Kurt Vonnegut's peephole has closed

I mentioned the great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut in my February post with the title Watch out for life! And I quoted these opening lines from Deadeye Dick:

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings.

The 84-year-old writer died yesterday in Manhattan.

To me, Vonnegut's novels are like a bugged computer program. When you examine a detailed section, everything seems to be in place, and it should work fine. But when you assemble all the sections into a whole, either the global program doesn't work, or else it produces the wrong answers. For Vonnegut, the source of the bug is life itself. He was a joyous pessimist. His philosophy: If something can blow up, it will... and there'll be a great bang and fabulous fireworks. He might be described as an existentialist novelist. A great story-teller, too.

Comparing the candidates

I've translated the thumbnail descriptions in this banner that points to an excellent website, the Comparotron, created by the newspaper Libération, which makes brief point-by-point comparisons (in French only) between France's twelve presidential candidates.

Traces of the past

As a child, I often used to accompany my father, of a weekend, to his bush paddock near South Grafton, at a place called Deep Creek, where Dad would leave the Jeep and wander around on foot, inspecting the cattle. Although it was not a particularly wild or remote setting, I always liked to nurture the absurd thought that we were surely the first human beings, since the dawn of Creation, to stroll over this virgin land. It was fairly easy to cling to this illusion, in spite of the fact that this land had no doubt been exploited by previous proprietors for beef grazing. Except for my father's barbed-wire fences, there were no visible traces of human intervention in that dull environment.

Here at Gamone, the situation is totally different. I often have the impression that I'm a usurper on a territory that belongs to hordes of more or less ancient phantoms. Yesterday, Natacha sent me a paper written at the end of World War I concerning agricultural activity in the Bourne Valley. The author points out, not surprisingly, that the male work force was decimated, here as elsewhere in France, by the ravages of war. But he adds: "From Rencurel to Pont, no land is abandoned. Women, old people and children make sure of that." That's where Choranche is located: between Rencurel and Pont-en-Royans. Today, alas, there is no longer much agricultural activity here. In emptying the French countryside of its rural families, the economic attraction of urban areas has been even more effective than warfare.

The soil nevertheless remains a vast storage house full of traces of the past. After reading Natacha's paper, I was out in the yard digging up a plot of earth to plant tomatoes, and my hoe unearthed this curious iron object (which I've cleaned up and painted with anti-rust liquid).

It's a bullock shoe, which must be quite old. I would imagine that a Gamone farmer once used a pair of bullocks to drag a plow on the slopes. When I think of the effort involved in planting a tiny plot of tomatoes, I realize that it must have been incredibly difficult for these individuals to survive in such a place. In any case, I look upon trivial traces of the past such as this old piece of metal as small treasures. I have a tremendous respect for the hordes of phantoms.

Angels

Maybe I have a distorted way of looking at things but, when I first saw this image, I had the impression that the red-haired angel was handling a roll of toilet paper. When you think about it, that would be a great question for Byzantine theologians: Do angels use toilet paper?

Sometimes, in the middle of a spirited conversation between several people, the talking stops abruptly, for no particular reason, and there's a gap of maybe ten seconds or so of spooky silence, up until somebody takes up the conversation once again. In French, there's a quaint expression to designate such an incident. They say: An angel just passed by.

You might be wondering why I've brought up the subject of angels. I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with Easter Monday or the alleged resurrection of Jesus. On the contrary, I wish to mention a down-to-earth affair: a white paper with a curious title, République 2.0, on the challenges of digital technology in French society.

A few weeks ago, the presidential candidate Ségolène Royal called upon a distinguished Socialist personality, Michel Rocard, to produce a report on this highly topical subject.

And angels in all this? In browsing through the report this afternoon, I was intrigued by the following recommendation, in the section of Rocard's report that deals with technological innovation in France:

Encourage logic of a "business angels" type.

Here, the abstract term "logic", which is highly popular in technocratic French, simply designates a way of doing things. The expression "business angels" appeared as such in Rocard's report, in English, and the inverted commas ("twitch twitch") were no doubt inserted to underline the author's awareness that he had switched momentarily into less than academic French. And what exactly does this recommendation mean, when translated into everyday language?

In case you didn't know, so-called business angels are wealthy individuals who get a kick out of operating as venture capitalists, using their personal cash. They're the sort of individuals who are capable of being so enthralled by the great ideas and ambitions of a talented innovator (who knows how to sell him/herself) that they're prepared to bury him in bags of money (like in a Dilbert cartoon) enabling him/her to set up a business. It goes without saying (but I'll say it all the same) that Michel Rocard is convinced that, in the domain of digital technology, there are many brilliant young French innovators who would be able to achieve marvels if only they had the financial resources enabling them to get into action. Who knows? Maybe he's right...

I've never thought of France as the kind of country where it's easy to start off with a brilliant idea and build it into a business. First, the competition's stiff, in the sense that, in a brilliant country such as France, there are hordes of bright individuals with brilliant ideas. But the real problem is that, in France, the concept known elsewhere as free enterprise turns out to be a terribly expensive affair. As soon as an individual decides to set up a business, to do anything at all (or even nothing in the immediate future), the entrepreneur is hit with a massive volume of charges of all kinds, and it's hard to survive. Either you have to make piles of money rapidly, or else the charges drag you into bankruptcy. That's France.

Years ago, I had a brilliant idea (in the course of a lifetime, this can happen), and I would have loved to be discovered by a business angel hovering in the skies of Paris. I remember writing down a neologism, wearware, on a piece of paper, and trying to explain to friends that it was a matter of designing exotic garments incorporating various kinds of digital devices, maybe coat pockets that flashed messages of a kinky kind with graphic and audio effects. Just imagine it. If only I had been able to develop the brilliant idea of wearware, I would have become filthy rich, and I wouldn't be here today in my modest Alpine abode typing this silly blog message. Retrospectively, I believe it's quite likely that my guardian angel stepped in, fortunately, and saved me from spending my life as a filthy rich developer of wearware.

All-purpose automobile

I often think it would be great to own a nice new automobile, sparkling on the outside, and spotless inside. The only problem is that I need to be able to cart around such things as fencing material and miscellaneous rural stuff. The nice thing about my old Citroën ZX is that it runs perfectly and I don't have to worry about it getting dirty or scratched. Back in the days of the primitive but much celebrated Citroën 2CV, American tourists used to refer it by a quaint title: basic car. Today, that expression suits my vehicle well.

Mixed messages

When speaking, we often quote other people's words, or use expressions that, if written, would be surrounded by inverted commas. Some speakers, whenever they do so, have developed the habit of holding up their hands and twitching a couple of fingers on each hand, to represent visually the inverted commas. Although I like and employ natural hand movements of all kinds during conversations (a Mediterranean habit), this relatively recent "twitch twitch" mannerism always irritates me, because it glares out as an acquired quirk, rather than a spontaneous gesture. Now I realize that I shouldn't be irritated by the "twitch twitch" thing, because it's a pure example of the acquired behaviors known as memes, which I referred to in an earlier post whose title was Imitation. Basically, a meme is an act that individuals encounter by chance and then imitate impulsively. So, there must be something in the "twitch twitch" mannerism that urges viewers to do the same thing.

In France, over recent years, a popular hybrid verbal/gestural meme has enabled people to reply negatively to a request for a service. The meme, which soon spread like an epidemic, consists of pointing to your forehead and saying: "There's no sign there marked Post Office."

Countless memes are purely verbal, consisting of no more than a fashionable expression such as "doing his thing" or "getting a life".

I've often thought it would be fun to invent and introduce a striking meme, to see whether it would succeed in proliferating. Here's one of my schemes: If ever I were to appear on a TV talk show (an unlikely idea), I would wait for an opportunity to introduce the ordinary expression "bare facts". This would be easy. In replying to a simple question, I would ask: "Do you want me to give you the bare facts?" At the same time that I pronounced these words, I would casually turn my backside to the camera, make a gesture as if I were going to drop my pants, then slap myself on the arse, hopefully evoking the theme of bare buttocks. That's all. (I would need to practice this act in front of a mirror, to get it right.) Afterwards, if my meme were successful (that's to say, to catch on and proliferate), we would find other participants in talk shows turning their backsides to the camera whenever the question of bare facts arose, and tapping themselves on the arse. Later, if it were a champion meme, certain courageous users would unbuckle their belts when the discussion turned to bare facts, and actually exhibit their buttocks... which would be much more spectacular than just twitching your fingers in the air.

The question of successful memes is similar to a theme that I talked about in an earlier post, whose title was Second-hand creativity: the way in which a few adolescents wearing used and embroidered jeans can create, unwittingly, a vast fashion and marketing phenomenon.

There's a successful verbal meme that has recently acquired celebrity status in the mouth of George W Bush: the metaphor of sending messages. It's a hi-tech substitute for the old-fashioned notion of "giving an impression". For example, when Democrats urged that means must be found to put an end to the US intervention in Iraq as soon as possible, Bush shot back with rhetorical questions about the kind of "message" that such measures would send to the forces. Recently, a remarkable Democratic lady, Nancy Pelosi, has been doing essential diplomatic work that should have normally been performed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or by Bush himself.

Bush and his associates have hastened to criticize Pelosi's visit in terms of the kind of "mixed message" of national disunity that it will be sending to people in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Today, sending messages is primarily an e-mailer's pastime and a blogger's preoccupation. International diplomacy, on the other hand, is surely a more serious activity, or art ("twitch twitch"), than simply sending messages. Bush should change his verbal memes.

Benedict XVI on the historicity of Easter events

We know with relative certainty the day of the week on which Jesus was brought before Caiaphas, then Pilate, and fixed to the cross. It was the day before the Jewish sabbath: that is, a Friday. This information is provided by two of the four evangelists:

— Mark 15, 42
By this time evening had come; and as it was the day of preparation (that is, the day before the sabbath), [...]

— John 19, 31
Because it was the eve of the sabbath, the Jews were anxious that the bodies should not remain on the crosses [...]

We also know with relative certainty the day of the month (but not the year) on which Jesus was crucified. It was the day of preparation for the Pesach (Passover) festival: that is, the Hebrew date of 14 Nisan. This information is provided twice by one of the four evangelists:

— John 18, 28
From Caiaphas Jesus was led into the governor’s headquarters. It was now early morning, and the Jews themselves stayed outside the headquarters to avoid defilement, so that they could eat the Passover meal.

— John 19, 14
It was the day of preparation for the Passover, about noon. Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your king.’

It is also provided by a purely Jewish document:

— Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin ("Damages") order,
Sanhedrin tractate, V, 2, 43a
The day before Pesach, they executed Jesus of Nazareth [...]

Using the fact that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, 14 Nisan, historians have been able to conclude that this event probably took place on Friday, 7 April 30, when Jesus was about 36 years old.

At some time prior to this fateful Friday on the eve of Passover, Jesus had a final meal with his apostles.

Concerning this celebrated Last Supper, which inspired the Christian ceremony of the Eucharist, there is a dating problem that has not yet been solved in a way that satisfies everybody. Most people consider that it took place on the evening of Thursday, 6 April 30, but this convenient date raises problems, for reasons that I shall now summarize.

There has always been a ceremonial Jewish dinner on the eve or the first evening of Pesach that is known as the Passover Seder, or simply Seder. Christians often refer to this Jewish ritual as the paschal supper. Clearly, since Jesus was tried and executed on the eve of Pesach, then the Last Supper could not have possibly been an ordinary Jewish Seder. Besides, at the start of Jesus's final meal, John describes a curious event that is not part of a traditional Seder: Jesus washed the feet of his companions. Furthermore, as described by the evangelists, essential ingredients of the Seder appear to have been absent in the Last Supper. The gospels make no mention of the presence on the table of lamb, matzot (unleavened bread) and various symbolic foodstuffs.

In spite of these negative factors, the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) persist in speaking of the Last Supper as if it took place at the start of Pesach and constituted a traditional Seder. For example:

— Mark 14, 12-16
Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered, his disciples said to him, ‘Where would you like us to go and prepare the Passover for you?’ So he sent off two of his disciples with these instructions: ‘Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him, and when he enters a house, give this message to the householder: “The Teacher says, ‘Where is the room in which I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’” He will show you a large upstairs room, set out in readiness. Make the preparations for us there.’ Then the disciples went off, and when they came into the city they found everything just as he had told them. So they prepared the Passover.

The Catholic Church has always recognized, of course, that there are contradictions in the Gospels concerning this central theme of the Last Supper. Last Thursday, in his homily during the Holy Thursday mass in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, Benedict XVI made an allusion to these contradictions. Then he went on to make an astonishing reference to Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here are the words of the pope:

In the narrations of the Evangelists, there is an apparent contradiction between the Gospel of John, on one hand, and what, on the other hand, Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us. According to John, Jesus died on the cross precisely at the moment in which, in the temple, the Passover lambs were being sacrificed. His death and the sacrifice of the lambs coincided.

This means that he died on the eve of Passover, and that, therefore, he could not have personally celebrated the paschal supper; at least this is what it would seem.

On the contrary, according to the three Synoptic Evangelists, the last supper of Jesus was a paschal supper, in its traditional form. He introduced the innovation of the gift of his body and blood. This contradiction, until a few years ago, seemed impossible to resolve.

The majority of the exegetes thought that John did not want to communicate to us the true historical date of the death of Jesus, but had opted for a symbolic date to make the deeper truth more evident: Jesus is the new and true lamb that spilled his blood for us all.

The discovery of the manuscripts of Qumran has led us to a convincing possible solution that, while not accepted by all, is highly probable. We can now say that what John referred to is historically correct. Jesus truly spilled his blood on the eve of Passover at the hour of the sacrifice of the lambs.

However, he celebrated Passover with his disciples probably according to the calendar of Qumran, that is to say, at least one day earlier -- he celebrated without a lamb, like the Qumran community who did not recognize the Temple of Herod and was waiting for a new temple.

Now, the explanations of Benedict XVI are really weird, for two reasons that I shall outline briefly before concluding this lengthy article:

— In suggesting that Jesus was an Essene, the pope has decided, as it were, to rewrite New Testament history on the basis of archaeological findings at Qumran made in the middle of the 20th century.

— Among the great Qumran scholars, nobody has ever imagined for an instant that the historical Jesus might have been an Essene.

My own explanation of the contradictions (for what it's worth) has the merit of being simpler and more orthodox than the pope's. I would imagine that the instructions about going into the city and meeting up with a man carrying a jar of water were in fact given by Jesus on the morning of Thursday, 6 April 30. After all, since the troublemaker from Nazareth and his followers were being spied upon by the authorities, it is feasible that Jesus thought it wise that his followers should be assembled in the "large upstairs room" well in advance of the eve of Passover. One can imagine that this room might have assumed the role, in the mind of Jesus, of a temporary shelter from his pursuers. But, by the end of Thursday afternoon, when everybody was present in the upper room, Jesus foresaw already that he would never live to see the eve of Pesach, twenty-four hours later. So, he transformed Thursday's assembly into an advanced and abridged ceremony: a sort of symbolic Seder. Since it was too early to envisage their evening get-together as a real Seder, there would be no lamb or special Jewish foodstuffs on the table, and the bread would be ordinary, not unleavened. But Jesus, knowing now that his time on Earth was about to end and that he would never be able to participate in a real Seder with his companions, improvised a virtual Passover supper... whose powerful spontaneous symbols (Jesus was equated to a sacrificed lamb, with Thursday's ordinary bread and wine of the upper room symbolizing his flesh and blood) gave rise to the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as we have known it ever since. To my mind, there is no need whatsoever to drag the Essenes into the picture.

In any case, the words of Benedict XVI, the day before yesterday, were astonishing and his reasoning is hard to fathom.

Walnut wine

This plastic cask is full of walnut wine that has been aging for several years... mainly because I've been too busy, or too lazy, to finish processing the product. In fact, the wine in the cask is a bit "soupy" because it still contains the sediment of the green walnuts that were macerated in it for over a year. I've removed all the solid remains of these walnuts, leaving only a sediment.

Quite a lot of work has to be done before the wine is bottled and ready to drink. First, I have to siphon off the clear part of the liquid, and filter the rest through a cloth. Then I have to add a precise quantity of pure alcohol. Some producers of walnut wine use distilled liquor of one kind or another, whereas I have always preferred the solution of pure pharmaceutical alcohol. Finally, I add a certain quantity of sugar.

This is the instrument that I intend to use, at least in the beginning, to separate most of the wine from the sediment, which lies on the bottom of the cask. It's a siphon.

How does it work? That's a good question, and I must admit that it took me quite some time to grasp how to use this device. The clear plastic tube will be placed inside the cask, and the small silver nozzle will enter the neck of the big glass recipient that will be holding the siphoned wine. The flexible white nylon barrel is a little like a concertina, in that the operator can squeeze it flat, preferably using both hands. A naive observer might imagine that the operator simply pushes this concertina barrel in and out in order to pump the wine out of the cask and into the bottle. But that's not at all how the device works. There's an additional small detail that must be mentioned. The silver nozzle is in fact a kind of tap, which is normally closed. To open this tap, you merely have to push the silver nozzle back towards the black handle. So, here's the operating procedure:

— First, you squeeze the concertina barrel flat, and you stick the plastic tube into the cask.

— Then you release slowly the concertina barrel, which causes the plastic tube (but not the white barrel) to fill up with wine.

— Finally, you place the silver nozzle in the neck of the glass recipient and push the silver nozzle to open the tap. The wine then flows slowly from the cask into the recipient.

Elementary, my dear Watson!

Pakistani goatskins and a long-haired camel

From time to time, I receive a genuine but hilarious e-mail. This morning, a Pakistani guy contacted me, stating: "I have heard from reliable sources that you import musical instruments from my country. Please take a look at my offer of low-priced goatskins to make bongo drums." It's possible that this e-mail owed its origin to my former association (in the '70s) with the concrete-music research group known as the GRM in Paris. Or it could be just run-of-the-mill spam.

Thinking that my son would appreciate this trivial story, I phoned him in Brittany. As often happens, he reacted with a far funnier tale. Recently, he found a message on his mobile phone: "This is the director of the zoo in Paris. Your long-haired camel has escaped, and we've just learned that he's wandering around at a busy traffic intersection on the edge of the city. Would you please contact me urgently to tell me what we should do." The caller left a phone number. Amused and intrigued by this unexpected tale, my son decided to contact the phone number. He was amazed to find himself talking with the zoo director, who informed my son that the incident concerning the escape of the long-haired camel was perfectly true, but that the stray animal had soon been captured, and that all was now well. The director thanked my son for having been sufficiently concerned about the fate of the long-haired camel to phone him up. So, it was not a hoax call. The director had been trying to contact the circus owner who had donated the long-haired camel to the zoo, and he had merely used a wrong number, which happened to be that of my son.

The moral of my post. We should never brush aside messages about Pakistani goatskins and long-haired camels, because there might well be an element of truth in them. Put differently: Life is surely more than a drawn-out April Fool's Day joke. We must persist in believing that there might indeed be more to human existence than spam and hoaxes.

Ashes to ashes

It's ages since the late John Lennon shocked people by comparing the popularity of the Beatles with that of Jesus Christ. As for the Rolling Stones, who are still alive and kicking, most observers would have imagined that these old-timers had moved beyond the stage at which they might shock anybody. But Keith Richards claimed, this week, that he had once snorted the ashes of his dead father. And shock waves circled the Earth up until the Rolling Stones guitarist, who has battled heroin addiction, explained that his statement was a joke... which failed to amuse everybody.

In a different domain, many French people were surprised, if not shocked, to learn this week that alleged relics of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake by the English at Rouen in 1431, were in fact crumbled fragments of an Egyptian mummy. This discovery was made by a young medical doctor named Philippe Charlier who has become a renowned specialist in the research field known as paleopathology, which consists of analyzing pathological elements in ancient human and animal remains. The fraudulent nature of these relics, belonging to the archbishopric of Tours, was revealed by spectrometry and carbon 14 tests. But Dr Charlier also called upon two professional sniffers who carried out much the same kind of act that Keith Richards had joked about: nasal contact with human remains. When these two expert noses from the French perfume industry detected an aroma of vanilla, Dr Charlier was able to conclude with certainty that the remains came from a decomposed, rather than a cremated, body.

The Catholic Church, which looks upon Joan of Arc as a saint, used to be prepared to consider the Egyptian elements (including a fragment of a mummified cat) as authentic remains of the French heroine. It's understandable that the Church could have made such a huge error of judgment in the 19th century, when this stuff was unearthed. Today, it's harder to understand why the Church persists in making an infinitely greater error of judgment by asserting absurdly that natural events determined by the principles of science (many of which are known perfectly, whereas others remain less well-known) can be upset by allegedly magic happenings called miracles, brought about by prayer culminating in the "intercession" of the late pope.

Blue-eyed backup beasts

From now on, like somebody with a pacemaker, I'm going to have to learn to live with this pair of blue-eyed beasts purring away on my walnut desk behind the iMac screen. They're a pair of identical disk drives, each of which can store some 300 gigabytes of data. I've spent the last day or so studying the complicated Retrospect software and developing scripts to handle my backup automatically every night, starting at 3 o'clock in the morning. Yesterday at midnight, when I set my Retrospect scripts in action for the first time, I realized that the operations would take a long period of time, since everything on my iMac would have to be copied. In fact, the computer churned on all night and all day, up until the end of the afternoon. This lengthy time was exceptional. From now on, Retrospect will only need to copy things that I've modified during the day.

If I were really conscientious, every morning after feeding the dog, I would turn off the blue-eyed beast that had performed backup during the night, and I would take it down to my neighbors' house for safe storage. Then I would bring back its twin to my house and turn it on. In that way, if my house happened to be demolished by a falling helicopter or meteorite, my computer work would not be lost. Dédé and Madeleine have been happy to look after my sheep and donkey at times, but I'm sure they would soon get tired of caring for my metallic beasts on a daily basis. Of course, I could always envisage building a tiny tree-house for my disk drives, down alongside Gamone Creek. But wouldn't I look silly if the tree-house and its contents got struck by lightning, or if a squirrel or a weasel got into the tree-house and started gnawing away at my precious disk drive. For the moment, I'll leave both blue-eyed beasts where they are, hiding more or less safely behind my computer.

Successful switch to Free

A few weeks ago, I was uncertain about the best timing for my switch of ISPs [Internet service providers] from Orange to Free. Friends had warned me that I might run into unexpected problems, and I was worried that technical hitches or delays might leave me with no broadband Internet access at all for several days or even weeks.

In reality, everything has worked out perfectly. I've been using my new e-mail address, sky.william@free.fr, for the last week, and my Internet-based telephone is fully operational.

Today, a woman at Orange phoned me to say that they had received my registered letter stating that I wished to terminate my association with them. She asked me to tell her the reasons behind my decision. There were several reasons, including the fact that Free is less expensive than Orange, and that Free enables me to phone Australia. She couldn't really put up a case against such arguments, so she simply asked me the date at which I wished to cut my ties with Orange. I said today, and she replied OK. So, my old e-mail address, sky.william@wanadoo.fr, is no longer operational.

Facts overtake sporting hero accused of doping

The branch of the German legal system that prosecutes wrongdoers announced today that the DNA of bags of blood seized in the Spanish affair known as Operation Puerto matches that of Jan Ullrich. It would therefore appear retrospectively that this cyclist who once impressed us greatly was a cheat.

Live in Britain?

For young Australians of my generation, having completed their education at the end of the '50s, it was the "done thing" to live in the UK for a while. We could easily get a winter job in London, sleep in a sleazy flat in Earls Court, meet up with other Aussies and drink warm lager in a pub of a Friday evening, visit the Tower of London and the Tate Gallery of a weekend, and abandon Britain for a hitchhiking tour of the Continent as soon as the weather warmed up. Back then, that was the nearest thing to what you might call a packaged overseas holiday deal.

In reality, I resided in London for no more than the harsh winter of 1962-63. So, when I returned to Great Britain briefly in 1977 as a tourist, to gather material and impressions for my future guide book, the truth of the matter was that I knew almost nothing concerning the subject about which I was going to write. In spite of this inexcusable ignorance, my book turned out to be quite successful, probably because I produced it in much the same logical way in which I had designed and written computer programs. [That's a big and complex subject, which I don't intend to tackle here.]

Since then, I've returned to England for a day or so from time to time, but I don't look upon Britain as a good place for a holiday, and the idea of living there has never tempted me at all. There are, however, many Commonwealth people who would like to live in Britain. Apparently too many, because the authorities have just decided to introduce culture tests for prospective immigrants. Here are a couple of typical questions:

— In what year was Elizabeth II crowned?

— How many members are there in Scotland's parliament?

I don't know whether or not ordinary Australian candidates (if such individuals exist) would find it easy to pass this test.

For me, today, the fact that my native land still declares its allegiance to the United Kingdom is a total mystery, which neither bothers me nor even interests me. It's simply yet another indication that Australia has not yet had the courage and imagination to take its destiny into its own hands. The nation bows down to the Crown just as it has been bowing down to Bush. Vive la République !

Fast track

Millions of TV viewers were no doubt glued to their screens today, watching the latest French wonder train setting a new world speed record of over 574 kilometers an hour. At the start of the thirty-minute broadcast, I said to myself that the media people had no doubt assembled dozens of helicopters to follow this much-publicized event. I soon realized the stupidity of my thinking about helicopters, which might be great for cycling races, but totally inadequate for a TGV [train à grande vitesse: high-speed train]. Media people followed the record-breaking train in a low-flying jet aircraft. The event was, of course, a prestige affair. Among the guests inside the train, there was a Californian member of congress, representing potential purchasers of Alstom equipment. Although the manufacturer and French railway engineers learn a lot from high-profile experimental stunts such as this, it goes without saying that no ordinary trains are likely to be operating at anywhere near such a speed in the foreseeable future, because all sorts of costly modifications and precautions were required in order to stage this record-breaking event. Even ordinary road bridges take an unacceptable hammering when a train goes underneath at such a speed. Everyday TGVs will soon be crawling along on this new line from Paris to Strasbourg at no more than 320 kilometers an hour.

William's theory of leaks

The above title mustn't give you false hopes. I'm not about to expound a set of principles and proofs that might earn me a Nobel Prize. In fact, my "theory" on leaks might be summed up in a three-word aphorism: Nobody leaks innocently! All I mean to say is that, whenever we hear of journalists suddenly having access to information that's normally supposed to be of a confidential nature, it might be a good idea to ask questions of the following kind: Who in particular might have reaped benefits from the divulgation of this information? What kinds of benefits? And why?

Another way of putting it is that press leaks are generally organized, indeed engineered. They're like the celebrated French miracle aimed at promoting today the saintlike qualities of the late pope. [Click here to see my article on this subject.] Leaks, like miracles, don't just happen, out of the blue. They're put into circulation purposely, like rumors, with precise aims in view.

I don't yet know who exactly made the decision to leak the information about a Thorpe doping query, but I imagine that this mysterious leaker [Let's call him Monsieur Leak] was seeking to achieve certain ends. Meanwhile, all Australia has started to go mad. The national director of swimming is even yelling out about the idea of hiring a private investigator to collar Monsieur Leak, as if that might solve anything.

When in trouble, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout!

For the last 24 hours or so, that's what Australia has been doing: running in swimming circles, screaming and shouting. I have the impression that Monsieur Leak [whoever he is] may have been awaiting these reactions. Maybe they tell him something about the fundamental but murky question of whether or not Ian Thorpe really is guilty of doping. Organized leaks aim to obtain information.

It would be good if everything were to calm down, as in an Olympic pool. Meanwhile, the procedures evolve...

Leak in the pool

Contrary to what naive observers might believe, the prestigious French sporting newspaper L'Equipe surely did not dream up, in one way or another, the story about Ian Thorpe. What happened was quite ordinary from a journalistic viewpoint. The information behind the story was leaked to the newspaper by an unknown source, whose identity we may never know. Everyday journalism in many domains depends heavily upon leaks. In the case of a serious and time-honored newspaper such as L'Equipe, one would normally expect that they only print leaked information from reliable sources. So, it would be foolish to insinuate that L'Equipe might have invented their information about Ian Thorpe.

Richards Ings, chairman of ASADA [Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority], spoke this afternoon to a Sydney radio station on the event referred to by L'Equipe, which stems from a urine test in May 2006. Although nothing has been asserted yet on this question by the WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency], it appears perfectly feasible for L'Equipe to imagine that Ian Thorpe's raised testosterone levels might have been unacceptable... which is all—no more and no less—that the newspaper claimed. The world swimming body FINA [Fédération internationale de Natation] would appear to know that a Thorpe affair has indeed been simmering, because they have apparently called upon the CAS [Court of Arbitration for Sport] to evaluate the situation. In doing so, FINA did not reveal explicitly the name of the swimmer in question. Finally, the only real scoop created by the leak to L'Equipe concerns the identity of the implicated swimmer: Ian Thorpe.

Is there any point in trying to determine the precise source of the leak, maybe in the hope of taking legal action against either the leaker or the newspaper that published the leak, or both? I don't think so. Good journalists, like good detectives, don't normally reveal the identity of their sources. One would suspect, though, that the leaker was probably somebody with French links... As far as the newspaper is concerned, is it really a crime to print leaked information?

Annual Plowmen's Festival

In our Royans region, the major event marking the start of spring is the Plowmen's Festival in the nearby village of St-Jean-en-Royans. It's a purely pagan festival, in the original sense of the Latin words pagus, meaning "a country district", and paganus, "a villager". This annual event takes place inevitably close to the date of the great Judeo-Christian spring festival of Easter. Although the Vercors has always been a highly religious region—which once included three great 12th-century monasteries, one Cistercian (Léoncel) and the others Carthusian (Ecouges and Bouvante)—there is little doubt that the pagan Plowmen's Festival is more joyous in a popular sense than the celebration of Easter at St-Jean-Royans. The parade of floats, drawn by tractors, has always been an unsophisticated rather kitsch event, appealing above all to children. [Warning: The rest of this lengthy post is likely to be extremely boring for readers who might have ceased to look upon our marvelous world through the innocent eyes of wonderstruck children.]

While waiting for the parade to start, the Three Little Pigs are safe inside their house of wood, whereas the Wicked Wolf, standing in front of the door, looks bored. In the final rush to finish the float, somebody made a spelling mistake in the panel attached to the nose of the tractor, and had to insert a last-minute letter "C":

Little Red Riding Hood, holding her basket of provisions, is chatting calmly to another Wicked Wolf, while her rural grandparents are seated patiently on the float:

I forget what happened exactly (my fairy-tale culture is worn at the seams), but apparently Pinocchio got involved with some kind of a blue-gray aquatic creature:

Aladdin found a Magic Lamp, and that pale blue phantom-like thing emerging from the lamp is a so-called Genie:

With the village church in the background, the float presenting the complex drama of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is being dragged by an ancient dwarf-driven tractor that is an authentic museum exhibit, which causes genuine tractor-lovers (so I've been told) to stand still, open-mouthed, in admiration and awe:

If I understand correctly, this is the Handsome Prince on Horseback who kissed Snow White, lying in her glass coffin, and brought her back into our everyday world:

We have here a side-view of the resurrected Snow White, apparently seated on the rump of her Prince's steed:

To be perfectly truthful, I didn't succeed in identifying the two females seen here, seated below a shop sign marked séduction coiffure (hairstyle seduction), but I suspect that one is an Ugly Queen and the other, maybe, a Wicked Witch of one kind or another. I don't know who did the role-casting for the Plowmen's Festival.

No fairytale-oriented Plowmen's Festival would be complete without Alice in Wonderland. There's a delightful rural Royans touch here. The magic potion labeled Buvez-moi (Drink me) is contained in an old-fashioned milk can.

When they're not wearing fancy dress and crawling in their tractors through the main street of the festive village, some of the young drivers are no doubt authentic plowmen, equipped with state-of-the-art agricultural equipment of the kind seen here:

Finally, the parade closed with the maidens of St-Jean-en-Royans dancing on the macadam:

The only problem as far as the Plowmen's Festival is concerned is the weather. The first days of spring might be ideal for plowing the fields, but it's still a little too chilly for enthusiastic dancing in the street. This morning, as often happens at St-Jean-en-Royans, the fairy-tale princes, princesses, assorted elves, goblins and wicked wolves had to dash for cover when sleet started to fall upon the floats. Here in the Royans, the most extraordinary fairy tale of all would be a sunny Sunday for the Plowmen's Festival.

Fabulous Google offer

I've been saying so many nice things about Google that readers will end up believing that I work for this company, or that I own shares in Google. But here I go again. Their offer named Google TiSP, which enables users to install a totally free broadband Internet connection in their own bathroom, is ingenious, indeed fabulous. [Click on the image to see their website.] I'm annoyed in that I've just signed up for a broadband contract with the French Free organization (as I explained in this blog already). Today, I learn that, with Google TiSP, I could have obtained a higher-quality service, of an optimally fluid nature, for a financial outlay of zero. I'm infuriated. A positive aspect of this affair is that, in suburban Australia, I'm pleased to think that this free Google service will no doubt persuade many users to abandon their existing costly and inefficient ISP [Internet service provider] and move to Google TiSP.

Stray animal at Gamone

This morning I was surprised to find my donkey Moshé rolling around in the dust with a stray animal:

Many of the local farmers are too lazy to build fences, and this is not the first time I've found stray livestock at Gamone. If nobody claims this fellow, I'll be happy to hang on to him, because he seems to get on well with Sophia, the two donkeys and the billy-goat.