Devil in the clubhouse

A few years ago, I was saddened to hear that one of my favorite singers, the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, had apparently been fleeced financially by a female associate while he was playing around at being a Buddhist monk in a California retreat. [I say "apparently", and I refrain from quoting names, because there still seems to be some wrangling going on in this sordid domain.] For me, it's difficult to imagine that anyone would set out deliberately to injure, by betrayal, such a fine individual. But I guess I'm naive. Maybe Cohen, too.

I have similar sad feelings when I learn that the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is suing an employee named Josh Timonen for reasons that include fraud and embezzlement.

Click the photo to access a website that provides details on this affair.

The main reason I mention this unexpected matter is to explain why I decided to remove the red A (for atheism) banner from my blog. Apart from displaying that A banner, I've never had any contacts with the foundation or the people who appear to gravitate around Richard Dawkins. I'm in no way a member of the Dawkins "club". Personally, I would be far happier if my scientific hero were a more reserved and inconspicuous individual, avoiding the limelight. In my humble opinion, he should limit himself to what he's really good at: writing or maybe documentary movies. I can't understand why he wanted to start his foundation, create a website, get into public debates with idiots, etc. I have the impression that it's through this flamboyant worldly dimension of his existence that Dawkins has ended up getting screwed, apparently, by one of his closest friends: in fact, a highly-paid collaborator.

Donkey expedition day

In my article of 2 August 2010 entitled Moshé's future companion [display], I spoke of my intention to acquire a young donkey named Fanette, as soon as she was old enough to be weaned from her mother.

Last Monday was donkey expedition day. Sylvie in Presles (the girl who was responsible for finding me my dog Fitzroy) had agreed by telephone, a fortnight ago, to drive down to Gamone to pick me up at 9.30 so that I could accompany her in the operation of bringing the donkey Fanette down here, along with Fanette's mother Nina and another adult female donkey named Margot. (Sylvie's irregular working hours at the hospital in St Marcellin mean that she has to plan ahead precisely for "leisure-time" activities such as this.)

When I crawled out of bed in the semidarkness, I sensed that this was the first really wintry day of the cold season. I could see snow on the slopes at the end of the valley (my regular "barometer" for approaching winter conditions at Gamone), and a mild blizzard was blowing gusts of freezing rain through the air at Gamone. My first reaction was that this was not a day for creatures such as me to be wandering around out in the open on the mountain slopes. I wondered whether Sylvie might phone to suggest that we should postpone our expedition for a nicer day. But I nevertheless went ahead dressing in warm clothes, because I realized that a young rural woman who has grown up on a farm in the mountains is unlikely to be impressed by a bit of sleet and wind. When Sylvie arrived at exactly 9.30, the first thing I noticed was that her small Renault car carried traces of a layer of snow. And the first thing that she noticed here was the fine kennel I had built for Fitzroy. She was also struck by the fact that Fitzroy's snout had grown amazingly in a Pinocchio fashion since the last time she had seen him (at the start of September). I left Sophia in the kitchen, while Fitzroy remained outside, as usual.

The road up to Presles was bathed in fog. The snow started as soon as we reached the plateau. Sylvie had been sufficiently forward-thinking to install snow tires on her car a few days ago, so she had no trouble in driving to the place where her three donkeys were located. She left the vehicle by the roadside and we trudged through a wind-swept field to the donkeys' paddock. There, I waited in the blizzard while Sylvie disappeared into the mist with a bag of apples and stale bread, calling out to her animals: "Margot, Nina, Fanette…" Fortunately, I was decked out in my long R M Williams oilskin coat (seen here drying).

I was also wearing a woollen bonnet with waterproof lining, rubber boots and leather gloves. It took Sylvie some twenty minutes to locate the three donkeys and lead them back to the wire gate of the enclosure. Then we set out walking in the direction of Choranche. We were particularly worried that the donkeys might refuse to enter the short tunnel on the cliff face, just a hundred meters down the road from the plateau of Presles. In fact, there was so much fog that the donkeys didn't even realize that they were entering a tunnel. So, an hour later, we were down at Gamone.

The three female donkeys moved calmly into Moshé's paddock. Since then, their coexistence with Moshé has been perfectly peaceful.





One of these days (there's no hurry), Sylvie will take her two adult females back to Presles. Between now and then, if all goes well, Moshé and Fanette will have become accustomed to one another.

Poetry of Pont-en-Royans

Today, for illiterate 21st-century youth, the very idea of poetry has a dinosaur flavor. What the fuck is that, man? And yet, that's not quite the case. In fact, it's not at all true to suggest that the modern world is losing its archaic poetry. On the contrary, poetry is emerging constantly in new forms, called rap, slam, etc.

From my privileged observation post alongside Pont-en-Royans and the Bourne, old-fashioned 19th-century poetry still moves me immensely. Click on the following image to obtain a readable display:

Meanwhile, our Bourne flows majestically:

Here's my interpretation of what the anonymous poet of 1871 was saying… which was surely both profound and beautiful:

In the abyss
Wild Bourne, turning
Flowing, rolling
With terrifying screams

Fantastic stream
Diabolical noise
In the night, it pursues us
Complaint of a curse

Like an emerald
Your sordid green flow
Affects me: vision of the
Fearful eye of a hawk

The immense rock
Is there to defend you
Your river bed warns me:
"God Almighty, man is small."

Then, on a crest
Above the emptiness
Human traces, fortified ruins
Six centuries old

That stuff transmits
Thoughts that make me
Shiver with fear, my heart
Feels an approaching calamity

With or without translation, those are great thoughts and words, which speak directly to my heart, or whatever it is that records marvelous moments and visions.

Kandlbauer in the wind

A laconic article in the Aussie press (of all places) informed me of the life and death of a 22-year-old Austrian guy, Christian Kandlbauer, designated as Austria's "bionic man". In September 2005, this headstrong lad apparently climbed a high-voltage electricity pylon as a dare. When he came back down to earth, his two arms were missing. Specialists succeeded in replacing them by artificial thought-controlled prostheses. A year or so later, Chistian managed to get a driver's license, enabling him to scoot around in a specially-fitted-out automobile.

To my mind, without wishing to cast aspersions upon anybody, I would consider that the above-mentioned series of events definitely placed the courageous youth in the category of dangerous drivers. What I mean to say is that I wouldn't feel comfortable about walking along the roadside while knowing that the audacious high-voltage pylon climber was about to swoop past bionically in his amazing automobile.

On 19 October, Kandlbauer's car suddenly swerved off an Austrian road and wrapped itself around a tree. After three days and nights attached to another great machine, whose role consisted of keeping him alive, Christian Kandlbauer was found to be clinically brain-dead. And all the machines were shut down.

Wollidogs

Nobody will be surprised to hear me say that, in my eyes, Sophia and Fitzroy are a beautiful pair of dogs.

Ever since Christine and I brought him down from his Alpine birthplace, on September 3, Fitzroy has been a very cuddly animal, both because of his soft fur and, above all, because he seems to be happy when he's seated on my knees, in the sun. So, a lot of time, I have a back view of Fitzroy's head.

Seen from this angle, Fitzroy reminds me of the dolls called Golliwogs, which were popular when I was a child. The French composer Claude Debussy wrote a piano piece named Golliwogg's Cake-Walk, performed here by the guitarists Julian Bream (left, British) and John Williams (Australian):



We are now widely aware that this woolly-headed depiction of an African cake-walker has racist connotations, alas, linked to the horrifying phenomenon of slavery. Besides, the "wog" syllable (derived innocently from the verb "to wiggle") evokes the ugly term employed by Australia's "chick chick boom girl", seen here doing her act:



For all these reasons, and inspired by the rear view of Fitzroy's head, I suggest that "Golliwog" be replaced from now on by a new word, Wollidog, derived from "woolly dog". It goes without saying that, if toy manufacturers were to start producing fuzzy Wollidogs, the facial features of these new-style dolls should cease to look anything like our black genetic cousins from Africa. They would remind us rather of Fitzroy.

History of wine at Choranche

When I arrived in Choranche and settled down at Gamone, many of the local folk were surprised to find an Australian in their midst. They seemed to imagine that, not so long ago, I had surely been sunbaking on a beach in the tropics, with kangaroos hopping up to me from time to time, and the lilt of didgeridoos in the background, and then I suddenly cried out: "Jeez, I just gotta get to Choranche, as soon as possible!" So, I jumped aboard a jet, and there I was. Naturally, the local folk were curious to know what exactly had motivated that sudden decision. I suppose they saw it as some kind of revelation, like Archimedes yelling out Eureka in his bathtub, or Newton inventing the laws of gravity after getting hit on the head by an apple. The locals wanted me to describe my bathtub, my apple tree. They were a bit disappointed when I explained that I'd been working in computers for most of my life, and that it was normal to accept an interesting job in a celebrated high-tech city such as Grenoble. Soon after that, the company that had hired me changed its marketing strategy, and they no longer needed a senior technical writer. But I decided to stay on here, because I had grown fond of the wilderness. Then it was time for me to retire…

Meanwhile, I've acquired a certain reputation here in an unexpected domain. It's a domain in which I was utterly ignorant when I left Paris. In fact, I still wonder whether I really have any genuine credentials in this field, because it's not exactly my cup of tea. You see, I've acquired a reputation here as a specialist in the history of the ancient monastic vineyards of Choranche.

Retrospectively, I can see how this has happened, as the outcome of a well-defined series of small events. Often, they were chance events. When I bought the property at Gamone, for example, I had no idea that it had once been a vineyard. I only started to realize this when I found that the vaulted stone cellar was full of the debris of rotted wine vats and casks.

At the same time, I was intrigued by an intriguing juxtaposition of names that can be observed both in a map and in the local road signs. The neighborhood below Gamone is known as Choranche-les-Bains, where the term "bains" (baths) indicates that this place used to be a spa.

But, if you turn around at that spot, there's another sign, suggesting that this tiny neighborhood has a second name.

The Chartreux were members of an ancient monastic order inspired by the life of the medieval hermit Bruno [1030-1101], who has become one of my legendary heroes. [See my humble website concerning this personage.] These monks journeyed regularly to Choranche from their ancient monastery of Val Sainte-Marie at Bouvante, located 15 kilometers to the south of Choranche.

Soon after my arrival, local people informed me that this neighborhood of Choranche-les-Bains (midway between Gamone and the village of Choranche) had been transformed into a fashionable spa just about a century ago, when the health properties of the local mineral springs were advertised. Here's an old postcard of the main spa building:

Opposite the spa, a fine hotel, the Continental, was erected to provide accommodation and meals to the throngs of visitors who came here to relax in the cirque de Choranche (cirque, meaning circus: a geological term designating a bowl-shaped landscape surrounded by cliffs).

The popularity of Choranche-les-Bains ended just before World War II, but the spa building remains, today, in a perfect state, and is used as a holiday place for children.

The hotel building, too, is still there, but in a rather sad state.

The other day, I happened to be chatting about that epoch with my neighbor Georges Belle, shown here with Madeleine Repellin at our recent annual dinner for senior citizens of Choranche:

Georges recalls that, as a child, he used to see crowds of tourists getting out of buses to have lunch at the Continental in Choranche-les-Bains, which was a most fashionable watering-hole (as we might say today), in spite of the fact that there was no entertainment for visitors, not even a gambling casino. Today, Georges resides in the house that was built by the monks after their purchase of this domain back in 1543. (I've found the actual notarial record of this purchase in the archives at Valence.)

And what were the links between the popular spa of Choranche-les-Bains and the Chartreux monks, to the point that today's signposts carry the two names for this single neighborhood? It has been suggested that Chartreux monks at Choranche might have been interested in these mineral waters. Why not? After all, the Carthusians (as they are called) have been associated over the years—rightly or wrongly—with all kinds of scientific and technological endeavors, from metallurgy to pharmacology. So, why shouldn't they have moved into the neighborhood of Choranche-les-Bains, at an unspecified date in the ancient past, to investigate the interest of running a "spiritual spa", based upon monastic solitude? Nice idea… particularly the spiritual angle. But this explanation of the presence of the monks is false.

Let's get back to the red stuff, wine, upon which much of southern France has been turning for ages, with or without the crazy notion that this excellent beverage might be associated with the blood of an ancient and obscure miracle-man, in faraway Palestine, named Jesus of Nazareth. I soon found out that wine, not mineral springs, was the real reason why various monks had moved into the commune of Choranche, as long ago as the Middle Ages. Today, people still evoke the existence of a Mediterranean microclimate at Choranche, because the commune is surrounded by cliffs, which capture the warmth of the sun and act like a giant energy accumulator.

At that stage, I started to explore the in-depth history of wine-making at Choranche, using many kinds of resources, often of an unexpected nature. For example, a neighbor showed me this ancient oaken vat which she had found in a cellar alongside her house.

Above all, I learned that an old man named Gustave Rey [1910-2001] was actually born in my house at Gamone. I invited him along here, and we had a lengthy conversation (during which I took notes) about olden days at Choranche. Later, when I organized all this precious information, I had before me the fascinating history of the cunning ways in which the local folk had reacted to the calamity of the phylloxera invasion (a plant louse imported inadvertently from the USA), which destroyed the totality of French vineyards during the second half of the 19th century, reducing countless winegrowers to poverty.

I've evoked this subject in my blog because I've just completed an article on the history of the Choranche vineyards [in French, downloadable here] at the request of Les Cahiers du Peuil: a reputed historical journal published by the communes up on the Vercors.

Fine ancestors

On the Skyvington side, one of my direct ancestors in Dorset—my 5-times-great-grandmother—was Amelia Sevior [1756-1837]. Now this unusual surname is subjected to all kinds of spelling variations: Seviour, Sevier, Sevyer, Seeviour, Siveyer, Sivier, Sivyer, etc. I was intrigued by the fact that, in changing a single vowel, you end up with Savior or Saviour. Maybe I'd hit the genealogical jackpot: an ancestral line running back up to the distinguished family from Nazareth.

In fact, the Sevior surname is derived from the Old English word for a sieve. So, I surely had ancestors in the Middle Ages who worked as sieve-makers. That might explain why I'm fond of sieves: in the kitchen, of course, but also around the house, where a plasterer's sieve is an ideal tool for removing excess stones from typical Gamone soil.

Talking of sieves, look at these two portraits of the virgin queen of England, Elizabeth I.

The painting on the left [1579] is by George Gower, while that on the right [1583] is by Quentin Massys the Younger. In both portraits, the queen is holding a sieve in her left hand. Apparently this is a literary allusion to Tuccia, a vestal virgin in a story by Petrarch [1304-1374]. Tuccia succeeded in carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve, and this was thought of as proof of her purity and chastity.

In my native land, prospectors use sieves in their search for precious stones such as sapphires.

Now, you're surely wondering whether I've inherited any wonderful old medieval sieves from my Dorset ancestors. Well, no, I haven't. Neither sieves nor gems of any kind.

Neighbors

I'm told that Françoise drops in on my blog from time to time. So, I'm sure she'll be happy to see this fine photo of her mother and their dog Vriska, taken this afternoon.

For the moment, the relationship between Fitzroy and Vriska is—let's say—undefined. In his usual cattle-dog style, Fitzroy attempts to challenge the visitor (held firmly on a chain by Madeleine) by circling her and snipping at Vriska's rear legs from time to time.

Fitzroy behaves like that with Moshé. In fact, he's not nearly as courageous as he makes himself out to be. The donkey only has to move towards Fitzroy in a threatening manner, and the dog darts for protection on the other side of the electric fence. I'm reminded of a story concerning a splendid Border Collie named Looky (no longer alive today) who once came down here from Presles to meet up with Sophia and father her pups (including Christine's lovely dog Gamone). Well, Looky was a professional sheep dog, and he couldn't resist the urge to round up every group of living creatures in his vicinity, including the family's hens. Now the hens weren't necessarily happy with the idea of being rounded up by a dog. The owner's wife told me that, if ever a hen looked as if it might peck the annoying dog, Looky would scramble to safety like a terrified child. Fitzroy, too, is a speedy runner.

Fitzroyalty update

Sophia had grown accustomed to a pair of pillows in her wicker basket. It had been an idea of my daughter Emmanuelle. But Fitzroy believes that pillows are not for sleeping on; they're for tearing apart.

Here's a photo of Fitzroy playing with a doormat, taken from a first-floor window:

Did I say "playing"? Here's what the doormat looked like this afternoon:

Fortunately, Fitzroy lives outside, day and night. By now, he has destroyed almost everything that was offering. So, I'm hoping that things will improve from now on. The relationship between the two dogs is excellent.

Fitzroy is constantly challenging Sophia to jousting competitions, but Sophia's weight and size advantage mean that she's always in control of the situation. Meanwhile, Fitzroy tries out every combat strategy he can imagine, and only stops his jousting when he's exhausted.

Bullshit overload syndrome

I'm a condemned man. Five minutes ago, I suddenly went down with a terrible affliction: a deadly virus that I picked up by browsing through an article in one of Australia's top-class daily newspapers.

I'm a victim of bullshit rage, known among specialists as BOS: the bullshit overload syndrome. Warning: Before reading any further, I advise you to put on a hygienic mask, protective goggles (I almost wrote "googles") and maybe rubber gloves (unless they prevent you from using your computer, which would be a pity).

Fortunately, I was able to identify the source of my infection. Believe it or not, I got it from a god, who is one of Australia’s best-known people-management thinkers. Just imagine it: thinking about managing people (as distinct from money, monkeys, computer memory, time, etc). Jeez, those must be exciting thoughts! I would imagine it's as good as sex, if not more invigorating, and dangerously daring. But identifying the guy (sorry, the god) who poisoned me with this virus is unlikely to be of much help, because I have the sensation that I'm already suffocating from the deadly fumes of Aussie bullshit. So, as a last resort, I intend to pray night and day to Adorable Mary, Saint of the Southern Cross. I'm sure she won't let me down… unless, of course, she's also a victim of BOS, as a consequence of all the recent bullshit surrounding her in the Aussie media.

Celtic cooking

I once married a French girl with Breton origins. I should add that she also has a good dose of Provençal genes, surely imported long ago from Rome or any one of a dozen places on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the context of my personal genealogical research [see my monograph entitled They Sought the Last of Lands], I succeeded recently in moving back to William the Conqueror. Then I was intrigued to learn that William's paternal grandmother was Judith of Brittany [985-1017]. This young lady, who died at the age of 32, was the daughter of Conan I [927-992], duke of Brittany.

With credentials like that, one might imagine that I would know how to cook wild boars. If you're a fan of Astérix, you're aware that his joyous companion Obélix was capable of consuming voraciously several such animals, roasted on a spit, at a single setting. Well, I'm ashamed to admit that I personally have no idea whatsoever of the best way to cook wild boar. So, I'll need help in learning how to handle the following huge hunk of meat:

A local hunter shot this beast on the other side of Gamone Creek. And it's a tradition to offer a piece of the meat to neighboring land-owners. So, if ever you happened to have inherited a great wild-boar recipe from your Druidic ancestors, I would be most grateful if you were to share it with me. According to the hunter's two sons, who came along to Gamone this morning with the big hunk of meat, there are two basic approaches to cooking it: either like a roast, or in the form of a spiced stew. The problem with the first approach is that I would need to organize a dinner evening with guests to do justice to the big leg of boar. So, I think it would be wiser to aim at a stew, resulting in stocks for my deep freezer.

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.