Fantasies and nightmares

Back in 1994, sixteen years ago, I settled down in Choranche. Mystified by the spiritual prospects and potential of my future hermitic life, I had nevertheless imagined, in the back of mind, that I might be terrified by the idea of living all alone, particularly in the dark and ominous silence of the middle of the Alpine nights. As things turned out, happily, that was not at all the way the Chinese cookie crumbled (to borrow a silly metaphor used by the radio Goon Show of the '50s). On the contrary, I came to acquire, rapidly, such a psychological domination of my territory at Gamone that I soon realized that it would be a relatively easy task to resist the onslaught of real invaders such as mercantile Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses… not to mention brain-damaged individuals such as Stéphane (the most pernicious specimen ever, for my ex-neighbor Bob more than for me), who once suggested that it would be good if an old-timer such as me were to give him freely my fields at Gamone, so that he could raise hogs or God-knows-what.

These days, I take pleasure in wading through the swamps of both my fuzzy dream-time fantasies and my murky nightmares. The liquid realities of the former hover constantly over the image of Alison, in blue ribbons and white lace, in the precincts of the cathedral in Grafton, where our humble adolescent bodies might have come into magical fusion in a celebration of the Almighty. I say "might have" because I never in fact (for the records) got around to screwing my first great school friend… even though I certainly imagined hazily this kind of relationship. I can even recall, most clearly, an evening when I dared to allow my eager hands to stray upon her adolescent breasts. Alison promptly put them back in place (my hands, not her breasts), and celebrated this moment of interrupted ecstasy by telling me the most amazing trivial "joke" that my naive ears could have ever heard, let alone imagined. A guy happened to get into bed with his wife in an upside-down position, and he said to her: "Darling, you must shave your mustache." Today, half-a-century after having heard this joke, I would be a liar if I were not to admit that I didn't know what the hell was funny in Alison's joke, which I didn't understand at all at that time. In other words, at that stage, I hadn't yet discovered (unlike Alison, apparently) that humans grew hairs around their penises and vaginas. On the other hand, I'm still amazed retrospectively that Alison, at that early age, might have already gained "carnal knowledge" (what a delightful expression) of the famous 69 position in the Kama Sutra.

In the domain of nightmares, I had imagined that I would be beleaguered at Gamone by terrifying visions of cliffs. After all, I'm surrounded by such entities, and they continue to impress me immensely by their constant presence, twenty-four hours a day. There again, I'm surprised. My nightmares at Gamone are rarely associated with the local topography. On the contrary, I dream horrifically about the silly phenomenon of corporate computing activities, maybe in places such as Paris or Grenoble. Those are my regular nightmares… rather than the nice idea of being pushed off a Choranche cliff.

Conclusion. This situation suits me fine. I shall continue to think of corporate life as Hell, and of Gamone as Heaven. Meanwhile, Alison will remain forever as my Vestal Virgin. And Mary MacKillop is being beatified. What more could Saint William ever hope for?

Scottish cuckoo's nest

In his Pharyngula blog [display], the biology professor PZ Myers warns us immediately of every tiny flame of crazy Creationism or insipid Intelligent Design that dares to flicker on the surface of our Darwinian planet. And that makes it easier for us ground troops, under the supreme command of Field-Marshal Richard Dawkins, to drag our fire hoses to the scene and quench the flame of the match before it attains the dangerous dimensions of a candle. Often we get airlifted to foreign lands. Today, for example, our front has moved to Scotland, where we're faced with a particularly nasty inferno: an entire cuckoo's nest has suddenly burst into flames!

The Centre for Intelligent Design has its base somewhere in Glasgow, and a website somewhere on the Internet. The fellow in the photo is its director, Dr Alastair Noble, a former school inspector who is now engaged in the promotion of faith-based teaching in schools. The president of C4ID—to use its trendy acronym—is Norman Nevin, a professor of genetics from Belfast who has received an OBE (Order of the British Empire) award. He believes sincerely that Adam was a real historical personage and that the stories of Genesis actually happened as stated. That's to say, the universe was created in a week, God extracted a rib from Adam in order to build Eve, and Noah had to do some rapid and expert boat-building in order to save various lucky specimens from the wrath of God. The vice-president of C4ID is another doctor, David Galloway, who belongs to both the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons and a local Evangelical church. So, the institution is apparently run by distinguished gentlemen with academic titles. But will that suffice to make it any less loony?

In hearing the titles of these fellows, I was reminded of the delightful sequence in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest in which Jack Nicholson is about to embark on a fishing trip with his band of insane companions.

In an aura of dignity, he introduces them cursorily, one by one, to the puzzled boat-owner: "We're from the State Mental Institute. This is Dr Cheswick. Dr Tabor. Dr Scanlon. I'm Dr McMurphy." Miraculously, each of the mental patients remained calm, smiled and succeeded in looking, for an instant, as if he were indeed a brilliant physician.

But aboard the ark, it was soon joyous bedlam. Hey, talking of boats, a fascinating question has just sprung into my mind. Did Captain Noah actually invite an ancestor of Nessie (Scotland's Loch Ness monster) aboard his vessel? Obviously, the answer is yes, otherwise descendants of these creatures wouldn't still be there today.

You don't have to gulp it down immediately

The expression "fast food" suggests that you're expected to gulp it down rapidly. A US photographer, Sally Davies, has conducted an interesting experiment that seems to prove, on the contrary, that fast food is capable of standing by patiently, like a faithful robotic dog, until you decide that the right moment has come to savor it. She purchased a simple meal on 10 April 2010 (from a celebrated chain of fast-food outlets), and she promptly took a photo of it:

She then decided not to eat it straight away. Instead, she took further photos of it, periodically, to see how the food reacted to the passage of time. Here, for example, is the meal as it appeared on the 137th day:

As you can see, it's pristine, as if it had just been dished up. Now, this experiment would appear to prove something… but it's hard to say what. I was intrigued, above all, to learn that no bugs or insects of any kind had moved in for a tiny fast snack. If I understand correctly, even run-of-the-mill bacteria didn't appear to be very keen on this food… which is probably the most disturbing discovery of all. An observer can't help wondering if the daring bacteria that had moved in first actually succumbed to their tasting… like the tasters employed by medieval despots who were afraid of being poisoned. There are many pressing questions. For example: Has the meat retained its delicate barbecue texture? Are the French fries just as crisp today as when they emerged from the fry-pan? Another interesting question: Could food with such exceptional qualities of durability maybe play a vital role in lengthy space voyages?

The only thing that seems to be missing (for the moment) from this fascinating experiment is an in-depth gastronomical description of what the food actually tastes like at the end of that lengthy period.

POST SCRIPTUM: The latest French publicity for a celebrated fast-food outlet looks like this:


I'm a little annoyed to realize that French viewers are expected to understand that the English expression Big Tasty means "grand et savoureux". Does the US McDonald's corporation dare to consider that they're on a cultural mission aimed at teaching the French to speak English? No doubt yes. The thing that most intrigues me in this ad is the unexpected statement DURÉE LIMITÉE in the lower left-hand corner, meaning "limited duration"... which contradicts completely the above-mentioned idea, gleaned from the experiment of Sally Davies, that these fast foodstuffs might be astonishingly durable, if not eternal.

Having spoken thus, I'm confident that French cultural authorities will not tolerate this sort of linguistic bullying… in spite of the fact that they're faced with countless silly young French idiots who might think it smart to be brainwashed by a foreign force. In a Darwinian perspective, I'm convinced that the defenders of French linguistic culture will nevertheless emerge victorious, because all the young idiots who are tempted to eat that big tasty shit will surely die young, leaving little or no progeniture. Unless, of course, the US marketing geniuses hit upon the idea of launching a fabulous MacDarwin burger... whose exact evolutionary contents remain to be specified!

Paradoxes

Have you ever wanted to know what a web page is? Well, here to satisfy your curiosity is a screen shot of part of a typical web page.


In fact, it's a picture of a Wikipedia web page that explains what a web page is. If you want to access the web page in question, just click the above picture. Now, the Wikipedia article also contains a picture of a typical web page, and you can click that picture to see the web page in question. Once again, that will provide you with a clickable picture of a typical web page. But the embedding seems to stop at that point… instead of going on to infinity (as I had hoped).

When I was a child, I was fascinated by the packet of breakfast cereals that displayed, on the front side of the packet, an image of itself. For years, that picture created a tempest in my mind, and screwed up the calm breakfast atmosphere at South Grafton.

In my previous article, I evoked modern logic. After the cereal packet featuring a picture of a cereal packet (which in turn featured a picture of a cereal packet, and so on), my next biggest mental shock (several years later) was the paradox of Bertrand Russell about sets that are not members of themselves. Consider the set of all possible ideas. Obviously, that set is itself an idea. So, the set of all possible ideas is a member of itself. On the other hand, it's clear that the set of all pipes is not a pipe. So, the set of all pipes is not a member of itself. Consider all possible sets of the latter kind: that's to say, the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Is that gigantic set a member of itself? Good question. To be a member of itself, that set has to be a set that is not a member of itself.

That sounds like a lot of mere words. No, Russell's paradox was much more than mere words. Curiously, nobody ever bothered to inform members of the philosophy department at Sydney University that Russell had evoked this enigmatic set… and, in so doing, destroyed forever all the formulations of logic that had existed up until then.

Man gave names to all the animals

For a year at the University of Sydney, I attended the classes of John Anderson [1893-1962] in Greek philosophy. It wasn't very exciting stuff—a little like entering a fine-looking restaurant in Paris and being served a ham sandwich—for the obvious reason that philosophical thinking, like everything else, has evolved considerably during the two millennia since the ancient Greeks. Listening to the Scottish gentleman rambling on about Plato and Aristotle was equivalent to sitting in on mathematics lectures presenting the elements of Euclidean geometry, or attending a year-long course on the astronomy of Isaac Newton. I've already said that it was grotesque to be teaching a university course in Aristotelian logic at a time when this domain had been totally dominated for decades by so-called symbolic (mathematical) logic. As for delving into the complicated reasons why Socrates was made to drink hemlock for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens, that was a pure waste of time for students in the middle of the 20th century.

On the other hand, in the midst of all this antiquated mumbo-jumbo, I did appreciate one small but non-trivial item of philosophical culture: Plato's theory that things in the real world are mere imperfect instances of so-called universals, which are ideal models of a purely abstract nature, existing only in the mind of God. Funnily enough, my familiarity with Plato's so-called theory of ideas made it easy for me, many years later, to grasp the avant-garde approach to computer programming known as object-oriented programming. Here you start with an abstract class, which is then used to create effective instances of that class, referred to as objects.

For Plato, the countless dogs that we meet up with in the everyday world are merely instances of the divine concept of dog-ness, while cats are instances of cat-ness. And Bob Dylan seemed to be perspicacious when he pointed out that Man, in the beginning, had been obliged to give names to all the animals. This is exactly what a computer programmer does when he starts to invent the classes for an object-oriented project.

The only annoying aspect of Plato's theory is that, while it may be helpful for somebody who needs to master object-oriented computer programming, it is totally and unequivocally wrong as a philosophical explanation of our real world.

Richard Dawkins explains Plato's error brilliantly in the opening pages of his latest masterpiece, The Greatest Show on Earth, which I mentioned briefly a year ago [display]. Truly, if you plan to buy and read only one book in the immediate future, make sure it's this one, since this book proposes knowledge that is an absolute must for all informed and cultivated citizens of our day and age. The author asks a simple rhetorical question: Why has it taken so long for humanity to grasp Darwin's "luminously simple idea"? Dawkins replies that the fault lies with Plato. To understand evolution, you have to abandon your naive Platonic trust in concepts such as dog-ness, cat-ness or anything-else-ness. We exist in a perpetually evolving universe in which a single creature could well combine simultaneously a bit of dog-ness and bit of cat-ness. Or maybe this creature seems to exhibit a lot of dog-ness today, whereas his remote ancestors were better described as apparent instances of wolf-ness. In any case, there's an amazing aspect of Darwinian evolution that demolishes Plato's universals, not only in theory, but at a real-life practical level. This is the fact that the planet Earth has actually witnessed—at one moment or another, and for a lapse of time that allowed for procreation—a living specimen of every imaginable creature on the scale that separates pure dog-ness from pure cat-ness. To see why this apparently exotic claim can be made, you only have to envisage (if you have sufficient imagination) the last common ancestor of dogs and cats, which may or may not have looked physically like something in between a typical dog and a typical cat. (The chances are that it looked like neither.) Between that strange creature and a dog, evolution gave rise to a big series of intermediate animals that ended up looking more and more like dogs. The same can be said for the path from that archaic creature to a cat. So, we only need to imagine these two series of animals laid end-to-end (with their common ancestor in the middle), and we have obtained the real-life metamorphosis of a dog into a cat, or vice-versa. But, if Man had to find names for every member of this gigantic set of specimens, Dylan would be singing for centuries.

Long ago, when I first heard Professor Anderson describing Plato's theory of ideas, I was truly charmed by the image of our watching shadows cast by a camp-fire on the wall at the far end of a cave. It was a romantic Boy Scout metaphor, and I'm sad today, in a way, to realize that Plato's fire has gone out forever. Happily, though, Darwin has led us out of the obscure cave and into the light and warmth of the Sun.

Sarko's Vatican show

A profound principle of the French Republic is the separation between the State and the Church. Consequently, many French observers were shocked to see Nicolas Sarkozy behaving outwardly at the Vatican this weekend, in front of cameras, as if he were there on a private religious pilgrimage.

He was seen crossing himself several times, and even mumbling a prayer... which doesn't sound a lot like the everyday Sarko we all know. In any case, many citizens feel that such behavior is inappropriate on the part of the president of a laic republic such as France. It's all the more annoying when we recall that Sarko was visiting the pope primarily with a view to making amends for recent French deportation operations directed at Gypsies.

Since becoming president, Nicolas Sarkozy has had several opportunities of strutting around with celebrities. (He even married one.) He recently told journalists an amusing anecdote about his visit to Buckingham Palace in March 2008.

Apparently, while getting transported around by royal coach in London's chilly air, Sarko had developed a terrible thirst. As soon as he was seated alongside the queen in the magnificent banqueting hall, our parched president was given what he thought was a glass of water. So he gulped it down in one fell swoop. In fact, it wasn't water; it was gin. And, as we all know, Nicolas had given up alcoholic beverages back in the days when he was a young man full of dreams about becoming the president of France. Consequently, the glass of gin had an immediate effect upon him. Sarko told the journalists that he knew he was somewhat inebriated when he heard himself asking his gracious neighbor whether Her Majesty ever got bored by her job. "Well yes, certainly," replied the queen, "but I never admit it."

I wonder what they gave him to drink at the Vatican this weekend. Holy water?

Meditations upon a mysterious turd

To you or me, it might not look like an ideal theme for profound cogitations. But, for Sophia and Fitzroy, this small unidentified turd on the macadam (in front of Fitzroy's snout) needed some explaining.

I don't know what conclusions they reached. If the dogs had asked for my opinion, I would have said that it had been dropped during the night by a fox. But I don't have anything like the amazing olfactive apparatus of a dog. So, my opinion doesn't really count. Sophia's expression suggests that she has made her mind up concerning the nature of the turd, and is now wondering where the animal in question might have come from. Fitzroy's position, on the other hand, suggests that the little dog thinks the turd-dropper might still be hanging around in the vicinity. Ready to attack, Fitzroy seems to be wondering how he'll recognize the intruder.

Facets of Islam

The other evening, I watched a wonderful French TV documentary about the Moroccan cities of Casablanca and Fez, which are attempting to preserve certain zones of their splendid architectural heritage by several projects such as the creation of guest quarters in family homes. This work is being organized by a dynamic young Moroccan woman, Laïla Skali: a professional architect with a profound knowledge and love of her culture.

Towards the end of the documentary, Laïla's father invited viewers to a rare video experience: the opportunity of looking in on a Sufi ritual of chants and rhythmic movements. He explained that it was a good idea, in his mind, that outsiders should be able to observe at close hand the practices of this mystic branch of Islam. Indeed, it was fascinating to see all those young men terminating their prayers and their curious "ballet", as if these rites were an everyday affair, and then moving back to the medina to take up their ordinary activities as merchants and craftsmen.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the planet, another exceptional woman, Christianne Amanpour (known to viewers as a CNN journalist) was interviewing a Muslim of a rather different personality: English-born Anjem Choudary.

Here's an extract of that interview in which Choudary succeeds brilliantly in frightening shit out of every viewer who might have imagined previously that extremist Muslims are the sort of nice folk whom Christians might invite along to a Sunday afternoon tea-party in the grounds of the parish church.



There's a good article on this incident in the following US magazine:

Choudary is fond of his floating flag image, which he has already applied in a British context. One result of his outspoken comments is that there's a macabre flag floating permanently over the cleric's head now, marking him out clearly for what he is, what he believes, and what he's praying for.

Doctors know best

Ancient ads such as this one show just how much progress has been made since those carefree days when people believed naively in publicity messages, just as they believed that smoking was an elegant and harmless social behavior.



Retrospectively, I'm always amazed that a company would have decided to name its cigarettes Camel. It's a term that evokes bad breath, combined with the fleeting thought that maybe the flavor is obtained by mixing a small quantity of camel shit with the tobacco… maybe rather a small quantity of tobacco with the camel shit.

Gamone excavations

A fortnight ago, Fitzroy started his campaign of excavations at Gamone by digging up the geotextile fabric support beneath the layer of marble chips under my rose pergola.

For the moment, I think it's wise to refrain from fixing up the damages, because Fitzroy would observe my repair operations, and he might imagine it's some kind of game I want to play with him.

Today, he moved into a new domain: our underground roof-drainage system.

The little dog actually succeeded in removing stealthily a thick layer of rocky soil and then making a hole in the PVC pipe.

In both cases, I don't know how Fitzroy figured out that, beneath the soil in those two places, there was some kind of interesting stuff that was worthy of closer inspection. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were to wake up one morning and find fragments of a Neanderthal skeleton on the lawn…

Gore blimey!

Many observers of the English have evoked their eccentric nature. It would be silly to generalize, of course, but I've always had the impression that certain citizens of this sceptred isle can be amazingly tasteless at times, in spite of their fine manners and cultivated upbringing. Look at the Queen's hats, for example. The following English attempt at producing a clear and outspoken message on climate change is a fabulous calamity, on a par with the English invention of the meaty foodstuff called spam.



Maybe the creator of this video shocker is a descendant of the guy with a big axe who used to chop off heads for Henry VIII in the Tower of London. Maybe his great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper. In saying this, I must be careful, though. For all I know, this eccentric video artist might be a genetic cousin named Skyvington or Pickering...

Forces of nature

I've always known that the wind at Gamone can be an amazing force of destruction… although I have to admit that it only blows up strongly on rare occasions, no more than once or twice a year. (It's nothing, for example, in comparison with the north-westerly Mistral, which blows regularly down the Rhône valley, all the way to the Mediterranean.) Strong winds seem to blow into Gamone from the south, but that's simply because of the narrow southern corridor between Pont-en-Royans and Gamone, which is the unique opening through which winds from the valley can enter the cirque de Choranche. Once they're inside the giant cavity of Choranche and Châtelus, the winds bounce around haphazardly off the warm cliffs, concentrating their energy, which means that they blow in short bursts of a minute or so, spasmodically but violently.

For a long time, I've left a couple of old roof rafters posed on the lawn, supported by solid blocks, as a sort of bench. When the sun's shining, my neighbors Madeleine and Dédé are particularly fond of this place. Well, the other day, a violent gust turned all this heavy timber upside-down. In the following photo, you can see the marks on the ground where the greenish blocks were positioned.

A new force of demolition has arrived at Gamone. I'm referring, of course, to Fitzroy. Naively, I had thought it would be a good idea to install a lightweight curtain as a kind of door into his kennel, to attenuate the chilly breezes in winter. Well, Fitzroy doesn't seem to have appreciated this idea.

Meanwhile, I've succeeded in obtaining a few snapshots showing Fitzroy's new attack strategy, mentioned in a previous article [display]. For a small dog, the guiding principle is to go in underneath, while continuing to stand firmly on your four paws, and remaining as close as possible to the big dog. This means that much of your body is protected.

The danger, though, if your head pops out on the far side, is that the big beast can turn around and grab your snout.

So, it's wiser to go in directly from the tail end of your adversary. Wriggle in such a way as to force the big animal to spread her hind legs apart. Then, you only have to arch your back a little to raise the big dog's hind paws off the ground, which destabilizes her, and prevents her from turning around. Then you can calmly edge forward and nip her behind the front legs.

Be careful, though, not to move too far forward, because the big female can then bend down and get you.

Nothing stops Fitzroy, who continues his assaults in a non-stop manner. As for Sophia, she reacts as effectively as possible to all these strategies, but she gets fed up after a while, or maybe bored, and calls upon me to open the door enabling her to move back into the calm haven of the kitchen… which is out of bounds for Fitzroy.

Oral's spout

Oral Roberts [1918-2009] was a US TV-evangelist, and this is a recent cover of a magazine on miracles published by his followers.

Jeez, Oral's spout might indeed be miraculous, and some folk might find it fun to get underneath for a taste of glory, but they sure have a weird way of healing in Oklahoma!

Vatican baby blues

Nothing less than ridicule will put an end to antiquated conflicts labeled Vatican versus Science. In the right corner (Jesus saved the robber to his right), there's this silly old German lightweight contender.

He's an aging virgin mother-fucker (approximate terms ?) who knows fuck-all about procreation and babies, not to mention Science. But he seems to have a big Vatican mouth… God only knows why (when persecuted communities throughout the planet are seeking rightly to promote their woes). Curiously, while others remain condemned to silence, the Vatican's big ugly mouth still persists in vomiting worldly magical crap of bygone eras.

Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, there's a Man with a capital M: the British scientist Robert Edwards, whose achievements are illustrious. And this great gentleman has just won the Nobel Prize for Medicine!

Latest news. The Vatican isn't happy with the choice of the Nobel Prize. I say: Fuck the pope and his crazy associates! The world must strive to get rid of would-be spiritual guides in Rome, the sooner the better.

ADDENDUM: This morning, a French media celebration of the work of Robert Edwards includes a splendid pedagogical illustration of the "in glass" fertilization process. It's so limpid (pictures say so much more than words) that even silly old Benny should be able to understand it.

Is your iPad fond of bones?

The British actor Stephen Fry, who loves Apple toys, has come up with an amusing comparison for an iPad. “The way I see it is it’s like a dog.” [source] When most people decide to get a dog, they don't necessarily say to themselves (unless they're hunters, security-minded individuals, etc): "I need a dog to perform a precise set of functions." You get a dog because you're simply craving to have a dog. We're humans, and dogs are dogs. That's all there is about it.

Today, I'm not absolutely sure I could tell you why I bought an iPad. I think it was a mixture of curiosity and wonder. Rationalizing, I said I needed an iPad to see how my novel All the Earth is Mine would look as an electronic book. That explanation was partly true, but it didn't really justify the purchase. As for my second dog, I must admit that I didn't bother trying to invent reasons why I needed him, nor did Fitzroy express reasons why he might (or might not) need me.

Meanwhile, Fitzroy is receiving a top-quality canine education from his wise and experienced great-aunt Sophia. Much of their work might be referred to as tactical combat training.

It can be tough at times, like in the army, but the dogs have never once lost their tempers nor harmed one another in any way.

It's not always easy to get good shots of the dogs when they're romping around together. I've been trying vainly to get a meaningful photo of Fitzroy's latest invention: a technique that consists of squeezing in between Sophia's hind legs until his whole crouched body lies directly beneath the belly of the bigger dog. In that position, with his head well protected, Fitzroy can safely nip the back of Sophia's front paws. Since Sophia's hind legs are jammed apart by the bulk of Fitzroy's body, she finds it difficult to turn around in order to dislodge the smart pup. Of course, Sophia finally succeeds in doing so, whereupon the audacious little Collie has to imagine another technique for attacking the giant Labrador citadel. As my ex-neighbor Bob (subjugated by Fitzroy's charm) remarked the other day, Sophia had reached a stage of life at which she was entering into calm retirement, untroubled by forces in the outside world. Overnight, a tiny black-and-white furry whirlwind swooped into her life from nowhere. Well, not exactly "from nowhere"; rather, from the top-of-the-world village of Risoul 1800 in the Hautes-Alpes: a most prestigious Alpine address for a distinguished dog.

Amazingly, Christine has just discovered that, among her maternal Provençal ancestors, an odd couple ("odd" meaning different) came from Risoul 1800, the same village as Fitzroy. Christine and the little dog were already bonded into a lovely relationship while she held him tenderly on her knees for several hours during our return trip to Gamone, after our having "dognapped" him from his family environment at Risoul 1800. Before then, for a day or so in Arles and the region around Aix, this brief Provençal excursion in the company of my ex-wife had been transformed into a largely family-history affair... which delighted me in the sense that I've always been interested in Christine's genealogy, both in Brittany and in Provence. Well, now that we learn that our "Fitz-Risoul" came from the same remote village as some of Christine's ancestors, I'm sure that her affection for this wonderful little animal has been amplified.

Technology world is super sexy

I hope this video is still available:



Can you see it?

Where can I plug it in?

TV news from the hugely popular automobile show in Paris confirms that the electric car is about to become an everyday reality in France.

Click the image of the Citroën C-Zero to access their cool little marketing video.

In fact, several modes of private transport are being affected by the electric revolution.

Clearly, this revolution can only take place if, beforehand, a vast infrastructure project covers the land in "electricity power plugs" (recharger stations). Having witnessed the superb and rapid achievements of French industry in the creation of national networks of other kinds (rail, roads, electricity, telecom, etc), I have every reason to believe that electric cars are truly just around the corner.

Monkey business

From time to time, I've explained that the underlying theme of my Antipodes blog, ever since I started it in December 2006, is the concept of an upside-down Antipodean universe in which things don't happen in the same way as in our everyday "ordinary" world. That's why I've always symbolized this blog by the famous Epinal image of people walking on their heads.

I spoke of this concept in my article of 17 May 2007 entitled Upside-down world [display]. French culture has always been intrigued by this theme, which has often been expressed by the vision of a world in which humans and animals would have interchanged their places and roles.

A neighboring theme is referred to in French by a term, singeries, that might be translated as "monkey business", in which monkeys perform human activities as if it were a perfectly normal affair.

The excellent Gallica website (associated with the national French library) has just offered us a delightful set of images of such worldly animals [display].

The French word for a monkey, singe, is used as a verb meaning "to imitate grossly", equivalent to our English verb "to ape". I mentioned a trivial Antipodean case of this kind of propensity to imitate in my article of 16 March 2007 entitled Mediterranean Bondi [display].

It goes without saying—but maybe I should say it clearly nevertheless—that I've always considered that many essential differences between my native land (Australia) and my adopted land (France) are fundamentally "Antipodean" in the upside-down sense I'm evoking. To my mind, as an observer of both societies, it's not merely a matter of their handling things in slightly different ways, but rather a question of profound historical and cultural differences that have often culminated in quite different structures of thought in the two universes.

Pursuing my family-history writing

If my blogging has dropped to zero over the last few days, it's because I've been preoccupied with my work on the monograph entitled They Sought the Last of Lands.

I've finally started to set down on paper (electronic paper, if you prefer) the story of my Skyvington ancestors. To see the first dozen pages, click the photo of my grandfather and then request the downloading of chapter 4.

It's not a particularly exciting story, because those of my Skyvington ancestors whom I've succeeded in identifying led rather dull lives. But don't we all? Especially those of us who've spent most of their time in a rural setting (like me at present), watching the birds fly and the tomatoes grow.

Sharktopus

Something tells me that this US movie mess is likely to be a gigantic success in Australia this summer.



The final scene in the trailer—where the monster snaps up a bikini-clad bungee-jumper—is superb. It reminded me of fly-fishing for trout here on the Bourne.

Jupiter scared me

It's all very well to be offered a fabulous early-evening spectacle of Jupiter above the clifftops to the east of Choranche, especially on my 70th birthday, but I wasn't warned, and it gave me a shock last night.

You see, it doesn't twinkle. (Of course, it doesn't, since it's a planet, not a fiery star.) All on its own in the semi-darkness, just above the horizon in the direction of the French Alps, the fixed light in the sky was eerie. I was alarmed that workers might have started to erect a skyscraper on the Vercors plateau. Or was it maybe a gigantic laser device designed to spy on Sophia, Fitzroy, Moshé and me? That seemed to be unlikely, because none of us has run into any trouble with espionage authorities… except maybe Fitzroy, who's a newcomer in the family, and about whom I know little. Was it an intervention of Silvio Berlusconi? No, that fool wouldn't have enough men to install a big lightbulb up there. I concluded that the most likely explanation was the presence of a hovering flying saucer. This reassured me somewhat, but I remained a little spooked.

This evening, I'm unlikely to be disturbed. As of yesterday, I've become older and wiser. Not only do I now know that it's merely the planet Jupiter, but there are so many clouds on the horizon (as is often the case at Gamone) that I'm unlikely to see anything whatsoever.

Crocodile Douglas

My son François Skyvington has just pointed me to a French TV trailer concerning his recent moped excursion in Western Australia.

[Click the image to see the trailer.]

The documentary includes a sequence with the crocodile expert Malcolm Douglas, who died a few days ago in a freak accident when his four-wheel-drive vehicle crushed him against a tree on his farm property near Broome.

Beware of aerial cows

One of the subtle advantages of being born an Anglo-Saxon (as the French call us) is that, while you're growing up, a lot of precious nonsense is thrust upon you, capable of sustaining you throughout life.

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

An audacious American flight pioneer (maybe of non-British descent) was apparently deprived of this cultural background, which left him ill-prepared for an ordinary calamity.

This "latest US news" illustration from Le Petit Journal is an offering from the online Gallica service.

Not a soul in sight

I was a naive lad of 17, enrolled as a science student at the University of Sydney, when I stumbled upon a book that would influence me greatly, at an intellectual level, for the rest of my life: Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

At that time, it was totally weird that scientists might dare compare animals (such as Homo Sapiens) and vulgar machines (such as computers). An anecdote in this famous book made an immediate and lasting impression upon me. Since Wiener's words now constitute a marvelous page in the history of science, I prefer to quote them in full, rather than trying to summarize his lucid language.

Now, suppose that I pick up a lead pencil. To do this, I have to move certain muscles. However, for all of us but a few expert anatomists, we do not know what these muscles are; and even among the anatomists, there are few, if any, who can perform the act by a conscious willing in succession of the contraction of each muscle concerned. On the contrary, what we will is to pick the pencil up. Once we have determined on this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. This part of the action is not in full consciousness.

Wiener continues:

To perform an action in such a manner, there must be a report to the nervous system, conscious or unconscious, of the amount by which we have failed to pick up the pencil at each instant. If we have our eye on the pencil, this report may be visual, at least in part, but it is more generally kinesthetic, or, to use a term now in vogue, proprioceptive. If the proprioceptive sensations are wanting and we do not replace them by a visual or other substitute, we are unable to perform the act of picking up the pencil, and find ourselves in a state of what is known as ataxia. An ataxia of this type is familiar in the form of syphilis of the central nervous system known as tabes dorsalis, where the kinesthetic sense conveyed by the spinal nerves is more or less destroyed.

Wiener then starts to talk of a typically handicapped patient as if he/she were simply a sick machine:

However, an excessive feedback is likely to be as serious a handicap to organized activity as a defective feedback.

He even evokes an engineering error that could possibly affect human beings:

Is there any pathological condition in which the patient, in trying to perform some voluntary act like picking up a pencil, overshoots the mark, and goes into an uncontrollable oscillation?

Wiener's medical associate Arturo Rosenbleuth informs him that there is indeed a well-known condition, known as purpose tremor, associated with injury to the cerebellum.

For many years, I was persuaded that the inevitable outcome of Wiener's so-called cybernetics would be demonstrations that humans were some kind of complex machine… and that researchers might finally get around to designing computerized machines capable of behaving with so-called artificial intelligence, as if they were humans.

In another domain, I've just been reading about a pathological condition in humans that seems to demonstrate a profound truth about our existence. Click on the following Seed magazine banner to read this short article, written by David Weisman:


It's really weird (for want of a better word) that our two cerebral hemispheres function like a pair of complementary but quite different machines. Together, they provide their owner with the mysterious illusion of an entity that he/she refers to as "me". What's spooky in Weisman's story is the fact that this "me" feeling (I was going to call it "me-ness", but this neologism looks crazy) can gaily shunt out an entire cerebral hemisphere, as if it were an undesirable—or, in any case, unrecognizable—alien.

Ever since reading the books of Richard Dawkins, accompanied by Susan Blackmore's truly earth-shaking The Meme Machine, I've started to imagine that this "me" is indeed a marvelous and terribly complex illusion... but a pure illusion, all the same.

ADDENDUM: I'm reminded of a trivial but charming personal anecdote. Long ago, when I was capable of getting erotically involved with Irish nymphs (the closest I ever got to the land of my maternal ancestors), I happened to ask the young lady alongside me to tell me how her compatriots used colloquial language in love-making. If I had become interested in this mundane question, it was because I had already noticed that some of my own Franco-Australian language appeared to arouse her in only one way. It made her laugh with derision! (The term "panties", for example, made her burst out laughing, as if I were thinking of her as my baby doll... and it had to be promptly replaced by the ugly "knickers".) In this highly-charged linguistic atmosphere, I touched the most intimate portion of her anatomy and asked naively: "Back in Ireland, how do you refer to this part of your body?" Her delightful reply was infinitely more revealing than a treatise on Gaelic: "That's me."

Better than the Bible

If you're interested in religions based upon the Hebrew Bible—Judaism, Christianity or Islam—then you should buy these two splendid books. They reveal essentials facts, based largely upon archaeology, concerning likely circumstances in which the stories of the Bible were conceived and set down in writing.

Both books have been written by the same scholars: an Israeli, Israel Finkelstein, and an American, Neil Asher Silberman. And they're "better than the Bible" (a sentiment that brings to mind John Lennon concerning the relative popularity of the Beatles with respect to Jesus Christ) in the sense that Finkelstein and Silberman don't beat around the burning bush. You don't have to worry about the authenticity of their explanations. They go straight to the facts, and demonstrate that the Biblical stories cannot possibly be descriptions of historical realities.

Today, few serious scholars persist in imagining that the stories of the Hebrew Bible describe real historical events. And there's no authentic factual evidence whatsoever (apart from the words of the Bible) enabling us to consider that real individuals such as Moses, David and Solomon, etc, actually existed once upon a time. Does this mean that everything in the Bible is make-believe? Not exactly, because the inspiration for most of the Biblical stories was surely derived from various real events and iconic personages. So, we have no right to say that everything's pure fiction. But neither does anybody have the right to claim that the books of the Bible relate authentic history.

Over the last week, I was reminded of the work of Finkelstein and Silberman because of a silly front-page "news" article that has been appearing throughout the world. I'm talking of an inspired American Christian guy (I prefer to leave him anonymous, to refrain from adding to his publicity) who claims to have discovered a way in which the waters of the Red Sea might have parted in order to enable Moses and his Hebrew brethren to escape from their Egyptian pursuers. I'm tempted to say to this brain-damaged guy: "For Christ's sake, what's the problem? Everybody knows it was God who separated the waters. Why the fuck do you need to demonstrate things scientifically?" In fact, this affair falls into place once you realize there's nothing whatsoever to be proven, for the simple reason that the Red Sea story is pure magic make-believe. If it didn't happen, then why go to the trouble of trying to explain technically how it might have happened?

Deadly palm oil

In certain domains, the environmental and well-being awareness of my Australian compatriots is far in advance of the French situation. It's only recently that stickers announcing the absence of palm oil have started to appear, here in France, on certain packets of sliced bread.

In Australia, on the other hand, a dynamic consumer movement opposing the palm-oil industry has existed for quite some time.

The product is potentially "deadly" both for human beings with cholesterol problems, and for the jungle creatures (such as orangutans) affected by deforestation followed by palm plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

To be perfectly coherent in the environmental combat against palm oil, we should even abandon a splendid old French product: traditional Marseille soap. Now I have a friend down there, in Marseille, who won't be too happy when she hears me saying that. In fact, Natacha recently gave me a stock of this fine soap that's large enough to keep me clean for years to come.