Capture of Salah Abdeslam, alive, in Brussels

I'm watching live coverage of police operations in Molenbeek (outskirts of Brussels) where the terrorist Salah Abdeslam was apparently arrested alive about an hour ago. Helmeted riot police are strolling around, accompanied by police dogs, and the atmosphere is electric.

Breaking news 19 h 15. 

Biological test has confirmed the identity of Salah Abdeslam.

Click on the following link to access a video clip of the capture:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2016/03/18/01016-20160318ARTFIG00400-capture-a-molenbeek-abdeslam-detient-les-secrets-du-13-novembre.php

That live capture was great news!

Meanwhile, it's important to get this fellow extradited to France as rapidly as possible, so that he can be safely protected, not only from his friends and enemies, but from himself above all. It would be a terrible pity if he were to be carelessly injured or lost simply because French authorities weren't taking sufficient care of him. In our combat against Daech, this ugly guy is a priceless French asset.

A fellow who's mad as a hatter and inebriated can get out of trouble

The story started up in the sky, on a jet liner traveling from Algeria to France.

After a few drinks, a merry young chap started to become boisterous. He insisted upon ordering more alcohol, and he wanted to carry on smoking. When the cabin crew tried to calm him down, he decided to piss on them. So, they overpowered him while the flight commander obtained an authorization to land rapidly at Lyon.

Apparently the fellow will not have to face justice, because specialists in Lyon concluded that he's legally irresponsible for his acts, since he suffers from severe psychiatric afflictions. So, one day, with a bit of (bad) luck, you might find yourself on the same flight as this passenger. And, if I understand correctly, he'll be obliged to wear neither a straight-jacket nor even a striped penitentiary T-shirt with flashing red lights and warning signs.

Fitzroy has received a pharmaceutical gift in the mail: a luxurious beauty product

Emmanuelle sent him this gift from Paris. But Fitzroy hasn't yet discovered the contents (not, of course, meant to be consumed).

It's a high-quality shampoo. Emmanuelle assures me that this product should be able to eradicate the nasty smell of a dead wild boar, which has been encompassing my dog for the last fortnight.

Best invention since sliced bread

Self-lacing shoes from Nike:

If the manufacturer wishes to send me a pair (size 43) for testing

(to be followed, of course, by an in-depth blog post), my address is

Mas de Gamone, Choranche 38680, France

Prehistoric Twitter bird icon

French archeologists have made a fabulous discovery. A fragment of silex found near Bergerac (Dordogne) contains an engraving, produced 35,000 years ago, of the famous Twitter bird icon.

Click to enlarge slightly

This discovery probably suggests that the French government might look into the possibility of acquiring this prestigious company and declaring it a part of France's national heritage. That would mean, of course, that all tweets, from then on, would have to be written in classical French, and approved by the Académie française.

Captain Kampf has left the vessel

The Frenchman Serge Kampf [1935-2016], a commercially-successful businessman in the arena of the management of personnel for software development, was a native of Grenoble who used a good part of his personal wealth to promote rugby.

Our paths crossed during my early years in France, simply because Kampf succeeded in purchasing the French company named CAP (Centre d'Analyse et de Programmation), which had been one of my first employers. After that buyout and the subsequent disappearance of the original company, Kampf retained preciously the CAP acronym, which soon acquired a new meaning that had nothing to do with the original sense of "Centre d'Analyse et de Programmation". And that's why I've decided to designate the late Serge Kampf as "Captain".

My first employment with the original CAP company took me to Brussels, where our daughter Emmanuelle was born. After a trip out to Australia with Christine and our baby, I was called back to Paris by the CAP company, to set up their in-house training department, with the aim of producing computer programmers. Then I abandoned completely this activity in order to spend a few years in the French broadcasting world, with Pierre Schaeffer at the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF.

Later, I moved briefly into the new CAP domain that Serge Kampf had started to build up. One of Kampf's key subordinates, a certain Jean-Pierre Descendre, had the impression that I would be the right man in the right place to handle an outlandish adventure that would consist of creating a computerized teaching laboratory for the Shar of Persia and his wife Soraya. I was on the point of accepting naively this crazy mission. Fortunately, Kampf was alert enough to realize that Descendre was surely leading the company (not to mention me too) into a mine field. So, he stopped the project instantly. Thanks, Serge, for saving me from the magic carpets of Persia...

Scottish Kangoo from my sister Susan

When my sister Susan Skyvington dropped in rapidly at Gamone last year, she met up with my Renault Kangoo automobile. In this morning's mail, I received a nice gift from Susan, who offered me a Scottish Walkers version of my Kangoo.

And it's full of my favorite Scottish shortbread biscuits!

Thank you so much, Susan, for that delightful little gift.

Old octopus stories in the Antipodes

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Trump on Tonight Show, not very laughable

Here are two old Donald Trump spoofs from the Tonight Show:

When I compare these US political specimens with typical spoofs created here in France, I find them totally trivial, and devoid of any kind of in-depth humor. They don't really make me laugh. In the course of a typical evening of French TV, I would normally discover several times more stuff that's far funnier. In any case, I have the impression that US authors of political humor have simply lost their touch. In the above specimens, they have gone to a lot of trouble in their attempt to simply imitate Trump, whereas authentic humor would attempt to magnify reality and make it more absurd. For example, the authors are surely proud to have dressed their would-be Trumps in exactly the same necktie as the real-life Trump, and given him an identical hairdo. Their Trumps remind me of characters in typical US "historical" movies. Why don't they try to twist the real-life necktie and hairdo to make them outlandish and truly funny? Their necktie might, for example, have been knitted in mauve wool by one of Trump's admirers. His hairdo might be composed of a barely visible nylon net surrounding a hilarious mess of pink knots (including a mislaid hairclip).

I believe that the ghosts of Laurel and Hardy would shudder in boredom if they were to watch the Tonight Show.

Crater of dinosaur doom

This is an artist’s impression of the Chicxlub crater, buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, whose rings are located at a depth of some 20 km beneath the surface of the sea.

(D van Ravenswaay/Science Photo Library)

The following video provides us with an idea of the possible appearance of the site, after the impact:

Events triggered off by this impact may have been responsible for the disappearance of dinosaurs.

Later this month, a scientific vessel will arrive in the vicinity of the Yucatán Peninsula, sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, with the aim of building an exploration platform at a depth of 17 metres. This should enable geologists to study the formation of the ancient peak rings, which remain hidden beneath half-a-kilometre of limestone rubble.

If all goes well, this research might provide us with a better idea of the circumstances in which the dinosaurs left the stage forever... leaving room for the evolution of alternative animals (much later on, of course) such as me and my dog Fitzroy.

God's dull clowns

At both extremities of my personal Antipodes (Australia and France), God's dull clowns seem to be playing their roles by using comparable scripts. Dignitaries of the Church bend over backwards to protect randy members of their clergy who got caught dipping their wicks into the oil of youth. And the protectors' performances are similarly sickening. The latest dignitary to be embroiled in such a situation is the archbishop of Lyon, cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

Whenever such noble fellows are caught up in dubious protection rackets, they're probably convinced personally that they're behaving correctly, at least in the eyes of God. But perspicacious observers tend to see them, when they fail to denounce sexual offenders, as advocates of the Devil. And, when the victims are innocent youth, society labels the weakness of these dignitaries as "failure to protect young people in grave danger".

Cryptography

The Turing Award, organized by the Association for Computing Machinery, is often described as the Nobel Prize for computer specialists. Its early winners included two pioneers of artificial intelligence: Marvin Minsky (1969) and John McCarthy (1971). The most recent winners were Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. In 1976, they invented the fascinating subject of public-key cryptography, which enables users of the commercial World Wide Web to communicate in total safety. This subject is not easy to understand, but it concerns us in such an everyday fashion that it's worthwhile making an effort to see how it works. I therefore recommend that you study carefully the following excellent video:

Click the YouTube icon

You might need to watch this video several times, while taking notes, in order to understand clearly the principles of public-key cryptography.

Beautiful penguin story

Click the YouTube icon

As they say in French, the carrots are cooked

That nice old-fashioned French saying designates a situation in which failure is just around the corner. And that's the current situation of the Korean Go player Lee Sedol in his match against an AI (artificial intelligence) known as AlphaGo. In the following photo, Lee is on the right, whereas the fellow in front of him has the job of carrying out the moves requested by the AI opponent.

Well, after two matches, the AI has defeated Lee Sedol in both games. So, the AI only needs to clinch one more game to win the tournament.

Needless to say (although I insist upon making this point, without attempting to go into details), this man/machine competition is more exciting and intellectually meaningful than the recent competitions involving a question-answering AI from IBM known as Watson.

If Trump wins, the human species will be in very deep trouble

Those words come from the US intellectual Noam Chomsky.

Click here to access a short article on this scary warning.

French president communicates with the god of rain

Ever since François Hollande arrived at the Elysées Palace, observers have been impressed by his apparent contacts with a mysterious deity: the God of Rain.

It's difficult to identify this deity, and learn his exact name, because there are many possible candidates, in several theological domains. But we have witnessed numerous situations when the president was in a profound state of communication with his deity.

Many French citizens do not seem to realize that we could be taking bad weather risks when we imagine the possible refusal to usher in a second presidential term for Hollande. If ever the God of Rain were offended by our vote, the land might be smitten by his wrath. There could be terrible droughts, and the rivers of France might run dry.

Here at Gamone, since the start of winter, there have been so many days and nights of chilly rain that I've often felt we were being inundated with warnings. Maybe the god is becoming angry. We should take heed... or maybe pray.

When my dog leaves home for an hour or so, I never know what kind of a life he's leading

Up until a year ago, the favorite destination of my dog Fitzroy was a farm-house over in Chatelus, on the other side of the Bourne: the residence of his female lover. But, over the last year, I've noticed a significant change in Fitzroy's behavior. He has developed the habit of racing to the crest of the hill behind Gamone, and disappearing for an hour or so. But I've never been able to determine the destination of his excursions. So, this mystery remained unsolved... up until today.

A fortnight ago, as soon as I let Fitzroy off his chain so that he would come inside the house, he set off immediately to the crest of the hill behind my house. When he returned home, an hour or so later, he had a nasty smell. Since then, it has been too wet and cold to give him a bath. Consequently, I've been obliged to get accustomed to living with the nasty smell. Yesterday, when Tineke and Serge visited me, they were immediately conscious of my dog's disgusting smell, and they preferred that I leave him chained up outside, alongside his kennel. Tineke insisted upon the probability that Fitzroy had in fact been rolling around on the corpse of a dead animal. And I agree... although I've probably grown accustomed to living with this horrible smell.

When Martine arrived this afternoon, I warned her not to touch Fitzroy, because he was surely carrying traces of a dead animal. Through her job as postwoman, Martine is aware of everything that's happening in Choranche. She started to inform me that one of my closest neighbors, René, has an unusual pet: a wild boar that lives on the property like a domesticated animal. One day, the boar went out into the woods and became pregnant. It returned home with a litter of half-a-dozen piglets, and René started to feed them. Unfortunately, a fortnight ago, one of the little piglets appears to have died.

Hearing that tale, I immediately obtained a likely explanation of Fitzroy's escapades. For my dog, René's property is no more than a jog of 5 minutes up along the crest of the hill behind Gamone. Fitzroy has surely been racing up there often, to play with René's dog and the litter of wild boars. So, the mystery of Fitzroy's frequent escapades has a logical explanation. Likewise, Fitzroy's dirty smell is almost certainly the odor of a dead piglet.

Since putting together those explanations, which are quite logical, I'm less annoyed by the nasty smell.

Road-racing champion

Click the YouTube icon

As a child in South Grafton, I was often terrified by wild magpies that would attack me when I was riding my bike to and from school. In the case of this ostrich, I can't guess what it had in mind. Was the animal behaving aggressively? Or did it simply want to go for a training ride with that team of professionals? An observer made an interesting remark: If the animal can run so fast, all on its own, imagine the speed it might attain if it had a bicycle. I wonder if the organizers of the grand prix in Dubai would accept this competitor.

World Drone Prix, Dubai

This fabulous racing track has been designed in Dubai for the World Drone Prix:

International Women's Day

Suffragette being arrested in London

French women who make things change

Click here to discover 9 French women who make things change.

Drone killers

No sooner had I seen the arrival in society of small drones, than I made an elementary prediction:

In the near future, a lot of so-called bright people are going to design evil toys whose unique aim is to destroy those nice little drones!

Well, drone killers have arrived. Here's a nasty specimen:

Discovery of a ghostlike deep-sea octopod

This charming little beast was discovered in the Pacific, near Hawaii.

Click the YouTube icon

Within a few days, the creature became one of the most popular octopods in web history, viewed by countless people throughout the world. I wonder how we might let the little beast know that he/she has a vast crowd of friends from one end of the globe to the other. I wonder too how scientists might convince imaginative young web users that this is (I believe) an authentic real-world video document, and not merely a work of virtual animation art.

Hard disks were born in 1956

Hard disks were created for the first time by IBM in 1956, half a century ago, at about the same time that I started to learn computer programming. The first model was called Ramac, and it was bulkier and heavier than a grand piano.

Personally, I was aware of the existence of such storage devices, but I never actually used one. Seeing the clumsy way in which they were transported by a tiny team of human workers, I imagine that these fragile devices were surely in a state of breakdown for much of their existence.

It's interesting to see that the familiar acronym "ram" existed already: random-access memory. This was an annoying term, because it gave the impression that the contents of the storage device were not in fact accessed in a strictly determined fashion, but a little like throwing a dice. That, of course, was not really true. The adjective "random" was an example of primordial IBM marketing buzz.

What made the patriarch so batshit mad?

This old fellow—the Extreme Right-wing founder Jean-Marie Le Pen—looks as if he’s about to burst a valve in his backside:

What kind of event might have made him so angry? Imagine that the patriarch has just heard the vice-president of the Front national, Florian Philippot, announcing on France 2 that their party will no longer be celebrating the Joan of Arc festival on May 1.

Incidentally, it's reassuring to discover that the Extreme Right-wing Front national party no longer succeeds in trying to steal a dearly-loved French historical symbol such as our Joan of Arc.

Local weather report: makes me shiver

Here at Gamone, winter weather reports are often alarming. And the press photos accompanying such reports often make things worse.

I've just discovered, for example, an orange-level warning for four departments, including Isère, starting at 3 o'clock in the middle of the night, and lasting until tomorrow. There'll be abundant snow, icy roads and even avalanches.

If their weather-report service were ideal, it should have been accompanied by an explanation of the following kind:

If you happen to be living down in the valley, at an altitude of a few hundred metres, then we apologize for this scary weather-report, and ask you to ignore it completely.

Meanwhile, during the next 24 hours, I'm likely to receive calls from friends who wish to know whether I'm surviving. And I'll be pleased to inform them that everything's perfectly calm here, that I'm watching TV from alongside my excellent wood-burning stove, while my lovely dog Fitzroy is sleeping on the floor, and that the weather is quite warm, without the slightest sign of snow, ice or avalanches.

Alone in an old lighthouse at the tip of Brittany

Marc Pointud isn't getting paid to look after the ancient lighthouse of Tévennec for two months, nor was he washed up here after a shipwreck.

No, he took the initiative of asking maritime authorities to enable him to reside here for a while, with the unique aim of spreading information about this extraordinary place... and maybe persuading philanthropic companies to participate as benefactors in the restoration of the site.

Click to enlarge

Click here to access the TV website about this adventure.

Video on Van Gogh

This trailer introduces a pleasant video called Loving Vincent:

Click here to visit the movie's website.

Planning for a major flood in Paris

During the two decades of my life in Paris, I can recall no alarming case of flooding of any kind. But many people believe that a gigantic flood will surely occur there, at some unknown time, sooner or later. So, experts are in fact making plans for such an event, which could give rise to gigantic damages throughout the city.

During the period March 7–18, with the help of the European Union, the Prefecture of Police in Paris will be organizing a vast operation called EU Sequana 2016, to test people's reactions to a big flood situation in the French capital. Many organizations will be participating, including hospitals,  the national electricity supplier, transport providers, communication companies and police forces. Even neighboring countries such as Italy, Spain and Belgium will be participating in this simulation of a major once-in-a-century flood crisis. The "big one"... to borrow California's earthquake expression. Not surprisingly, most Parisians probably refuse to believe that such a catastrophe could really take place in their beloved city. All the more reasons for a dramatic and plausible trial.

As recently as 2011, the residents of Montmartre were alarmed by a torrent that flowed down their famous stone steps.

Click the YouTube icon.

The most devastating recorded flood in the history of Paris took place over a century ago, in 1910.

Click the YouTube icon.

Is another great flood of that kind awaiting us? Nobody knows. But this possibility cannot be denied.

So hot in Australia that a koala used a bicycle to get a drink

Yesterday in the Adelaide Hills, a thirsty koala climbed to the top of a bicycle wheel to get a drink from a cyclist's water bottle.

Click to enlarge slightly.

Passing cyclist Nick Lothian stopped to take a photo of the event. The koala was still drinking when the photographer reappeared on his return journey, half an hour later.

Fauna Rescue volunteers were called in to collect the one-year-old female, who spent the night recovering at the Adelaide Animal Hospital. The animal was due to be released, in an excellent state of health, later in the day.

Story sent to me by my childhood friend Bruce Hudson.

Naked weather report

How many French fighter jets does it take to shoot down a Belgian drone?

Yesterday afternoon, the French air force was lucky. The cost of their defense plan was minimal. It took no more than a single Rafale jet to take care of the intrusion into French air-space of a Belgian drone. Besides, the Rafale didn't even have to fire a single shot, because the Belgian drone crashed politely under its own power, all by itself, two hours after crossing over the Franco-Belgian border. Wow, what a rapid and gentlemanly aerial combat! Unfortunately, we'll never know which of the two aircraft would have been victorious if they'd been drawn into an all-out bloody battle. Personally, I would have bet my money on the French Rafale, for the simple reason that it's supposed to be somewhat bigger and faster than a Belgian drone. But one never knows...

It appears that the Belgian drone was about 3 metres in width. So, it was considerably bigger than a simple toy. A press article contained the following image (without explanations):

The press information on this spectacular affair informs us that, according to the pilot of the Rafale, the drone was traveling at an altitude of 1,000 metres, and at a speed of 160 km/h. One wonders how the Rafale could have accompanied the drone at such a low speed, without using some kind of an air-brake or a parachute. Apparently the drone was carrying no "charge", but this vague military term provides us with no more detailed information. For all we know, the drone may have been equipped with miniaturized Belgian weapons that were deliberately destroyed as soon as the presence of the Rafale was detected. How can we be absolutely certain that the drone was not carrying a tiny evil AI (artificial intelligence) device that intended to pursue, say, a ch'ti target in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region?

For the moment, no information has emerged concerning the identity of the owner of the drone. A mysterious affair, to say the least. Or is it simply what the French refer to, from time to time, as a Belgian joke?

Leap year

Click here to see today's Google doodle, presenting a bunny leaping into the final day of February 2016.

Come on ladies, let's knock him out!

There’s a delightful story in yesterday’s newspapers about a criminal who couldn’t prevent his holdup in a boutique in Rennes (Brittany) from getting totally screwed up… by a few courageous female shoppers.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a heavily-built bandit dropped in to the shop Ombre des Marques in the Boulevard de la Liberté, and yelled out that he wanted to take their drawer full of cash, otherwise he would shoot everybody. Since the staff refused to obey this threat, the fellow stepped behind the counter and grabbed a heavy drawer containing the day's earnings. Meanwhile, a dozen female customers observed the surprising events unfolding in front of their eyes. One of them decided spontaneously to intervene. She cried out to the others: "Come on ladies, let's knock him out!" So, they jumped upon the big fellow, knocking him to the floor, and simply sat on him. The silly fellow was so busy holding on to the drawer of money that he couldn't even reach for the alleged weapon hidden (?) in his pocket.

Police arrived rapidly on the scene, where they admired the weighty work performed by the ladies.

A detective explained: "When we entered the shop, we saw that the bandit was stretched out on the floor, held down by the weight of the women. They're exceptionally brave ladies, because they didn't know whether or not the fellow was really armed."

The detectives congratulated the women, and set off to the police station with the captured bandit.

Best beaches in the world

Click here to access a lengthy and well-illustrated article in Britain"s Guardian newspaper on the top 50 beaches in the world. The list includes four French sites.

French site — Pyla dune, an hour's drive from Bordeaux

This huge sand dune is 2,7 km long, over a hundred metres in height, and a few hundred metres in width. The dune is located on the shores of the Atlantic, while its landward side looks out over a vast forest. This ancient dune is in perpetual but gentle movement, of an imperceptible kind.

French site — Morgat, Crozon peninsula, Brittany

French site — Bora Bora, French Polynesia

In my native land, Australia, the list includes a single beach: neither Bondi, Yamba nor Byron Bay. That absence doesn't surprise me, as I've never been impressed by Aussie beaches. I've found them hugely overrated, often boring and ugly, never poetic... but possibly dangerous.

French president visits the agricultural show

Click here to see a one-minute video of the rowdy visit of president François Hollande to France's annual agricultural show in Paris.

A few fellows actually vandalized the government's agricultural stand.

The idiots durely didn't realize that acts of that senseless nature are unlikely to win them supporters. On the contrary...

Buying a beach in New Zealand

This splendid beach named Awaroa is located in the Abel Tasman national park at the upper tip of the south island of New Zealand. This remote paradise of 7 hectares, 10 km from the closest village and only accessible by boat or helicopter, was up for sale for a few million dollars.

Last Xmas day, a New Zealand pastor named Duane Major decided to tackle the challenge by a crowd-sourcing approach. He rapidly received 40,000 pledges, amounting to 2.3 million dollars. Even the New Zealand government participated in the project, with a gift of 350,000 dollars. The pledges were even accompanied by poems from children, praising the beauty of the site.

That's the same nation whose citizens were most upset when France was testing nuclear weapons in that part of the world... before blowing up a Green Peace vessel in Auckland. Retrospectively, I have the impression that French authorities didn't really understand the kind of citizens with whom they were dealing.

David Cameron is truly a pommy a-hole

The more I see and hear David Cameron, the more I'm inclined to designate him by means of the nasty old-fashioned Aussie slang term "pommy". There's no doubt about it, Cameron is indeed a perfect pommy specimen.

He has just produced a pure specimen of prickish pommy behavior in an allusion to Jeremy Corbyn.

“I know what my mother would say. I think she’d look across the dispatch box and she’d say: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’.”

New agriculture in France

The French organization Agence Bio has just published data that indicates an impressive rise in organic farming (referred to in French as agriculture bio).

The figures show that the acreage devoted to organic farming has risen by 17 % in a year, reaching 220,000 hectares,. That still amounts to merely 4.9 % of agricultural territory in France.

The number of French farmers who've abolished pesticides and chemical fertilizers has risen by 8.5 %. They now amount to 28,725. There again, that's merely 10 % of farmers in France. The Agence Bio organization evaluates this agricultural group at around 69,000 full-time employees.

Exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to ocean acidification

An alarming article has just been published in Nature on the subject of threats of a new kind to the coral of the Great Barrier Reef.

Coral calcification has been declining for several decades. There are several possible causes, such as increasing temperatures, pollution, excessive fishing, development of destructive infrastructures, multiplication of invasive creatures, etc. But ocean acidification is now looked upon as a likely explanation. In the case of the Great Barrier Reef, it is clear that the damage is more rapid and worse than what scientific observers had originally envisaged.

Turning the ugly pages of French testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific

The president François Hollande has just been on a trip to French Polynesia, where he thanked local people for tolerating 30 years of nuclear testing. He spoke frankly and solemnly, in particular, of the impact of these activities on the environment and public health.

Click here for an extract of the president's speech. "Without French Polynesia, France would have no nuclear arms." Over a period of 30 years, France carried out 193 nuclear tests on the atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa. These tests have given rise to many cancers in the archipelago. Ever since the end of the testing in 1996, the  citizens of Polynesia have been asking constantly for indemnities, without success. The president hopes that this situation will now evolve positively.

Click here for an excellent in-depth explanation of the infamous Rainbow Warrior attack in 1985 (one-hour interview in French of Jean-Luc Kister).

Celebrating the centenary of the horrors of Verdun

Today, in France, the nation is celebrating the centenary of the most horrible butchery in European history: Verdun.

On the morning of 21 February 1916, a vast German offensive was set in action at a quarter past seven. For the next ten hours, the 1,291 German field guns fired more than a million shells, along a front of 20 kilometers. Within ten months of warfare, some 700,000 soldiers were slain: 379,000 French and 335,000 Germans.

Since early this morning, a sad movie clip has been reappearing whenever I click upon the main Verdun website. We see naked soldiers strutting robotically around the courtyard of an asylum. Clearly, they're brain-damaged. It's a terrible illustration of the ghastly psychiatric consequences of war.

Simon and Garfunkel “Sounds of silence”

Click here to listen to a 1966 presentation by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the French city of Provins. Christine and I were living in Brussels at that moment, and our daughter Emmanuelle was born towards the end of that year.

Three ways of looking at living entities

A Faccebook user, David Hillis, made this interesting three-part chart:

• The EGO section, inspired by the egoism of Homo sapiens, places a male human being at the summit, while more modest creatures (such as a human female) are located further down.

• The ECO section, inspired by an ecological outlook on various kinds of living creatures, includes the above-mentioned pair of human beings, together with various specimens of living creatures and plants that exist in the vicinity of humans.

• The EVO section, inspired by an evolutionary approach, is a slice of a tree trunk whose circular rings designate groups of living entities whose members are equally distant, timewise, from the start of life.

Umberto Eco has left us

Umberto Eco, born on 5 January 1932, was a distinguished Italian linguist, specializing in semiotics. and a successful novelist, author of The Name of the Rose (1980).  This first novel sold several million copies, was translated into over 40 languages, and gave rise to a movie in 1986 by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, with Sean Connery in the role of Brother Guillaume de Baskerville, an ex-inquisitor investigating the suspicious death of a monk in a monastery in Northern Italy. Click here to view the opening of this powerful movie. Personally, I look upon this work as a total success, compared with the total failure of the infamous book and movie by Dan Brown.

All's well that ends well

David Cameron's marathon in Brussels seems to have culminated in a happy ending, enabling him to return to London with sufficient benefits to convince his fellow citizens that the United Kingdom should remain a member of Europe.

But I hope that this is not merely another Antarctic penguins story...

Antipodean penguin-counters probably screwed up

You might have found my title a little hard to understand. Well, an Antipodean penguin-counter is simply an Australian or New Zealand technician whose job consists (among other activities) of counting penguins. Now, this job has intrigued me since I came upon news of the disappearance in Antarctica of no less than 150,000 Adélie penguins, which were probably annihilated by the arrival of a gigantic iceberg.

The thing that puzzled me most was that this sad news — which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 February 2016 — did not say whether observers in Antarctica had in fact found traces of countless dead penguins. I imagined therefore that their crushed bodies were hidden beneath piles of ice and snow.

Information on the alleged catastrophe had been supplied by researchers on climate change from the University of New South Wales and New Zealand’s West Coast Penguin Trust, who had published an article on 2 February in the review Antarctic Science, edited by Cambridge Journals Online. In fact, I don't subscribe to those publications. So, I failed to double-check the story.

I now learn that a New Zealand academic named Kerry-Jayne Wilson has stated: "I don't know who started to spread that information, but we never said that 150,000 penguins had died. The birds probably migrated to some other place, to await better weather." As you can see, the plot does not thicken. It actually thins... like melting blocks of ice.

Now, while we're looking forward to more precise information concerning the alleged catastrophe in Antarctica, let me tell you a great penguin story, which took place in Sydney back at the time I used to live there. My mate Jimmy (who told me this true story) was contacted by his friend Bob, who did delivery jobs for Taronga Park Zoo.

Bob: "Tomorrow afternoon, Jimmy, I'm supposed to drive down to the wharves to meet a ship from Antarctica, pick up a rare species of penguin and take it to the zoo. But I've got to get my van repaired, so I can't carry out this task. It's a well-paid job. Here, I'll give you all this money if you're prepared to replace me. All you've got to do is pick up the penguin at the wharves, and then take it to the zoo."

Everything worked out well. Jimmy picked up the rare penguin, as requested by his mate Bob. But, towards the end of the afternoon, they all met up unexpectedly in the middle of the city. And Bob was surprised to see the penguin walking down the street alongside Jimmy. Bob was furious.

Bob: "Jimmy, what the hell are you doing here with that penguin? I gave you cash, and told you to take the penguin to the zoo."

Jimmy: "Calm down, Bob. I took the penguin to the zoo, exactly as you asked me. We had a great time there, all afternoon. The penguin loves the zoo. He was thrilled above all by the monkeys and elephants. But we've still got a lot of money left over. So we decided to come back here to the city to see a movie."

BREAKING NEWS: Click here to access yet another article, published today in French, concerning the alleged plight of the Adélie penguins.

To be in Europe, or not to be in Europe?

That is the question, concerning Britain's future relationship with Europe, to be handled in Brussels today and tomorrow.

Donald Cameron and the European president Jean-Claude Juncker

The United Kingdom is indeed a member of Europe today, and most Europeans hope sincerely that this will remain the case.

For the moment, Britain is not exactly a typical member of Europe. The UK doesn't use the euro currency, and it is not a signatory to the Schengen Agreement of 1985. Meanwhile, Britain is seeking further special concessions from the European members. And, within the next day or so, we'll probably know whether Britain's demands have been accepted or rejected at Brussels.