In the early hours of an Australian morning

Urunga is a small seaside town to the south of Coffs Harbour (Australia), not far from my native Clarence River region, and the Pacific Highway runs through the municipality. Over a year ago, I wrote about that notorious road [display], which is regularly the scene of terrible accidents, often due to the presence of giant lorries on a narrow undulating road that was laid out back in the days when the traffic was sparse and lightweight. As I've often said, it was a great road for bike-riding.

Here's a typical curve in that highway, in the middle of Urunga, looking towards the south:

This is in fact a rear view from the Google vehicle, which was actually moving northwards. But let us carry on as if we were driving to the south. As we move into the bend, we notice a white house on the right-hand side of the road.

As we drive past this house, we catch a glimpse of an automobile parked alongside the front verandah. There's a palm tree in the front garden, but it hasn't yet reached the height of the electricity pole near the edge of the road.

A few meters further along, we have a view of the front lawn and façade of the house, behind a small leafy tropical tree with a delta-shaped bunch of slim trunks.

A few days ago, in the early hours of the morning, a giant B-double truck (full of bananas) had been driving southwards and plunging into this bend. Suddenly, the truck driver found himself face-to-face with a north-bound utility vehicle, which had drifted onto the wrong side of the road. A collision was inevitable. The utility was demolished, and its driver killed. Before the truck came to a halt, it had careened off the road and destroyed half of the white house.

A 14-year-old boy, on holidays, had been sleeping in the front corner bedroom of the house. He died instantly, the innocent victim of a real-world nightmare. And the next day, a local politician was quoted as declaring that, really, it was high time to do something about that notorious Pacific Highway...

Antipodean exploits

The first exploit is simply an unbelievable catch in a game of cricket in New Zealand. The ball was about to touch the ground beyond the official boundary of the playing field, in which case the batsman would have made a substantial score. To avoid such a happening, a fieldsman in the other team leaped into the air at the last moment, and grabbed the ball. Then, during the half a second that he was still in the air, this fellow tossed the ball to a fellow fieldsman who was located well inside the playing field, and this second fieldsman had no trouble in catching the ball. So, theoretically, the batsman was caught out. Here's the video:

The second exploit concerns an Australian girl who went bungee jumping in Zimbabwe, on the edge of the Victoria Falls.

When she was down near the surface of the water, the cord snapped, and she got carried away (her ankles still tied together) by the rapidly-flowing Zambezi River. Miraculously, she survived with no more than a few bruises. Here's the video:

King Fred was a female

Last night, when I started to watch a fictionalized documentary on Frederick the Great, King of Prussia [1712-1786], I had no idea what it was all about… and it took me quite some time to figure out what was happening. The German director Jan Peter had made the curious decision to call upon two female actresses for the role of the celebrated monarch. The aging king is played by Katharina Thalbach.

And Katharina's real-life daughter Anna plays Frederick as a young prince, before the death of his harsh father, Frederick William I.

For the old king to look so much like the prince, I kept on saying to myself that the makeup artists had done a splendid job. And it was only much later, when I read an article on the movie in Télérama, that I learned that the roles had been played by a mother and her daughter. Funnily enough, Jan Peter's weird choice works superbly, maybe because there was indeed a refined feminine dimension in Frederick's character. He was a gifted musician, versed in French culture, who seemed to prefer the company of men.

This excellent film is not only enjoyable; it is quite didactic, providing uninformed viewers (such as me) with a view of that early phase of Hohenzollern royalty in Prussia.

An aspect of the movie that amused me was the way in which Frederick dined regularly with his distinguished French guests Voltaire and La Mettrie. The latter philosopher—whose famous L'Homme Machine (Machine Man) inspired me when I was working on my Machina Sapiens—actually died in Potsdam after stuffing himself with delicious pheasant and truffle pâté.

Uncle Peter

I've always looked upon my maternal aunt Nancy Walker (8 years older than me) as a kind of big sister. So, when she married a Sydney gentleman named Peter Smith in 1954, he too became, for me, a kind of brother-in-law, rather than an uncle. In any case, for well over half-a-century, Peter and Nancy welcomed me constantly into their family environment on countless occasions… even as a house guest at times, as if I could look upon their home as my home. Retrospectively, I believe that I tended to overplay my pseudo-sibling status at times… but Peter and Nancy never suggested overtly for a moment that they might have been a little fed up with my constant presence.

I thought of Peter as a link between two quite different worlds: the city (Sydney) and the bush (Waterview, South Grafton). Nancy and I were both country kids, who met up with the "big smoke" at the end of our adolescence. Peter, on the other hand, was characterized by the relative sophistication that came from being brought up in a prosperous North Shore context. His father owned a butchery business named Leroy. Peter, when I first met up with him, was actually an accomplished butcher… who once gave me a blue-and-white woolen butcher's apron. He had attended a prestigious Sydney Presbyterian school (Scots College). When I first met up with Nancy's future husband in Grafton, he drove around in a superb sports car.

In July 1982, in Bangkok, Emmanuelle, François and I encountered a new facet of the existence of Peter and Nancy. Peter had abandoned the butchery business and moved into marketing with a multinational pharmaceutical corporation, which had promptly sent him on a mission to Thailand. Back in Sydney in 1985, when my children and I disembarked in Australia, we were promptly welcomed by Peter and Nancy. Frontiers between our generations dissolved permanently when I found my uncle and my son, clad in plastic bags to keep themselves dry and warm, participating side-by-side in the City-to-Surf foot race on 17 August 1985.

Last week, after a startlingly rapid decline, Peter left us. And there are no longer any men of his generation in our family.

Cursed existence

Jeanne d'Arc

Jeanne d'Arc. In English, Joan of Arc. Her family surname was d'Arc. And her given name was Jeanne (pronounced jun in French, like fun, so much nicer than Joan). She was born six centuries ago, on 6 January 1412, in Domrémy (Lorraine). As a pious rural maiden, Jeanne d'Arc was horrified by the wounds inflicted upon the brethren of her village by the Anglo-Burgundian forces.

While minding her sheep and spinning wool, Jeanne heard the celestial voice of Saint Michael the Archangel exhorting her to create a rebellion aimed at kicking the English out of France.

It was a long combat, during which Jeanne behaved with the military force of a male. A successful combat. But Jeanne paid with her life.

And the tragedy of Jeanne d'Arc is expressed in a quiet noble style by Leonard Cohen and lovely Julie Christensen.

Totally operational once again

My iMac running under Lion is once again in a perfectly operational state. For the moment, I don't know what it was that knocked out my machine on the evening of 1 January 2012, and I may never know. But, contrary to what I suggested in my preceding blog post, this was not a hardware bug. It was a mysterious software glitch that seemed to manifest itself in the middle of the night, when I was no longer using the Mac. Was it something to do with the New Year? Maybe…

A guy at the Fnac store in Valence succeeded in erasing the memory of my machine. Funnily enough, that operation thrilled me, because I've been operating inexcusably, for ages now, in a totally stupid way. I've had a nice explicit list of all my confidential codes in a folder named CODES sitting in a remote corner of the memory of my computer. This was most convenient when I wanted to consult my bank account, or order a book from Amazon, say... but it was totally crazy from a security viewpoint. Yesterday, I finally rectified that stupidity... and that might well be a positive lesson from this mysterious crash.

When I took my iMac home, I set about reinstalling the system from scratch, using my original CDs. Unexpectedly (for me, in any case), the installer suddenly asked: "Would you happen to have a Time Machine backup, which could be used to reboot your Mac?" I said yes, with enthusiasm. And that's exactly what happened during the next ten or so hours. Slowly but surely, my iMac was restored, magically, to its pristine state! Thank you, Time Machine!

My advice to all Mac users: If you don't have Time Machine yet, think about acquiring it. Meanwhile, it was reassuring, too, to know that Carbon Copy Cloner had done its daily job, providing me with a perfect copy of everything in my iMac at the moment it crashed.

The two backup tools constitute a tandem, apparently with a bit of overkill… but it's better to be too safe than not safe enough.

Computer crash

This morning, my Macintosh computer refused to start up. All I've got on the screen was a gray apple icon and a little revolving circle of dashes. Clearly, my Intel iMac (purchased in April 2010) had crashed. The people at the Fnac store in Valence had kindly warned me, 20 months ago, that Apple products are now manufactured in China, and that they seem to break down more often and sooner than before. So, they advised me to take out insurance, to cover repairs. I'll be depositing my machine with them tomorrow morning, and I should have it back home in a fortnight. And repairs will be covered by the insurance.

Meanwhile, I'm using my old iMac, purchased in 2005, which still runs perfectly (using the Leopard system). This is the machine I've been using already, regularly, to run the precious FreeHand tool for genealogical charts, which does not exist for the latest Mac system.

I've already hooked up the external disk that was being used for automatic daily backups on the iMac that crashed, and I'm relieved to see that everything is there, intact. Normally, on my Time Machine disk, I should have copies of the most recent stuff I was writing (about the famous thatched house in Blackbird Street) just before I went to bed last night. So, I won't have lost anything at all... apart from time spent driving to Valence and back. And it's unsettling to have to move back to an older computer system for a while.

Awaiting a weighty book

At the end of my blog post of 16 July 2011 entitled State of things [display], I suggested that readers might sit down quietly for an hour to watch a splendid talk by an outstanding American theoretical physicist, 57-year-old Lawrence Krauss.

I've just been pleasantly surprised to learn—in a note from Krauss himself, published yesterday [display]—that this talk actually took place some two years ago, at the instigation of Richard Dawkins and Robin Elisabeth Cornwell [Executive Director of the US branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science]. Later, the Foundation decided to post the talk video to YouTube… and it went on to log over a million views. This doesn't surprise me at all, since the subject is awesome.

Not surprisingly, friends of Krauss soon got around to convincing him that he should write a book on this fascinating subject of the way in which "nothingness" transforms itself constantly (with no help from any gods, just pure science) into "somethingness". When you think about it, it's a bloody good pretext for a book, to say the least: the sort of stuff that the Holy Bible would refer to as "good news". (I'm joking, of course. The authors of the poor old Bible wouldn't know what the fuck we were talking about.)

This momentous book will be coming out on 10 January 2012. Meanwhile, you can download (from the above Foundation link) the text of a splendid Afterword written by Dawkins for the imminent Krauss book. Inspired by the famous biblical words "Jesus wept" [John 11-35], I feel like summarizing the situation: Dawkins wondered. Wondered in awe at the words of a fellow scientist… without claiming that he (or many of us, for that matter) might be capable of following all the mathematics and physics that culminate in such mind-boggling conclusions. In any case, the words of the science poet Dawkins (who speaks from my level) are beautifully inspiring. And I'm awaiting eagerly the weighty words of Krauss.

Two for my cup of tea

I'm convinced that I've found the finest possible teapot [display] and my favorite jasmine tea [display].

On the other hand, I still hesitate concerning the ideal cup. My choice has been narrowed down to two quite different models. The white porcelain bowl on the right (a gift from my daughter) is a sacred chalice that seems to add a spiritual dimension (whatever that might mean) to the simple act of drinking a cup of tea. Whenever I drink tea from this delicate bowl (like a pyramid poised upside-down on its tip), I have a funny feeling that I should also be praying, meditating or listening to monastic chants emerging from a temple.

A more down-to-earth solution, when I'm working in front of my computer screen, is one of the delightful glazed stoneware cups I bought down in Moustiers. I've always agreed with the opinion of an aged Payne neighbor in my childhood Waterview, who amused my mother (unaccustomed to the expression of such refined sentiments) by saying: "I always feel the tea tastes so much nicer in a fine cup." The elegant forms and beautiful hues of the Provençal pottery certainly add something to the commonplace experience of consuming tea. But it's primarily a simple matter that I would designate as drinking comfort.

Baby mammoth

Last night on French TV, I watched a fascinating 95-minute documentary about the discovery in Siberia, in 2007, of an intact carcass of a baby woolly mammoth named Lyuba, who died at the age of a month or two—probably by drowning or being suffocated by mud— some 40,000 years ago.

The video I saw was a compilation of documentary fragments from several sources, but it tells the story of Lyuba in a complete and constantly interesting fashion. As far as I can tell, it was a French-language version of a product made by National Geographic whose title is Waking the Baby Mammoth. In any case, this afternoon, I was able to order a copy of the French version from Amazon.

Some viewers might be shocked by a cute gimmick of a Disney kind exploited haphazardly throughout the documentary. A highly-realistic virtual representation of little Lyuba is seen scampering around, from time to time, in the real world context of modern scientists who have been examining the unique carcass. Personally, I was never annoyed by these brilliantly-created excursions into fantasy, which seemed to reflect dreamlike visions that might indeed have been present in the minds of the scientists. At times, though, it was weird in the sense that the lovely little beast seemed to be invited along to participate in her own autopsy.

I appreciated greatly the performance of the US paleontologist Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan, who appeared to have a deep philosophical empathy both with the scientific phenomenon of mammoths and with the traditions of the Nenets herders who survive today in the icy Arctic world that was once the lush domain of Lyuba and her kin.

Exceptional entry into Pont-en-Royans

When Fitzroy became a family member at Gamone, a year or so ago, I was obliged to abandon my pleasant old habit of strolling down to Pont-en-Royans on foot, because looking after two dogs would not be easy, particularly on the stretch of road that runs alongside the Bourne, where's there's nothing you could call a pedestrian pavement. Here's a Google Street View presentation of the main road into Pont, a hundred meters after the Rouillard Bridge over the Bourne (midway between Gamone and Pont), which runs down the valley to the right of the road:

Pont is located not far beyond the bend at the far end of the main road with the white lines. In the vicinity of the point from which the photo was taken, if I were walking to Pont, I would be using a track through the woods up to the left, at the level of the tree line. Notice the knob up on the crest of the mountain to the right, the Trois Châteaux. You could see this knob clearly in the second photo in my recent blog post entitled Virgin Mary of Pont-en-Royans [display]. That's the ruins of the medieval watchtower enabling a few guardsmen to look out over three feudal castles located further down in the valley, to make sure that no assailants were moving towards any one of these castles.

The above photo contains another interesting detail. Notice the existence of the narrow road, with no signs whatsoever, that runs off to the left, and up the slopes, towards the woods. Let me ask you a trivial question. If you were a motorist, heading towards Pont-en-Royans (a few hundred meters down the road), is there anything that might tempt you to leave the main highway and drive up along that unmarked narrow road? Well, of course, there's always the possibility of an urgent need to relieve oneself in a natural setting. Apart from that, I shall explain in a moment that there's another theoretical reason, apparently, for setting off on a wild goose chase along a narrow wooded mountain lane. It's called GPS: the Global Positioning System. And this fabulous system can lead you into big trouble...

The pedestrian track joins up with that narrow road, a little further on, and you soon reach an entry into an ancient neighborhood of the village of Pont-en-Royans called Villeneuve (literally, "new town"). Here's the first house up there in the Villeneuve neighborhood:

Although the portal itself has disappeared, you can still see its traces to the left and the right of the road.

This tiny neighborhood came into existence in the 17th century. The year 1674 is engraved in the stone window frame of one of the houses:

Residents of the three or four dwellings at Villeneuve can drive up here along the narrow road that you saw in my first photo. The owner of this red vehicle has then turned his car around and backed into this convenient parking spot, at the top of the stone stairs that run down to the Picard Bridge.

Last summer, an English tourist was driving down towards Pont-en-Royans. When he reached the place shown in my first photo, he seemed to receive curious advice from his GPS device, which told him to turn to the left. He interpreted this as meaning that he should head off up the hill along that narrow road leading to the Villeneuve neighborhood. At that time, when he drove through the narrow portal and past the house with the date 1674, there was no big block of stone at the spot where the red car is now parked, since the handful of local residents all knew that the road stopped there. However the English tourist didn't know this. And, since his GPS device reassured him that Pont-en-Royans was just a hundred meters down the hill, he kept on driving. When he started to bump down over these stone steps, the tourist must have felt that the road was extraordinarily narrow and in pretty bad shape:

But his GPS kept on telling him that the Picard Bridge and the entry into Pont-en-Royans were less than 50 meters away. Besides, it would have been particularly difficult to back up over those steep stone steps. So he kept on driving. Halfway down, he must have been an expert driver, and taken great pains, to get through this narrow passage:

After that ultimate difficulty, the tourist's downhill drive ended here, at the bottom of the Villeneuve stairway.

His automobile and his faithful GPS system had at last brought him to the village of Pont-en-Royans... or almost. Unfortunately, there was no way in the world that he could drive his car through the narrow opening at the level of the two final steps. So, his car got firmly wedged in between the stone walls. And he had a unique opportunity (for a tourist at the wheel of his automobile) of viewing the terrasse of the Picard bistrot from an unusual place and angle.

The only way of extracting the tourist consisted of calling upon a local guy with a backhoe loader to knock down the stone wall to the right, and nudge the car onto the road.

 

As you can see, the wall has now been repaired. I believe that a local newspaper has a photo of the trapped automobile at the foot of the staircase. Later on, if I can obtain a copy, I'll add it to this blog post. Meanwhile, I'm told that the English tourist was furious to discover how hard it was to drive down a quite ordinary road whose existence was indicated explicitly by his faultless GPS device. Back in the UK, where roads and road signs are impeccable, it would be unthinkable to get into such an annoying predicament. Bloody Frog highway authorities!

Google-based review of major events in 2011

For me personally, this short video has the merit of evoking one of the ways in which I find out what's happening out in the wide world.

But I have to admit that I'm not a typical Google user, otherwise I would have discovered—all on my own and months ago—the following specimen of US youth:

Apparently, throughout the world, more Google users looked up pea-brained Rebecca Black and her stupid ditty than any other individual, happening or phenomenon on the planet Earth. As they say in the classics, it makes you think.

Silent night, holy fight

In Jerusalem, fights have been erupting for ages between different Christian denominations inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This Christmas, the fighting broke out in a different but equally distinguished place: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. And the belligerents were Greek Orthodox and Armenian clergymen. Parts of this video remind me of ice hockey games that have been transformed into brawls. 

Let there be peace on Earth...

Praise be to magic Cheeta

My title is meant to evoke the refrain of the delightful Tim Minchin song that I presented a few days ago [display].

A crazy story about the death of a chimpanzee has been taken up by media throughout the world. According to this story, the animal that has just died in a Florida primate sanctuary was the famous Cheeta, who was present in many of the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weismuller. That's to say, the deceased animal would have been 80 years old… which would have made it some 25 years older than the normal life span of a captive chimpanzee.

This story should be taken with a grain of salt, because quite a few different chimpanzees were employed for the role of Cheeta. They are listed in the Wikipedia article on Tarzan and Cheeta [access]. For the story of another chimpanzee that was alleged to have been the real Cheeta, read an article by R D Rosen, Lie of the Jungle: the Truth about Cheeta the Chimpanzee, which appeared in the Washington Post in December 2008 [access].

This affair illustrates the amazing gullibility of countless media organizations. They all seem to have relied on a single source for this story: the lady in charge of chimpanzees at the Florida sanctuary. She appears to have claimed, incidentally, that the deceased chimpanzee could be "soothed by Christian music".

Virgin Mary of Pont-en-Royans

In my quest concerning the drawing of the thatched house in Blackbird Street, I had imagined that it might be a good idea to obtain a bird's-eye view of the houses that appear (I believe) in the background. So, I set off on a lonely morning excursion along the slopes of Mont Barret on sunny Christmas Sunday morning. A friend from Blackbird Street, strolling around with his dog, directed me towards the Virgin of Pont-en-Royans. After a rough climb along a track through unkempt shrubs, I finally found myself at the lady's feet.

I was thrilled to meet up with an effigy of the lady and her son on the very anniversary of the birth of the latter. This was surely my closest contact ever, and maybe forever, with the solitude of heavenly bliss. Taking advantage of this extraordinary moment, I took this photo of the nearby mountain that separates Choranche and Pont-en-Royans.

As attested in the Napoleonic Cadastre, this mountain, on the territory of Choranche, is called Trois Châteaux (three castles) because an observer, from this exceptional viewpoint, could clearly distinguish three medieval castles in the valley: Flandaines, La Bâtie and Rochechinard. Today, the first two have almost totally disappeared from the surface of the planet Earth, whereas vestiges of the third castle exist splendidly, as I explained recently [display].

When I started down the slopes from the Virgin Mary of Pont-de-Royans, I had the impression that our encounter had not proved anything much at all concerning my primary preoccupation: the identification of the thatched house of Blackbird Street. But nobody (and, least of all, a lusty heathen such as me) should ever begrudge a passing encounter with a replica of the Holy Virgin.

Dorset censuses

Since much of my 19th-century Skivington genealogy was located in Dorset, I finally decided to purchase a set of CDs with the contents of the UK censuses for 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871.

I believe that purchasing these CDs—expertly produced by a small private company—is a less expensive and far more user-friendly solution than subscribing to one of the companies that provides you with access to censuses through the Internet. But I've reached this conclusion primarily because my 19th-century preoccupations are focussed essentially upon the single county of Dorset.

The researcher still has to spend a lot of time and effort in locating relevant individuals. In the case of my ancestral relatives named Legg, I've more or less given up researching, because there were hordes of them in Dorset at that time. Maybe, if I were courageous, I would decide to get further involved in research concerning these Legg folk, with the help of big family-history websites that we used to refer to as "message boards"... which I tend to avoid these days. But I've discovered that my great-great-great-grandmother Eliza Legg, when she married Charles Skivington, had two out-of-wedlock sons of which Charles wasn't the father. And I'm wary of the inevitable rock 'n' roll that would accompany an incursion into Eliza's family background. So I'm inclined to let sleeping Dorset rockers lie.

Thatched house in Blackbird Street

In the village of Pont-en-Royans, Blackbird Street (la rue du Merle) rises from the end of the Picard Bridge, just opposite the famous hanging houses above the River Bourne, and curves around the lower slopes of Mount Barret for a couple of hundred meters before descending to meet up with the main road to Sainte-Eulalie. Here's a view of the hanging houses seen from Blackbird Street:

In the lower center of the photo, you can see a fragment of the above-mentioned road that runs from Pont-en-Royans to Sainte-Eulalie, a couple of kilometers to the south. In the background, you can glimpse the stone arch of the Picard Bridge, high above the Bourne. On the opposite bank of the Bourne, you have the multi-colored façades of the hanging houses. Finally, at the spot where the photographer was located, in the lower right-hand corner of the photo, you can see the edge of Blackbird Street, with a stone parapet.

Let's move to the other side of the Bourne. Here we view the Blackbird Street neighborhood from the vicinity of the hanging houses:

A couple of vehicles are driving along the road to Sainte-Eulalie. The first vehicle is about to pass in front of the three "awkward doorways" mentioned in my blog post of 23 May 2010 [display]. Above the middle doorway, the narrow building with a relatively bright red (new) roof was the garage of my late neighbor Dédé Repellin. The level of Blackbird Street corresponds to the base of the houses in the background.

You can associate the two scenes by means of a building that appears in both photos. In the first photo, it's the building in the forefront (half-hidden by a dilapidated shed), on Blackbird Street, with snow on the roof and a tall cream-colored chimney. In the second photo, the snow has disappeared, but this same building, a little to the right of Dédé's garage, is distinguished by its slanting roof, and a small balcony high above the road. Further along to the right, a massive concrete base and pillars support the dilapidated shed (seen in the first photo).

Now, if I've tried to describe the layout of this neighborhood, it's because I would like to share with you, if possible, my attempts at identifying a mysterious unsigned drawing, dated March 1870, which my ex-wife Christine discovered recently in her collections of antiquarian artwork. We come upon a big house with a thatched roof.

All the familiar old engravings of Pont-en-Royans show houses with tiled roofs. And the famous Picard Bridge appears inevitably in all such images. Consequently, Christine (who's quite familiar with Pont-en-Royans and its pictorial representations) was disinclined to imagine the house with a thatched roof as an element of 19th-century Pont-en-Royans. Nevertheless, in the background, there are buildings that look like our hanging houses, as well as a mountain. So, Christine decided to send me a copy of the drawing, to ask for my opinion. And, over the last week, I've been carrying out an investigation of the affair.

Today, my conclusions are firm. This was almost certainly a building located not far from the Picard Bridge, between Blackbird Street (on the right-hand edge of the drawing) and the Bourne. The house was no doubt eliminated, to a large extent, to make way for the new road from Pont-en-Royans to Sainte-Eulalie. But it's possible that vestiges of the building have survived in the vicinity of Dédé's garage and the house with the slanted roof.

Let me start out by explaining the reasons why I've reached these conclusions. Here's an enlargment of the buildings in the background, to the left of the thatched house:

When I showed the drawing to Paulette Ageron (the 84-year-old sister of my neighbor Madeleine), she was adamant that the block of three buildings to the far-left is the place where she was born. These buildings on the Place de la Halle (market square) were destroyed by Nazi bombs in 1944, but old-timers remember them well… no doubt because of the bombing. And Paulette needed no prompting to assure me that she recognized the place where she was born, on 27 April 1927, in her parents' second-floor residence in a house whose first-floor occupants were Monsieur and Madame Guillot. Let us leave aside this leftmost block, and turn our attention to the remaining 5 buildings. Here's what we find there today:

Although the buildings, their façades and even their heights have evolved considerably during the century and a half since the drawing was made, little imagination is required in order to associate significant elements in the two images.

A vital element in the elucidation of this puzzle was the Napoleonic Cadastre of Pont-en-Royans dated 15 March 1823. Significant fragments of this precious document are still accessible in the town hall of Pont-en-Royans, where the friendly employees Colette and Chantal allowed me to take photos. Here's a fuzzy map of Blackbird Street (photographed on a dull morning, without lighting, on the floor of the town hall):

In the drawing of the thatched house, the woman with a child is seated on an empty grassy slope. I would imagine that this is the allotment #130 in the Napoleonic Cadastre, stretching all the way down to the Bourne, and that the thatched house lies on the allotment #123. But my reasoning might be faulty. Maybe the house was located on the allotment #127, much closer to the Picard Bridge, in which case the grassy patch would have been the allotment #125.

To conclude, here's a well-known illustration of that area at the beginning of Blackbird Street:

To my way of reckoning, the artist who made this delightful illustration of the local blacksmith, at the start of Blackbird Street, must have been located with his back towards the thatched house. For the moment, I have no information whatsoever concerning the date and origin of this artwork. My investigations are not yet terminated...

Christmas dogs

For many years, I've been cynically amused by all the talk about the sense of Christmas. Back in the days when I used to celebrate this festive season in one way or another, notably in Brittany in the context of my ex-wife, I was impressed primarily by the immediate family scene. In Christine's ancestral context, this scene—of a theatrical kind on special occasions such as Christmas—was both qualitatively and quantitatively rich in a way that impressed a naive Antipodean such as myself, projected into this new world by my love for Christine Mafart and our decision to marry and have children.

I was conscious of the inevitable backdrop against which our ephemeral celebrations were taking place, and I was often saddened by the idea that it would have been unthinkable for me to ever seek to evoke that backdrop with my wife, who didn't appear to be sensitive (so I thought, rightly or wrongly) to this behind-the-scenes situation. She was always too busy making sure that her parents and siblings were all getting organized for Christmas in an optimal fashion… almost as if it were a military operation that had to be timed and executed ideally. And I might be assigned the unlikely task of opening oysters. (I say "unlikely" in the sense that, during my entire adolescence not far from the Pacific Ocean and the fabulous oyster fields of Wooli, nobody had ever thought it fit to teach me this art.) Needless to say, the Mafart home in Saint-Brieuc at Christmas wasn't exactly the kind of situation in which somebody might suggest romantically: "Hey, why don't we all go down to the beach and light up a barbecue." Things weren't like that.

The absence of three background elements disturbed me constantly. First, there was the harsh outside world, excluded magically from our Christmas celebrations. Second, there was no place in our family festivities for the city of St-Brieuc, the seaside environment and fabulous Brittany. Third, in this merry midst, my personal psychology, with its preoccupations and ambitions, was an empty cocoon.

Today, those events and personal sentiments are far away in my past. And I find myself celebrating Christmas alone with my dogs.

They're warm, well fed and playful. And I believe they're happy. Unfortunately, they know next to nothing about the birth of Jesus. Me neither, for that matter. And the only wise man Sophia and Fitzroy have ever encountered is, of course, me. But they don't appear to be missing out on too much.

Praise be to multifaceted Jesus

This hilarious song of praise to Jesus by the Australian comedian Tim Minchin was supposed to be included in a show on ITV in the UK this evening, but it was censored at the last minute.

As somebody pointed out astutely, this censorship operation is neither here nor there, because the song and the censorship will be talked about by many observers (exactly as I'm doing now), and hordes of viewers will be drawn to the YouTube presentation. So, we might conclude: Praise be to Magic, Woody Allen, zombie, Superman, Komodo dragon, telepathic, vampire, quantum, Hovercraft, Minchin, censored, YouTube Jesus!

Higgs hunt

In the olden days in Australia (that's to say, when I was a kid), a simple gambling game called Two-up consisted of placing bets on throws of a pair of pennies. Obviously, there were three possible outcomes:

1. Two heads:

2. Two tails:

3. One of each:

Now, let me ask you a simple question: What is the probability of the last-mentioned outcome (one coin landing tails, and the other heads)?

Did I hear you say one-out-of-three? That answer would be wrong. The right answer, of course, is one-out-of-two. In mathematical jargon, the probability of a mixed heads-and-tails outcome is 0.5.

That banal Aussie Two-up demo was a prelude to one of my favorite science stories. Once upon a time, during a lecture in a university of present-day Bangladesh, the Calcutta-born mathematician and physicist Satyendra Nath Bose happened to make the above-mentioned mistake. Unbelievably, in front of his surprised students, Bose exploited unwittingly the erroneous one-out-of-three probability in order to provide a convincing explanation of a certain experiment in the domain of quantum statistics.

In a nutshell, quantum happenings and explanations are so weird that you can even obtain the right answers by using what might appear to be crazy reasoning... as long as everything remains mathematically immaculate. We might say retrospectively that, not only was there method in the temporary madness of Bose, but superb madness in his very method. In any case, Bose's initially mixed-up meanderings gave rise (I'm cutting a long story ultra-short) to what has since become known as Bose-Einstein statistics. This extraordinary Bengali mathematician and physicist (who needed Albert Einstein's personal recommendation in order to get a university job, since he didn't have a doctorate) finally obtained cosmic recognition through the naming, in his honor, of a subatomic particle: the boson. What a lovely story!

Let's jump forward to more recent times. Peter Higgs is an 82-year-old English theoretical physicist. Long ago, he happened to be enrolled in a secondary school near Bristol: Cotham Grammar School. The list of distinguished alumni of this quite ordinary establishment is astonishing. One of them was the Nobel laureate Paul Dirac. That list now includes the name of Peter Higgs (represented here in a portrait by Ken Currie, 2010):

His surname qualifies a fabulous elementary particle that has become the Golden Graal of contemporary physics: the Higgs boson. These days, most cosmologists believe that this theoretical entity should in fact exist, and that's why the international Cern research institute has built a gigantic machine, located on the Franco-Swiss border, that will hopefully demonstrate that the Higgs boson is a tangible reality. (Maybe "tangible" is not an ideal adjective, since it's not as if you might slice a Higgs boson in two with the help of a Swiss Army knife, or run into such a particle while strolling around in the streets of Geneva.)

The funny thing about this affair, to my mind, is that everybody carries on talking about the Higgs boson as a particle, as if it were a tiny bit of matter. That's a little like referring to light as photons. While this usage is perfectly correct from a quantum theory viewpoint, you wouldn't normally ask somebody to turn on the light by saying "Please beam us a stream of photons". It's a fact that the existence of the Higgs boson will indeed be demonstrated one of these days, we hope, by a collision of particles that might be imagined like this:

At a press conference this week, Cern representatives revealed that the mass of this particle appears to be about 125 gigaelectronvolts, and that its existence will probably be revealed with certainty as early as next year. To understand why the capture of this elusive particle would be so prized by cosmologists, it's preferable to think of the Higgs boson, not as a tiny bit of matter (so small and ephemeral that we cannot possibly comprehend it), but rather as a field. As is the case for photons, quantum theory enables us to switch freely from a particle-oriented to a field-oriented interpretation of bosons. You can look at bosons from either way, whichever happens to suit you. We're intuitively familiar with everyday fields such as magnetism (or rather electromagnetism) and gravity. Higgs bosons, viewed as a field, are extraordinary (Can any entity in the Cosmos be thought of as ordinary?) since this field pervades, totally but invisibly, all the interstices of the Cosmos.

The Higgs field is crying out to be revealed—almost certainly through a corpuscular experiment at the Cern—for the simple reason (Can any explanation in the Cosmos be thought of as simple?) that the presence of this field would be a gigantic step towards our "understanding" (Can anything at all in the Cosmos be truly understood?) of a totally mind-boggling notion: namely, the creation of being from nothingness.

At the end of that last paragraph, I borrowed the title of a famous book by Jean-Paul Sartre. But I have to add that this illustrious French philosopher would have been sadly incapable, in spite of his alleged brilliance as a thinker, of appreciating even the present modest blog post, because philosophers of Sartre's kind never imagined for an instant, strangely, that science might have anything to do with explaining the realities of the Cosmos and of our human existence. And so they never bothered to learn mathematics and physics, just as they weren't particularly intrigued by biology, DNA, genetics, computers and all the rest.

POST SCRIPTUM: Not surprisingly (But isn't everything in the Cosmos both surprising and unsurprising, simultaneously?), bosons and quarks are not far removed from snarks and boojums, as presented in the celebrated nonsense poem—an "agony in eights fits"— by Lewis Carroll. The title of my blog post, Higgs hunt, evokes mildly this association. I hope that readers will have appreciated my avoidance of an utterly ridiculous expression (the God particle) that mindless media folk have often used to designate the Higgs boson. I would have gladly taken a timid step in that silly direction, however, by referring to the Higgs boson as the Godot particle… since everybody is surely waiting for it.

A horseman has ridden away

"And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, 'Come!' And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that men should slay one another; and he was given a great sword. When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, 'Come!' And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and its rider had a balance in his hand; … When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, 'Come!' And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given great power over a fourth of the earth; to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth."         — Book of Revelation [6:1–8]

A week or so ago, I was moved by a brilliant article in Vanity Fair [display] in which Christopher Hitchens, ravaged by cancer and radiation treatment, analyzed cynically a proverbial declaration by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger."

Here, we see Richard Dawkins on the left and pale shaven-headed Hitchens on the right. I'm awaiting the arrival of a paper copy of the special Christmas issue of New Statesman that I mentioned in my recent blog post entitled Dawkins to edit New Statesman [display]. Meanwhile, a few extracts have appeared online [display].

While Hitchens attained fame as a writer in professional US circles, I persist in imagining him as the epitome of a highly-cultivated and brilliant English wordsmith.