Super-sacred rock

I warn Antipodes readers that you won't necessarily understand much, if anything, of what I'm about to say. First, it's in French. And second, even I don't grasp the theme of things. But, here goes...

Recently, a distinguished French newspaper, Le Figaro, displayed a quiz on its website [display] comprising twenty questions designed to test your awareness of French political happenings, generally at an anecdotal level, over the last twelve months. The 14th question was perfectly topical: a simple matter of identifying the personality who said: "I'm reminded of words from the Bible: Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." Many people in France know the answer to this question. The Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal dared recently to talk like Jesus when she was criticizing certain elders of her party, designated in colloquial French political talk as "elephants". [Our metaphors start to get terribly mixed if we try to imagine Jesus talking of jungle beasts.]

What intrigues me is: Why did the French graphic artist of Le Figaro decide to illustrate their question by an image of Australia's Uluru?

Has Ayer's Rock ever been a specifically Christian symbol? I don't think so. Would it be a symbol of folk who deserve to be forgiven because they don't know what they're doing? Surely not. Finally, I end up believing that the employee of Le Figaro chose this image of Uluru for the simple reason that this sacred rock strikes us all as being terribly Biblical, like the words of Jesus... whatever that means. Funny, no?

Exceptional document

In my genealogical research over the last quarter of a century, I've collected all kinds of so-called BDM certificates [births, deaths and marriages], but I had never before seen anything quite as exotic as the latest version of my Australian birth certificate, in the form requested by French authorities for my naturalization application. And, if I introduce such a subject into my blog, it's because I've always been fascinated by records, archives, genealogical documents and all the official human stuff intended to inform us who we are, where we come from, and—maybe, as an afterthought—what we've all been doing during our brief stay on the planet Earth.

In concrete terms, there is now a second sheet of paper, supplied by the Sydney office of the federal department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, referred to as an apostille, attached to the old certificate by means of a green ribbon. And, on both sides of this second sheet of paper, there's a red seal. The following image shows how they've punched a hole in one corner of the old certificate, and run the folded green ribbon through this hole:

Here's a fragment of the attached sheet, the apostille, showing a seal and the signed stamp of the authorities:

On the reverse side of the apostille, as seen in the following image [which is greatly reduced so that I can fit it into my blog], the two extremities of the green ribbon holding the two sheets of paper together are glued onto the apostille by means of a second seal:

The raison d'être of all this elaborate craftsmanship is, of course, to discourage forgers. If somebody attempted to undo the ribbon so that the apostille could then be attached to a fake birth certificate, observers would normally detect traces of the subterfuge.

In fact, it took me no more than a minute to imagine an elementary technique for the delicate removal of the original certificate, and the subsequent attachment of the apostille to a fake birth certificate concerning another individual, maybe even a fictitious personage. No, I don't intend to explain my discovery here and now, because one never knows if it might be useful, one day, to have the details of such a secret technique tucked away in a corner of one's mind. Let me put it another way. For the moment, while my modest financial resources enable me to lead a simple but pleasant existence, I don't intend to try to make a fortune by getting involved in the international forgery business.

Seriously, with today's computers and instant communication possibilities, wouldn't you think that the authorities of advanced nations such as France and Australia would have moved beyond the stage of depending upon quaint old-fashioned stuff such as pretty green ribbons and red seals [for which I've been obliged to pay a non-negligible sum of money, along with a certain waste of time and effort] to confirm that a poor inoffensive bastard named William Skyvington was indeed born in Australia 67 years ago?

Let me conclude on a positive note. As I explained yesterday in Children's itinerary [display], I had to drive along treacherous mountainous roads in order to post off my green ribbon and red seals to the naturalization authorities, who happen to be located in the Atlantic city of Nantes. Well, there's a fabulous French system called Chronopost [which isn't exactly cheap] that enables you to use the Internet to follow the transport of your package as it crosses France... or indeed the planet. Here's what I learned today:

Once my green ribbon and red seals had crossed the Vercors mountains in my old Citroën, they were deposited in the fabulous cheese town of St-Marcellin [it's the cheese, not the town, that's fabulous] and then conveyed to Grenoble, where their presence was recorded at 19:23 yesterday evening. By 05:13 this morning, the ribbon and seals were in Nantes... but they won't actually be delivered into the hands of my friendly naturalization lady named Cécile Guillas [even red tape is a highly personalized affair here in France] until Monday morning. The only thing that worries me now is that Cécile, in using a pair of scissors to extract my lovely birth certificate from its protective plastic envelopes, might inadvertently damage (cut) that lovely green ribbon or the equally lovely red circular seals, which would be a great pity. I'm attached to that document... like an apostille.

Labyrinths

The theme of labyrinths has always interested me, and I built websites [display] that simulate those of Chartres (France) and Lucca (Italy).

Google Maps has just provided a link to an excellent video presenting an anthology of labyrinths throughout the world:



It's a pity that they speak, not of labyrinths, but of mazes. To my mind, a maze is merely a confusing entity capable of trapping visitors, like streets in some of the poorly-designed housing allotments that spring up these days on the outskirts of cities. [I'm thinking, say, of the north of Valence.] A labyrinth, on the other hand, is a carefully-planned system of paths designed to make it difficult to move either from the outside to the inside (in the case of a treasure), or from the inside to the outside (in the original Ancient Greek sense of a prison).

Children's itinerary

In French, there's a nice expression to designate an itinerary that's considerably longer than normal: chemin des écoliers [children's path]. The idea is that kids leaving school at the end of the day are often in no great hurry to get home. So, they take the longest possible path, enabling them to meet up with friends and maybe get involved in unexpected adventures.

This morning, I had an important letter to post: the final documents completing my application for French naturalization. Following last night's fall of a rock, the road down to the village of Pont-en-Royans was closed to both vehicles and pedestrians. So, to get to a post office and back, I had to take a long and often dangerous itinerary.

At one stage, for several kilometers, I was obliged to drive slowly along this steep and narrow road on the flanks of a mountain. Fortunately, I only met up with a single automobile moving in the opposite direction. Before backing up, I was forced to stop and walk to the rear of my Citroën to ascertain the width of earth that separated us from the precipice. When I finally emerged from this small road, I had a clear view of my home down in the Bourne Valley.

On the road down the slopes, I noticed that the postwoman had stopped at the house of my Macaire neighbors. I pulled up too, so that she could give me my mail. Madame Macaire promptly invited me to lunch.

Paul Macaire is a least a third-generation native of Gamone.

Their ancestral family home was a stone house like mine, two hundred meters up the road from Gamone. When the Nazis invaded the Vercors, they set fire systematically to every residence whose front door was locked, considering that it might house Résistance guerrillas and stocks of arms. The Macaires' house happened to be locked, so it disappeared in flames. The front door of my future home was wide open, and the house survived.

The Macaires told me that the road from Presles down to Choranche had been macadamized a mere half-century ago. Before that, most residents of Presles and the Coulmes plateau would visit the markets of the Bourne Valley on horseback or in carts drawn by bullocks. In the early days, only five residents of Presles were prosperous enough to own automobiles, and the Macaires rapidly learned to recognize the distinctive noise of each of these five automobiles, as well as the direction in which it was traveling. So, without rising from their dinner table, Paul Macaire would be able to say to his young wife, for example: "Hey, Chabert is returning home early today. I'll bet his old woman scolded him last Friday for drinking wine with his mates down in Pont-en-Royans." Today, on the bitumen, all the automobiles sound the same, and there are too many to be recognized individually. But I often have the impression that folk like the Macaires know everything that's happening in the commune... often before it actually happens.

Down at Choranche, the road was opened up at the beginning of the afternoon. I ran into my neighbors Dédé and Madeleine, who had wandered down there on foot, with their delightful dog Briska, to inspect the traces of yesterday's rock fall.

Like the Macaires, the Repellins are Nth-generation natives of this extraordinary but erratic region where I'm settled, where you can be obliged at times to drive for hours over dangerous roads in order to post a letter. When I think of these friendly old-fashioned neighbors, there's an adjective that springs into my mind immediately: authentic. This doesn't necessarily mean that they provide you with facts and objective judgments whenever they open their mouths. On the contrary, the veracity of their every declaration has to evaluated instantly, as it were, with respect to the advantages they might reap if ever what they're saying were true. This means, for example, that it's pointless to ask for their opinions concerning the ongoing conflicts between local farmers and the rock-climbers who throng to Choranche, for the Macaires and the Repellins cannot easily disentangle themselves from past epochs when their ancestors would have been scandalized to find city people encroaching upon their precious farmlands. But they are authentic in the sense that, even if the land at Choranche no longer belongs exclusively to them, they certainly belong to that soil.

Bright stuff

Today, society can appreciate retrospectively the revolutionary effects of the widespread use of the elegant adjective "gay", starting in the 1960s, to designate individuals who are attracted physically to people of the same sex. It was a great invention, for many reasons. First, it wasn't really an invention at all, since the old French word "gai", of Gothic etymology, had existed since the Middle Ages. The term "gay" has a positive ring, like describing somebody as lively, dynamic or simply happy with life in general. The adoption of this new old-fashioned adjective enabled people to abandon the antiquated derogatory terms that had been used too often to stigmatize gay folk, just as it did away with excessively clinical adjectives such as "homosexual". Above all, in its modern sense, "gay" has never been an insiders' code word... such as the silly adjective "camp", which gay men were accustomed to use in designating themselves back in Sydney when I was a teenager. So, all in all, I believe that the invention of this adjective has been a highly successful linguistic and sociological operation.

These days, individuals who have succeeded in moving intellectually and morally beyond the antiquated domains of religious belief systems (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc) are in dire need of a similar adjective, enabling them to perform publicly their "coming out" in a simple and elegant fashion. Well, a US philosopher named Daniel Dennett has recently provided us with exactly the word we need: bright.


For an easy-to-read introduction to all things bright and beautiful, I recommend Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Not surprisingly, Dennett is a disciple of Richard Dawkins, who seems to like the "bright" word. Admittedly, atheism is not exactly the same kind of phenomenon as homosexuality, and it would be silly to suggest that homosexuals and atheists of the world should join their hands in a big common combat against bigotry and intellectual intolerance. Having never been implicated in the struggles of homosexuals for ordinary human rights, I have no knowledge of gay attitudes towards religion and atheism... if ever we were to generalize in this manner.

After saying all this, I'm determined to conclude this article by means of a grandiloquent declaration that would have surely shocked my grandparents and parents if they were still alive. But, before that, a joke:

Mary, a pretty Irish girl, went across the waters to work in Liverpool. With her pockets full of money, she returned to Dublin and visited her Catholic aunt.

Aunt: And what have you been doing in Liverpool?

Mary: I can't tell lies, but I'm ashamed to answer you...

Aunt: Come on, Mary. Tell the truth. God alone will decide whether you've sinned.

Mary: In Liverpool, I became a pro..., a prosti... No, I'm to ashamed to pronounce the word.

Aunt: Mary, you must tell me.

Mary: I became a prostitute.

Aunt: Thank the Lord and the Blessed Virgin. For a terrible moment, Mary, I thought you were going to tell me you'd become a Protestant.

Well, here it is. My coming out. I'm bright!

Fragile existence

A few hours ago, I drove down to the village of Pont-en-Royans to drop in on my local physician, Dr Xavier Limouzin. He was as proud as a successful angler to have guided me wisely, over a period of several years, into an expert medical context in which early traces of prostate cancer have been detected. At a practical level, this means that I'll no doubt endure an operation in the near future. My youthful mustached doctor (a distinguished member of the local fire brigade, and an amateur of antiquated motor cycles) leaned back in his armchair and allowed himself to be carried away by the apparent beauty of such a surgical intervention: "It's an amazing two-man team effort. The urologist operates with a colleague. They showed me a fabulous video that demonstrates how it's done." In watching Dr Limouzin describe with enthusiasm the work of his specialized colleagues, I had the impression that I was maybe missing out on some kind of superb Spielberg production, and that I should order immediately the DVD through Amazon. "The only access they need is a tiny set of holes in the lower abdomen. Once they've got their tiny instruments inside, in the prostate region, it's beautiful to see the way they operate, as a team." OK, we're surely talking about a couple of Olympic ice artists such as Torvill and Dean, or maybe a Russian/American pair of astronauts repairing their space station. Maybe, I thought, this expert couple fiddling around so aesthetically in the region of my old-fashioned sexual apparatus might be attempting to create an artificial offspring, possibly a monster.

After bidding farewell to my adorable doctor, I was halted by a minor catastrophe at the exit of the village of Pont-en-Royans, on the road up to Gamone.

While I was chatting about prostate surgery with Dr Limouzin, a giant rock had fallen down from the Baret mountain (which I observe from my bedroom window). After the impact, which would have surely squashed any automobile that happened to be moving up the road at that instant, the rock disintegrated into several fragments, one of which halted on the other side of the road, while the others jumped over the parapet and descended into the Bourne. As my friend Natacha put it, with what I see as a Marseilles sense of judgment, when I told her this anecdote on the phone: "Obviously, for God, your hour of doom has not yet come." Thanks Natacha, thanks God.

Seriously, life is fragile. Isn't it? Beautifully fragile. That's what makes the whole thing so amazing... whichever way you look at it. Meanwhile, if I were serious, I would start to think about looking at things from the point of view of those two surgical artists whose skill consists of being able to eliminate the bugs and other cellular intruders in my lower belly.

Shit, when I think about it, if Limouzin's conversation had bored me, and I had left five minutes earlier, my fucking prostate might now me some kind of French pâté spread out over the macadam on the road from Pont-en-Royans up to Gamone.

I love life! It's so unpredictable. Lively, as they say.

Australian Internet censorship

Is Australia an adult nation?
It's so long since I lived in Australia for an appreciable length of time that I prefer to refrain from stating my hasty and uninformed personal opinion on that interesting question. But I've just heard about a Labor project that would consist of blacklisting various websites whose content is judged to be dangerous for the angelic minds of Aussie kids.

In the above sentence, the banal adjective "various" is significant, in the sense that only a random sampling of such websites would appear on the blacklist, for the simple reason that websites grow like weeds in your backyard, and you can no more blacklist all the offensive websites of the planet than you can eradicate noxious plants. The authorities can do little more than bow down symbolically to a lobby of wowsers and do-gooders who know fuck-all about the technicalities of contemporary communications of the web kind.

For almost two years, my personal email communications with Australia have been plagued constantly by some kind of a fuckwit blacklist maintained by Big Pond, designed to prevent the delivery of messages emanating from the French national ISP [Internet service provider] named Orange, ostracized as an alleged producer of spam [an absurd accusation].

In spite of all my efforts, I've never succeeded in eradicating this annoyance, and making sure that all my French emails would be delivered systematically to my relatives and friends in Australia. Often, I had the impression that trying to solve a problem of that kind was like attempting to nudge the Australian Way of Life. That's why I decided to create this blog, so that my relatives and friends in Australia would be able to see what I was doing and thinking in France. So, now that my blog is a thriving offspring, well over a year old, Antipodes says: Thank you, Big Pond fuckwits!

Today, when I start hearing talk about projects to censor the Internet in Australia, I'm itching to answer my opening rhetorical question, at the start of this article. For the moment, I'll force myself not to do so.

Change of attitudes and words

Not so long ago, many people in France were intrigued by the dynamism, exuberance and energetic determination of the newly-elected president... without necessarily admiring his actions and operations, or taking the man seriously. Nicolas Sarkozy was new; he was young; he was different... Political observers accustomed to the time-honored and relatively austere traditions of French politics of the Fifth Republic—from de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard and Mitterrand through to Chirac—were initially astounded by this Speedy Gonzales with a finger in every pie. He seemed to be operating almost everywhere, simultaneously, and people soon understood that he would not be calling upon the services of his submissive prime minister... or any other minister, for that matter. Why should he? Sarkozy's wife Cécilia turned out to be more efficient than even a French minister of Foreign Affairs in liberating the female hostages in Kadhafi Land. But she ended up running away.

I have the impression, though, that the dashing French prince, presently enamored of an Italian fashion-model princess, might be moving into the treacherous midnight zone of Cinderella, when the champagne bubbles can burst, and beautiful people can turn into toads. What I'm trying to say is that I sense that more and more French people are irritated by the Sarkozy style, and that the fairly tale could end rudely at the drop of a magician's hat. [I'm aware that I might have mixed up a few images and metaphors in this paragraph.]

Sarkozy's new-year message to the French nation was disappointing. For inexplicable last-minute reasons, instead of having his message video-recorded in a professional style, Sarkozy decided to deliver his speech live, in a stilted formal fashion, prompted by means of an idiot board. Then he threw in a weird allusion to a personal vision designated as a "politique de civilization", which left people startled and confused, primarily because nobody seems capable of grasping what this expression might mean.

Certain popular young Frenchmen are frankly angry.

France's favorite personality, the celebrated tennis player and singer Yannick Noah, is scandalized by Sarkozy: "Everything shocks me. His attitude, his tone and his arrogance shock me. The display of wealth and his cynicism shock me. The disinformation shocks me." Noah ends up borrowing the image of Louis XIV at Versailles: "He's the king with his court, and the sycophants are down on their knees before him."

In a slightly different register, another outspoken young Frenchman, the leftist politician Arnaud Montebourg, has decided to attack Sarkozy in an indirect manner.

He has aimed his fire at his former Socialist colleague Bernard Kouchner, enticed by the siren song of Sarkozy into becoming his minister of Foreign Affairs. Montebourg has declared vigorusly that it's high time for Kouchner to simply resign from a presidential context that brings to mind "the Ancient Romans of the decadence". For those who need more than a metaphor to understand his criticism, Montebourg accuses Sarkozy of "moral bankruptcy", and throws in nasty expressions such as "betrayal of electoral promises", "fiscal injustice" and "diplomatic fiasco".

The criticism of both Noah and Montebourg can be described as fighting words. What will Sarko try to invent, to defend himself? Maybe, like Forrest Gump, he should run like hell.

Same procedure as every year

The French-language blog named Jour après jour [Day after day], written by a regular Parisian reader of Antipodes known as cm, informed me of the existence of this hilarious English video, which is apparently a Xmas-time cult show on German TV:



If I understand correctly, in Germany, Xmas viewing of this sketch is a yearly ritual of the same order as our tuning in to the pope's Urbi et Orbi message or the performance of Strauss waltzes from Vienna. In France, curiously, TV channels are convinced that Xmas and New Year audiences are expecting hours of what they called bêtisiers, which means anthologies of media howlers: TV journalists and comedians who can't carry on because they've got the giggles, studio decors that collapse on the heads of participants, politicians who make stupid remarks while imagining they're not on camera, celebrities who slip down staircases, etc. It's a fact, I believe, that French mentalities (whatever that might mean) are geared to laughing at this kind of rubbish. Maybe there are students in French sociology who might find it worthwhile to carry out doctoral research in this domain.

Australian arithmetic

During my short trip to Australia in 2006, I was shocked to discover that there were no trains to a couple of NSW towns that I wished to visit (Braidwood and Byron Bay), and I was further surprised to find that the only way of crossing the river at Grafton was by means of the antiquated bridge over which I used to pedal my bicycle when I was a boy.

Since then, I've got into the habit of asking naive questions about Australia's infrastructures. Why do Australians never stop boasting about the fabulous wealth of their land, while still tolerating old-fashioned infrastructures that are often like those of a developing nation? A friend tried to tell me recently that the respective infrastructures of France and Australia cannot be compared because... there are three times as many tax-payers in France as in Australia. This analysis is rubbish, of course. When Australia sells a mountain of precious minerals to foreign purchasers, her potential income from the deal has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of Aussies paying taxes. It's a matter of complex political, economic and business considerations that determine what percentage of such wealth will return to Australian citizens, and how much will be left in the hands of greedy international capitalists. It's childishly naive to imagine that the quality of Australia's roads, bridges and railway lines depends necessarily and exclusively upon the financial resources resulting from income tax paid by Aussie wage-earners. That is not only bad arithmetic; it's bad politics. And you can't run a country on such idiotic principles. If indeed the mountains of minerals that we're peddling to foreign buyers don't enable the citizens of Australia to take advantage of decent infrastructures, then our nation's leaders should halt immediately the sale of these mountains of minerals, while we do some serious thinking about what has gone wrong.

Let me turn my attention to another kind of infrastructure. In my articles entitled Australia's submarines [display] and Nuclear energy [display], I referred to an aspect of Australia's future defense system that has given rise to articles in the local press over the last few days. All these articles repeat the same huge investment figure: some 25 billion dollars for six future submarines. Now, this is typically the kind of situation in which a citizen, instead of believing naively what he hears, has the right and the possibility to do some independent thinking. Let's talk in euros. The unit cost of each of Australia's future submarines amounts to 2.75 billion euros. And what is Australia going to receive for this sum? An old-fashioned vessel that runs on diesel oil. My God, that's a lot of cash for a diesel boat!

By way of comparison, let us look at the production of one of the world's most advanced nations in the field of nuclear-propelled submarines: France. It just so happens that France, like Australia, is currently planning to renew its fleet of six attack submarines. The future model is known as the Barracuda, and it will be constructed in the Cherbourg shipyards in Normandy.

The Barracuda vessels will, of course, be propelled by nuclear energy. So, they will be intrinsically far more sophisticated than Australia's classic vessels. And the Barracuda's unit cost price? One billion euros. In other words, Australia's classic submarine, to be delivered in 2025, will be 2.75 times as expensive as France's avant-garde nuclear vessel, to be delivered eight years earlier, in 2017.

Is there something wrong with my arithmetic? Or is there maybe something wrong with Australia's political thinking about the nation's allegedly high-priced infrastructures?

Happy new year

I take this opportunity of conveying my best wishes for 2008 to readers of the Antipodes blog. Over the last few weeks, I've been more absent-minded than usual (primarily because of a relatively banal health problem that suddenly hit me), and I somehow or other forgot completely that my friends Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier had invited me to spend the evening at their place. So, last night, I was curled up in front of my fireplace trying to digest the rather indigestible words of Nicolas Sarkozy's new-year greetings to his compatriots, when the phone rang. It was Serge informing me that they were waiting for my arrival. Now, while it's embarrassing to turn up late in such circumstances, it was suddenly fun to jump into my automobile, abandon the solitude of Gamone and find myself (a few kilometers up the road) in the warm atmosphere of my friends' home. After expressing my muddled apologies for forgetting about their invitation, I listened to a delightful anecdote from Tineke, which I shall summarize briefly. Several years ago, I built a small website [display] for Tineke. Well, recently, a Dutch scientist and his wife discovered this website, and they immediately dropped in on Tineke at Choranche in order to acquire one of her sculptures. This proves that the website is effective from a professional viewpoint, as it were, which is reassuring. But the anecdote doesn't stop there. The scientist is a computer specialist, aficionado (like me) of Apple products, and he's also a talented photographer. What's more, he has a sense of humor, for he left a gift for me with Tineke and Serge: a copy of his latest book, entitled Windows for Beginners.

Contrary to what might be imagined, this delightful little book has nothing to do with Microsoft's operating system. It's an anthology of excellent images of real-world windows in many corners of the planet.

Recently, in this blog, I proposed a small selection of Tineke's photos concerning the demolition of the rock overhanging the road at Choranche [display]. Last night, I had an opportunity of seeing the entire set of photos, presented in an elegant large-screen montage. In the context of this presentation of massive aspects of our mineral world of the Vercors (dark humid cliffs, jagged fragments of rocks, icy slopes and frozen valleys), I was impressed, above all, by the faces of the various human actors in charge of this demolition project: the serious regard of the elected represented of the region (whose troubled expressions reflected the recent horror of finding the occupants of an automobile crushed by a huge boulder that had slid down the slopes of Choranche), and the strangely nonchalant attitudes of the young helmeted climbers, attired in colorful garments and encumbered with ropes and chains, who were often obliged to scramble over the cliff face in the light of projectors, in the middle of the freezing night, adjusting steel rods and holes for dynamite in the fragile rocks.

Tineke's photos reveal the regard of an artist. She's not only a sculptor, but a painter too. Like her, I was fascinated, a fortnight ago, by the presence of heavy frost at Choranche, enclosing every element of vegetation on the slopes and in the valley of the Bourne. Well, Tineke ventured out into the cold with her camera and produced an amazing series of images of this exceptional frost. She also produced a remarkable series on a simple but wonderful theme: brilliantly-hued roosters and hens wandering around contentedly in a local farmyard. Here at Gamone, I've often had fowls (including peacocks and ducks), and I've always considered them as immensely beautiful creatures, whose mere presence can have a strangely soothing effect upon human observers... like fish in an aquarium, which dentists used to install in their waiting rooms, in the hope of attenuating the stress of patients.

When I was about to leave for home around 1.30 this morning, I found my Citroën covered in ice. Serge suggested that I wait a minute while he prepared an antidote: a plastic watering-can full of boiling water, which removed the ice instantly. This morning, the cold has conquered my automobile once again [I don't yet have anything that might be described as a garage], and the traces of the boiling-water method have given rise to beautiful crystalline forms on the windshield and bonnet. I said to myself: If Tineke were to see my old Citroën in this striking visual state, she would surely either take a photo of it, produce a painting of the subject, or maybe even create some kind of gigantic Martian-like metal and stone structure, on our slopes of Choranche, entitled William's automobile. You never know what surprises you might get from authentic artists. Like an unexpected phone call, at the start of a wintry evening, which drags you out of your silence and solitude and into a universe of warm light, splendid colors and strange forms.

Gigantic news from Down Under

It's still 2007 here in France, whereas the new year is already an hour and a half old in my motherland. And the following dramatic story has already been transmitted across the planet on the Internet by Reuters, accompanied by an image:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian newlyweds kissing on the backseat of their hire car were unaware their chauffeur was street drag racing, until a police siren broke their romantic bliss and ended the race. The chauffeur, clocked at up to 130 kph (80 mph) racing a young driver in a rental car, was fingerprinted on the side of the road and the hire car confiscated. "It's alleged that as the traffic light turned green both the (cars) accelerated harshly from the intersection and continued to travel at speed along the highway," police said in a statement. Both drivers were taken away by police, while newlyweds John and Laina Tauranga were escorted home in a police car.

Shit! Fuck me! Stone the crows! Can this really be true? Was this vehicle truly racing at 130 kph while the innocent newlyweds were kissing on the back seat? Thank God that the Australian police force is constantly vigilant, to detect frightening happenings of this kind, and to attenuate the consequences of such barbarian acts upon innocent victims. What a terrible atmosphere of drama in which the newlyweds John and Laina are going to start their married life. I hope they'll receive appropriate psychological counseling to recover from this ordeal. Unbelievable...

The new year, as I said, is less than a couple of hours old in my motherland, but I can sense already that dramatic Aussie stories are going to amaze me more and more throughout the coming months.

Old bridges in Australia

In my blog, I write one day about major themes such as Australia's future submarines, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto [who, I've just learned, used to be in the same class for foreign students as my Australian cousin Peter Hakewill at the Institute of Political Science in Paris] and all kinds of issues. Then, the next day, I'm submitting a lukewarm article whose title evokes bridges. Certain readers might be surprised or disconcerted by my eclectic behavior.

Please be patient. I'm merely working, as unobtrusively as possible, on my Google image. As I've already indicated, in my article entitled Identity issues [display], the Google folk appear to be scratching constantly their heads, trying to figure out what my Antipodes blog is all about. Now, this is a most pertinent question, since Google is displaying oriented ads on my blog site, and their ads are supposed to reflect what my blog is all about. Sometimes, Google's robots seem to sense, quite rightly, that my daily preoccupations might have something to do with Australia... which is, after all, a keyword that sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb. On the other hand, like certain members of my family in Australia, the Google robots don't seem to have assimilated or accepted various otherwise-obvious facts:

(a) The Antipodes blog is really concerned, not with my birthplace of Australia, but with my adopted land: France.

(b) I've been living in France for most of my adult life, and I persist in loving life in France, which has become for me, not only a gigantic legend, but a myth. Like Joan of Arc, I now hear voices...

(c) I'm a grave and no-doubt incurable victim of the Francophile virus, which has attacked me particularly in the intellectual region of my being. For me, in the Cosmos, there's France... and then the rest.

(d) Linguistically, there was Egyptian, Greek and Latin (with a little bit of Hebrew thrown in for the fans)... followed by French. Alongside this linguistic diamond, English was a magnificent chunk of flint, particularly with Shakespeare. Since then, as a worldly touristic and business Esperanto, the flint has disintegrated into porous rock.

(e) My ex-wife, children and dearest friends are all French.

(f) I dash to my mailbox each morning in the hope of receiving the final official document from Australia [a long-awaited stamped copy of my birth certificate] that will enable me to be gifted with the most profound but purely symbolic and superficial honor of my life: French citizenship!

OK, let's stop all this shit talk about France. The subject that I wish to tackle in the present article [since I know that Google is watching over my shoulder] is bridges: old Australian bridges. No hurry, because Australia has the habit of holding on to its antiquated infrastructure. Within the normal lifespan of an Australian, you're not likely to be surprised by the proliferation of new bridges, road, railways lines, etc. That's the charm of my native land. Nothing new under the rainbow...

First, there's the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which will shortly explode into New Year fireworks:

Then there's my home-town bridge across the Clarence in Grafton:

Finally, in this short touristic coverage of Aussie bridges, there's Bawden's Bridge over the Orara River, in the murky shadows of which I was apparently conceived on a tepid January afternoon of 1940 by a randy male named King Skyvington and a female named Enid Walker, otherwise known as my dear and fabulous Dad and Mum.

OK, Google, it's now up to you. I suspect that you're going to conclude that I'm attempting, through my Antipodes blog, to lure unsuspecting citizens of the world into going out to Australia and settling there. Fair enough. That's partly true. But they should be warned. Watch the Sydney fireworks on New Year's Eve, with no risks of danger, and cross the Clarence River, if you must, by means of the decrepit bridge of which we are so fond. But beware, dear tourists, of becoming romantically bewitched under Bawden's Bridge over the Orara, and using it as a backdrop for procreation. Its bizarre waves are capable of giving rise to un-Australian offspring who might be enticed by antipodean lands such as France. Weird creatures such as me.

Now, let's see how Google is going to react to this article about bridges in Australia.

Tense frustrations concerning Colombian hostages

We must understand that it's normal for the promised transfer of hostages of the Colombian Farc to be subject to all kinds of more-or-less unexpected delays and obstacles. We're not playing a polite diplomatic game among gentlemen. Everybody knows perfectly well that, if ever regular Venezuelan and Colombian political powers and armies were capable of detecting the slightest breach in the defensive system of the Farc, they would exploit it instantly, and blast the arse off these arrogant outlaws. So, the outlaws have every reason to be ultra-wary.

Needless to say, like every other citizen of the world concerned by the struggle for the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt, I hope sincerely that the bloody Farc will screw up something or other, and get blasted into eternal oblivion. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

They're not honorable guerillas, merely mindless outlaws, inhuman jungle vermin... like some of my ancestral bushrangers (not to mention any names).

Prohibition of smoking

There's no doubt about it: the prohibition of smoking in French cafés and restaurants, as of next Wednesday, is likely to be a gigantic event in the history of French society and the Republic.

It's such a "big" idea (where I dare not imagine all that might be encompassed by my fuzzy adjective) that it might not go off smoothly. There'll surely be some unpleasant surprises. For me, the situation is potentially more frightening than the notorious "year 2000 bug", which turned out to be a fizzer. [If I remember correctly, the term "fizzer" is Australian jargon for a damp firecracker that doesn't explode correctly... but I ask to be corrected if I've made a mistake.) Smoking has always been such an integral part of everyday life in French cafés and restaurants that its global prohibition is a little like a crazy fascist law banning, say, the use of the first-person singular form of verbs, meaning that the celebrated Cogito ergo sum of Descartes would henceforth have to be rendered in everyday parlance as "People think, therefore they are".

Parenthesis. Amusing anecdote, inspired by my comparison, which has nothing to do with the prohibition of smoking. In 1969, a French author, Georges Perec [1936-1982], wrote a 300-page novel, La disparition, without ever using the letter "e". Close the parenthesis.

Let me get back to the forthcoming ban on smoking. I hope that French "authorities" (whoever they are) will make a point of collecting all sorts of statistics, during the coming weeks, about unusual happenings. I'm thinking of freak crimes, inexplicable accidents, domestic disasters of all kinds, etc. I reckon there might be a lot of this kind of stuff in France over the next month or so. Don't try to persuade us that it's a normal resurgence of matters that are smoldering constantly, or that the harsh winter conditions can provoke despair and violence. If a foreign archduke, visiting Nicolas Sarkozy in the president's winter residence, were to be assassinated by a crazed gunman during the next few weeks, it should be relatively easy to track him down. [I'm referring of course to the crazed gunman, not to our wandering Sarkozy or the assassinated archduke.] French detectives would simply have to start searching for a heavy-smoking underworld personage who had the habit of making nasty political allusions to archdukes on the "zinc" [metal-topped café counter] while consuming his matinal espresso and "grilling" [French slang for smoking] his habitual Gauloises.

PS Sometimes, interesting elements of my blog are hidden in exchanges with friends who send in comments. This is the case concerning an interesting comment from Silvio [display] on the subject of Australian sporting prowess.

Pakistani test explosion

The test explosion seen in this video took place on 28 May 1998 in the hills of the Chagai district of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan:



The yield of Pakistan's first fission weapon was 9 to 12 kilotons of TNT (as compared to the 15 kilotons of the Hiroshima bomb).

Things could easily get out of hand in Pakistan in the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in the sense that the nation could theoretically be taken over by radical Islamists. If there were any real chance of this happening, it's certain that military hawks throughout the world (maybe even in neighboring India) would be tempted to evoke the terrifying concept of preemptive strikes.

Ways of looking at the world

In illustrating this humble article by a fragment of the hallucinating triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, I've let myself be carried away by a series of associations. At the outset, all I really needed was a simple Necker Cube:

This is a familiar graphical device that demonstrates how an image can be interpreted in two different ways. The horizontal line at the bottom can be envisaged as either the front edge of a cube, or alternatively the rear edge.

Since a Necker cube is a rather austere object, I thought it might be preferable to call upon one of the numerous fantastic graphical constructions of M C Escher [1898-1972], some of which might be described tersely (too tersely, of course, since the artist was a genius) as enhanced Necker Cubes.

Then I said to myself: Well, if I'm looking for a disconcerting graphical vision of things, why not get back to Hieronymus Bosch, who demonstrated so strikingly that the ordinary world is extraordinary?

In fact, I merely wanted to preface an account of my recent rereading of the masterpiece by Richard Dawkins: The Extended Phenotype. The underlying theme of this brilliant text is that the author would like to persuade his readers to choose between two plausible, if not equivalent, ways of looking at the world of Darwinian evolution. On the one hand, there's the classical notion that an organism such as a bird in the Amazonian jungle, for example, will emerge as an evolutionary winner if its fitness for survival is maximized with respect to that of other birds. On the other hand, there is Dawkins' celebrated "gene's-eye view" of the situation, presented in his earlier book The Selfish Gene, according to which all evolutionary battles take place primarily at the level of genes, which only emerge as victorious survivors if they are capable of replicating (reproducing themselves) more plentifully than their rivals.

Normally, we think of the phenotype of a gene as the macroscopic effect it has upon the organism in which it resides. For example, when a gene is responsible for giving a child red hair, this particular outcome designates a phenotype of that gene. In the Dawkins title, the adjective "extended" highlights an amazing aspect of certain selfish genes. In a nutshell, the effects of a gene can sometimes extend well beyond the bodily limits of the host organism (human, animal or plant) in which it resides. A spectacular example of this effect is provided by beavers that build dams that increase their chances of survival. It would be absurd to imagine a stressed beaver gene mumbling to itself: "I must get around to building a dam, otherwise I won't survive." But the presence of the gene has the same final effect as if it were consciously aware of the need to build dams.

In using the metaphor of a Necker Cube, Dawkins is telling us that we're free to switch back and forth between two complementary images:

— On the one hand, there's the image of beavers surviving because their inherent fitness includes the ability to build dams.

— On the other hand, you have the relatively abstract image of a gene whose presence in a beaver causes the animal to build dams, whereby ensuring the survival of the gene in question... not to mention the survival of the beaver that hosts that gene.

The raison d'être of The Extended Phenotype consist of trying to persuade us that the second attitude is preferable. But you have to read the arguments minutely, through to the final pages, to be fully impregnated with the power of Dawkins' fascinating message.

Assassination politics

The etymology of the word "assassin" is weird. At the time of the Crusades, the original Assassins were fanatical members of a Muslim sect in Persia who consumed hashish—their name meant "hashish eaters" in Arabic—in order to get high before carrying out murder raids. Since then, assassination has become a callous political act in all kinds of societies throughout the world, including the USA.

Benazir Bhutto went to school in her native Karachi, then she moved on to Harvard and Oxford, where she was the elected president of the celebrated debating club known as the Oxford Union. Educated in these great ivory towers of western civilization, she returned to a context of violence that carried off her father and brothers. Later, she and her husband were accused of getting involved in various corruption affairs.

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile on 18 October 2007, and immediately escaped from an initial assassination attempt that killed and injured hundreds of people. Today, her luck ran out. Observers are asking an obvious question: Is it possible that today's attack might be the work of al-Qaeda and followers of Osama bin Laden? There's a more down-to-earth question: In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, will General Pervez Musharraf still allow the 2008 elections to take place? If so, how will Bhutto's PPP [Pakistan Peoples Party] react to the brutal disappearance of their charismatic leader?

Nuclear energy

In my recent article entitled Australia's submarines [display], I suggested that there is insufficient political consciousness and statesmanlike imagination in Australia to envisage a big project such as the construction of a fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines. In The Australian today, there are a few negative remarks on this question. For example, Opposition Senator Nick Minchin states: "Australia has no capability or expertise to build or maintain nuclear submarines and the Collins-class boats have proved that conventional submarines can do the job. Rather than have a distracting debate, Labor should just rule out the nuclear option now." Peter Briggs, president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, stated that the main problem is lack of knowledge: "I think they should rule out the nuclear option because frankly we do not have time for such a major debate if we are to deliver new submarines by 2025. Australia has no nuclear industry and no nuclear facilities at our universities, and so we don't have the personnel or the knowledge required."

I'm dismayed by this defeatist thinking, which reflects Australia's stubborn head-in-the-sand attitude towards nuclear energy. And, with Kevin Rudd now elected, it's almost certain that the nuclear-energy situation in Australia will be bleaker than ever.

Here in France, of course, nuclear energy has become an everyday affair. Technological progress and advanced expertise should normally decrease the risks of catastrophes, and relatively few people—apart from Greenpeace and a handful of environmental groups—would contend today that developments in this domain should be halted. On the contrary, the commune of Cadarache in the south of France (near Marseille) will soon be hosting a huge futuristic research program called ITER [International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor] funded by the European Union, India, Japan, the People's Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the USA.

Over half a century ago

Starting in 1950, Australia dominated the Davis Cup for a period of four years, first with the duo Frank Sedgman and Ken McGregor. Then the young Australians Lewis Hoad and Ken Rosewall took over. In Melbourne in 1953, Hoad and Rosewall beat the US players Vic Seixas and Tony Trabert.

The 1954 finals in Sydney gave Seixas, 31, and Trabert, 24, a chance to get even with the 20-year-old tennis twins Hoad and Rosewall.



And that's exactly what they did, in the first two days, in a series of four-set matches.

Back in those final sunny days of December 1954, my paternal grandparents [Pop and Ma, as we called them] had invited me to drive down to Sydney with them to watch the finals of that Davis Cup tournament at White City Stadium. I seem to recall that we attended the doubles match, on the second day, since that was the kind of social tennis to which we were accustomed back in Grafton. For us, it was hard to imagine a game of tennis in which the server wasn't gazing in the direction of the backside of his partner (often of the opposite sex), crouched near the net. Singles matches appeared to us as unusually solemn and solitary events, in which you didn't even have somebody to chat to during the calm periods while your opponents were collecting the balls for the next stroke.

On 28 December 1954, at the splendid lawn courts between Kings Cross and Edgecliff, I got autographs from the four players.

This 1954 tennis tournament in Sydney remains in the local history books as a much-publicized event, probably because of the hero status of Hoad and Rosewall. Personally, I wasn't greatly surprised to see the young Australians defeated. Physically, they looked like young Australian sportsmen of the kind one could see anywhere. Seixas and Trabert, on the other hand, appeared to me as Martians, particularly when seen up close. They seemed to exude a mysterious mixture of power and sporting wisdom, quite unlike the naive grins of the Aussie kids. I had the impression that, for these superior Americans, tennis was not just a game; it was their business.