Autopsy of fake photos

The art of producing fake photos used to be practiced primarily, and more or less expertly, by tyrants such as Joseph Stalin [1879-1953], wishing to remove undesirable individuals from group snapshots.

These days, countless computer users have tried their hand at innocent "Photoshopping", often in a crude fashion, as demonstrated in my fake photo of Marseille's ferry boat scampering around out in the sea as if it were an offshore racer:

On last year's April Fool's Day, my article entitled Stray animal at Gamone [display] wasn't intended to convince anybody that my donkey Moshé really rolled around in the dust at Gamone with a visiting red kangaroo:

Things get a little bit murkier when professional people use Photoshop retouching in a deliberate attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. My article of 23 August 2007 entitled Photoshop surgery [display] indicated a ridiculous case of such an operation:

A much talked-about recent case of falsification was this Chinese image of Tibetan antelopes racing away from a high-speed train:

Observers were amazed that a photographer, Liu Weiqing, could be present at exactly the moment that the train emerged on the viaduct, sending the herd of rare animals hurtling away in fear. Well, he wasn't! It's simply yet another fake photo, obtained by combining the train and the antelopes. The story of how this photo was first acclaimed as a masterpiece, before being revealed as a fake, is utterly fascinating.

Today, I learn [once again from the excellent Scientific American magazine, mentioned in my previous blog article] that there's a clever US specialist named Hany Farid who has developed methods of revealing that such-and-such a photo is fake. I advise you to visit his fine website [display] to see specimens of Farid's art and findings. In his magazine article, Farid offers us this lovely image of Jan Ullrich shaking hands with an attractive female cyclist:

Cautious viewers, discovering this image, might ask semantic questions. First of all: What on earth was this unusual cycling event that brought together Ullrich and a female in a yellow jersey, with long hair and superbly muscular legs? Second: How come the female's helmet appears to be a recolored clone of Ullrich's helmet? Last, but not least: What's that American fire hydrant doing alongside the road? Did Jan Ullrich ever get around to competing in the USA in a mixed male/female event (?) during the brief period in 2003 when he was a member of the Bianchi team? Click the fake photo [or, better still, subscribe to Scientific American] to find answers.

Many observers are anguished when they realize how easy it has become to cheat with photos. Hany Farid's excellent article entitled Digital Image Forensics informs us that the goodies and baddies are at love-all. [Excuse me for borrowing a tennis metaphor... but the final of the French Open is about to start at Roland-Garros.] The image crooks use ingenious techniques to create fake photos, but the cops have a lot of excellent detection tricks up their sleeves.

Blogging is good for you

In the latest issue of my favorite magazine, Scientific American, there's a brilliant one-page article by a New York freelance writer named Jessica Wapner on the therapeutic value of blogging. She starts by declaring that "self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off ". In a nutshell, we bloggers seek to take advantage of "the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings ".

Jessica suggests that creative writing in general, and blogging in particular, provide physiological benefits of many kinds... involving appetite for food and sex, and even cancer treatment!

[If only Nicolas Sarkozy were to read Antipodes, if not Scientific American, I'm sure he would promptly "invent" the idea that blogging expenses should be reimbursed by France's splendid health system.]

Jessica quotes a Harvard neuroscientist named Alice Flaherty who provides us with a word that we bloggers should paint in large letters on the wall above our computer: hypergraphia, designating an uncontrollable urge to write. Maybe it's a viral affliction. Personally, I see it as a genetic thing. You're born with this psychosis, and you simply have to learn to live with it... but it seems to get worse with age.

Gee, I feel so much better since writing the above stuff. I only hope that my words don't sicken any disgruntled readers...

Republican Calendar

French researchers in genealogy or local history inevitably run into a quaint but annoying thing (little known outside France) called the Republican Calendar. Shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, and for a period of fourteen years (from 1792 until 1805), France abandoned the ancient Church-inspired calendar, designated as Gregorian, and replaced it by a rapidly-contrived system with new names for years, months and days. For example, my birthday, on 24 September, is named Chestnut in the Republican Calendar, while Christine's, on 8 January, is Marble. [It's not hard to understand why our marriage couldn't possibly be harmonious!]

The inventor of the new names was a romantic author referred to as Fabre d’Églantine, who joined the revolutionary leaders as a secretary in 1792. [In this concocted name, Églantine designates a wild rose.] An egoistic scoundrel, he was guillotined with Georges Danton on the Republican date of 17 germinal an II [April 5, 1794]. These days, we remember Fabre d’Églantine as the poet who wrote the words of a famous lullaby: Il pleut, il pleut, bergère. It's a love song addressed to a girl who's minding her sheep out in the fields.

It's raining, raining, shepherdess! The singer tells the wet girl that rumbling thunder indicates an approaching storm, and he invites her into the warmth of his house. Recently, in a splendid TV saga entitled Voici venir l'orage [Look, a storm is coming! ], concerning the dramatic flight from Russia of the Jewish ancestors of the French movie directrice Nina Companeez, the words and music of this lullaby symbolized in a moving manner the trials they had to face, first in Bolshevik Russia, and later in Nazi-occupied France.

The revolutionaries of 1789 imagined that their cause and spirit were, not just French, but universal. It's amusing to discover that, in their eagerness to replace the old names of the Gregorian Calendar, they invented terms that are anything but universal, because they're based upon French seasons and agricultural activities. My birthday, for example, falls in the first month of the Republican Calendar, called vendémiaire, which is related to the word vendanges, meaning grape-picking. But Fabre d'Églantine and his friends forgot, or ignored, that, during the month of September in Australia, say, there's not much in the way of grape-picking. All the other names for months are similarly parochial in a naive fashion: October/November is brumaire, evoking autumn mist and fog; July/August is thermidor, evoking hot sunny days; etc. The revolutionaries would have surely been upset by the upside-down maps of the world in which tiny France looks as if it would be crushed if ever the giant African continent happened to "drop down" onto her.

Incidentally, my writer-hero Richard Dawkins refers to the kind of naming anomaly made by Fabre d'Églantine as a case of "unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism". Here's how he speaks about "consciousness-raisers" in our atheists' bible, The God Delusion:

It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents — and, by the way, giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.

[If only Nicolas Sarkozy were to read Antipodes, if not the books of Dawkins, I'm sure he would promptly "invent" the idea of decreeing that upside-down maps of the world be pinned on the walls of every French classroom.]

Close the Dawkins parenthesis. The Republican Calendar dominates the decade that concerns me in my research about the origins of my property at Gamone. I've always believed that the place once belonged to the Chartreux monks at Bouvantes whose monastery and other possessions were auctioned off between December 1790 and March 1791. It's quite likely that their outlying properties in Choranche were sold during the years that followed, maybe at a time when the Republican Calendar was operational.

In the archives that I've examined already in Grenoble, I was astounded to discover that, in the notes on political events in the Isère department during the three or four years following the French Revolution, there's no serious mention whatsoever of Choranche or even Pont-en-Royans. A possible reason for this curious absence is the fact that, throughout the revolutionary period, this part of the Royans still remained, to a certain extent, under the influence of the ancient Bérenger family, lords of Sassenage. [In medieval times, there was a so-called prince of Pont-en-Royans!] I even came across a parliamentary note about a complaint lodged by the lord Bérenger of that epoch because the revolutionaries had not yet returned various documents that he had apparently lent them. In about 1793, the archives of the commune of Pont-en-Royans were deliberately burnt in the middle of the village. On the other hand, the good lord's precious Sassenage archives concerning the Royans "principality" were saved for posterity in his charming little castle on the outskirts of Grenoble... which means that we're able to consult them today on our computers.

Fascinating painting

People at Google must be aficionados of the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez [1599-1660], because they've celebrated his birthday by creating a graphic Google banner based upon the famous painting called Las Meninas [Maids of Honor].

Here's a fragment of the original Velázquez masterpiece:

The intriguing nature of this painting was first brought to my attention back in 1966 when I read a popular work of modern philosophy, Les mots et les choses by Michel Foucault [translated into English as The Order of Things], which starts with an in-depth analysis of the Velázquez painting. Foucault suggests that this painting demonstrates, or at least symbolizes, the existence of an invisible emptiness at the heart of the world that we attempt vainly to circumscribe... not by images, but by language. So, let us see rapidly what is so upsetting about this painting.

At first sight, one has the impression that the subject of the painting is the blonde child between the two maids. Her name is Margarita, and she's the eldest daughter of the Spanish queen. When we examine the individuals more closely, however, we find that the artist Velázquez himself is present, standing behind the left-hand maid, and that he is looking directly, not at the little princess, but at us, the viewers. Then a blurry mirror on the rear wall, just to the right of the painter's head (as we see things), reveals the true subject of the painter's work: the barely-recognizable king and queen of Spain, Philip IV and Marianna.

The painting is inverted in such a way that we see, not the true subject, but rather the regard of those who can see this subject. In the antipodean sense that I evoke often in this blog, the painter has turned his world upside-down and inside-out. At a visual level, the two most prominent subjects in the foreground of the painting, from our viewpoint, are a bulky pet dog and a plump male dwarf in female attire (said to be an Italian jester). Meanwhile, supposedly major individuals such as the royal couple and a noble man are seen as mere images on rear-wall mirrors, suggesting that Velázquez himself was not overly preoccupied with the task of reproducing their image on his canvas.

This complex work of art (designated by many admirers as the greatest painting ever made) is an excellent symbol for Google. We throng to Google in the hope of receiving profound knowledge about our world... whereas Google, in reality, is simply throwing back at us, through its endless lists of websites of all kinds, our own imperfect image. Maybe a vast but essentially empty image.

Plug taken out of river

Julie, a kinesiologist at the place in Chatte that I've been attending twice a week for the last two months, happens to be a former junior world champion in rowing, a member of the Romans club on the banks of the Isère. This morning, I asked her: "Have you seen what they've done with your river?"

Yes, she had. A week ago, the electricity authorities manipulated their dams in such a way that the only water flowing into the Isère at the level of the village of St-Nazaire came from the Bourne: the noble little stream that flows through Choranche and Pont-en-Royans. The Bourne is largely a mountain torrent, since its volume depends constantly on what's happening, in the way of rain or snow, up on the Vercors plateau.

At the place in St-Nazaire shown in this photo, there's normally a beautiful lake formed by the confluence of the Bourne and the Isère. Visitors are always stunned by the beauty of the red rocks at the tip of the peninsula, reflected in the green waters. Once upon a time, there was a fluvial port here named Rochebrune [meaning "brown rocks"]. The Chartreux monks used flat boats to bring down iron ore from distant Allevard. From St-Nazaire, these raw materials were transported by donkeys up to furnaces at Bouvantes, operated by the same monks who used to make wine at Gamone.

Julie's rowing boats are not the only grounded vessels. Against the backdrop of the aqueduct at St-Nazaire, the Royans river-boat for tourists looks like a stranded whale. Happily, this weird situation will not last for long: just the time it takes for dam workers to remove logs that have floated into their electricity installations.

Fulfilling day in Grenoble

Once again, I took the train to spend the day in Grenoble at the Archives départementales de l'Isère: a friendly and efficient patrimonial institution. I can think of no more enjoyable excursion than this return to rare documentary sources concerning Choranche. It's pure luxury: taking a comfortable train ride to a building in a nice city where I can simply look up the marvelous notarial documents revealing the background of my adoptive home place, Gamone. Every old document that I encounter [today, I was examining the years 1880 and 1881] is a mini-masterpiece of humanity. I skim through all kinds of consequential, less consequential, but often dramatic events.

This morning, as I was driving down from Gamone, I ran into my neighbor Georges Belle on his moped. He told me he was coming up here to see whether he could find saplings for his tomato plantation. Georges is an old-timer who lives in the splendid Carthusian building located midway between Gamone and the village of Choranche. He knows I'm interested in local history... but there's no way in the world that this grumpy old guy might invite me into his Carthusian abode, which is probably quite a mess.

Before my day in Grenoble was over, I had learned that the property of Georges once belonged to a certain Julien Chabert. I also learned that a former owner of Gamone, the carpenter Eugène Gerin [1843-1891], purchased a vegetable garden in Pont-en-Royans on July 11, 1881... which suggests that, at that date, he hadn't yet acquired Gamone. Why would a fellow buy a vegetable patch in Pont-en-Royans if he already had enough space to grow vegetables—as I do today—at Gamone? So, that leaves me with a decade of notarial archives within which I should theoretically be able to find a document concerning Eugène Gerin's purchase of Gamone. The vegetable plot thickens...

Searching through archives is in fact a relatively sporting activity. First, you need to be intellectually alert, in the sense that you're using your powers of reasoning to find needles in haystacks. You have to be able to manipulate the fat dossiers of rusty old documents. And you need sufficiently good eyesight to browse rapidly through piles of hand-written pages of notarial acts, trying to glimpse a significant term such as Choranche. Personally, in a normal day of researching, I find that I can get through some two years of notarial documents. After that, everything starts to get blurry... which is definitely not good for this kind of activity. Maybe, one of these days, genealogy and local history research will be accepted as Olympic sports.

Deadly level crossings

Yesterday, for the second time in a week, I caught the inter-city train from St-Marcellin to Grenoble in order to spend time exploring the archives concerning the history of my property. This excursion is truly luxurious in the sense that the traveler arrives in the center of Grenoble and gets swept up immediately by a tram that takes you to any place whatsoever inside the Alpine city.

At about the same time I was making the return voyage, seven adolescents met their deaths in a level-crossing catastrophe, elsewhere on this regional transport network, up towards the lake of Geneva, when their bus stalled on the rails.

Here's the scene today, as authorities attempt to determine what happened:

In my recent article entitled Doubling the line [display], I evoked the anguishing theme of level crossings, of which there are still some 15 thousand in rural France.

The following specimen, which I use almost daily, is a true death trap:

Normal French Cartesian logic seems to have got screwed up here in a potentially mortal manner. Since it's a dangerous crossing, lying just alongside the busy highway from St Marcellin to Romans, somebody decided that orange lamps should flash here constantly, aimed at warning motorists that they should behave cautiously. But these orange lamps interfere with the more urgent message of a red lamp that goes into action periodically when the barriers are about to descend, because a train is arriving. Motorists who arrive here regularly, like me, day in day out, end up ignoring the constantly-flashing orange lamps, insofar as they do not indicate any kind of imminent danger. Consequently, they're conditioned subconsciously to ignore also the red lamp, whose flashes signal a matter of life or death. To put it bluntly, this place is waiting for a mortal accident to occur.

Saint Laurent

Without Yves Saint Laurent, France is a little more naked than usual. Talking of nakedness, recall the magnificent statement of this gay guy who seemed to understand women in a sublime fashion:

Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body. The most lovely clothes to attire a woman are the arms of the man she loves. For women who cannot achieve such happiness, I am available.

Personal anecdote : YSL played a major role in the French perfume business. Once upon a time, I was driven mad by a Parisian maiden named Valérie who was perfumed by a product named Kouros, designed theoretically for males. What a diabolical idea that a female might wear such a perfume! Thankfully and harmoniously, my body ended up becoming an intimate friend both of Valérie and of Kouros.

Aussie crime-buster: arrested, innocent

This nicely-dressed clean-shaven 51-year-old Aussie guy is Mark Standen. Yesterday, in the fight against organized crime, he was Australia's top cop.

Today, he has been arrested, suspected of master-minding a scheme to import chemicals enabling the production of millions of dollars of narcotic stuff known as ice. It goes without saying that, for the moment, this Aussie drug cop is presumed to be innocent.

Mutual horse help

In my recent article entitled Horse sense [display], I didn't try to conceal my irritation about Alison's horses escaping and then pounding across my lawn at Gamone. The surroundings of my house are so rudimentary [the soil at Gamone is full of rocks] that they hardly deserve to be called a lawn. Well, I'm happy to say that Alison hasn't come down here yet to retrieve her animals... which is fine. They are still devouring, with obvious pleasure, huge quantities of delicious Gamone grass and weeds. And I prefer to see these lovely horses at Gamone, happy, rather than back up on Bob's muddy slopes, which simply don't have the same vegetal resources as here. For me, a hungry horse is like a mistreated dog. I can't stand such images. I'm terribly sensitive to the sufferings of animals.

Although there's still a lot of rain at Gamone, the weather is warm, and flies have become a constant problem for my donkeys and for Alison's horses. Betsy [the beige female] and Diamond [the white male] often stand side by side, eye to arse, in such a way that the sweeping tail of one animal chases flies from the head of the other. Nice thinking. My donkeys Moshé and Mandrin [located on the upper side of the electric fence] often watch the horses in amazement. This kind of cooperation would be unthinkable between intelligent but egotistic donkeys. Let's face it, in Aussie donkey-like terms: Would you, or would you not, be prepared to stick your nose in a mate's arse simply because he's bothered by flies?

Magic roses, minimum dog

Christine took this photo to show me roses of the Albertine variety that blossomed recently, almost magically, alongside her house in Brittany:

Apparently it's an old rose-bush that was there long before Christine acquired her property. She cleaned up the harsh rocky surroundings of the plant, which soon blossomed splendidly, no doubt for the first time in years... thanking her for her care, as it were. And the most amazing thing is this magnificent variety of rose has the same name that Christine once chose for her antiquarian book shop.

On the right edge of the photo, we can just make out the snout of a dog, who seems to be making an effort to get included in the picture. This minimum dog is of course Christine's Gamone, the delightful daughter of my Sophia.

Spokesmen

During a brief period in 2003, I was tempted to make fun of the USA's search for mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which I likened to a quest for the Grail [display]. I didn't carry on with this website for long, because I soon discovered that things weren't in any way funny. Back in those days, everybody laughed a lot at the comical declarations of the Iraqi spokesman Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf.

You can find several amusing samples of al-Sahhaf's outpourings on YouTube. As for the man himself, it's said that he's currently leading a happy family existence in the United Arab Emirates. Maybe, observing the situation in Iraq, al-Sahhaf is having the last laugh.

In my sarcastic website, I imagined a certain Aristobulus Flavius, Scribe of the Oval Office, latter-day image of Josephus Flavius, author of The Jewish War. The real man in question was Ari Fleischer, who resigned in 2003 after getting horribly mixed up in the Scooter Libby affair... which I've often mentioned briefly in the past:

— article of February 3, 2007: All my trials, Lord [display]

— article of March 7, 2007: Goat stories [display]

— article of July 9, 2007: Woman who has paid the price [display]

— article of August 14, 2007: Brain removal [display]

All of that is past history. Today, we learn that a dyed-in-the-wool Bushman, also a former presidential spokesman, has just turned traitor. The mere title of the memoirs published by Scott McClellan sets the tone: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.

Obviously, we've reached the stage where it's no longer wise for a head of state such as Saddam or Bush to employ a spokesman. Would this mean that chiefs should henceforth speak personally for and by themselves, unaided? That could well be a greater calamity.

Magic talents

This is a rare photo of me engaged in the mysterious activity known as dowsing. If you don't happen to know the meaning of this term, you might take a look at my article of 13 August 2007 entitled Strange skills [display], or you might do better to go directly to the Wikipedia article on this subject [display]. Basically, I'm using a pair of metal rods to search for water beneath the lawn at Gamone. The image is rare in the sense that I don't usually authorize people to take photos of me when I'm engaged in dowsing, because this art involves a set of secret principles that I do not wish to divulge. Exceptionally, this particular photo and the one that follows were taken by a professional dowsing colleague from Marseille who was visiting Gamone in order to watch me in action, and partake of my wisdom in this domain.

In this second image, you might be able to discern, on my black tracksuit trousers, my sponsor's logo. As you can see from my tense concentration, this activity is akin to a high-level competitive sport such as curling.

So, it's normal that the big guys in the sponsorship arena seek out talented dowsing athletes such as yours truly.

To be perfectly truthful, on the particular day these photos of me were taken, I did not actually succeed in detecting the presence of water alongside my house in Gamone. But that was neither here nor there, because it rained for most of the weekend. And, in any case, I'm hooked up to the municipal water supply at Choranche.

Religious insanity in God's own country

In the following video clip, we see a funky guy introducing, in boxing-match style, a white pastor named Michael Pfleger who then made fun of Hillary Clinton while preaching last Sunday in Barack Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ:



When I see such clownish antics, bordering on some kind of clinical emotional problem, words fail me. If I were a Christian, I would pray that the pastor might be forgiven by his brethren and maybe even enlightened by the Lord. If I were a US voter, I would also be inclined to do a bit of praying, no matter whether or not I believed in God. It goes without saying that I wouldn't dare to suggest that the silly preacher should be punished in hell. On the other hand, I do feel that everything in the world would go a little more intelligently if all the religious crackpots in America, including—above all—those in presidential spheres, would quietly go to hell... at least until after the election's over.

Horse sense

When I was a child in Australia, the expression "horse sense" evoked common sense of an ordinary kind: nothing to do with the ability to whisper in horses' ears, or anything of that kind.

Bob's charming teenage daughter Alison, my unique neighbor for several months, is an expert horsewoman who reminds me of my sister Jill back in Australia. Alison has been playing around with horses for years, and she doesn't even bother to put a saddle on her beige Bessie and white Aigle before riding around on the slopes of Gamone. Bob informed me recently that his daughter plans to move down to Spain, next September, to work in a professional equine context. [This information concerns me primarily in that it means that Bob will surely put his property up for sale... and I won't have any neighbors at Gamone for a while.]

Although I admire Alison's expertise with her horses, I'm not convinced that the girl has a great degree of horse sense, as I defined it earlier on, because she doesn't seem to be able to prevent her two adorable animals from cantering across my lawn every so often, eating my rose plants, digging up tufts of earth and transforming the slopes alongside my house into mud.

Generally, as soon as Alison realizes that her horses have escaped to my place (where I immediately set up an electric fence to keep them in a field beneath the walnut trees, where they can't do any damage), she strolls down here to take them back up home. I tell her constantly that I would prefer to have her horses here permanently, where there's a lot of grass to eat, rather than find them arriving here on my lawn in the middle of the night, as they did yesterday, or early in the morning, as they did today. Bob himself tells me he doesn't understand why his daughter won't turn on their electric fence to keep her horses at home, instead of imagining that the huge beasts will remain calmly in place behind a few flimsy pieces of string. My own explanation, as I said, is that it's basically a lack of horse sense.

Birthday of Moped Man

Happy birthday, my dear 39-year-old son François... finalizing at present the cutting and editing of a TV documentary based upon his recent excursion to Madagascar.

Virgins

This is surely the naughtiest image of Mary you could ever imagine. It's the sort of porn stuff that the police in my native Australia will surely be banning and burning during the Pope's July visit to Sydney for Youth Day. The Virgin is fondling a serpent with her left foot, and the rigid reptile seems to be enjoying every moment of the caresses.

Seriously, this image reflects a legend about the Greek goddess Eurynome [whom you can look up on Google: today's cornucopia of facts, if not necessarily of knowledge and wisdom].

It appears that the whole Catholic thing about the mother of Jesus being a virgin is based upon a translation error. The origin of the legend is a statement in Isaiah 7, 14. Here's how it reads in the antiquated King James Version:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Revised English Bible introduces an interesting surprise: the word "virgin" has disappeared!

[...] the Lord of his own accord will give you a sign; it is this: A young woman is with child, and she will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel.

The change from "virgin" to "young woman" reflects the true content of the original Hebrew, which speaks of almah ["young woman"], not bethulah ["virgin"]. The error of the King James Version was introduced way back before the birth of Jesus, when scholars translated the Hebrew almah into Greek as parthenos ["virgin"]. Much later, in Matthew 1, 22-23, the evangelist is inspired by this Greek translation error when he declares:

All this happened in order to fulfil what the Lord declared through the prophet: "A virgin will conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel..."

That's to say, Matthew was the ignoramus in elementary biology who set out to mystify everybody by claiming that the conception of Jesus had never been preceded by the sexual penetration of Mary and the introduction of male sperm. Many Catholics persist in considering that Mary's hymen membrane had remained perfectly intact although she was in a state of pregnancy. The least that can be said is that they have a lot of explaining to do! These days, high-tech interventions enable a woman's reproductive cell to be fertilized without an explicit sexual union with a male. Otherwise, failing technology, we remain in the fairy-tale domain of frogs that metamorphose into princesses.

Sadly to say, ever since the Isaiah translation bug and Matthew's failure to do his Hebrew homework, the trivial concept of virginity has become a Big Thing among Christians and Moslems. Amazingly, a French marriage has just been canceled, as if it had never been enacted, because a dissatisfied husband discovered with horror that his legal wife wasn't a virgin. Somehow or other, the court in Lille has contrived the delicate argument that the canceled marriage was a transaction founded upon the presence of "goods" [my word, not theirs] that did not conform to what was imagined by the male "acquirer" [again: my word, not theirs]. In other words, it was as if the guy imagined that he would be obtaining a fresh piece of meat, only to discover that it was tainted.

Most cases of canceled marriages in France are due to the fact that the consent of a partner had not in fact been obtained. The case of a ruptured hymen is something new... and shocking.

Gamone strawberries

These days, this is my regular breakfast delicacy, served up with sour cream and sugar. I have to pick the strawberries early in the morning, before they're discovered by several big fruit-eating birds that make Gamone their home at this time of the year.

Falling faster than sound

Around noon on Monday [French time], a few hours after the successful landing of Nasa's Phoenix vessel on the surface of the planet Mars, a 64-year-old French parachutist named Michel Fournier will be ascending in the Canadian skies for two and a half hours by means of a giant helium-inflated balloon. Then, at an altitude of 40 kilometers, he will be detaching his nacelle. Finally, he will be falling to Earth for over seven minutes at speeds in excess of the velocity of sound.

Fournier is no newcomer to parachuting, having made some 8,600 jumps. He has been planning this high-altitude tentative for years, and training intensively for the exploit in the style of an astronaut.

If he succeeds in his exploit, Michel Fournier will gain no less than four world records: (1) altitude of balloon ascension, (2) altitude of parachute jump, (3) speed in free fall and (4) duration of free fall.

BREAKING NEWS: The website for the Big Jump [visit] indicates that weather conditions have enforced a 24-hour postponement of operations. So, rendezvous Tuesday morning in Canada.

Has life existed on Mars?

Ever since the 19th century, people have speculated seriously about the possibility that living organisms might have come into existence on the red planet. Tonight, like hosts of observers throughout the world, I shall be waiting anxiously to learn if Nasa's Phoenix lander has arrived safely on our neighboring planet, and deployed correctly its rich assortment of scientific equipment.

There are now several excellent videos describing the Mars rovers named Spirit and Opportunity, which landed respectively on 4 and 24 January 2004. The following video uses synthetic images to indicate what should happen tonight if everything goes fine for Phoenix:



The cosmologist Giordano Bruno was convinced that life existed beyond the planet Earth:

For no reasonable mind can assume that heavenly bodies that may be far more magnificent than ours would not bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human Earth.

For expressing thoughts of this kind, the Inquisition accused Bruno of heresy, and he was burnt at the stake in Rome, thereby becoming the world's first martyr for science.

These days, people have ceased imagining that Mars might be populated by little green creatures who built canals. We have few ideas on the nature of self-replicating organisms that might exist elsewhere in the universe. Even the great Charles Darwin [1809-1882] may have been wrong when he suggested that life probably started, here on Earth, in a "warm little pond ". For all we know, life might be able to spring into existence in a volcano, or deep inside clouds of gas. But the presence of liquid water would appear to be conducive to the development of primitive forms of life in a context of carbon-based chemistry, as on Earth. The Phoenix laboratory might be able to inform us if this was, or is, the case on Mars.