Australian passport

It was fun getting my passport renewed. It all worked so smoothly that I'm tempted to believe that the efficient services of the Australian embassy in Paris were designed with one purpose in mind: to make it easy for William to get his passport renewed. Everything was handled by Internet, telephone [friendly French-speaking hostess] and the splendid French Chronopost service. Then the new passport got delivered to me yesterday at Gamone by a guy in a van who was thrilled to inform me that he remembered the path up to my place from the time he delivered my broadband Internet box. I'm amused by the tiny logo at the bottom, which signifies (I suppose) that there's an electronic chip inside the passport.

My passport photo is ideally sinister. The authorities don't want you to smile. You have to look as if you've just been caught in the act of setting up a roadside bomb in Kalgoorlie, say, and you're about to answer trivia questions from the police designed to see if you might not be un-Australian. I think I look like all that.

I've just browsed through a paper document that came with my new passport, entitled Hints for Australian travellers, signed by a certain Alexander Downer. Living in France, where I can phone free-of-charge to Australia, I find that the department of Foreign Affairs and Trade puts an unnecessary accent on the reverse-charge telephone procedure [even to the point of printing Telstra publicity on the back of the slightly-undersized plastic passport jacket]... but I imagine that this service might be interesting for an Aussie lost in Iraq or Indonesia.

I consulted a government website, mentioned in the literature, called smartraveller.gov.au. And I was amused by the following advice:

Make sure your passport has at least six months validity and carry additional copies of your passport photo with you in case you need a replacement passport while overseas.

The idea of carrying spare copies of your passport photo is bizarre. Does this imply that, beyond Australia, there are backward zones of the planet in which photography hasn't yet appeared? Maybe... That reminds me of an anecdote at the unique restaurant in Choranche, back in the days before portable phones. From time to time, motorists would stop there for a drink and ask politely: "Is it possible to make a phone call?" And the proprietor, my old friend Georges, would take pleasure in replying cynically: "Just a moment while I find out whether the telephone exists at Choranche."

Awards

In an otherwise banal and factual news dispatch taken up by the UK Telegraph, the verb "award" is somewhat surprising:

Apple is expected to award a German iPhone distribution deal to Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile and a French deal to France Telecom's Orange later this week.

It's a little like Apple is henceforth giving out prizes to the best students in the class, where the "class" is neither more nor less than the global European telecom infrastructure.

Asked to respond to allegations that he might have disturbed European mobile networks by playing them off against each other before choosing partners, Steve Jobs said: "It's kind of like getting married. We dated a few people but didn't get married to them. I guess there are a few upset girlfriends out there." Funnily, that's the same metaphor I used in my previous article.

Europe versus Microsoft

At a professional level, I used to be in close contact with Microsoft. Once upon a time (in the early '80s), their spreadsheet tool was called Multiplan (inspired by the grand ancestor VisiCalc). In the context of my initial contacts with Apple France executives Jean-Louis Gassée and Daniel Blériot, I was asked to produce a demonstration floppy (non-rigid disk) of Multiplan on the famous Apple II computer. Shortly after, this primitive hardware/software tandem was replaced by the revolutionary Macintosh and Excel.

Several years later, I wrote stuff about Microsoft tools running on the Macintosh. This work must have been appreciated by the French branch of Bill Gates's corporation, for they offered me a helicopter ride to a journalists' get-together in a fairy-tale castle near Chartres.

That was the time when computer users everywhere were delighted to discover that Microsoft's word-processing tool, named Word, was totally (and no doubt deliberately) unprotected. That's to say, anybody could start using it freely on their PC or Macintosh. That was the ingenious marketing trick that got a whole planetary generation addicted to Word. It was the computing equivalent of free marijuana.

It could be said, retrospectively, that this pioneering epoch of personal computing was an essentially macho affair. For reasons I can't explain, neither the managerial nor the technical levels of the PC revolution seemed to put the limelight upon any outstanding females.

Today, I find it ironical that Bill Gates's arch-enemy in the Old World is a brilliant 66-year-old Dutch woman, Neelie Kroes.

In her powerful role as the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes doesn't want Europe to become a capitalistic jungle, where the strong devour the weak. In 2004 she set out to bust the Microsoft trust, by accusing the US corporation of failing to implement system-level interoperability, thereby condemning all competition. A European law court has just confirmed that Microsoft's fine of 497 million euros was justified.

Here in France, to verify that Microsoft is not yet playing the game in the sense implied by their European condemnation, you merely have to wander into a retail store and say that you want to purchase a PC without the Windows software. As a surprised salesman pointed out, that request sounds a little like wanting to buy an automobile without a motor. The analogy, though, is stupid. It's silly to try to compare computers with old-fashioned machines such as automobiles. The motor in an automobile (essentially hardware) is not at all the equivalent of software in the context of a computer. Somebody who wants to buy computing hardware without imposed software is more like a guy who wants to get married without having others choose his wife. But we no longer need such metaphors to get the message across. Today, almost everybody is aware that it's perfectly feasible to envisage buying a PC and installing Linux on it. So, to put it metaphorically, Bill Gates should pull his finger out.

This whole affair might, of course, turn out to be a non-problem... if Europeans were to wake up to themselves, and decide massively to buy magnificent Macs.

French fighting words

In speaking of Iran's stubborn refusal to abandon research that could lead to the production of nuclear weapons, French leaders have been using quite martial language.

On 27 August 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy set the tone in his foreign affairs speech to a gathering of French ambassadors: "Iran equipped with nuclear weapons would be unacceptable." He stated that UN sanctions—such as Resolution 1737 of the Security Council, adopted on 23 December 2006—were the only means of avoiding a catastrophic choice "between the Iranian bomb and the bombing of Iran".

This morning, Bernard Kouchner, French minister of Foreign Affairs, declared that we must "get ready for the worst, where the worst means war".

This afternoon, François Fillon, French prime minister, said that Iran "must understand that the tension is extreme". Then he backed up Kouchner by affirming: "The world is faced with a real threat of the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapon."

Do these bellicose words from Sarkozy, Kouchner and Fillon mean that France is getting geared up to envisage an attack of Iran? Certainly not, because Sarkozy has made it clear that force is not the right solution to this problem. They are merely pointing out explicitly that an atmosphere of potential warfare will exist as long as the UN sanctions approach has not been strengthened. In any case, the situation will probably become clearer after the forthcoming Washington meeting between the six nations [China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, USA] that are examining the possibility of extending the existing sanctions.

Thou art Petraeus

Upon this rock, George W Bush has decided to pursue his war in Iraq. But the gates of hell could well prevail against this bright and confident soldier, who has just been offered Bush's war on a silver plate, like the head of John the Baptist.

The great French statesman Georges Clemenceau [1841-1929] once said cynically that "war is too serious an affair to be placed in the hands of generals". Clearly, the US president has no such qualms about handing over the Iraq fiasco to David Petraeus. Meanwhile, some of Bush's supporters take pleasure in pointing out that the four-star general is a bright guy, with a doctorate in international relations from Princeton, who surely knows what must be done in Iraq. Ah, if only Bush had obtained a doctorate or two from a distinguished US university, everything would be going so much more smoothly today!

There's an amusing expression in French slang: filer le bébé, literally "to hand over the baby", particularly in contexts where the metaphorical baby has just dirtied its diapers, and needs to be cleaned up. In transferring the Iraq baby to Petraeus, Bush is no doubt warming up for the inevitable forthcoming moment when he'll be secretly delighted to hand over the whole shitty mess to the next US president.

Slow food

As a sane reaction against the abominable American phenomenon of fast food, the "slow food" concept was invented in 1986 by an Italian sociologist, Carlo Petrini, dismayed to find a McDonald's outlet erected near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Three years later, the international Slow Food movement was founded in Paris [click here to visit their website], with Petrini as president [a position he still holds], and it now counts 80,000 members throughout the world. The movement's mission is clear and precise: Slow Food works to defend biodiversity in our food supply, spread taste education and connect producers of excellent foods with co-producers through events and initiatives.

While reading the news this evening, I learned that the movement had chosen September 15 to organize its first national Slow Food Day in France. Unintentionally, I happened to respect the spirit of this event. For lunch, I prepared myself one of my favorite simple cold dishes: king prawns, mayonnaise [home-made, of course], Provençal olives, Gamone lettuce, tomatoes and pickled walnuts.

Local chapters of Slow Food are designated by a lovely old Latin word: convivium. Apparently, the theme of French conviviums today was one of the planet's most ancient and noble foodstuffs: the potato.

Camping site at Châtelus

From Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne, there's a magnificent view of the limestone cliffs above the village of Choranche.

My friends Michèle and Daniel Berger run a camping park in Châtelus named Chez la Mère Michon, located just below their house. I've just reinstalled an updated version of the simple website I built for them. Click on the above photo to access this website. You can then click on a Union Jack flag to display the English version.

Another iPhoney display of Antipodes

I'm impatient to discover whether or not Antipodes will be readable, in reality, on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Readers may have noticed that, in yesterday's article concerning the restoration of the façade at Gamone, I employed the same display technique that I used in my son's photo website [display]. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my earlier iPhoney article [display], it will not be possible to exploit this Flash-based display technique on the iPhone or the iPod Touch.

Gamone façade almost finished

After a week of dust and noise, the façade at Gamone is almost finished. [You can click the above photo to display a series of images of the work.] The scaffolding remains in place because a final phase of the operations must still be performed. When the mortar is completely dry, next week, the entire façade will be sandblasted, to remove dust and to enhance the brickwork around the windows on the left.

Meanwhile, Eric Tanchon, the skilled tradesman who's doing the restoration, has taught me how to apply lime and sand mortar to the wall that my son and I erected a few years ago, using heavy limestone boulders that I gathered up on the banks of the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans. I had imagined naively that the gaps between the boulders would be filled in carefully with mortar using a narrow trowel. Well, that's not at all the way that professionals deal with such a situation. Eric showed me how to use a large trowel to hurl mortar at the wet wall from a distance of half a meter. Later, when it's dry, I'll simply use a wire brush to scrape away the excess mortar from the surface of the boulders. For the moment, I'm about halfway through the job, as can be seen from this photo I took this morning:

My wall still needs to be "loaded" with a lot more mortar (as they say in tradesmen's jargon) before I can start to scrape it smooth. We imagine stupidly that, in carrying out this kind of work, we should remain nice and clean like the people in ads for do-it-yourself hardware stores. I'll let you guess what I looked like, with my eyes protected by goggles, after half an hour or so of hurling semi-liquid mortar at a stone wall half a meter away. No problem. Today, we have such niceties as hot showers and washing machines. And I was able to watch the rugby on satellite TV while my clothes were getting cleaned. Back in the centuries when Gamone was a wine-making installation, I would imagine that fellows who built stone walls using sand and lime mortar simply dived fully-clothed, afterwards, into the Bourne.

iPhoney gadget

For people like me who don't yet have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, a software gadget called iPhoney makes it possible to see what such-and-such a website would look like on the real device. I now know, for example, that this is what my Antipodes blog would look like when displayed on an iPhone or an iPod Touch:

I'm disappointed, of course, to discover that Flash stuff simply doesn't get displayed at all on these devices. In any case, it's rather senseless to display graphic websites on such a small screen.

Dear Janet Albrechtsen

This is the content of a letter I sent, dated 4 September 2007, to a well-known journalist, Janet Albrechtsen, at The Australian.

You wrote recently:

Who can forget how European intellectuals danced on the graves at ground zero? French philosopher Jean Baudrillard declared his "immense joy" when planes flew into the twin towers.

Your evocation of the great intellectual Baudrillard dancing on the graves at Ground Zero, and expressing his pleasure in the wake of the terrorist acts of September 11 is misleadng, indeed absurd, and stems surely from a misreading of what he actually said in his article entitled L'esprit du terrorisme, published in Le Monde, November 3, 2001. Here is a key passage in that article:

Tous les discours et les commentaires trahissent une gigantesque abréaction à l'événement même et à la fascination qu'il exerce. La condamnation morale, l'union sacrée contre le terrorisme sont à la mesure de la jubilation prodigieuse de voir détruire cette superpuissance mondiale, mieux, de la voir en quelque sorte se détruire elle-même, se suicider en beauté. Car c'est elle qui, de par son insupportable puissance, a fomenté toute cette violence infuse de par le monde, et donc cette imagination terroriste (sans le savoir) qui nous habite tous. Que nous ayons rêvé de cet événement, que tout le monde sans exception en ait rêvé, parce que nul ne peut ne pas rêver de la destruction de n'importe quelle puissance devenue à ce point hégémonique, cela est inacceptable pour la conscience morale occidentale, mais c'est pourtant un fait, et qui se mesure justement à la violence pathétique de tous les discours qui veulent l'effacer. À la limite, c'est eux qui l'ont fait, mais c'est nous qui l'avons voulu.

He is describing in subtle language a gigantic abreaction (psychological term designating the expression and consequent release of a repressed emotion) that could be detected in many comments surrounding the tragic events of September 11. I would paraphrase Baudrillard's wordy analysis by the following trite statements:

— For many observers throughout the world, the USA had become too big (hegemonic).

— Many people said to themselves: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

— These same people hoped (unknowingly) that the big fellow might one day bite the dust.

To express the latter sentiment, Baudrillard evoked « cette imagination terroriste (sans le savoir) qui nous habite tous ».

Throughout that article [which did in fact raise many eyebrows in France because, as in all psychological demonstrations, the reasoning was subtle], Baudrillard was attempting to analyze a recent planetary event in an objective clinical fashion. He was never standing on a political pedestal and voicing vulgarly his own personal opinions. And to suggest that this humanist was immensely happy to witness the Twin Towers terrorism is not only wrong; it's ignoble.

The mindless intervention of Bush in Iraq — condemned globally, since the start, by French intellectuals, politicians and ordinary people — has introduced us to the daily phenomenon of murder and torture. If you're seeking examples of individuals capable of dancing on the graves of innocent victims, you'll find lots of them in the universe created by Bush. But Jean Baudrillard was not that kind of a person.

Trains that run on time

Civilized humanity is thinking today, of course, about the earth-shaking events of a certain September 11, seen by most of us on TV, that nobody is likely to forget.

Jumping from one subject to another. In France, there's a profound old saying: Nobody's interested in trains that run on time. It means that people are concerned—indeed excited—by things that go wrong [look, for example, at the mind-boggling drama of the McCann vacation in Portugal], whereas we tend to forget about things that go right.

French trains have the habit of running on time, and this means that they're rarely front-page news... except when they break speed records. See my blog of 3 April 2007 entitled Fast track [display].

The publicity people working for the French railway system, called SNCF, have produced a nice website based upon the theme that nobody's interested in trains that run on time. It starts out by suggesting that maybe you might be interested in an exotic animal known as the Crowned Propithecus of Madagascar.

Chances are that you're even less interested in this beast than in French trains that run on time. So, we're back to scratch... unless you click the above banner, to see a delightful mini-show of the beast talking and acting like a robotic SNCF lady. Brilliant publicity work.

Buzzword

I'm amused to see the extent to which the buzzword "singularity" has gained ground in recent years. When I was a student, singularity was a rather ordinary mathematical concept. Roughly speaking, if a mathematical function behaved normally except for certain particular values of its arguments, these special cases were designated as singularities. Then the word was applied to theoretical situations in which the normal laws of physics break down. The most famous case of a so-called space-time singularity occurs within black holes.

More recently, the word "singularity" has been used to designate an advanced case of AI [artificial intelligence], namely an ultraintelligent machine. If AI researchers were indeed capable of designing a machine that happened to be more intelligent, in general, than the brightest humans [which is a situation that has never yet arisen in practice], then we might expect this smart machine to be smarter than humans in various engineering tasks. Among other challenges, that machine could turn out to be extremely talented in the art of designing even smarter machines... which might give rise to a snowball effect. And the end result could well be a vastly intelligent machine of the kind referred to as a singularity.

A colloquium on this theme, called the Singularity Summit, has just been organized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Palo Alto, California [location of Stanford University].

Many singularist believers predict that technological progress is accelerating at such a rate that ultraintelligent machines are just around the corner. Detractors, on the other hand, claim that the AI singularity concept is no more than harmless garden-variety science fiction. As for me, although I have the retrospective impression that AI research [which once interested me greatly] ran into a brick wall a couple of decades ago, I must say that the power of computing amazes me today in ways that I would never have imagined not so long ago. Consequently, I'm ready for anything.

Soft Apple touch

When Apple's cutting-edge iPhone appeared, a few months ago, I had the impression that its least interesting aspect was the fact that you could use it to make phone calls. To put it bluntly: Who wants to make phone calls these days? It's so much more fulfilling to communicate through the Internet. Besides, I already possess a perfectly satisfactory portable phone, which I don't really need to replace. Consequently, I was thrilled to discover that Apple has just put out an extraordinary iPhone that doesn't make phone calls. They call it the iPod Touch.

To be truthful, I believe I'll probably be able to survive for a month or two without this lovely gadget, because I'm not really the sort of old guy who jogs around the countryside like Sarkozy wearing earplugs. In fact, my forthcoming purchase will be a new iMac, but only after the release of the Leopard system, next month.

I've believed for ages that smart personal computing is a strictly Apple affair. Today, I have the impression that it's almost a societal misdemeanor that uninformed people should be allowed, let alone encouraged, to purchase computerized products of other origins. I'm happy to announce today that, beyond Apple, there's nothing more than a prickly desert full of serpents and scorpions. Believe me! Or rather: Believe Steve Jobs. Better still: Just believe!

Does it really matter?

I've been browsing through stories in The Australian about police behavior during the APEC events in Sydney. And I've been asking myself questions of a rhetorical kind. That's to say, it's important to pose such questions, without necessarily hoping to obtain answers.

• Does it really matter if a pair of air-force fighter jets scarred shit out of an innocent private pilot in a tiny Cessna who strayed into the air-exclusion zone?

• Does it really matter if dozens of police removed their identity tags before manhandling innocent demonstrators in an excessive manner?

• Does it really matter if a freelance photographer was arrested and charged after refusing to stop filming police during the protest?

• Does it really matter if an innocent 52-year-old onlooker, crossing the road ahead of an APEC motorcade, was arrested violently in front of his son, and spent 22 hours in jail before being released on bail?

Personally, I don't think it matters a lot, because every society generally ends up with the police it deserves. And many Australians are so hoodwinked into believing naively that they live in a laid-back environment that they apparently accepted the recent police closure of Sydney as a necessary evil, without seeing Howard's dictatorial constraint as a state-imposed incursion upon their civil liberties.

Hearing complaints, Andrew Scipione, the new chief commissioner of police, explained: "That's the way we do business in NSW now." What a frightening conclusion.

Too bad to be true

The gray-bearded man on the left is a still shot of Osama bin Laden taken from a video that was aired in October 2004. The black-bearded man on the right is alleged to be this same Osama bin Laden in a recent video, released yesterday. If you wish to see a presentation of this latest video, click the above image.

My personal reactions? I'm convinced that the second video is an expert hoax. You only have to compare the two representations of Osama bin Laden to see at a glance that the alleged recent video is simply a finely-executed remake of the older one.

QUESTION: Who would have produced this remake?
ANSWER: Video specialists working for Bush.
QUESTION: Why would they have produced it?
ANSWER: To demonstrate that the devil is still rampant.
QED.

Blind corner

I've often said that this corner in the main street of the village of Pont-en-Royans, near the Picard bridge, is one of the worst I've ever seen in an urban context in France.

At the bend, there's only room for a single vehicle. But, up until you reach the corner, you have no idea whether another vehicle is approaching in the opposite direction.

All sorts of trucks and buses use this street constantly. And, if you find yourself face-to-face with a big fellow like this, the only way out is to reverse, often over a distance of twenty or thirty meters... provided that you're not being followed by a line of vehicles.

Fortunately, a solution is in sight. This old building is about to be sacrificed. Work started yesterday on the demolition. Drivers will then be able to see approaching vehicles.

Tenorissimo

In memory of Maestro Pavarotti, this image of the evening sky in the direction of Italy, seen from my house at Gamone:

French Communist irony

One of France's oldest newspapers is the Communist daily L'Humanité, founded in 1904 by the great Socialist Jean Jaurès, who was celebrated because of his defense of Alfred Dreyfus. His pacifist views provoked his assassination by a nationalist student from Alsace-Lorraine, Raoul Villain, three days before the outbreak of World War I. At the end of this war, in which France emerged as a winner, pacifism was considered retrospectively as a misdeed. Villain was therefore liberated. The widow of Jaurès was even obliged to pay the court costs! In modern France, Jean Jaurès became a national hero, and streets and avenues bear his name from one end of France to the other.

L'Humanité, read by countless folk who don't belong to the French Communist party, has printed one of the few articles I've discovered in France concerning the start of the APEC conference in Sydney. I've translated the following tongue-in-cheek extract:

On this occasion, John Howard made an odd appeal on the Internet video platform YouTube. He asked protest groups to support the fundamental efforts made by the USA and Australia since their nonsigning, in common, of the Kyoto protocol. Protestors will surely respect Howard's electronic gesture and refrain from transforming the prime minister's environmental celebrations into a demonstration against a global economic order.

The banner of L'Humanité is beautifully cynical, in the time-honored spirit of the Parti communiste français. The US bomber is dropping teddy bears. No need for explanations. The journal's slogan is a splendid play on its name: In an ideal world, Humanity would not exist. For those who might not understand: If everything were fine in the world [meaning, among other things, that bombers would not be dropping explosive devices disguised as teddy bears], then there would be no need for a newspaper, defending the powerless innocents, such as L'Humanité. I'm in no way a Communist, but I agree.

Click the banner to see the English-language version of this great French daily newspaper.

Stadiums

A few days ago, in my article entitled Fences and walls, I evoked the use of barriers as protection, as in Sydney this week. In the modern world, there's a new kind of fortress: sporting stadiums. At the outset, it was a matter of defining an enclosed space for sporting events, making it possible to "protect" matches from those who would wish to watch them for free.

Modern stadiums, particularly for soccer matches, are faced with the additional responsibility of protecting players from certain spectators, and separating adverse spectator groups. Here's an aerial photo of the new stadium at Montpellier, to be used for Rugby World Cup matches:

During these events, France will be employing some 27,000 police officers and gendarmes. They'll be aided by 1,500 members of the armed forces, 5,000 firemen and 4,000 first-aid specialists. That sounds like a pretty solid protective barrier... even by John Howard's standards.