François Skyvington's moped road movie #4

Episode #4 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

As usual, the program was particularly didactic... whether or not that was the intention of the producers. We learned, for example, that an old-fashioned man-powered meteorological observation station still exists in Provence.

Next, François met up with bees, kept in the wilderness on a Cévenol hillside in ancient tree-trunk hives.

You only have to lift a trunk to admire the fabulous activity of the bees.

The beekeeper explained the advantages of this ancient technique.

François (bitten by a bee in real time) appeared to be fascinated nevertheless by the beauty of Cévenol beekeeping.

Then he turned to goats. More precisely, to goat cheese.

Bisons, of course, were a different kettle of fish. This sequence was particularly didactic in the sense that an observer (like François himself) needed a little time to be reassured that these Provençal graziers of bisons must not be looked upon as nostalgic cowboys.

Their job consists of breeding and grazing bisons for meat.

From a distance, the setting evokes the Far West.

The animals are not necessarily dangerous, but they have to be respected.

François told his hosts that he had been impressed by his encounter with these beasts. After all, it's not an everyday affair, in France, to venture out onto the empty plains to take care of bisons.

The departure of François, in the setting sun, was of a lonesome cowboy style.

On the slopes of the Cévennes, he got off his faithful moped steed—like Lucky Luke on the other side of the Atlantic—and settled down to watch the last rays of the Sun.

It was too dark to see, but I imagined my son chewing nonchalantly upon a stalk of prairie grass, and looking back upon his experiences of the day.

A delightful episode, as usual.

Creek bed cleaned

Whenever it rains extremely heavily on the slopes above Gamone, once or twice a year, the creek becomes a raging torrent, and it often overflows onto the road. To prevent this overflow, the village council decided to clean and deepen the creek bed (completely dry at present) below my house.

The work was carried out yesterday by a fellow-citizen of Choranche, René Uzel, using his own mini digger. The previous day, with the help of Choranche's municipal employee, René had actually laid a few meters of new macadam at two weak spots on the road up to my neighbor's place. First, he used a heavy disc grinder to make cuts in the existing macadam, which he then removed with his mini digger. After smoothing the underlying earth, René then drove off in his truck to pick up a load of steaming bitumen. Finally, he used a heavy roller to obtain a perfectly flat surface. I was very impressed by his manual skills. After all, there are surely few stonemasons today (that's René's initial trade) who can lay down a macadam road single-handedly.

ADDENDUM: Yesterday evening, I was surprised to find that Choranche played an unexpected role in the latest episode of the ongoing MasterChef cooking competition. In my blog post of 19 December 2006 entitled Caves of Choranche [display], I mentioned briefly the fact that my adoptive village is world-famous for its limestone caves. Well, MasterChef had organized a trial between the members of two cooking teams who were asked to produce a gastronomical dinner, inside the main gallery of the Choranche caves, for a small group of speleologists emerging from the bowels of the earth. I was shocked to learn that the authorities in charge of the preservation of this site would have allowed it to be invaded by cooking fumes and camera lighting.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #3

Episode #3 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

The opening shots of this episode were amusing. François prepared us solemnly for images of the celebrated bridge painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

But no sooner had he reached the spot than a carload of Japanese tourists arrived on the scene. And it appeared that they were just as interested in François and his orange moped as in the Van Gogh bridge setting.

The theme of this Arlesian episode was art. François started off by visiting the studio/gallery of a fellow who transforms children's plastic toys into sculptures.

Surprise: in the midst of all this colorful plastic, the sculptor had been working on an orange moped.

In Arles, François seemed to be smiling ironically when he asked a local lady, attired in a folkoric costume, to tell him what it meant to be an Arlésienne.

Family members were aware that François might have asked his own maternal grandmother this same question. However Yannou and her mother never had the habit of getting dressed up as Arlésiennes and parading through the streets of their city on horseback.

François then found his way to a celebrated hotel: the Nord Pinus on the Place du Forum in the center of Arles, alongside a statue of the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral [1830-1914]. In my blog post of 7 September 2010 entitled Provençal excursion [display], I mentioned a dinner evening with Christine at an outdoors restaurant on this charming square.

François listened enthusiastically to the owner's tales about celebrity guests such as great artists, writers and bullfighters.

He stayed overnight in this famous hotel, then drove down to Port St Louis, at the eastern tip of Camargue, to visit an unusual place: a center for individuals who create artistic performances in the street.

Finally, he set out to meet up with a local photographer who has developed a technique of shooting from a mobile hoist, enabling him to produce wonderful photos of a flock of sheep on the plain of the Crau.

As usual, François succeeded in establishing friendly links with all the interesting individuals whom he encountered.

My favorite pages of scripture

Christine gave me this rare copy of a French-language edition, dated 1848, of the apocryphal scriptures.

It includes, above all, the marvelous Infancy Gospel of Thomas, whose naive simplicity stunned and amused me as soon as I read it.

This amazing document is now available on the web in French and in English. The background of these fabulous pages of Christian scripture is outlined here.

The story I like most presents the child Jesus as a sculptor of miraculous sparrows:

When the boy Jesus was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream. And he gathered the disturbed water into pools and made them pure and excellent, commanding them by the character of his word alone and not by means of a deed.

Then, taking soft clay from the mud, he formed twelve sparrows. It was the Sabbath when he did these things, and many children were with him.

And a certain Jew, seeing the boy Jesus with the other children doing these things, went to his father Joseph and falsely accused the boy Jesus, saying that, on the Sabbath he made clay, which is not lawful, and fashioned twelve sparrows.

And Joseph came and rebuked him, saying, “Why are you doing these things on the Sabbath?” But Jesus, clapping his hands, commanded the birds with a shout in front of everyone and said, “Go, take flight, and remember me, living ones.” And the sparrows, taking flight, went away squawking.

More recently, Christianity got back in intimate contact with birds through Saint Francis of Assisi, who was said to have preached regularly to congregations of winged creatures.

Getting back to the Infancy Gospel, I suppose that most people would agree with me that the sparrows affair in the childhood of Jesus was frankly miraculous, and must therefore be judged according to the famous criterion of David Hume that I presented in my article of 20 August 2012 entitled A little knowledge [display]. We have to decide which was the more likely happening:

— Possibility #1: The lovely child Jesus made sparrows out of clay and then transformed them into living creatures that flew off into the heavens.

— Possibility #2: The fellow who penned the delightful Infancy Gospel of Thomas was an inveterate fabulator, liar, etc.

All this wouldn't be so bad if sophisticated Christians, today, had simply written off the affair of young Jesus and the sparrows as an antiquated non-event, due to the zeal of an anonymous latter-day evangelist who had gone out of his way to make things look really stupendous for Jesus. Unfortunately, there's an Islamic fly in the ointment. In a nutshell, these folk are stuck with their Koran. In this first extract, Jesus is talking:

I have come to you, with a sign from your Lord, in that I make for you of clay the figure of a bird, and breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by God's permission. And I heal the blind, and the lepers, and I bring the dead to life by God's permission. [Koran 3:49]

A second extract presents the words of God, addressed to Jesus on the Day of Judgment:

You make out of the clay the figure of a bird, by my permission. And you breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by my permission. [Koran 5:110]

The bottom line in the Koran occurs a little later:

I restrained the children of Israel from violence to you, when you showed them the clear signs. And the unbelievers among them said: "This is nothing but evident magic."

Concerning Jesus and his sparrows, and all the delightfully silly rest of the Infancy Gospel, that Koranic statement about unbelievers suits me fine: This is nothing but evident magic.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #2

Episode #2 of François Skyvington's road movie was presented yesterday afternoon on the Arte channel.

The opening theme was the magnificent Roman aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, about 20 km to the west of Avignon.

After chatting with a local fellow who sketches the structure regularly (in the manner of Paul Cézanne painting and repainting the Mont Sainte-Victoire), François took to the air as a passenger in an ultralight aircraft, enabling him to obtain an extraordinary view of the aqueduct. This sequence finished with a trivial but amusing stunt: François on his moped, on an airfield, racing against the aircraft as it took off.

An interesting didactic sequence took us to the nearby stone quarry that has been in operation ever since the Romans cut out the stones for their fantastic aqueduct. In the vicinity, a sculptor works the same beige stone. Then we met up with a beautiful stone guest-house (an ancient sheepfold) where François bedded down for the night... hopefully in the company of the members of the film crew. A big Labrador enabled the owner of the guest-house to dig up truffles, while his wife prepared an evening dinner of beef and olives cooked in wine.

The next day, François took to the waters of the Gard in a canoe. Then he visited a secluded ancient hermitage that is being restored... and we were informed of the techniques for building stone walls without mortar, so that rainwater escapes without deteriorating the walls.

All in all, this was a fine Provençal touristic documentary. But François has the knack of transforming his excursions, through his friendly personality and easy style of contacts, into a series of happy events. And his happiness (perfectly genuine) rubs off onto viewers.

My tastes in French words

Certain words and expressions in the glorious French language correspond, in my mind, to opposite extremes on the scale of beauty and ugliness. Let me start with the latter.

• I'm annoyed by the French adjective moelleux, which might be translated as "mushy". It's a texture reference to the slushy matter inside our spinal cord. This adjective, in French, is a favorite of distributors of foodstuffs such as yoghurt, cheese, etc.

• I detest the French expression baume au cœur. Theoretically, this means "heart ointment". Metaphorically, it designates soothing effects of all kinds. Each time I hear this expression, my auditive system records the nonsense expression beau moqueur ("handsome mocker").

• I react unfavorably every time I hear of an alleged ville d'étape. This means a town for an overnight stop. But what makes one town more favorable than another to be stopped in for an evening and night?

• An old-fashioned word I adore in French is sapience, which exists also in English. It means wisdom, like Sophia: the name of my deceased dog.

Once upon a time, there was a weird German medieval mystic named Heinrich Seuse (in English: Henry Suso).

He was an adept of practices known as mortification, designed to promote personal pain conducive to an assimilation with the sufferings of the Lord. He wore underclothes studded with nails. Like a Hindu fakir, he slept on a bed of nails, even at the height of winter. And it is said that he never washed himself for a quarter of a century. Still, he succeeded in producing a fabulous illustrated masterpiece, Horologium Sapientiae (Clock of Sapience).

Its general theme, in a nutshell, was that the acquisition of philosophical wisdom is rhythmed by the metronomic ticks of a clock, which remind us constantly of our imminent encounter with death.

François Skyvington's TV series

This evening at 18 h 30 on the Franco-German TV Arte channel, I watched with enthusiasm the start of the travelogue series starring François Skyvington.

Well, people who have phoned me all agree with me that it was wonderful TV. The on-screen presence of François was excellent, faultless. Above all, viewers really had an opportunity of learning something about the territory at the heart of this first episode: the Camargue region in Provence.

Christine has just told me on the phone that her 91-year-old Provençal mother Yanou—whose father came from Trinquetaille, near Arles, on the northern edge of the Camargue—was able to admire the TV debut of her great-grandson, in the company of her children Christine and Alain, from her friendly senior-citizens home near St Brieuc (Brittany). I see that event as a wonderful case of "une boucle qui se boucle", as they say in French (a loop being looped).

My personal conclusions are explicit. François is certainly a talented presenter, and he is surrounded by a great professional team. Bravo!

Fitzroy in Sophia's basket

Up until recently, Fitzroy liked to tear apart everything in his vicinity, including cushions, baskets, mats, etc. Well, he seems to have become better behaved at that level. As of yesterday, when I dragged out Sophia's old wicker basket and put a cushion inside, Fitzroy suddenly realized that it might be a comfortable place to lie down, instead of a couple of nice objects to destroy. This afternoon, he even used the basket when I put it alongside his kennel.

I've been trying to prevent him, as far as possible, from venturing around in the paddock with the donkeys, because he comes back to the house covered in prickly burs, which I then have to remove with my fingers in a one-by-one manner. From time to time, in certain underlying regions where the layer of burs is thick, I resort to scissors. As for Fitzroy, he seems to enjoy all this attention, which he probably sees as grooming operations carried out kindly by the chief dog in the pack (that is, me).

THIS MORNING: Yesterday was quite cool. In the space of a week, we've gone from heat-wave conditions to chilly autumn weather. Last night, seeing Fitzroy dozing cozily, indeed angelically, in Sophia's basket on the warm kitchen floor, I didn't feel like putting him outside into his kennel. So, I closed the door between the kitchen and the living room (so that Fitzroy wouldn't decide to scramble upstairs and wake me up in the early hours of the morning), and left him to sleep there. Well, this morning, I discovered that it was no more than wishful thinking when I spoke about Fitzroy being better behaved in his relationship with easily-destructible objects. Back at the time of Sophia, Fitzroy had already started to destroy the basket and its cushions (which once belonged to an Ikea chair, which has had new cushions for a year now). This morning, inside and around the basket, there was a new crop of fragments of foam rubber. For this outside photo, I gathered up the fragments and placed them inside the aging basket.

My dear old Sophia is no longer there to deplore the damaged state of her cherished basket, which was impeccable before Fitzroy's arrival. So, it doesn't really matter if Fitzroy and the elements continue their inevitable process of destruction. And I'll continue to collect the bits and pieces of a morning.

Restoration of the holy image

I was inspired by Cecilia Gimenez for her restoration of Ecce Homo.

The original was indeed a bit dull, and it needed fixing.

Like many other Internet artists, I felt like getting involved in this fascinating field of restoration. And I was inspired, too, by Clint Eastwood's recent contribution to the Mitt Romney circus.

You can find a huge collection of masterpieces here.

Inventing a blasphemer

Over a fortnight ago, a 14-year-old mentally-deficient girl named Rimsha (probably suffering from Down syndrome), said to be a Christian, was arrested and thrown into prison near Islamabad on blasphemy charges because it was claimed that she had set fire to papers that included pages from the Noorani Qaida, a religious book used to teach the Koran to children. In Pakistan, a crime such as that could lead to life imprisonment.

Richard Dawkins tweeted his indignation:

Meanwhile, nearly a million Internet users (including myself) have signed a petition on this case.

The girl's most outspoken accuser was an imam named Khalid Chishti.

I know it's not nice to judge people by their external appearance, but those eyes and that vague smile destabilize me somewhat. Frankly, if I happened to be thinking about purchasing a used rickshaw, for example, I wouldn't feel confident about accepting a vehicle proposed by Khalid Chishti.

I would be afraid that the vehicle might break down mysteriously in the middle of a neighborhood where they like to throw stones at people who look like white Christians.

Well, the latest news is that the imam Khalid Chishti has just been arrested because it is claimed that he set up this whole affair by inserting pages of the Koran in among the trivial papers that the girl was said to be burning. If the imam were truly guilty of doing this, that would make me a pretty shrewd used-rickshaw buyer. And it would make the imam a disgusting bastard. For the moment, however, since the case against the imam has not yet been judged, we should respect the principle of the presumption of his innocence... even though he and his supporters would have probably not argued that way concerning the accused child.

POST SCRIPTUM: I've deleted a comment that insulted the nation of Pakistan as a whole while advocating barbaric punishment for individuals who perpetrate evil deeds such as that for which the imam is accused. The imam's name is apparently spelled as Chishti rather than my initial spelling (Chisti). This morning (Monday, 3 September), Rimsha was still in prison, and will probably remain there until Friday, at the earliest. Shameful!

Frilly-necked postcard

Yesterday, while browsing through old papers, I came upon this postcard:

As an Australian, I recognized immediately this fine photo of a dancing specimen of our celebrated frilly-necked lizard [Chlamydosaurus kingii]. It's not really dancing, but simply running speedily across the sand in the direction of the photographer, with its frills flattened by the airstream. Now, who would have sent me such a postcard, and why did I keep it in a box of precious old documents? Here's the other side of the postcard:

It was mailed to me from Tokyo, 28 years ago, on 1 September 1984. The message reads:

Erimaki tokage, la nouvelle idole of Tokyo, le Macintosh des lézards!

In English:

Erimaki tokage (frilly-necked lizard in Japanese), the new idol of Tokyo, the Macintosh of lizards!

And the postcard was signed by a great French filmmaker, 63-year-old Chris Marker, who was a good friend of mine at that epoch. He was in Japan to film the making of Akira Kurosawa's movie Ran, which resulted in Marker's documentary AK, released at Cannes in 1985. Here is one of the rare portraits of Chris Marker (who detested the idea of personal photos and biographical stuff):

During the three or four fascinating years that I spent at the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF [French National TV Research Center] in the early '70s, private screenings of Marker's short movie La jetée [The Pier], created in 1962, were one of our staple foods.

Pierre Schaeffer—founder and chief of the center—often explained to us why Marker's cinematographic essay was a great milestone in the history of movie-making. And countless cinéastes have indeed been impressed by Marker's ground-breaking style expressed for the first time in that tiny masterpiece.

And what does all this have to do with frilly-necked lizards and Macintosh computers?

Japanese fascination with an Australian lizard was the outcome of a promotional project created by Mitsubishi Motors. Confronted with a vehicle called the Mirage, the people at Mitsubishi's ad agency found that this word sounded like the Japanese "tokage". So, the expression Erimaki tokage became popular overnight, in the typical way in which certain memes apparently proliferate in that country.

Soon, the Japanese transformed the image of the Australian lizard into a cute manga creature.

In Australia, of course, we're not accustomed to thinking of our native fauna as imaginative objects of adoration... maybe because we've become accustomed to seeing the real creatures up close.

We know that many of our exotic animals are not as friendly or cuddly as they might appear. On the other hand, Australians are no doubt happy to pocket yen from tourists who arrive Down Under with aims of seeing Erimaki tokage. I can imagine a version of the Paul Hogan ad:

"We got some visitors here who like lizards. I'll slip another frilly on the barbie."

By coincidence, the original ad I'm referring to (directed, not at Japanese, but at Americans) dates from the same year as Chris Marker's postcard, 1984. But it looks terribly old hat today.

And 1984 was also the year in which the Macintosh computer arrived on the scene. I've always thought that their celebrated commercial has a science-fiction style that vaguely evokes the Chris Marker movie.

Since Chris Marker was fond of sophisticated machines such as the Mac, he was rapidly brought into contact with the French branch of Apple Computer, whose director was Jean-Louis Gassée. At the same epoch, I had submitted to that company a project for a futuristic video application, while knowing full well that the current technology was not yet capable of supporting my project. Apparently Apple France gave Chris Marker a copy of my project—named Videoville—and that's how we became friends. Chris was tremendously impressed, like me, by the potential of the Mac, and we dreamed about the sorts of creations that might soon appear. However, not long after that time, I went out to Australia, and I lost contact with Chris.

A month ago, I was sad to hear of his death [obituary]. Many of the papers written about Chris Marker have mentioned his adoration of cats. At the time I knew him, the creature that fascinated him most was, not the cat (nor, of course, the frilly-necked lizard), but rather the owl. Inside his house in Neuilly, Chris Marker had a marvelous collection of all kinds of artistic representations of wise and less wise owls.

Opening chapter of Skeffington study

I've more-or-less terminated the opening chapter of my Skeffington One-Name Study, entitled Elusive patriarch [download], dealing with the half-century that followed the Norman Conquest in Leicestershire, in the vicinity of the village of Skeffington.

As the title of this opening chapter suggests, I haven't been able to track down and identify the patriarch of the Skeffington family in England. So, you might say that the hero of my document is totally absent. On the other hand, as I've often suggested, the widespread adoption of genealogical genetics (Y-chromosome profiles) could well add totally new dimensions to this quest. For the moment, I seem to have no potential relatives whatsoever in the Y-chromosome database, so the current score of my Skeffington matching is a huge zero. In fact, the match hasn't even got under way yet, since I'm still the sole player on the field. My chapter 1 might become interesting in the future, for certain small groups of readers, when the techniques of genealogical genetics have become commonplace.