He was using his eerie cry—between a bark and a cough—to let his females know that he was in the vicinity, but he didn't seem to be in a hurry to plunge into the thickets and start searching for them.
In any case, the outcome of this massive data recovery is that things don't look nice for the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin nor, for that matter, for Jacques Chirac... who has already made it clear that, in keeping with French law, he refuses to be interrogated concerning affairs that took place during his presidency. As I pointed out in my post of 26 May 2007 entitled Chirac has some explaining to do [display], the affair is complicated, but it all boils down to determining whether or not these gentlemen attempted to frame Nicolas Sarkozy with the help of fake documents suggesting that Sarkozy had stashed away money in a foreign bank. Stand by for future installments...
When it was constructed in 1932, a span at the South Grafton end could be raised to allow shipping to pass. As a youth, I saw this span raised dozens of times. These days, sadly, there is no longer any river traffic on the Clarence. So, the local authorities decided to use the lower level of the bridge as a support for metal pipes, and this means that it can no longer be raised. Last year, when I walked across the lower-level footbridge, I had the impression that our once-splendid bridge was like an aged invalid, doomed to remain constrained forever to his bed. In any case, this bridge is totally antiquated, since it was designed to handle road traffic of 75 years ago. On the afternoon that my sister Jill drove me out of Grafton last year, we got blocked in a traffic jam, at the northern approach to the bridge, which was as bad as peak-hour situations in Paris. Meanwhile, I'm trying to understand why my native Australia—which is supposed to be a wealthy land—doesn't have modern bridges (and trains, too) such as the high-tech marvels we find in France, named Tancarville, Normandie, Millau...
We have, of course, a great and unexpected historian in Australia: Robert Hughes. When we were together at Sydney University, at the end of the 1950s, I recall Bob above all as a talented cartoonist, allegedly studying architecture. He went on to become a Time journalist, then he blossomed magically into a splendid Australian historian. I would even say, in measuring my words, the most eloquent Australian historian ever.
My Irish-born Protestant great-grandfather from County Fermanagh, Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934], used a bullock team on his property named Riverstone, further up the Clarence. This anonymous hand-colored postcard shows the kind of setting in which my Braidwood-born great-grandfather Charles Walker [1851-1918] worked on the Kennedy property as a so-called boy in charge of the bullock team.
Isaac Kennedy was a prosperous pioneer, and his commercial operations often brought him down to South Grafton, where he would stay at the Steam Ferry Hotel. Isaac had five unmarried daughters—one of whom, Mary Jane Kennedy [1888-1966], would become my maternal grandmother—and he never lost a moment in doing his best to find them husbands. At the bar of the Steam Ferry Hotel, after a drink too many, Isaac was capable of taking a handful of golden coins from his coat pocket and spreading them out on the bar for everybody to see, while declaring: "There's a lot more gold of that kind waiting for any eligible young man who wishes to be betrothed to one of my five lovely daughters." A wag responded: "Isaac, if you give me a fair price in gold, I'll take the whole five." If local history is to be readable, I believe it should include authentic anecdotes of that kind.
The road up to Gamone has just received its annual trim. A farmer from a relatively distant village [Chantesse, on the Grenoble side of Vinay] has a permanent contract to carry out this work, not only at Choranche, but in several other places. It's a solid money-making affair for this fellow, and the job is easy, provided that no discarded fencing wire is hidden in the roadside weeds. At Gamone, by the time this annual event takes place, the weeds have grown so tall that they droop over the road, and driving through them is a little like moving along a jungle track. Then, in the space of a day, the road becomes as bald as Billy's head after a visit to the lady barber in St-Jean-en-Royans.
If I were sufficiently motivated, I could spend days and days guiding this machine over the slopes of Gamone... but I see no point in doing so. Not surprisingly, Dédé was the first person who pointed out to me, years ago, the futility of devoting time and energy to clean up land, only to find it just as weedy as ever a year later.
I was amused by the terse comments penned on the back of this photo by my cousin Peter Hakewill, the photographer: "Sheep country. Bleak. Over-cleared of trees by dumb cockies." [The word "cocky" is Aussie slang for farmer.]
Up on top of that sacred mountain [well, it's sacred for me], there's a cavernous site [weird on top of a mountain] called the Pas de la Charmate, shown here:
Archaeologists tell us this site was occupied frequently during the four millennia stretching from 9,800 to 5,800 before the present era. That's a hell of a long duration: twice as long as the time since Jesus up until today. And what did my Cournouze neighbors do with themselves during that time? Well, we know they hunted mountain goats, deers and boars, which was a perfectly normal occupation. Maybe bisons and mammoths, too. Apparently, a more amazing occupation of these ancient residents of Choranche and Chatelus was ceramics. They must have had business links, too, with folk living on the French Riviera and even the distant Adriatic coast, because Cournouze digs have revealed the presence of pierced seashells from these places. It's highly likely, too, that my former Cournouze neighbors had developed the art of sowing a tiny acreage of crops to produce feed for their equally tiny herds of domesticated animals, maybe primeval cattle.
An association named Familles de France [Families of France] and a group of family associations in the rural département of Ardèche [not far from where I live] recently used the law court in Paris in an attempt to gag the US Internet website called Second Life. More precisely, they wanted the editor of this famous website, named Linden Research, to introduce some kind of filtering device (?) that would prevent the under-age youth of France from viewing stuff they described as "pornographic, scatological and zoophilic". They also declared that the website contained publicity for tobacco, liquor and drugs.
Half a century ago, I had the privilege of studying this momentous text under the great Scottish-born professor of philosophy John Anderson at the University of Sydney. Socrates had been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens [in much the same way that Anderson himself would be accused, two millennia later on, of corrupting the youth of Sydney... like me in 1957]. Today, I look back with nostalgia to my sitting in that Sydney lecture theater [whose walls were adorned with classical frescos] and listening to the aging professor talking about Socrates and his alleged crimes. During that year, the boy named Billy from South Grafton became an adult... and a philosopher.
The Fnac's so-called Apple Shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris, named Fnac Digitale Odéon, with an area of over 300 square meters, certainly appears to look and taste and feel like an Apple store... except that it ain't. This shop is part of an ordinary retail chain, founded half-a-century ago by French Marxist militants named André Essel and Max Théret. The latter gentleman was even a personal bodyguard of Trotsky. How's that for professional reconversion?
Personally, as a Macintosh enthusiast and a Fnac customer, I look back with delectation upon all that has been happening in the Apple domain ever since that delightful day in the early '80s when Jean-Louis Gassée, the charismatic chief of Apple France, placed a personal computer in my hands and told me prophetically: "William, this machine is going to change your life."
They demonstrate retrospectively that I'm not simply climbing onto a bandwagon. I really believed in this firm right from the start. And I still do, more than ever. Apple thinks differently and knows how to get computing right.
People in the vicinity of Choranche are familiar with this film, and they're aware of the various nearby sites where it was shot, because many of us have friends who participated in the creation of the film in one way or another. For example, a guy I know well was commissioned to prepare a vegetable garden that is seen in the film, and this same fellow acted as the personal chauffeur of the great actor Michel Serrault during his stay in the region.
Here are the words:
One would imagine that meat balls and tomato sauce are a simple dish. In fact, they require some twenty ingredients. And their preparation and cooking, from start to finish, take about an hour of fiddling around. The quantities of ingredients indicated here are for two people.
No intelligent person would designate the destruction of the Twin Towers as a religious act. On the other hand, an upsurge in anti-religious expression of all kinds has been taking place throughout the Western World since 9/11 and the subsequent God-driven decision of George W Bush and his Anglo-Saxon allies to wreak havoc upon Iraq. I first evoked this anti-religious sentiment in my message of 9 December 2006 entitled God bashing [display].
Today, alas, we know that this is no longer the case. The extraordinary research and scholarship of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, brilliantly exposed recently in both a book and a DVD set entitled The Bible Unearthed, shatter every illusion we might have retained in this domain. In a nutshell, all the stories of the Torah and the Prophets are neither more nor less than that: enthralling but perfectly fabricated stories. For years to come, Israelis and Palestinians will still be capable of killing one another in their respective determination to administer the tombs of the alleged patriarchs, in the cave of Machpelah at Hebron. But we know now that there were no patriarchs. Neither an Abraham, nor an Isaac nor a Jacob. They were literary constructions: personages invented by scribes in Jerusalem writing in the 7th century BCE [before the start of the so-called Common Era: that's to say, the year zero, which Christians used to associate approximately with the birth of Jesus].
It goes without saying that you don't need to become familiar with archaeological findings in the Holy Land [I remain fond of that expression] or the land of the Pharaohs [and that one, too] to form an opinion concerning the case against religion. As Richard Dawkins makes it perfectly clear, not only in The God Delusion but in his celebrated books about genes and evolution, science has truly advanced to a point at which there is simply no longer any tiny place whatsoever for any kind of divinity. This is a conclusion that imposes itself naturally upon any serious inquirer equipped with a minimum of scientific culture. Indeed, this atheistic awareness has become an essential cornerstone of contemporary culture in general. So, the case against religion might be summed up, not surprisingly, in a single word: Science.
The Unesco committee that selects World Heritage sites, meeting in Christchurch (New Zealand) from 23 June until next Sunday, has added the Sydney Opera House to Unesco's list of prestigious cultural sites. In France, a similar honor was bestowed upon the city of Bordeaux.
The classified parts of the city add up to nearly four and a half thousand acres, representing almost 50% of the area of Bordeaux. This is the first time that Unesco has ever classified such a vast urban area. The most striking aspects of the ancient capital of the French wine world are the quays and 18th-century stone façades alongside the Garonne River. Since 1998, three religious buildings in Bordeaux were already World Heritage sites because of their inclusion in the pilgrims' routes to Saint James of Compostella.
As a consequence of September 11, 2001, Rudy nows knows more about how to deal with terrorists than anyone else in the world... including Bill Clinton, of course, and maybe even George W Bush. Rudy is a specialist in terrorist threats just like the mother of Frédéric Dard was a specialist in imitation dog turds. It's Giuliani's business, and nobody should dare to tell him how to run his business, particularly if they're Democrats. Above all, Rudy doesn't want to listen to anybody talking about bringing the troops home from Iraq.
At the start of his career, managed by talented producers and musicians, Mike knew so little French that he had to reproduce each song phonetically, but his female fans were scarcely worried about the fact that Mike didn't really understand the sense of the songs he was being told to sing. Unfortunately, at the height of his huge success, he was out of his depth in the constant ambience of adulation and riches into which he had been projected, and in 1975 Mike Brant jumped to his death from an apartment building in Paris.
Blair is fortunate in being able to count upon the services of a dynamic employment agent: George W Bush, who has always been efficient in finding jobs for friends. It goes without saying that everybody would be immensely pleased if Tony Blair were able to play a role in solving the enormous and longstanding problems of the Middle East, but I have a gut feeling that, for this work, he's not really the right man in the right place. How could Arab people ever accept suggestions from the man who helped Bush invade Iraq? I hope I'm wrong, and that Blair manages to drag a white rabbit of peace out of his magician's hat. But acts of magic, to me, are like God and miracles. They would be fabulous... if only they existed.
Sophia has dug up this dust bath in front of the house. The donkeys, too, love to bathe in dust. I end up believing that dust is a primordial element, no less attractive than green grass, water or snow (in the case of a Labrador animal such as my dear Sophia). The biblical oldtimer who came out with the "dust to dust" expression knew what he was talking about.
This colorful photo of female Darfur refugees is in stark contrast with the obscure reality: a UN estimate of over two million displaced persons, and maybe 200 thousand deaths since the start of ethnic violence in that region of Sudan, in north-eastern Africa.
No sooner had Bernard Kouchner (of "French Doctors" fame) been named minister of foreign affairs by Nicolas Sarkozy than he visited Khartoum, on 11 June 2007, and launched the idea of an international conference on the Darfur tragedy. And that conference took place today, offering a glimmer of hope.
"Silence kills," said Sarkozy, assuming fully his new role as an international statesman. And Kouchner evoked "a tiny glimmer of light in the depths of this darkness". The Paris conference obtained Khartoum's authorization to deploy more than 20 thousand peace-keeping soldiers supplied conjointly by the African Union and the UN.
The vomit-hued stone wall has been there since time immemorial, but I have the impression that a new cement lion appears in the garden, alongside a naked Venus, every year or so. Village-level kitsch paradise.
I've been convinced for ages that this construction, in the middle of St-Jean-en-Royans, will look much better when water starts to flow in the basins. Meanwhile, the metal cabinet on the left informs us that the whole artificial affair will be run (one of these days) by electricity. Committee-designed art.
I've driven past this place for years, and it appears to be still intact. I've often imagined myself residing in the upper-level cubic habitation on the left, and wishing to step down into the garden for my customary midnight moonlit pee. The consequences of the operation would depend upon whether or not I'd been imbibing no more than water.
Friends at Pont-en-Royans tell me that this outdoor cliff-hanging "powder room" (as Americans say) is perfectly safe, since the big horizontal beams at the base of the construction are well fastened into the rocks. OK, but I'm obsessed by the image of leaning on the fragile wall while I'm putting my pants back on, and finding myself—a few seconds later—swimming naked in the Bourne alongside wooden debris and other floating objects. Here's the topographical context (viewed from above) of this much-photographed Pont-en-Royans shit-house:
Today, few flights use this quaint old airport, but Le Bourget has become internationally renowned as the site of the biennial Paris Air Show, which started in 1909.
For me personally, Le Bourget was a symbol of my flight to London in 1962 to obtain a long-overdue French visa, regularizing my de facto status as an employee of IBM in Paris. Much later, Le Bourget was also a symbol of my "flight" from Paris to the provinces, in that I attended the Paris Air Show with my daughter in 1993 on the eve of my departure. I recall every moment of that delightful sunny day, during which we watched acrobatic flyers, and had our ears pounded by the latest Dassault jets. The day ended at a Moroccan restaurant in the Marais quarter of Paris, not far from where we lived. My daughter, on the other hand, retains a quite different symbol of my departure from Paris: an antiquated crammed red Renault, which I had just purchased from a friend in the Marais, which had to be pushed manually to get me started on my route to the south. Not at all "Paris Air Show".
