts it: "Clearly, that dog's not traumatized by his arrival at Gamone!"

As for me, now accustomed to spending long moments of joy in the sunshine, cuddling the woolly pup and stroking his belly, I'm constantly overcome by what I call the Fitzroy stare.

He could be asking me what it's all about, or whether I'm in control of the situation. He might be curious about my background, and my credentials for looking after dogs. He might be saying to himself: "What a splendid male specimen!" (Me, that is, not the dog.) Or rather: "Jeez, what a dumb-looking master!" In fact, Fitzroy's stare is probably no more than a visible indication of his simple desire to exist calmly and confidently, without wondering about anything in particular. Often, as I approach my 70th birthday (the day after tomorrow), I've said to myself that it would have been great to be born a dog. In fact, though, I don't regret anything.

Rabbit logic

I was intrigued to stumble upon this video of a self-sufficient US rabbi whose name, Lapin, is French for rabbit. He was being interviewed by a celebrated US TV idiot named Glenn Beck (about whom I have no desire to say anything whatsoever).



The Rabbit's logic is so outlandish that I can't resist the temptation to mention it, without daring to try to analyze it. He has declared that American atheists are parasites! (Let us not be waylaid by the disturbing fact that this ugly word evokes automatically the horrendous Nazi language that was used, once upon a time, to designate Jews.) And why does the skull-capped Rabbit consider that American atheists are parasites? "They're doing nothing to add energy into the system."

Let me offer Rabbi Rabbit the following energy-inspired video sequence, by the great French stand-up comic Pierre Desproges. It's a parody of the famous Duracell publicity, which featured a tireless little pink rabbit who remains active long after all the competitive batteries have worn out their steam and ceased to function.



Rabbi Rabbit's thought processes are truly disturbing… including his opening lines about having a certain number of fine atheistic friends with whom it's nice to have a beer. What the fuck is he trying to achieve in branding atheists as parasites? What alarms me most is that Rabbi Rabbit is no doubt a prolific breeder. I hope we're not going to be infested by inspired "thinkers" of this crappy kind…

Two and a half minutes of Scarlatti

Monday morning offering from Gallica. A fragment of the Fugue in F minor of the Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti [1660-1725] is played on the harpsichord by the Belgian performer Aimée Van de Wiele [1907-1991].

To listen to the old gramophone recording, click the image of Scarlatti, then click the arrow at the top of the page.

Novel shipped to iBooks

For reasons unknown, my previous post about the shipping of the electronic version of my novel All the Earth is Mine [display] was premature. Finally, Smashwords has confirmed that they shipped it off yesterday to Apple. So, once again, I repeat my request to US readers to let me know, in a week or so's time, whether they can find my book in their iBooks catalog (which remains invisible for an individual such as me, residing here in France). If senders include an email address, I'll be pleased to forward them a PDF version of my novel.

Ratzinger is an enemy of education

Watching this amateur video of Richard Dawkins standing up in a London crowd and speaking out against the pope, I was immediately reminded of the great Bertrand Russell, back in the Cold War days, addressing the throngs at Trafalgar Square on the dangers of nuclear weapons.



A major scientist such as Russell or Dawkins, speaking his mind publicly and brilliantly on fundamental issues, demonstrates a marvelous British tradition of outdoor oratory. It's the Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park, but with beautifully simple and powerful words worthy of Winston Churchill in wartime London. In decades to come, I'm sure that people will be using the Internet (or whatever system has replaced it) to hear and admire the Dawkins anti-papist speech of Saturday, September 18, 2010.

Laptops to lead Aussie kids "out of poverty"

I was surprised by a recent article in the Australian press with a shock title: "Looking to laptops to lead Doomadgee children out of poverty". A photo showed a group of kids, mostly Aboriginal, holding up their machines for a corny staged shot.

There were several reasons for my surprise:

• It shocks me to see a newspaper headline stating explicitly that certain Aussie kids are apparently living in poverty. That's a strong word, which outside observers don't generally associate with citizens of Australia.

• The notion that laptops might be capable of "leading children out of poverty" is outlandish, and hard to believe.

• I'm familiar with the project entitled One Laptop Per Child, conceived by the US computing academic and visionary Nicholas Negroponte. I wrote a blog article on this subject, entitled Fabulous educational project [display], back in October 2007. I had always imagined that the children to be assisted by Negroponte's wonderful mission belonged to so-called developing nations. It's an almost unpleasant surprise to find scores of Australian children, throughout the land, included in the bunch of recipients of these low-cost laptops.

Readers should visit the website of the excellent Australian organization handling this project. You'll be able to reach your own conclusions concerning this project in Australia… and I'm aware that you won't necessarily react negatively, as I have done. I'm not suggesting for a moment that there's anything wrong with this plan to hand out cheap laptops to kids in Australia. I'm merely pointing out that it's a charitable enterprise, initially designed for Third-World inhabitants, and that it's weird to see my native land falling back upon international US-inspired charity in order to solve internal educational problems.

The spirit of such an initiative is surely the celebrated Chinese proverb: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." What shocks me, I guess, is that it's not directly the Australian ministry in charge of education—assisted, maybe, by philanthropists and industry—who's teaching these under-privileged kids to "fish" with computers (and the Internet).

ADDENDUM: In my initial post on this subject, I suggested that, in Third-World villages in places such as Africa, electrical power for the laptops could be generated by cyclists. I'm happy to see that there's now a device on the market to meet this challenge.

Admittedly, if poverty has reached the point at which, due to malnutrition, it's impossible to find a sturdy cyclist, then we're stuck with a real problem. I must talk with Lance Armstrong, one of these days, to see if he has any worthwhile ideas on this question...

British expert on Catholic crimes

In the context of the pope and priestly pedophilia, the brilliant British barrister Geoffrey Robertson knows what he's talking about, and he talks well.



In this Al Jazeera interview, he sums up the situation excellently.

The artist as a young man

Lovers of religious art might marvel at the sensitivity and tenderness behind this flowery "Mary and child". The Virgin appears to be depicted as a gypsy woman. From a physical viewpoint, she's the kind of female who might be put aboard an airliner bound for Romania if Sarkozy's police were to find her hanging around in France today.

The artist who painted the gypsy Virgin and her child is mentioned in the novel Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut. The narrator, named Rudy Waltz, is talking of his father Otto, enrolled in a painting school.

… a professor handed him back his portfolio, saying that his work was ludicrous. And there was another young man in rags there, and he, too, had his portfolio returned with scorn.

His name was Adolf Hitler. He was a native Austrian. He had come from Linz.

And Father was so mad at the professor that he got his revenge there and then. He asked to see some of Hitler's work, with the professor looking on. He picked a picture at random, and he said it was a brilliant piece of work, and he bought it from Hitler for more cash on the spot than the professor, probably, could earn in a month or more.

Only an hour before, Hitler had sold his overcoat so that he could get a little something to eat, even though winter was coming on. So there is a chance that, if it weren't for my father, Hitler might have died of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910.

The subject of the painting purchased by Otto Waltz was the Minorite Church in Vienna. I believe that Hitler's painting of this place exists in reality (maybe in the hands of a private collector), but I can't find a copy of it on the web. Meanwhile, people tend to forget that Hitler was a painter of religious subjects, just as they tend to forget his love for children.

I can't imagine why Joseph Ratzinger has tried to give the impression that Hitler didn't even believe in God, that he was an evil atheist.

Well yes, I can in fact imagine why the pope has talked this way. He's playing his role as the descendant of Saint Peter, the great fisherman. In fishing terms, Ratzi's allusions to atheism and secularism might be thought of as bait, designed to catch his critics. He knows that we'll all get caught by starting to waste our time (as I've been doing) producing evidence to prove that Hitler and the Nazis were not at all atheists. And while everybody's talking about atheism and secularism, they won't be talking about the sexual abuse of minors. Well played, Ratzi! But we haven't really been duped.

Mysterious scoreboard

The French online digital library called Gallica gave us this puzzle.


QUESTION: This certainly looks like some kind of a scoreboard. But what's the game?

ANSWER: In 1912, this scoreboard was erected in an open field at Versailles, alongside a big muddy puddle. An automobile, backed up against the scoreboard, would be driven off in a roar, whereupon the mud that splashed up onto the scoreboard would measure the quality—or rather, the lack of efficiency—of the car's rear mudguards.

Ratzinger invents an atheistic Hitler

Yesterday, in his Edinburgh speech, Benedict XVI referred to the "Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews". He urged the British to "reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century", and he encouraged "respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate".

Ratzi needs to reread his Hitler, and browse through a few old Nazi photo albums.



"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
— Adolf Hitler, speech in Berlin, 24 October 1933 [Norman Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, vol 1 of 2, Oxford University Press, 1942]



In fact, the pope's allusions to "atheist extremism" and "aggressive forms of secularism" are a lukewarm attempt to draw people's attention away from the elephant in the drawing room: priestly pedophilia.

Here's a simple hymn of joy by Tim Minchin:



Consider yourself blessed for being able to listen to this Pope Song, for it might not stay around for long, free of charge, on the Internet.

ADDENDUM: There's a long list of relevant Hitler quotes on the Pharyngula blog [display] and an anthology of Nazi church-oriented photos with captions on another website [display].

From Bruno to Grafton

By the time I finish writing this article, I should have put a minimum of meaning into that curious title: From Bruno to Grafton. It's a complicated story, spread over nine centuries, and I'm not sure I'll succeed in relating it succinctly. Let me start at the end: a Google image of a dull red-brick building in my Australian birthplace, Grafton.

It's the local ambulance station. As a boy of eleven, I used to ride my bicycle past this building of a Monday evening, for the weekly get-together of the Wolf Cubs, which took place in a hall just behind the ambulance station.

The symbol on the façade of the red-brick building is a Maltese cross. Indeed, many ambulance services in my native land have been created by a 19th-century British-based charity organization, of an Anglican flavor, known as St John Ambulance.

Now, how and where does Saint John fit into this picture?

Before attempting to answer that question, let me jump back to the starting point in my title: a medieval scholar named Bruno, whose life and actions inspired the foundation of the order of Chartreux monks. [Click the image to access my presentation of this man.] In 1084, Bruno arrived in the Cartusia mountains (not far from where I live), ostensibly to set up a secluded hermitage with a handful of Christian companions. The official tale is that this middle-aged German-born scholar moved abruptly, for spiritual reasons, from his comfortable ecclesiastic quarters in Reims to the wilderness of Cartusia. This account raises certain credibility problems. Personally, I've never believed that story… which necessitates furthermore a miraculous event: a dream in which the geographical location of Cartusia is made manifest. So, what were the authentic reasons for Bruno's arrival in this part of the world? The answer is linked, I believe, to an extraordinary project imagined by one of Bruno's former students, Pope Urban II. That project consisted of organizing a gigantic military expedition aimed at chasing the Muslims out of the Holy City of Jerusalem. The First Crusade...

I've always imagined that the pope had sent Bruno to Cartusia on a geological mission, to negotiate the extraction of iron ore for the manufacture of crusader weapons… but that hypothesis is too complex to be developed here in my blog. Meanwhile, I tend to think of Bruno (perhaps unfairly) as the individual whose teachings apparently motivated the minds of the men who invented the crusades.

This subject of the crusades brings me back to the question of St John and the Maltese cross. Early in the 11th century, a hospital for sick pilgrims was founded in the vicinity of the site of the Holy Sepulcher. It was named in honor of John the Baptist. After the First Crusade of Pope Urban II had transformed the narrow streets of Jerusalem into rivers of blood, this hospital became recognized as the headquarters of an "armed force" of a new monastic kind, known as the Knights Hospitaller, or the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

The order soon became a prosperous institution, with branches—referred to as commanderies—in many corners of the world. In a couple of my recent blog posts, I mentioned the neighborhood of Arles called Trinquetaille. Well, from 1160 on, most of the vast Camargue delta between the Rhône and the small western arm of the river called the Petit Rhône belonged to the Hospitallers commandery of Trinquetaille.

Finally, when the crusaders were forced to leave the Holy Land, the Hospitallers moved the headquarters of their organization to the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes and then Malta… which explains why their symbol has been designated since then as a Maltese cross. Another great organization of a similar kind had come into existence in 1118: the Knights Templar. But, whereas the latter order was disbanded in dramatic circumstances a couple of centuries later, the Knights of Malta have never totally ceased to exist, in one way or another, and their prosperity endured for many centuries. In the neighboring village of Pont-en-Royans, for example, the ancient priory that once belonged to the monks of St Anthony was in fact a possession of the Hospitallers when it was confiscated by the French Revolution.

As for the English branch of the Hospitallers, and its ambulance systems, that's a relatively recent affair, dating from the 19th century. But it's nevertheless a living remnant of the great French chivalric order that came into being at a time when most natives of the British Isles were preoccupied by a more down-to-earth problem: the arrival on their shores of a certain William, Duke of Normandy.

In the footsteps of Van Gogh

While strolling recently in Arles with Christine, I didn't realize to what extent we happened to be walking in the footsteps—as it were—of Vincent van Gogh. It's only today, in front of my computer, that I discover retrospectively various associations of this kind.

This photo shows the majestic stone portal of the Hôtel-Dieu, with a poster indicating its new name: Espace Van Gogh. In France, the former expression (literally, God's hostel) designates ancient hospitals, often alongside a cathedral, in various great cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes and Angers.

In Arles, on Christmas Day 1888, Van Gogh used a razor to slash an ear lobe. Several months later, observing the painter's abnormal mental state, people in Arles signed a petition to have him interned at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. The other day, I took a couple of photos of the hospital courtyard, covered in flowers.





Van Gogh did a painting of this same courtyard.

Two other Van Gogh paintings present the bridge at Trinquetaille.

This is the bridge that Christine's grandfather Paul Marteau would have crossed regularly, as a youth, when walking back and forth between his native Trinquetaille and the main city of Arles. It was destroyed by Allied bombers in August 1944. When Christine and I were strolling between Trinquetaille and Arles the other day, we were using a bridge that was built in 1951 to replace the old one.

At the seaside in Brittany, 83 years ago

The excellent Gallica service provides a copy of this delightful illustration that accompanied an article entitled "Punishment for flirts" in the newspaper Le Petit Journal illustré of 11 September 1927:

At a seaside resort in Brittany, a few female visitors had got into the habit of strolling back to their residence while still attired in their bathing outfits. The local women, wearing their traditional costumes (including bonnets, flowing skirts and clogs), decided to flagellate the bathers with bunches of stinging nettles and thorny blackberry branches. The crime of the bare-legged bathers, for which they were being chastised, had consisted of attracting the lusty gazes of the husbands of the Breton women.

Hard to watch (continued)

This Irishman, John May, is a lunatic, but his accent is cute.



I don't know what he might have said after the first minute or so, because his words were starting to give me nausea, and I had to terminate the video.

This is the visible part of a dull little iceberg described in the Pharyngula blog [display]. It would appear that the hard-working godless Minnesota biologist PZ Myers has played a significant role in dissuading the Irish pollie Conor Lenihan from attending a book launch of John May's latest anti-Darwinian tripe.

If so, then this suggests that bloggers such as Myers (whom I read regularly) are not necessarily crying out futilely in the wilderness.

Pulp nation

I know little about Joseph Stalin's sense of humor, but I would imagine that he was cracking a joke when he once asked sarcastically: "How many divisions does the pope have?" It would be amusing, I think, to poll Catholics concerning their knowledge of the nature and origins of the tiny state, the Vatican, of which the pope is the chief. Many people probably think it's simply a suburb of Rome, where the pope happens to reside… which it is, in a way. Others might imagine the Vatican as an ancient autonomous territory, akin to Monaco or Liechtenstein, set up back in the days of Saint Peter and his companions. In fact, the Vatican is a relatively young "nation", of a quite artificial kind, founded on 11 February 1929.

The Vatican was the bastard offspring of Benito Mussolini and a wishy-washy pope, Pius XI, who never once had the courage to oppose the ugly Fascist dictator in an outspoken manner. Finally, Mussolini may have even been responsible for assassinating the pontiff by means of a mortal injection on 10 February 1939.

It's good to reflect upon these murky origins of the Vatican when we see Benedict XVI about to set foot in Britain, where he'll be treated, as usual, as a chief of state.

But the visit will surely be marred by all kinds of allusions to the current scandals about pedophilia within the church. It's not by chance that the distinguished British barrister Geoffrey Robertson has just brought out a book that examines in depth the international legal grounds for granting—or not granting—diplomatic immunity to such a straw-man leader during his four-day visit to the UK.

Click the cover image to access pertinent comments by Paula Kirby (on the Richard Dawkins website) of this recently-published book.

Dinosaur Quasimodo found in Spain

The taxon (biological category) of this recently-discovered dinosaur is Concavenator corcovatus, which means "the Cuenca predator with a hunchback". I prefer to refer to him by a nickname: Quasimodo. In the genus (first) term, the "venator" element means a hunter in Latin, while the "Conca" prefix is one of the various designations of the place where Quasimodo was discovered, known today as Cuenca, located midway between Madrid and Valencia. The species (second) term is a Latinized version of the Spanish word "corcovado" meaning hunchbacked.

Quasimodo lived at the beginning of the Cretaceous period, some 130 million years ago (10 million years after the end of the Jurassic period). Apart from his hump, whose raison-d'être remains a mystery, Quasimodo had bumps on his arms that probably housed some kind of feathers or bristles. So, he could well be another ancestor of birds.

Why are they all weeping?

The national French library has an excellent online service named Gallica. Among countless treasures of all kinds, they propose issues of the French daily Petit Journal illustré from 1884 to 1920. The following illustration appeared on the front page of that publication dated May 6, 1928:

Everybody is weeping… including a policeman and a horse. Try to guess why all the tears?

Answer: An accident had just occurred involving a truck transporting produce from the old Paris food markets known as Les Halles. It had been hit by another truck, and its load of vegetables had been scattered all over the road, and crushed by other vehicles. The first truck had been transporting a load of onions.

Every home needs an iPad

More seriously, one of my favorite iPad apps is Flipboard, which displays such things as your Twitter and Facebook pages. Since most of my new Antipodes blogs are automatically tweeted to my Skyvington account by means of the twitterfeed tool, the Flipboard app is useful for displaying my recent blogging activities.

I'm pleased, too, to have found a way of producing screen dumps of iPad displays, such as this picture of the start of All the Earth is Mine (which will soon be available through the iBooks store).

During my recent excursion to Provence with Christine, I found that the iPad was a convenient device for keeping up with the news. But I'm afraid I wouldn't feel at ease trying to actually write a new blog article by means of such a device.

Insanely determined candidate

The following video shows a Republican guy named Phil Davidson making his candidate's speech for the county treasurer's job:‬



It would be fabulous if this emotional fellow were to be the partner of ‪Sylvester Stallone‬ in an umpteenth Rocky film.

The basic gist of the scenario is obvious. In the wake of the Balboa affair, the heroic pugilist is invited to take on a nice well-paid regular job as the treasurer of‪ Stark County, Ohio‬. Everything's fine… up until the arrival on the scene of this crazy ‪Davidson‬ opponent, who's determined to steal Rocky's job. Naturally, the whole business ends up getting settled in the ring. I'll need a bit of time to figure out the precise elements of the plot. Possible title: Rocky Brain-Damaged.

US rumblings

A few weeks ago, in writing a blog article entitled Americans fond of symbolic destruction [display], I had been motivated by two quite separate things:

• On the one hand, I had just watched a TV documentary on the life and death of John Lennon. There were frightening scenes showing young Americans burning ceremoniously all their Beatles paraphernalia as a revengeful reaction to Lennon's trivial (but plausible) comment about their being more popular than Jesus.

• On the other hand, I had just observed an open invitation—from an American to his fellow Americans—to burn the Confederate flag on September 12, 2010.

One of my readers urged me, quite rightly, to avoid depicting all the citizens of his nation as "ugly Americans"… which is a notorious and obsolete expression that I've never used here.

Today, further rumblings in the USA cannot fail to intrigue, if not disturb, an outsider such as me. The most blatant event is the call by a brain-damaged guy named Terry Jones, labeled as an "evangelical pastor", to immolate a copy of Islam's sacred text, the Koran.

It would be easy to see this affair merely as an absurd and insignificant gesture made by an isolated idiot… but this doesn't seem to be the case. Some important Americans—including David Petraeus (commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan) and Hillary Clinton (US secretary of state)—have condemned explicitly the senseless intentions of this anti-Muslim fanatic.

Rumblings of a milder but equally pernicious nature are manifested in a book by the Republican politician Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives. I haven't read this document (and don't intend to), but reviews provide us, no doubt, with a good idea of the kind of ideas he's putting forward, summarized in the book's subtitle: Stopping Obama's secular-socialist machine. In the mouth of a conservative Republican such as Gingrich, the concept of secularism is quite weird. Like socialism, it designates some kind of ungodly sin. And the context in which condemnations of "secularism" and "socialism" are promulgated is automatically "Christian", as if it were an undisputed axiom that the founding fathers of the USA intended to create an exclusively Christian nation. (I prefer to put all those terms in inverted commas, highlighting Gingrich's particular way of approaching politics and using language. For example, I don't imagine for an instant that his conception of "socialism" has much in common with the great French political movement of the same name.)

Click the banner for a clearly-written critique of the Gingrich book by the black Californian writer Sikivu Hutchinson.

BREAKING NEWS: This morning, in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America, the US president Barack Obama warned that the "stunt" planned by Terry Jones would become a "recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda", endangering American citizens, particularly in the armed forces. Earlier in the week, a pragmatic solution was suggested by Bill Clinton: Why not simply cordon off the idiotic pastor in such a way that he and his friends would perform their book-burning all alone, out of sight of the media? Unfortunately, imaginative ideas of that kind rarely work.

Not found in France

I've often been intrigued by the absence, in France, of certain foodstuffs that are popular in the English-speaking world. A striking example is the cut of meat known (in my native Australia) as a T-bone steak. In France, there's another missing meat product: bacon, as served up with eggs for breakfast. The French do indeed eat a pork product referred to as bacon, but it's not exactly the genuine stuff. The following interesting video presents the manufacture of bacon in the USA:



As far as I know, there are no factories of this kind in France… but I may be wrong. I should ask for on-the-spot information—the complete in-depth bacon story—from a Franco-Australian observer who happens to live in the pork-production center of France: his native Brittany. I'm referring to my son François.

Hard to watch

See how long you can watch the following holy shit (made, of course, in the USA) before being overcome by nausea:

I got as far as the first shots of real-life kids, then I had to give up…