Korean fireworks

Curiously, I haven't noticed much in the media about a spectacular and successful operation that has just been carried out by South Korea against Somalian pirates. A week ago, the 11,500-tonne Samho Jewelry was transporting chemicals from the United Arab Emirates to Sri Lanka when it was hijacked between Oman and India. Aboard, the hostages consisted of 8 South Koreans, 2 Indonesians and 11 Burmese.

Over the last week, the South Korean destroyer Choi Young has been stalking the stolen vessel, 24 hours a day, and disturbing the 13 pirates aboard by flying periodically a helicopter over their heads.

Finally, South Korean commandos from the destroyer moved in rapidly and boarded the Samho Jewelry, as seen in this amazing photo:

They killed 8 Somalian pirates, captured 5, and liberated the crew.

By chance, an expert report about piracy on the high seas was being presented this morning to the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon by one of our favorite and most brilliant French Socialist statesmen, Jack Lang, who's an experienced producer of all kinds of theatrical events. OK, Jack, tell us: This perfect timing cannot possibly be coincidental. How did you organize things so that the performance took place exactly at the right moment, and with the right results?

Limelight, lucre and lust

I'm thinking of a weird winter that started 48 years ago, in December 1962, in London. I was 22 years old, and a confirmed computer programmer who had just spent seven wonderful months working in the heart of Paris, a few hundred meters away from the Elysées Palace in which Charles de Gaulle had been cogitating upon the Algerian problem. As a well-paid employee of the European headquarters of IBM, I had ended up imagining that I wasn't learning much French (because everybody at IBM spoke English), and I thought it might be fun to spend some time in the UK.

That harsh winter of 1962/1963 was a meteorological shocker, but it soon merged into a shocking spring, symbolized by the famous photo of the notorious call-girl Christine Keeler astride a contemporary chair. That was the sexy espionage season of the Profumo Affair.

This evening, I watched a TV documentary about the rich sex life of John Kennedy [1917-1963]. If I understand correctly, his treatment for Addison's Disease involved the absorption of pharmaceutical products that made him as randy as a billy goat. JFK appears to have been obsessed with screwing any cute cunt that appeared upon the presidential horizon, irrespective of the political affiliations of the possessor of the tempting vagina in question. The most famous Kennedy female was, of course, Marilyn Monroe… whose death remains most mysterious.

Before Marilyn, there were spectacular Kennedy conquests named Mariella Novotny, Suzy Chang and, above all, the posh German prostitute Ellen Rometsch, who appears to have opened willingly her thighs for diplomatic intrusions from both the East and the West.

Today, it's ludicrous to discover that remnants of the Kennedy clan have succeeded in blocking the broadcasting of a TV mini-series called The Kennedys.

Admittedly, it's a page that's hard to turn in modern US history (like many others). A heavy page weighed down by filthy American limelight, lucre and lust.

Evolution on a keyboard

When I saw Richard Dawkins sitting down in front of a piano, I was afraid that he might be about to give us a rendition of an old Anglican hymn, say, such as Onward Christian Soldiers or Abide with Me. (That's because I often do such strange things.)



His use of the keyboard to illustrate the vastness of evolutionary time is most eloquent.

Tools for better thinking

There's a fabulous website (for readers of my kind… whatever that fuzzy expression might mean) known as Edge, which was created by the celebrated literary agent John Brockman. It's truly a place where all the big minds hang out. This year's fundamental question for Edge participants (suggested apparently by Steven Pinker… which doesn't surprise me) is:

What scientific concept would improve
everybody's cognitive toolkit?

In other words, in the case of thinkers who don't seem to hit the nail exactly on the head: What are they missing in the way of paradigms that might enable them to "think different", or at least better?

I remember saying to myself, after my first reading of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins: That fellow would write and explain things even more brilliantly if only he knew a bit about object-oriented computer programming! (I still have this impression.)

Today, I was amused and impressed by the answer of this same Dawkins to the 2011 Edge question. The professor suggests that people should master, as a prime necessity, the principles of the double-blind control experiment, as used by countless researchers in the domain of biology and, more particularly, pharmacology. Why not? Testing potential remedies in an objective scientific style prevents us (as Dawkins states) from being "seduced by homeopaths and other quacks and charlatans, who would consequently be put out of business". As I've always said, Dawkins is at his best when he's talking about down-to-earth scientific knowledge. He's the mythical science master whom all of us should have encountered when we were at school.

Another brilliant answer to the 2011 Edge question was supplied by Michael Schermer. He suggested that people should learn to think in a bottom-up rather than a top-down fashion. Now, that kind of advice pleases me immensely, because it uses the everyday talk of computer programmers from back in the last quarter of the 20th century. The only difference is that most of us were emerging, at that time, from an epoch of being fanatically top-down rather than bottom-up. We had been inculcated into thinking that the only way of solving problems is to start at the top and work your way down. In fact, as Michael Schermer points out, Nature (like everything in the Cosmos, so it would seem, ever since the Big Bang) has always started at the bottom and worked its way up…

Most loathsome Americans

When I heard of the existence of the following list of names, my immediate reaction was: "No, that's not possible. It's surely an error. There can't be as many as fifty Americans who deserve to be called loathsome." Besides, I myself would probably be incapable of even naming fifty living Americans, be they loathsome or lovable. That's like asking me to name, say, my ten favorite British TV soap-opera characters, or my twenty most boring Aussie pollies, or the hundred most arrogant French citizens (in which list it would be fitting if I myself were at least nominated as a candidate).

Although I recognized few names, the list is amusing. But it's all terribly parochial (which is a criticism that Americans are unlikely to understand). Often, I tried to guess, from the explanations, why the list compilers considered that such-and-such a person was loathsome. In certain cases, on the contrary, they sounded like interesting individuals (the targeted people, not the list-compilers). The weird idea of designating the reader as the 50th loathsome American was, to my mind, dull and meaningless. Besides, I didn't like to see Barack Obama's name appearing in the list. I wasn't able to figure out whether or not the list-compilers themselves appeared in the list. They should, I think. In conclusion, this annual list appears to be a mildly interesting idea, but the project has got somewhat screwed up, and run out of steam somewhere down the line. Maybe I react like that for the simple reason that "loathsome" is an adjective I've always loathed.

Bug Mac and beetle sauce, please!

I was intrigued by an article in the French press revealing that Dutch food researchers are advancing rapidly in the domain of new foodstuffs based upon edible insects.

According to this fascinating article, crunchy baked insects often have a taste reminiscent of hazelnuts. As foodstuff, they're rich in proteins, low in fat, and insect maladies cannot be transmitted to humans who might eat afflicted insects. Unlike cattle, insects don't fart methane. Unlike pigs, insects don't produce piles of filthy manure that can harm the environment (as in Brittany today). You might say that the only negative aspect of the idea of insects being envisaged as food for humans is our cultural aversion to eating creepy-crawly things. Still, we've overcome that reaction in the case of lobsters, prawns and crabs. Besides, people who've gotten over the hurdle of consuming oysters, snails and frogs' legs shouldn't have much trouble in gobbling down, say, grilled grasshoppers or raw witchetty grubs. It's a pity that many videos of people being introduced to bush tucker in Australia, say, include images of screaming females looking as if they're about to puke.

Efficient promotional work will have to be carried out, to convince future consumers that insects are not, somehow, dirty and disgusting.

Buggy lollipops might be a good idea for kids, but I've got a better suggestion for selling such food to adults. The insects should be pulverized (so that their recognizable attributes disappear) and transformed into a surimi-like paste. This could then be aromatized, colored, enhanced with natural herbs and then packaged like ready-to-grill barbecue rissoles… maybe under a nice new market-oriented name: Insex steak. Producers could even start rumors about the powerful aphrodisiac effects of this stuff, and its extraordinary results in the case of sporting champions. Maybe they could hire the great Lance (now that he's about to retire) to launch a planetary promotional campaign with the buzzword InsexStrong…

The figures are eloquent. To produce a kilogram of traditional meat, farmers need to supply ten kilograms of vegetal fodder. This same quantity of plant resources could produce between six and eight kilograms of insects. And it's now known that at least 1400 insect species could be consumed safely by humans. So, when do we sit down for lunch?

Queensland calamity

As an Australian, moved by the legendary toughness of our northern cousins, I find it intellectually embarrassing that a dimwitted 59-year-old Queenslander named Ken Ham should be making a name for himself in God's Own Country (he would be better off shoveling mud in his homeland) by his promotion of Creationist bullshit of the worst idiotic kind.

Intelligent citizens of the world might be asking: Is that kind of juvenile fucked-up brain an endemic thing in Australia? I answer emphatically: No! No! No! Ken Ham is a sick mutant. Few Australians follow this fellow. We're all happy he found his way to the USA. Take care of him, feed him if you like, be kind to him, and keep the bastard, please! We don't want him back. We won't even ask for a refund… Shit, there's no use in spending millions to promote great Aussie themes about our dynamic land and open-minded cultures when a crackpot like Ham can instill overnight the idea that we might all be crazy Down Under.

But are we? Or aren't we? I'm not sure. Good questions…

I'm wondering whether we could launch some kind of international process (maybe with technical help from Julian Assange) aimed at "disowning" Ken Ham. You know, like parents who don't want to bequeath their heritage to a wayward offspring. Meanwhile, here's a good article about why our Ham is all pigshit.

Seriously, this Ham guy needs to be neutralized. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm talking of logic, not gunfire. For Christ's sake, don't shoot the silly bastard; he would surely be canonized overnight by Silly Benny. Saint Fucking Ham! Worse than Frankenstein's monster. What a horrible unending nightmare… Maybe there's some kind of cockroach powder than might work on Ham. Fellow embarrassed Aussies, let's put our heads together and decide what might be done.

The bark and the bite

I'm probably not mistaken, dear reader, in supposing that you would be quite incapable of distinguishing between a bit of bark from, say, a walnut tree and a similar bit of bark from a plum tree. That's because you're not a donkey. These animals seem to find the bark of young plum trees considerably more tasty than that of walnut trees.

It's not as if the donkeys are consuming tree bark because they're starving. As indicated in my article entitled Learning a thing or two about horses [display], there's abundant grass in the part of the property I recently opened up to cater for the arrival of Will's horses. The simple truth is that donkeys are fond of plum tree bark in the same way that we humans are fond of plums. As for the poor plum trees (growing wild at that spot, and not particularly valuable), I'm afraid they might not survive this in-depth attack. But they will have died for a good cause: the epicurean tastes of my donkeys... and I'll have a better view of the valley.

Almost like spring

The sun was shining, yesterday, at Gamone. It was almost like a warm spring day. So, I went out walking with the dogs.

As usual, Fitzroy takes advantage of every opportunity to joust with his senior companion. As for Sophia, she remains alert and slim as a result of all this unsolicited exercise.

Fitzroy was visibly impressed by the cascades in Gamone Creek.

I had some work to do there. Just below my house, the creek runs through a big pipe under the road. A fortnight ago, when a thick blanket of snow covered every detail of the landscape at Gamone, the municipal snow plow appears to have bumped into a few big blocks of stone that formed an irregular wall around the upper extremity of this pipe. Broken fragments rolled over into the hole in the creek bed where the underground pipe starts, blocking it. I first noticed this problem a few days ago, when creek water started running over the road instead of through the pipe. Yesterday afternoon, I decided that the best solution would be to solve the problem myself, instead of waiting for the municipality (made aware of the situation) to get into action. It's amazing how a few chains, a block-and-tackle and a conveniently-located tree can be used to dislodge huge blocks of stone. (I believe the Ancient Egyptians made a discovery of that kind, long before I did.)

The water is now cascading perfectly, once again, down Gamone Creek.

Wiped-out generation

In my recent post entitled Latest deductions from Skyvington research [display], I explained that I've been grouping together all the Mormon references concerning surnames such as Skeffington, Skevington, Skivington, etc, and painstakingly sorting them by year. The immediate goal of all this work is to home in on individuals who might have been the immediate ancestors of my earliest clearly-identified patriarch: George Skivington, born in Belchalwell (Dorset) in 1670. I've often imagined that there might have been some kind of rupture not long before the birth of this "Belchalwell George" (as I call him). On the one hand, George's parents had no doubt moved to Dorset from a neighboring region. And, in so doing, they had probably replaced the old Skevington spelling by Skivington. Since George was a relatively uncommon given name in 17th-century England, I would imagine that my "Belchalwell George" probably descended from a family context in which that name existed already. Now, that set of likely constraints helps to narrow down the domain in which I'm searching.



In my article of 15 August 2007 entitled Midland ancestors [display], I spoke of my excursion to a charming little town called Turvey in Bedfordshire, which was the home of a big family named Skevington in the second half of the 16th century. I've always been persuaded that these folk were the ancestors of my "Belchalwell George", and this is my main line of research at present. Besides, there were Turvey individuals named George Skevington. Finally, at the end of my recent processing, when I was able to sort all the Skevington records by date, I was surprised to discover a big packet of Skevington burial records in Turvey for the year 1608. It's a finding that would have never struck me previously, when I was dealing with records in a casual manner. It was only when I had grouped together all existing records, and sorted them, that this observation suddenly hit me in the face.


Clearly, for almost an entire generation of a family to be wiped out in the space of a single year, there was only one possible explanation: the Black Death, or bubonic plague. I spoke already, in my article entitled Dressing up [display], of the beak outfit worn by plague physicians in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I have reasons to believe that this plague calamity played a role in causing a handful of young Skevington survivors to move away from Turvey, maybe down towards Dorset. And, in so doing, their links with the past were no doubt weakened. In the turmoil of this upheaval, it would not have been unusual that the spelling of our ancestral name should change, in certain cases, from Skevington to Skivington.

Flood tourists

Peter Nicholson has kindly allowed me to reproduce the following cartoon which appeared in The Australian a few days ago:

We see here the wet and windswept lady Anna Bligh terminating her speech about the legendary toughness of Queenslanders [display]. Behind her, a tourist from Canberra, Julia Gillard, is sticking her massive nose into a camera. The other day, when Gillard loitered alongside Bligh at a press conference, the prime minister looked like a decorative table-lamp in an old-fashioned drawing room. She was posed there, waiting to be turned on, if ever anybody thought that her presence might light up the scene. But nobody seemed to think so. As for Kevin Rudd, I did in fact see video images of him wandering around in the water with a suitcase on his head, and mumbling something about lending a hand to students.

Here's another of Peter Nicholson's touristic visions of Brisbane:

Meanwhile, down in New South Wales, the flooded town of Grafton (my birthplace) received the visit of an American tourist, the premier Kristina Keneally.

Click the photo to access an article on this subject in The Daily Examiner by local journalist Terry Deefholts, who reached the rather obvious conclusion that the premier's excursion was a "public relations stunt". In any case, we could hardly expect any of the Anna Bligh style of rhetoric from such a mediocre woman. Terry Deefholts attempted vainly to persuade Keneally to talk about the notorious local road that I mentioned in my article entitled Highway called Pacific [display]. Her parting gibe to the insistent journalist was particularly condescending: "You could live in Sydney, you’ve got enough grunt for it." Those words sound like something from an old American movie: "What's a smart guy like you doing in this one-horse town?"

The following photo by Lynne Mowbray shows Terry (in the boat) accompanying the editor David Bancroft in the delivery of their newspaper to residents of flooded Maclean.

Another of their many flood photos caught my attention:

The two drovers taking cattle to higher grounds could have come straight out of my childhood memories of floods at South Grafton.

Mediterranean revolution!

It has happened, at last, in Tunisia!

Nobody was expecting that things would unfold so rapidly…


Eva Joly has just requested the financial freezing of the assets of Ben Ali and his family.

Dawkins talks to us informally

This is a great video. Towards the end, we discover Richard Dawkins reposing on a sofa in front of a fireplace and reading out his hate mail, full of four-letter words and all sorts of marvelous expletives. It's amusing entertainment!



After the entertainment, I encourage you to return to the opening questions in order to fully appreciate Richard's amazing didactic skills, particularly when he explains his major reason for believing in Darwinian evolution. There's a wonderful afterthought. If a divine creator had indeed planted, in myriad animals, all the genes that find there these days, then it could be truly claimed that God had manifested a devilish desire to trick us. If this were so, then what a bastard!

Let's get aboard a dream

Click the image to access a video that presents a project for the construction of a luxury liner that would be named France.

The project is the brainchild of a young Parisian entrepreneur named Didier Spade, whose ancestors used to build luxurious furniture for great ocean liners such as the former France (now demolished). Click the photo to visit the website of Spade's Paris Yacht Marina.

The people that they breed tough

Since March 2009, Anna Bligh has been the state premier of Queensland. Although this has been a prestigious title and task (she's one of the rare Australian politicians who doesn't seem to be playing a role when wearing a worker's hat), I'm tempted to say that, up until now, she has been "merely" the state premier. In the space of a few terrifying days, as flood waters covered Queensland and moved into Brisbane, Anna Bligh has become a stateswoman. In her words today, there were overtones of Winston Churchill in May 1940, when he said to the House of Commons: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

My grandfather and my father, who were both Queenslanders in a way, would have surely been moved by Bligh's words, as I was:

As we weep for what we have lost
And as we grieve for family and friends
And we confront the challenge that is before us,
I want us to remember who we are.
We are Queenslanders.
We're the people that they breed tough, north of the border.
We're the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.
I said earlier this week that this weather may break our hearts,
and it is doing that. But it will not break our will.
And, in the coming weeks and the coming months,
we are going to prove that beyond any doubt.
Together we can pull through this,
and that's what I'm determined to do.
With your help, we can achieve it.



The heroic spirit of Anna Bligh's emotional declaration reminds me of the poem Australia by A D Hope, which has provided me with a title, They Sought the Last of Lands, for my monograph on my paternal ancestors.

They call her a young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: 'we live' but 'we survive',

A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

Talking of "immense stupidity", I hope that Anna Bligh's authentic words will replace the ridiculous slogan that Queenslanders have got into the habit of throwing around: "Beautiful today, perfect tomorrow."

ADDENDUM: I attempted to bring the present blog post to the attention of The Australian (primarily for reasons that might be designated as poetic) through a comment to a relevant article on Anna Bligh. Besides, it was normal, out of elementary politeness, that I indicate my use of their video of the famous Bligh declaration. Unfortunately, my comment has not been published. This is not the first time that I've noticed a kind of xenophobic (technical?) rejection, on the part of The Australian, to comments from beyond the borders of our sunburnt country… notably from France. What the fuck!

Two singers, two different versions of a song

Here's the original version of Fuck You from the US singer whose stage name is Cee Lo Green:



Click the following image of a 22-year-old student named Anna to watch her performing a sign-language version of this song in playback:

Apparently Anna is not at all speech-impaired or deaf. She simply decided to learn sign language as a personal endeavor, to enhance her communication skills and to broaden her contacts with others.

Radio news on Australian flooding

Thanks to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, excellent media coverage of the flooding is available here in France.
[Click the banner to access their streamed site.]

We're hearing an awesome new expression, "evacuation centers", which didn't exist back in my childhood days in Australia. In general, the news is reassuring in the sense that the authorities, citizens and media people all appear to be acting calmly and firmly, with no signs of excessive consternation or panic. The only thing that surprises me in the many flood images I've seen is that people often appear to be half-naked, barefoot and generally "under-dressed" for such an emergency. Why don't they at least wear rubber boots (to prevent them wounding their feet in the muddy waters)?

BREAKING NEWS: By tomorrow morning (Wednesday, local time)—according to a forecast in Tuesday's Daily Examiner—the swollen Clarence will have reached a maximum height of 7 meters at Grafton, which is just 1.2 meters beneath the top of the levee at Prince Street. Everything should be OK as long as there's no more rain, and the embankment holds.

Queensland tragedy

French TV and the Internet enable me to follow closely the terrible tragedy that is unfolding in Queensland. Everything seems to be happening on a vastly greater and more violent scale than anything I recall from my childhood experience of floods on the Clarence River at Grafton. The case of Toowoomba is terrifying.

On the French TV news this evening, we saw a video of a half-naked half-frozen guy being dragged to safety after hanging onto a tree.

One of the most frightening aspects of this whole tragedy is the fact that the waters are likely to hang around for quite some time. That would appear to be a completely new aspect of flooding in Australia.

I can't help wondering whether the state and federal authorities are capable of handling this disaster in an optimal manner...

Isn't it just loo-vely!

Some people can get infatuated about the most unexpected themes. Just click the door and you can step inside.

There are some fine sites in France that this refined lady should visit, or at least admire from the outside. Here's a historic place in Grenoble:

At Gamone, the nec plus ultra (as far as I'm concerned) is pissing in the open air while admiring the landscape. For indoor operations, my upstairs loo is positioned in such a way that you can enjoy a magnificent view of the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek, crowned by the cliffs of Presles.

New bird will soon be flying in

Although I'm not an obsessive tweeter, I remind readers that you can communicate with me at the address

@Skyvington

Yesterday, I was amused to find that I could use Twitter to comment upon the poor communications of a senior French political figure (the Socialist mayor of Nantes) concerning the death of two French hostages in Niger… and receive a friendly reaction a minute later.

Consequently, one must be extremely cautious of the power of such a communications device.

Crosshairs

In my recent article entitled Shot stupidly for truffles [display], I evoked the banal subject of rural people here in France who own shotguns. Over the last week, I've returned to the interesting challenge of writing an autobiographical document tracing my personal itinerary since my initial contacts with computer programming, as an adolescent in Australia, up to my present infatuation with the vast domain of DNA. (This is the document that used to be called Digital Me. It now bears a nicer title, which I'm keeping private for the moment, while retaining the former title as its public code name.) In the context of my childhood ramblings, I well remember the everyday phenomenon of guns. My father had the habit of shooting rabbits with a rifle every now and again, while my uncles used a shotgun to kill ducks in their swamp. That was all there was to it at Waterview. The last bushrangers had disappeared a century earlier, and I have no personal recollections of anybody in my adolescent context ever using a gun as an offensive weapon.

In the USA, the relationship with firearms appears to be quite different to anything I've ever experienced in Australia or France. It's utterly unbelievable that, in March 2010, a website associated with Sarah Palin could react to the Democrats' legislation on health care by publishing the following map, in which weaponry crosshairs indicate places where Palin's political accomplices felt that action was needed.

Then Palin expressed herself on Twitter in an even more explicit style:

Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America:
Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!

In the case of the guy who has just shot a Democratic personality in Arizona, I sense already that smart lawyers will certainly end up demonstrating that he was demented, and that his act had nothing to do with political hatred. Nevertheless, certain folk in God's Own Country have weird and dangerous ways of expressing themselves "politically".


BREAKING NEWS: A positive vision of the USA reappears rapidly through the murky stuff. Admire the reassuring professional style of this Tucson surgeon:



Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is married to the US astronaut Mark Kelly.

Latest deductions from Skyvington research

As every genealogical adept knows, the quality of the Mormon IGI database [International Genealogical Index] is truly amazing… particularly when we realize that the faith-based research efforts of the members of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are motivated by beliefs that most of us look upon as totally ridiculous. Insofar as I see things in this way, should I therefore consider myself as a perfidiously dishonest double-dealer when using the Mormons' data to pursue my own kind of research?

No, not at all. If each citizen, in his daily preoccupations and activities, were to make a point of refraining from exploiting resources that had been created or obtained in ways that didn't necessarily conform to his personal convictions, then he would be condemned to sitting passively on his backside and waiting for events in the world to metamorphose magically into his ideal vision of reality.

There has always, however, been a curious weakness in the style of presentation of IGI entries. [I haven't checked whether this weakness has been corrected in the latest version of their search tool.]

The problem—unless I'm dumb—is that it doesn't seem to be possible to obtain a list of all entries sorted by date. This was annoying in that I wanted to know at what dates we start to find church records for individuals named Skeffington, Skevington, Skivington, etc. So, I decided to play around manually with the various Mormon IGI entries, using the excellent BBEdit text editor, with the intention of processing and examining all the available data... which has taken much time. My findings are summarized in the following chart:

After primitive Latin-inspired versions of the name—such as Sciftitone (Domesday Book of 1086) and Sceftinton (Leicestershire Survey of 1125 and Leicestershire Pipe Rolls of 1165 and 1192)—the earliest "modern" spelling was undoubtedly Skeffington, which appears in a Mormon IGI record dated 1315. The spelling with "ev" instead of "eff" appears a century and a half later, in 1478, and the "e" vowel is replaced by an "i" for the first time in 1563. The respective volumes of the various spellings present in the Mormon IGI are no doubt significant in a rough way. As you can see, there's a large package of Skevington entries, particularly for the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas the volume of Skivington spellings remains relatively low.

At a concrete level, what these deductions mean is that I might expect to find a Y-chromosome match, one of these days, with a fellow whose surname is Skevington. As for a match with a Skeffington, I've already more-or-less ruled out that likelihood, because I'm convinced that all the ancient male lines of that name ran aground (if I can be allowed to express myself in that fuzzy manner). In any case, for the moment, I would appear to be the only male individual with a Skeffington-based surname who has had his DNA tested.

Natural catastrophes over the last year

A few days ago, Channel 2 of the national French TV system aired an awesome program on natural catastrophes that have taken place all over the planet during the last twelve months. The splendid documentary by David Korn-Brzoza was based upon a simple but brilliant idea. He presented with few comments, month by month, the most spectacular and deadly catastrophes of the year 2010.

In some cases, such as the earthquake in Haïti, we remember above all the huge death toll.

In other cases, such as the Icelandic volcano whose smoke blocked international air traffic, we recall extraordinary images and an exotic geographical name that few people could pronounce.

In one case—the fires in Russia—the catastrophe concerned such a vast territory that nobody knew how to handle it. The same could be said in the case of the explosion of an oil platform off the US coast. If the year had not ended already, the great flooding in Queensland would have surely deserved a spot in this tragic documentary.

In the context of this kind of movie, scriptwriters are wont to get carried away with the poetic theme of the colossal inhuman forces wielded by our planet Earth, in the face of which we remain almost powerless. In the Korn-Brzoza documentary, fortunately, there was no insipid poetry, but rather a constant series of questions concerning the alarming hypothesis that global warming caused by human activities might be largely responsible for much of this suffering and terror. I find it appalling that certain bone-headed observers (often calling themselves "professors" of this or that) persist in rejecting this hypothesis.

Learning a thing or two about horses

Yesterday morning, as planned, my Welsh neighbor Will Walters came down here from Presles and we spent a good part of the day enlarging the electrified paddock for my donkeys and his horses. While awaiting his arrival, I distributed fragments of stale bread to the animals. While doing so, I became alarmed by the behavior of the black horse, which appeared to be exceptionally lethargic. To my inexperienced eye, the animal was drowsy. Instead of eating bread, it simply rolled over onto its side as if it were weak and sick. I was most alarmed, because I had the sudden impression that the horse might be agonizing… maybe poisoned by toxic weeds, or something like that. I put a bucket of water in front of its nose, but the animal continued to drowse, as if in a troubled coma. I tried several times to phone Will, urgently, to inform him of what was happening. Thankfully, he arrived soon after in his big 4x4 vehicle, with his three dogs (Fitzroy's family). I yelled out to him to come quickly, because I was persuaded that his beautiful black horse was on the verge of death.

"Let me look into his eyes," said Will, calmly, "and I'll tell you whether there's anything wrong." He did so, promptly, and the horse even got up onto its four legs. Will is one of those rare individuals who knows how to whisper into the ears of horses, and see what's in their eyes. He started to laugh. "William, the horse was simply sleeping. Deeply and serenely, in a state of bliss." When I pressed him to explain, Will adopted the stance of a professor of veterinary science… then his clear and concise explanations enabled me to learn a thing or two about these animals. "Horses have always belonged to the category of prey rather than predators. So, they sleep standing up, while locking their knee bones so that they won't fall over. In that way, if a predator such as a saber-toothed tiger were to arrive on the scene, the horse would wake up instantly and gallop away to save its skin." For the moment, I couldn't quite see what Will was trying to tell me, because I had been convinced that his glorious black horse had been in a state of somnolence, on the verge of death. Will carried on his explanations. "On rare occasions, a horse can find itself in an exceptionally positive and totally comfortable frame of mind. This can happen when it has eaten to its heart's content, and when it's located in a totally friendly and reassuring atmosphere, surrounded by familiar entities. In such an exceptional situation, instead of dozing while remaining upright, the horse is capable of suddenly lying down on its side and falling into a joyful state of sleep… which is exactly what just happened to the black animal. In other words, William, the horse was simply expressing its joy at being here in the friendly surroundings of Gamone."

This morning, observing the black horse grazing contentedly in a sea of apples, I thought about Will's wise words. Later on in the day, the two horses stood calmly upon the slopes of Gamone and gazed down at me as if this were their new home… as it is, for the moment.

I'm looking forward to the next time one of these huge beasts rolls over onto its side and falls asleep.

Shot stupidly for truffles

Rural people in the nearby Drôme region are upset by a regrettable incident that occurred recently on the property of a producer of truffles… which, as everybody knows, are a variety of underground fungus, used in fine cooking, which can be sold for a high price. On the other hand, a producer of truffles doesn't necessarily become a millionaire, because these fungi remain rare and hard to find.

A local 32-year-old producer, fed up with repeated thefts of his precious truffles, went out in the night, armed with a pump-action shotgun, to make sure there were no intruders. Suddenly, in the shadows, he saw an individual who appeared to be wielding some kind of weapon. So, he fired twice in the direction of the shadowy form. Alas, he soon realized that he had just killed an intruder who was wielding nothing more dangerous than a small trowel used to unearth truffles. In other words, he had in fact come face-to-face with a truffle-thief, but the killing of this defenseless intruder with two cartridges fired from a pump-action shotgun amounted to premeditated murder. At that moment, the killer made a second stupid mistake. He asked his father to hide the pump-action weapon, and to replace it by an ordinary hunting shotgun. When the gendarmes arrived on the scene, they lost no time in concluding that the killing had been carried out by means of a pump-action gun, rather than the standard gun that the alleged murderer was holding. Furthermore, tests are being performed to ascertain that traces of the victim's DNA can be found on the trowel, to make sure that this tool wasn't simply placed subsequently alongside the corpse of the victim. So, the accused man will be tried for murder, while his father will be charged with deliberate modification of a crime scene. Insofar as the 43-year-old victim was reputed to be a regular truffle thief, all the local folk are on the side of the producer, as is usual in this kind of rural affair.

I've been using the French-language pages of Wikipedia to examine the precise legislation concerning the ownership and use of a pump-action shotgun. In this context, I was intrigued to come upon this photo of a US soldier in Iraq in 2004 armed with a variant of the famous pump-action Mossberg 500 shotgun, manufactured in Connecticut.

Today, I don't have details on the kind of weapon used by the truffles producer in France, but it may well have been a less expensive 12-gauge arm, based upon the soldier's weapon (and superficially identical to a casual observer), known as the Mossberg Maverick 88. This easy-to-use pump-action shotgun (which I know quite well), manufactured in Texas and popular in France, is blue-finished, with a synthetic stock (rather than wood) and a cross-bolt safety lock. Ownership of this self-protection arm (which can be loaded with rubber-ball cartridges, nevertheless lethal at close range) is legal in France, but it goes without saying that you don't go out parading at night with such a device… and you don't point it and fire at anything that moves in the dark.

Once the barking of dogs indicates the presence of intruders, the general idea (which I've rehearsed mentally on countless occasions) is that you immediately phone the gendarmes by means of your mobile, while using an upper-floor lamp to cast light upon the visitors. Then, after a brief but all-important act known as a verbal injunction (sommation in French), you can start firing rubber balls, noisily but calmly, with both your bedside pistol and pump-action shotgun, above the heads of the supposed intruders. Here at Gamone, for example, that would be quite fun. (I'm joking, of course. I don't wish to find myself in a shoot-out reminiscent of the Clarke brothers in Braidwood.) But you must never aim to kill. Elementary, my dear Skyvington...

In a totally different context, over the last few days, a delightfully-crazy second-rate French comedian named Michaël Youn has been on the front pages of French news media because his Parisian apartment was robbed recently, and even his cherished Hummer was included in the stolen objects. It appears that this guy talked so much on the social media (Twitter and Facebook) about himself and his Parisian residence that it was almost inevitable that thieves might decide to pay him a visit. What is far more surprising (indeed almost unbelievable) is that the comedian used these same social media to ask the thieves to kindly return all his personal stuff, including the Hummer… and they did! For the moment, I'm not at all sure that I should believe this tale, which sounds like a publicity stunt. On the other hand, in the case of anybody who has got into the habit of talking a lot about himself on the Internet, I think it's vital to weigh one's words, and to transmit significant messages... which is what I've tried to do, between the lines, in the present blog post.