Visiting Madagascar on a mobylette

Let me explain, for readers who might not know, that a mobylette is a hugely popular moped (lightweight motorbike) made by the French manufacturer Motobecane. A few decades ago, for countless French teens, particularly in suburban and rural environments, this vehicle was a symbol of emancipation: an initial step towards adult liberty. My son François Skyvington created a book on this theme, presented in a French-language website [display].

In my article of 30 May 2008 entitled Birthday of Moped Man [display], I mentioned that François was working on a documentary film concerning a mobylette excursion to Madagascar. Well, this 52-minute film will be shown on the French channel Voyages at the following dates [Paris time]:

-- Saturday evening, 24 January 2009, 8.40 pm
-- Sunday afternoon, 25 January 2009, 12.50 pm
-- Monday evening, 26 January 2009, midnight
-- Saturday morning, 31 January 2009, 10.30 am

In the latest Télérama weekly, there's a fine review of the film:

Le Monde selon ma mobylette [The World from my Mobylette] by the journalist-photographer-moviemaker François Skyvington is all about roaming through Madagascar at 35 kilometers an hour. In the lazy rhythm of the national route 7, which crosses the island from one end to the other, the rambler takes his time, while sharing with us his conception of the expedition. One can understand why TV channels are attracted to this style of reporting, which is now recurrent. Viewers can easily identify themselves with the journalist-presenter, often more like a tourist than an investigator, who provides them with access to an exotic universe. Obviously, the constant presence of this personage tends to obscure the frontier between a genuine reportage and a simple vacation video, since he stirs up intense admiration for the marvels of the country he is crossing. François Skyvington avoids tactfully all errors of this kind. Admittedly, as soon as he straddles his mobylette, he is filmed from every possible angle, but he also knows how to disappear behind the camera as soon as we have opportunities of observing Madagascan folk. The documentary is composed of short sequences on subjects such as a factory that produces soccer tables, and a sapphire-mining rush that gave rise to population changes. The resulting film does not claim to be a complete and divergent portrait of Madagascar, but it is hard to avoid being carried away by the specific rhythm of this journey.

This review was written in French by Thomas Richet, and I've translated it into English.

Modern gladiator

Yesterday evening, I watched a fascinating TV documentary about the early history of the Roman city of Lutetia, known since the 4th century as Paris. The arena still exists, in a quiet corner of greenery in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

In the heyday of Lutetia, this arena was used constantly for combats between gladiators and wild animals. Today, the outlines of the antechambers and cages are clearly visible. Among the gladiators, there was a brave and agile fellow known as a retiarius who fought with nothing more than a net and a trident. He had no shield and his only armor was a fragment of metal or leather protecting the upper part of his arm that held his three-pronged weapon.

This morning, I was intrigued to hear of the presentation of a Japanese robot, designed to protect industrial premises, which is capable of behaving a little like a retiarius. The following photo shows the robot confronted by a man who's playing the role of an intruder, and hurling a net at him:

When the robot detects the presence of a human intruder, it phones its master to let him know that it may have run into a bad guy. If the robot's master tells it to attack, the robot throws its net over the intruder, entangling him. From that point on, I'm not quite sure of what might happen next. The Japanese manufacturer has refrained from providing information concerning the device's endgame, but I would imagine that traditions are respected, and that the robot is armed with a concealed trident.

Getting the words right

It's amusing that Barack Obama decided to proclaim his oath of allegiance a second time, after the judge screwed it up the first time. And it's interesting to discover that there's no Bible in this repeat event.

Christians might say that God, through His extraordinary communication capabilities, was surely capable of untangling the initial screwed-up message, so there was no point in invoking Him the second time round. It's more likely, I think, that the absence of a Bible proves that, during the screwed-up swearing-in, the Bible was merely part of the decor, rather than an essential element in the act. In my view, this is fair enough, because the role of the book appears to be a rather symbolic do-it-yourself thing in the swearing-in ritual. Each president-to-be seems to have the right to bring along the particular version of the book that pleases him. What would happen, I wonder, if a Jew were to be elected president? Would he be able to bring along a Hebrew edition of the Torah, without any New Testament whatsoever?

On the other hand, this repeat performance of Obama's swearing-in underlines a highly significant aspect of the procedure: namely, the fundamental importance of the exact words pronounced by the future president in his oath. As everybody knows, these words are extracted from the US constitution, and nobody has the right to play around with them, inventing even a trivially modified form of the oath. I found it amusing that the words were screwed up the chief justice John Roberts, nominated in 2005 by a president who became the laughingstock of the planet because of his habit of screwing up words. It was almost as if Roberts had staged deliberately this embarrassing incident as a departure gift to Dubya, to make him feel less alone.

The fundamental nature and all-importance of human language is the subject of The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker, which I've been reading slowly over the last week or so.

It's a truly remarkable study of the subtleties of language. I find it a sobering book in that I simply never realized, up until now, the amazing complexity of English verbs, even though I tended to imagine naively that I surely understand, more or less, what they're all about. Often, when words are poorly arranged in a sentence, a native English speaker realizes that something's wrong, but we don't necessarily know why it sounds wrong, and how to fix it. We laugh when we hear of this sign in a bar in Norway: "Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar." But George W Bush spoke that kind of English regularly: "I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office." Talking of Bushspeak, Pinker mentions the former president in The Stuff of Thought: "In 2006 George W Bush signed into law the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which increased the fines for indecent language tenfold and threatened repeat offenders with the loss of their license." Isn't it touching that somebody as badly-spoken as Dubya would be offended by indecent language!

I started this post by talking about Obama's swearing-in. Well, on the theme of swearing and oaths, Pinker's book happens to include one of the most colorful chapters you could ever imagine. The chapter title: The seven words you can't say on television. The great Woody Allen once explained his way of telling somebody to leave: "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words." Now, inspired by Woody's words, I really can't end these rambling reflexions about screwed-up words without a few nice words of farewell to the departing president, who impressed countless observers in such a special way: "Be fruitful and multiply, Sir, and enjoy your retirement."

Mission accomplished

Here's the bottom line, in a few approximate figures:

-- Deaths of US soldiers in Iraq = around 4,226

-- Unemployment in the USA = around 7 %

-- Disapproval rating in God's Own Country = around 67 %

In his most recent speeches, Bush has been striving to persuade people to retain a favorable impression of his eight years of havoc as the big boss of the USA.

When I try to imagine the aspect of George W Bush that annoys me most, I revert automatically to my love of science and my personal bias towards scientific logic. Students of my generation worshipped naively a process known as induction, which was a sophisticated scientific variation on the theme of generalization. We were led to believe that scientific laws arise almost spontaneously, whenever we happen to encounter the same kinds of events reoccurring in a similar fashion... such as the Sun rising every morning, and setting every evening. The general idea of induction is that, after following the Sun's movements for a certain number of days, you'll be led inexorably, almost automatically, towards a sound theory of the movement of our planet within the Solar System. Now, I don't know whether or not Bush has ever heard of induction, or whether his brain would be capable of analyzing such a philosophical concept. For argument's sake, let's imagine Bush for a moment as a turkey being fattened for Thanksgiving Day. Using induction (which, I repeat, is a false theory), George W Turkey would have included that God and Man are great benefactors of turkeys, which gravitate in perpetual Freedom (a term that Dubya loves, without necessarily knowing what it means) in a God-Given Cosmos of Turkey Lovers... Then, as the Thanksgiving Day axe was about to descend upon its neck, the presidential turkey would make a speech: "Knowing what I knowed, I did my best, and I trust that posterity will love me." Axe, slash, blood, feathers, crash... like a stratospheric goose in a jet engine over Manhattan. It's not impossible that Dubya will land safely and calmly. Americans, to my mind, are basically forgetful, often simply stupid (when they vote, for example). We'll see...

When Isaac Newton got hit on the head by an apple, he suddenly imagined (so the lovely legend goes) that an ubiquitous force was forever attempting to drag, not only apples, but everything in the Cosmos back towards our humble planet... and vice versa. I try to imagine George W Bush, in the place of Isaac Newton, getting hit on the head by an apple at his ranch in Texas. I see him exclaiming to his admiring wife: "Laura, with the help of God, I've given these apples their freedom! They're falling henceforth on my dull brain!" But we wouldn't have got a theory of the universe...

The following photo was taken in front of 10 Downing Street on 3 January 2009, after an anti-Israel demonstration:

As you can see, they're not apples. An observer might say that Bush is no longer connected directly with current events in Gaza. But the Old World seems to have retained already the image of a down-to-earth object, a male shoe, by which to remember the outgoing president. And this striking symbol is becoming a universal expression of opposition. But I'm exaggerating a little. While the missiles in question can certainly be described as down-to-earth, they weren't really striking. Dubya ducked. Neither an apple nor a shoe ever hit his brainless head.

Dog takes us for a ride

I'm always impressed by a dog that's smart enough to play tricks on the supposedly superior beings who think of themselves as the animal's masters. As of this afternoon, I realize that my neighbors' Briska belongs to that canine category.

In fact, I often suspect that most, if not all, dogs might belong to this smart category. The great US writer Kurt Vonnegut [1922-2007] published a collection of short stories under the title Welcome to the Monkey House. His book includes a tiny masterpiece entitled Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog, no more than seven pages long. The gist of this delightful tale: Thomas Edison [1847-1931], the celebrated inventor of the light bulb, happened to concoct a so-called intelligence analyzer capable of indicating what we would now call the IQ of the individual hooked up to the machine. Well, when Edison tried out the device on his dog, he was astounded to obtain a genius-level reading. Edison's dog, on the other hand, was furious to realize that its master was henceforth capable of revealing the Great Secret: namely, that dogs have always been vastly superior to humans from an intelligence viewpoint. The canine race preferred to keep a low profile, indefinitely, enabling them to be housed gratis, fed for free and admired by humans. In return, they were expected to give merely a minimum of Christian canine love: mainly effortless sloppy licks and tail wagging. From a dog's viewpoint, this continued to be a truly superb system! To avoid letting the cat out of the bag (wrong metaphor), Edison's dog struck up a bargain with its master. If the inventor were to keep quiet about canine intelligence, and destroy his diabolical contraption, then the dog was prepared to offer Thomas Edison the perfect formula for the filament of an incandescent electric bulb...

Let me get back to Briska. This afternoon, in front of my house, Madeleine was crying out: "William, Briska's caught in a trap. Phone Dédé and tell him to drive up here immediately."

I did as ordered, then rushed downstairs, donned boots and a jacket and raced up to the place, a couple of hundred meters above my house, where I could hear Briska barking furiously. Madeleine raced after me. I soon ascertained that the barking came from a spot on the muddy banks of Gamone Creek, at about the level of Bob's place.

Me: "Madeleine, Briska's barking doesn't sound as if she's in pain."

Madeleine: "Don't be silly, William. She's in pain! I can recognize her barking. She's surely caught in a fox trap. Maybe gored by a wild boar. When you find her, be careful. She's probably out of her mind, and she's likely to bite you."

I lost no time in racing up the creek bed and sighting Briska, several meters up on the banks. She was still barking, and darting back and forth, as if she were restrained, unable to come down. By this time, Dédé had arrived on the scene with his vehicle. Meanwhile, not wishing to be bitten by a delerious dog in agony, I did my best to push Madeleine up the muddy embankment, so that she might encounter the animal. Both of us struggled to catch hold of branches and pull ourselves upwards. Dédé, down in the creek bed, could see Briska moving to the right, then to the left, then back again, while continuing to bark furiously.

I might add (because I believe that this observation is significant) that I was intrigued to notice that my dear dog Sophia gave no signs whatsoever of understanding what the hell all this fuss was about. Sophia is a little like General Motors in the USA. When she coughs, this indicates that all Gamone might be catching a cold. But when Sophia behaves soporifically, it's highly likely that everything's perfectly fine at Gamone, that there are no murderous bandits in the vicinity and, concerning the problem confronting us, no dogs in pain.

Dédé (who remained down in the creek, where it was impossible to see what was happening, since he has trouble walking, let alone climbing creek banks): "Briska's almost certainly caught up by a wire or cable. She can't come down."

Madeleine (in living-room attire, including woolen gloves, and no longer accustomed to crawling up muddy creek banks in the middle of January): "I've got hold of her collar, but she refuses to descend. The poor dog seems to be wounded. She's terrified of the height of the embankment."

While doing my best to hold Madeleine in place—by poking my fingers, as it were, up her backside (I insist upon the "as it were")—so that she wouldn't roll back down into the creek, I was starting to become wary. It was more and more obvious to me (but not yet to Madeleine or Dédé) that their dog was not caught in a trap, was not attached by anything whatsoever, was not wounded in any way, was not in pain, was not afraid of heights, was not barking in anguish, etc. In other words, there was nothing whatsoever wrong with Briska. She had merely been having fun at that particular spot on the banks of Gamone Creek (which was running with a foot or so of water), and wanted to let us all know. Briska was thinking no doubt, in typical dog thought, that we might like to join in the fun. She had been inviting us to a rave party, as it were.

As soon as I got within reach of the dog, who was now held firmly by Madeleine (sprawled out face down on the muddy slopes), I gave her a big push on the arse (Briska, not Madeleine), which sent her rolling down towards Dédé, who immediately put her on a lead. Meanwhile, Madeleine's hand was covered in blood. We had imagined that it was the blood of our poor wounded Briska. In fact, Madeleine had cut herself slightly on a broken branch above Gamone Creek.

For the moment, the global situation is a little like that of the Airbus in the Hudson River. Nobody has located Briska's black boxes, capable of informing us what the hell all that bloody barking was about. All I can affirm is that it was a false alert, brilliantly executed by Briska... who must be erupting into dog-laughter at the moment I speak to you. (I don't know whether our dog is linked to the Internet, otherwise I would simply suggest that you look her up directly.)

I don't wish to influence the specialists who'll be called upon to examine the data of this afternoon's incident: Françoise Repellin, above all, daughter of Dédé and Madeleine. My gut feeling is that Briska was thrilled to have discovered, on the banks of Gamone Creek, a tiny smelly Garden of Eden where the roe deer come down to lie. Maybe there was even the delicious aroma of a decaying foetus, or something nice like that. And Briska decided to remain obstinately fixed in this marvelous site of discovery, like a successful archaeologist standing guard over his treasures. Meanwhile, Briska barked gladly, proudly, non-stop, like hell, for all the Gamone valley to know, like a dog in agony. Nothing could move Briska from that paradise... until I gave her a shove in the arse.

This evening, more than ever before, I love and admire that delightful dog Briska, poorly educated and unaccustomed to obeying orders from any human master or mistress (including Françoise), but more playful and smarter by far than oldies like Madeleine, Dédé and me. Let's face it: Dogs were made to be movie stars. Briska [to whom this blog post is dedicated], you're a cunning canine artist!

ADDENDUM: My neighbor Gérard Magnat, who's an experienced hunter, gave me a firm opinion on this incident. He concludes that Briska had come upon a wild boar drowsing on the creek bank. Apparently a boar isn't particularly impressed by a barking dog, even at close quarters. Roe deers, on the other hand, are terrified by dogs. The boar is sufficiently powerful to rip open the belly of a dog with a single upward thrust of its tusks. Gérard tells me that a boar is capable of carrying on its snoozing when surrounded by several barking hounds. But the boar will run like hell as soon as it sniffs the presence of a human being. Don't ask me why it finds us more fearful than dogs. So, according to Gérard, the boar was probably still snoozing calmly, and Briska was still barking furiously, right up until the moment I set foot in Gamone Creek. With all the barking, I would have been incapable of hearing a beast fleeing through the branches. It's a fact that Briska toned down her barking as Madeleine and I edged nearer. In fact, Briska was no doubt disappointed to find that we didn't appear on the scene like Saint George or Zorro, and rush into a mortal combat against the black dragon she had discovered.

Nice nicknames

Ever since I saw this amazing photo of Prince Henry of Wales wearing a Nazi insignia, I've been convinced that this lad has a detached screw floating around in his royal gray matter.

Yesterday, I saw his amateur video in which he designates comrades as "Paki" (slang for Pakistani) and "raghead" (slang for Arab). In the following version of the video of Mr Wales (as his military comrades call him), the subtitles are helpful, since Harry often mumbles and swears, and his instructions to comrades are delivered with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.



Today, we hear that Prince Charles and his sons use regularly the nickname "Sooty" for a dark-skinned polo-player of Indian origins.

Since Prince Harry seems to be fond of nicknames based upon facial features, I think it's high time we gave him one: a nice little nickname that sticks, evoking what Harry sees when he looks in a mirror.

I've often pointed out that Australians are misled when they imagine that their colloquial language is particularly rich and colorful. There is little in everyday Australian language that gets anywhere near the vast splendors and subtleties of colloquial French, regional dialects throughout France and argot (slang). Just look at the huge success of the Dany Boon movie Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, inspired by the colloquial language of the Picardie region. In the domain of Australian nicknames, however, there's a peculiarity that's so silly that it's hilarious. I'm referring to the common habit of using the nickname "Blue" for a guy with red hair. That's all we need for Prince Harry (who lived for a while in Australia). So, I nickname him solemnly, from now on, Blue... or Bluey for close friends.

Stone disk at Gamone

[This is a rewritten version of an article posted yesterday. The initial version of this article contained factual errors, which I've corrected.]

After purchasing my Gamone property, almost fifteen years ago (notarial document signed on 26 January, Australia Day, 1994), I discovered, among my newfound possessions, a stone disk.

The diameter of this heavy object is 76 cm and its thickness is 10 cm. The hole in the center, for the axle, is a square of width 4 cm. A decade ago, I was honored by the visit of the former Choranche postman, born here in my house at Gamone, Gustave Rey [1910-2001]. He used to ride a bicycle to deliver mail all around, and up as far as Presles. An unbelievable, heroic character! He gave me precious information that enabled me to write a lengthy article about the old vineyards of Choranche that has earned me my local reputation (which I owe entirely to Gustave) of being an authority about the ancient wine industry in Choranche.

Gustave laughed when he saw the stone disk leaning up against a linden tree. "We transformed this huge slab of stone into an outdoor coffee table. It weighs a ton. Then, one day, the wooden support suddenly broke. The stone fell on a guest and broke his leg." Having had a leg broken, myself, on the slopes of Gamone, I was attached to this story. It made me feel that our respective fractures represent some kind of common Gamonian destiny. The only thing that worries me at times, in this region where rocks are constantly falling from the mountain slopes, is that, one day, a huge hunk of stone might crush me entirely... but I don't really believe in the likelihood of such a calamity.

Meanwhile, my stone disk has remained posed against the giant linden tree, accompanied by an assortment of ancient blocks of limestone, at the entry into Gamone. The question remains: What was purpose of this disk? I imagined that it might be a millstone, used to transform cereals into flour, or maybe to press walnuts to extract their oil.

Not far from Gamone, at a mountain site named Ecouges, archaeologists have been working on the ruins of an ancient Chartreux monastery dating from the early 12th century.

Natacha took these photos of the site in the summer of 2005.

I learned with interest yesterday that, in the context of the exploration of these monastic ruins, archaeologists had discovered a major 12th-century quarry for the manufacture of millstones. So, I sent off a photo of my stone disk to Alain Belmont, the history professor at the university in Grenoble who's in charge of explorations at the Ecouges site. He replied immediately that, judging from the photo, my disk looked more like a grindstone, used for sharpening cutting tools, than a millstone. In fact, I should have realized this, right from the start, because I've seen sufficiently many old grindstones and millstones in the region to recognize the difference. Millstones are installed in a horizontal position, above a concave stone that holds the product that is being ground. And a considerable amount of energy is required, often from a stream, to turn the millstone. A grindstone, on the other hand, is set up vertically in a stout wooden frame, and it is turned by hand. My grindstone was probably used to sharpen tools such as this vineyard implement that I found at Gamone:

Ticket to Hell

This frightening photo shows my literary and intellectual hero, the Oxford professor and writer Richard Dawkins, standing alongside an old-fashioned London double-decker bus bearing an abominable message: There's probably no god.

Mindless souls who are sufficiently dauntless to ride on this red bus know full well the only possible destination for such a diabolical excursion. It ain't Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace and all that old nonsense, if you see what I mean. The terminus is for all Eternity... no way whatsoever of getting off the bus and taking a taxi back to the departure point.

Now, those obscure shrouded theological threats should normally frighten shit out of every congregation. But the old tricks no longer work... except, for the moment, in my native Australia (as intellectually dull and intolerantly alert as usual), where the bus concept is banned.

I invite you to Google "atheist bus" to find out all you need to know, and more, about this devilish project. Meanwhile, use Amazon to meet up with the books of our favorite atheist. Reading the beautiful words of Dawkins brings about the same joy, in a sense, as winning the lottery, encountering one's true love, raising a splendid family and living happily ever after. The only difference is that, in the red bus view, there ain't any old white-bearded gentleman named God looking down on events. As a matter of fact, it's remarkably nice and easy, during our brief span on the planet Earth, to be an atheist.

Paranoia

Ever since Apple announced that our hero Steve Jobs wouldn't be delivering the keynote address at the recent Apple Expo, and that this would be the company's final presence at this trade show, I have the impression that everybody is talking about this insanely geniustic guy, and that the entire business world is in a state of fever.

Or is it just me?

Cool spell

There's no doubt about it. The weather has been very cool throughout France over the last few days.

In the capital, to my mind, a man would have to be totally crazy to sit around with a bare bum in the mist and snow. But Paris, as we all know, is full of crazy folk...

I became aware that the global situation in France was particularly catastrophic when Natacha phoned me up, a few days ago, to say that she couldn't even go to work, alongside the splendid ecclesiastic citadel of the Bonne Mère, because Marseille was covered in snow.

I've been watching the slopes of Gamone from my bedroom window, wondering how long it might take for the snow to disappear.

My donkeys Moshé and Mandrin, protected by thick layers of fat and fur, have not been particularly troubled by the current conditions. The last few millennia of evolution have resulted in their using their front legs to claw at the icy snow and get through to grass. As for my beloved billy-goat Gavroche, he dines delicately in an Epicurean manner on weeds whose tiny heads emerge from the blanket of snow.

Meanwhile, from my bedroom window, I look down upon the rough stone wall built by François and me, and I watch the big blobs of snow melting, and losing their grip.

Of a morning, there's a marvelous moment when the sun's rays creep out from behind my magic mountain, the Cournouze, and impact the frozen landscape, transforming it into a blinding white mirror. At that instant, the grand old Sun seems to admonish the steamy slopes of Gamone: "Get thee back to Siberia where you belong!"

Apple deception

I've been using Apple products since 1981. In general, I've always looked forward to product updates, because Apple's new hardware and software are inevitably better, often in subtle ways, than what existed beforehand. Well, for the first time ever, I've experienced a reversal of this situation.

For the last couple of years, I've been using an excellent Macintosh word-processing tool named Pages, designed and sold by Apple. At the Apple Expo that has just taken place in California (which will go down in history as the last one at which the Apple company participated directly), many observers were shocked to discover that there were few announcements of new products from Apple. Personally, I was nevertheless happy to learn that an update to Pages had appeared. Last night, I downloaded a trial version of the latest version of this word processor and started to play around with it. I had imagined that, after testing the updated product to make sure that everything worked as indicated, I would purchase it immediately. Well, surprisingly, this is not going to be the case. There is nothing whatsoever in the new version of Pages to justify my paying 79 euros.

The most disappointing thing of all is a new Apple-hosted website service called iWork.com. The basic idea is that, if an author uploads his Pages files to this website, then his friends can view his writing, make comments about it, and keep copies of the files. On the surface, this sounded like a great idea for both my genealogical documents and my ongoing autobiography. The nasty truth of the matter is that the proposed service is incredibly slow. Besides, it doesn't really solve any problems that I haven't solved already by means of the nice technique of PDF files. On the other hand, there are new gadgets for Pages users who want to create cute newsletters with illustrations and gimmicky layout. Meanwhile, the glaring weaknesses of Pages still persist: namely, the impossibility of creating indexes and cross references to figures.

More snow at Gamone

The nasty stuff called global warming doesn't seem to have hit Gamone yet. This was the view, at midday, from in front of my log fire.

Sophia's Labrador genes take her outside regularly, for short inspections, just to make sure that we're not about to be attacked by polar bears, wild Eskimos or woolly mammoths.

Most of the time, though, she dozes in her basket on the electrically-warmed kitchen tiles.

Notice Emmanuelle's fine idea of giving our dog a pillow. I'm ashamed to realize that I never imagined that Sophia would appreciate such an object, let alone need it to support her heavy head.

Incongruous conflict

The ongoing conflict is Gaza is weird in many ways. First, there's the obvious question of why the Hamas suddenly decided, on December 19, to end their truce with Israel, and revert to their annoying habit of firing rockets at their neighbors. There are two plausible explanations, both related to elections. There will be a major election in Israel in February, and it's possible that Hamas leaders imagined naively that Israel wouldn't wish to get involved in military operations before then. Then there's the US situation, where Bush is about to leave, and Obama about to arrive. Maybe Hamas imagined that they could take advantage of a narrow "window" (to use space jargon) during which they could get away with mischief, with no threat of backlash.

A French military expert provided a quite different speculation for the Hamas decision. Everybody knows that defense research and development are leaping ahead in Israel, and that they'll soon have a sophisticated protective system capable of detecting and destroying the relatively primitive rockets that are being fired from Gaza. So, this might be a kind of last offensive fling for Hamas.

One has the impression that, if the Hamas really wished to end the beating that Gaza has been receiving from Tsahal, the obvious simple solution would consist of ceasing to fire any more rockets. But Hamas is basically a terrorist organization, and it simply doesn't reason this way. In a pure terrorist style, they're firing their rockets at civilian targets in Israel, and they're using their own Palestinian civilians as protective "padding" around their launchers.

In angering and provoking the military might of Israel, could it be said that the Hamas is behaving in a suicidal fashion? No, not really. Insofar as the Fatah and the West Bank "nation" have ceased to be credible, the Hamas has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Besides, we must never forget that they were elected by Palestinians to play exactly the kind of role that they're playing at present. It might be madness, but there's method in it.

Then, there's the unexpected mission of Nicolas Sarkozy, which started today. Like many people, I was surprised to see the Israeli minister of Foreign Affairs, Tzipi Livni, dropping in on the French president in Paris on New Year's Day... an hour or so after Israel's refusal to accept a cease-fire with Hamas.

It was barely a day earlier that an unofficial announcement on the Israeli radio revealed that the French president would be setting out, during the first week of the new year (that's to say, as of today, January 5), upon an in-depth peace-seeking trip through the Middle East. It was as if Tzipi Livni jumped the starting block, the following day, in deciding to visit Sarkozy in Paris. Does Livni really imagine that Sarkozy's rapid trip around the Middle East (including a visit to Syria) might bring peace to Gaza? Does Sarkozy himself imagine such a possibility? The answer to each of these questions is a resounding no. All this rushing around is merely a way of spending time and putting on a show while the dirty work of eradicating the Hamas is conducted in an orderly and systematic fashion, taking all the time that's required.

A terribly incongruous aspect of this conflict is the fact that the Hamas still refuses to recognize the existence of Israel... which is beating the hell out of Gaza. That's not merely an incongruous situation; it's frankly surrealist.

With the arrival of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the international diplomatic scene, are we likely to witness, at last, the creation of an authentic Palestinian nation in the foreseeable future? I don't think so. Little by little, that grand idea is being transformed into an impossible dream, a permanent legend.

Last but not least, the most incongruous thing of all is the fact that, in spite of Israel's understandable irritation about all those small rockets fired from Gaza, it would be absurd to suggest that Israel is genuinely upset in any serious way by the antagonistic behavior of Palestinians in general, and the Hamas in particular. Think of what's happening today in Gaza rather as a kind of training session or warm-up for the real action, which will come later on, against an authentic heavyweight enemy. I'm referring, of course, to Israel's determination to knock out, sooner or later (and probably sooner rather than later), the nuclear capacity of Iran.

Do-it-yourself posterity

In one of my favorite newspapers, The New York Times, an article by Frank Rich entitled A President Forgotten but Not Gone [display] sketches a brilliantly cruel portrait of George W Bush on the way out.

The time has come for Bush to start thinking about how he might be judged by posterity. Now, there's a French saying: You can never get better service than from yourself. In this spirit, the departing president has thought it appropriate and useful to publish a 52-page guide book on his legacy: a sort of How to Love and Admire Me in Ten Easy Steps.

[Click the photo to download the Bush legacy booklet.]

It's free, and it makes for pleasant reading. There are lots of illustrations, and I advise you to print it out on paper. Australian readers might take this piece of literature to the beach, and share it with friends. Here in chilly France, the best way of reading it, of course, is snuggled up in front of a log fire... but people will surely be disappointed to learn that there's no French translation of this opus.

Memorable French quotes of 2008

The excellent French weekly L'Express has assembled a list of the best French quotes of 2008 [display]. Not all of them can be translated meaningfully into English, while other quotes were pronounced by individuals who remain unknown in the world outside France. Now, since France has been my marvelous homeland for the last 45 years, I dare to imagine myself capable of evaluating the pertinence of these quotes. [I hope I donned enough safety gloves in that last sentence.] Here are my seven selections and French/English translations:







That sums up, more or less, this annus horribilis of 2008. Non-Latinists might consider that we're talking of an arsehole year.

Hilton sisters boost Aussie economy

The silly verb "to party", popular in The Sydney Morning Herald, might have been invented for Paris Hilton. Partying seems to be her principal vocation in life. But let's not criticize this filthy rich dumb doll. Her partying contributes economic aid to struggling nations... such as Australia. This photo of the Hilton sisters is charming:

Their look and style remind me of countless rough females I've glimpsed, over the years, on various well-known streets in certain big French cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille... These days, if I understand correctly, the Internet is revolutionizing this ancient profession... but I can vouch for the observed fact that certain determined craftswomen still operate from automobiles parked alongside the road between Grenoble and Valence.

That photo of Paris and her sister led me astray. Let me return to the economic actions of Paris and her sister Nicky... who apparently pocketed about $100,000 to lure guests to a New Year's Eve party at Sydney's Piano Room. Last Monday, Paris established a shopping record of the Sarah Palin kind when she took less than an hour to spend $5560 in Melbourne boutiques. This feat was praised by no less a commentator than Australia's acting prime minister, Julia Gillard: "I think that Miss Hilton is onto something very important, which is: Whether or not you want to have a holiday that's about fashion or a big night out, Australia's a great place to do it." Paris, thrilled, reacted instantly and spontaneously to Gillard's words: "I thought that was very sweet and it's true. I'm in Australia. I think it's important to help out, you know, the economy out here, everywhere in the world. And what's wrong with a doing a little shopping? It's New Year's. I need a New Year's dress."

No doubt about it: As long as Australia can count upon friends such as Paris Hilton, the alleged economic crisis is as dead as a stale Vegemite sandwich.

Post scriptum thought. That insanely large handout investment of $100,000 to entice Paris and Nicky Hilton to a social event in Sydney symbolizes a belief I've often expressed. There's tons of money Down Under. But much of this surplus cash gets funneled into the greedy clutches of foreign billionaires instead of being used to build roads, railways, bridges and a decent defense system.

Big movie mess

My 93-year-old uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker—a former dairy farmer from my birthplace at Waterview, near Grafton—has been living for the last ten or so years in the Australian seaside city of Coffs Harbour. At that place, in the midst of the sunny slopes dedicated to banana production, a local guesthouse operator decided to erect a tourist gimmick, made of painted plaster, that soon became famous: the Big Banana.

This banana was in fact the first of a long series of Aussie big things, described on Wikipedia [display].

In France, most ugly monstrosities of this kind feature the Virgin Mary. You find big virgins from one end of France to the other, often at prominent spots in the landscape where everybody is obliged to observe these hunks of stone and concrete. Hopefully, future communities will surely dynamite them and use the rubble to build roads...


In the domain of big things, totalitarian states inspired by a personality cult have invented a spectacular gadget that has rarely been exploited in our so-called free democracies. This is the idea of erecting a Big Me.

In France, not so long ago, a guy was sly enough to take this interesting idea to its logical conclusions. An adept of yoga named Gilbert Bourdin [1923-1998], from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, founded a weird sect known as Mandarom. He settled in the superb Provençal landscape of Castellane and erected various pseudo-Tibetan statues including a gigantic representation of himself that could be seen for miles around. Finally, in 2001, after tedious legal wrangling, the French army dynamited this eyesore.

In France, the term "turnip" is used (God knows why) to designate bad movies, and everybody understands this curious metaphor.

In my humble view, the award for the Big Turnip goes surely to the film Australia by Baz Luhrmann, which has just opened in France.

On Boxing Day, I drove up to Grenoble, with my daughter, to see the English-language version of this movie. Frankly, I find it a bloody catastrophe, from every point of view. I have no positive evaluations whatsoever concerning this bundle of clichés tied up with pink ribbons. Above all, the entire final part of Luhrmann's overblown product, presenting a make-believe World War II conflict in Darwin, is technically appalling from a movie viewpoint. You can't believe an instant of it...

Someone said that the cinematographic encounter between the pale giant Nicole Kidman (former wife of Tom Cruise) and Hugh Jackman (the alleged sexiest man on the planet) has the sensual intensity of a Vegemite sandwich. Although I've never tried to eat this Aussie shit, that sounds like a pretty good comparison. The film is so ridiculous that I have nothing more to say about it...

Divine job

One of the most amusing, if not fulfilling, jobs I can imagine would be speechwriter for the pope. Let me explain. No matter what a run-of-the-mill author writes, his/her words will be appreciated (in the best of cases) by a handful of readers and denigrated by others. Concerning words to be pronounced by a pope, on the other hand, the writer can be certain beforehand that millions of listeners and readers will love the stuff, absolutely, because they consider it, a priori, as inspired and infallible words straight from the mouth of the Creator's personal representative on the planet Earth. His director of communications.

Talking of absolutely divine documents, let me display the latest specimen. It's an English translation of a fragment of the pope's Xmas address to the Roman curia gathered in the Sala Clementina on 22 December 2008:

Because faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian creed, the Church cannot and must not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility toward creation, and must exercise this responsibility in public as well. And in doing so, it must defend not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation belonging to all. It must also protect man against his own destruction. Something like an ecology of man is needed, understood in the proper sense. It is not an outdated metaphysics if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected. In fact, this is a matter of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, disdain toward which would be the self-destruction of man, and therefore the destruction of the very work of God. What is often expressed and understood by the term "gender" is ultimately resolved in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wants to create himself, and to arrange always and exclusively that which concerns him. But this means living contrary to the truth, living contrary to the creator Spirit. Yes, the rainforests deserve our protection, but man deserves it no less, as a creature in whom a message is inscribed that does not mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its precondition.

This is excellent prose, of a journalistic kind, and I can imagine the pride of the holy ghostwriter seeing the pope's face light up when His Holiness discovered the slick but sloppy sentence: Something like an ecology of man is needed... With a tiny bit of rewriting, that sentence might have been elevated to a memorable quotation that would go down in literary history. First, I would have used the term spiritual ecology, which sounds much better, frankly awesome. Second, I would have written Man with a capital letter, in italics, to give it a scientific biological flavor.

Talking about capitals, notice the subtle way in which the rewriter jumps back and forth between the terms creation and Creator. I'll let you guess which noun refers to a familiar day-to-day process described by scientists, and which one designates the pope's special pal. Personally, I've always been so utterly awed by the amazing complexities of the archaic process that I like to spell Creation with a capital... but I now realize that this is a dangerous habit, since there are a lot of crazy folk out there who've succeeded in monopolizing the expressions Creationism and Intelligent Design to designate the accomplishments of the pope's much-celebrated magical Creator: the big old guy with a white beard up in the sky.

It's the latter part of this extract of the pope's Sala Clementina address that has stirred up shit, over the last few days, in the international gay and lesbian worlds. Read it carefully, to see what the anonymous speechwriter of His Holiness is actually saying. Here's the keystone of the literary lobbyist's subtle art:

What is often expressed and understood by the term "gender" is ultimately resolved in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.

The euphemism "self-emancipation" means, of course, assuming one's true sexuality. So, to call a spade a spade, the pope's Xmas speech turns out to be a blatant diatribe against homosexuality. Meanwhile, I reacted spontaneously: What the bloody hell is this word "gender" doing here? Gender, as we all know, is an ancient linguistic concept concerning nouns, which are often separated into formal groups designated as either masculine, feminine or neuter. Recently, it has become fashionable to apply the term "gender" to cultural differences between creatures of the opposite sex. For example, if a little boy likes to wear his sister's clothes, you might say (if you were incapable of finding a better way of putting it) that his behavior is of a female gender. But it's totally ridiculous to fall back upon the fuzzy gender concept, in human beings, as a criterion for distinguishing between those who have a penis and those who have a vagina. That difference (both the pope and his speechwriter should know by now) is called sex, and it's all a matter of so-called X and Y chromosomes... not to mention precise differences in the form of genital organs, which even the virginal pope, with a little bit of prompting, should be able to recognize.

I wondered whether the silly intrusion of this gender term might be a translator's error. Then I made an amazing discovery. The gender word has been included, in inverted commas, in the original Italian!

Ciò che spesso viene espresso ed inteso con il termine "gender", si risolve in definitiva nella autoemancipazione dell’uomo dal creato e dal Creatore.

The plot thickens! For me, it's clear. The pope's speechwriter is almost certainly an English-speaking priest, of Italian origins, who happens to be an inhibited homosexual. He can't bring himself round to talking of sex, so he prefers to say gender... even in the middle of a papal address in Italian! There's no other way in the world to explain the sudden production of so much pontifical rubbish. There's another clue as to the identity of the pope's speechwriter. He's clearly well-informed about ecological issues in Australia, because he refers both to the pope's recent visit and to the question of saving rain forests. So, maybe he's a homosexual Tasmanian priest of Italian origins.

Now, why am I so motivated by the idea of unveiling the identity of the speechwriter responsible for the pope's spectacular gender stuff? Well, ideally, if he were unmasked, he might get sacked for professional faults... such as throwing the word gender into a pontifical address. In that case, I might then be in a position to apply for this fabulous job. Meanwhile, I love this image of our electric pope, a real man's man:

I imagine Benny's bolts of blue lightning penetrating painfully the sin-stained backsides of gender miscreants...

Two virginity jokes

The first joke is factual. It concerns a delightful adolescent habit in the USA that consists of wearing a so-called purity ring and making a pledge of sexual abstinence up until one's marriage.

A survey has just revealed that serious young folk who have decided to make such a pledge and wear such a ring end up having premarital sex just as readily as everybody else. In other words, the purity rings and pledges are mere symbols of wishful thinking. But here's the joke... which would be funny, were it not distressing for those concerned. Whenever young people in this virginal category happen to fall into the screwing trap, they're likely to be confronted with more sexual problems than the others, simply because—like bad boy scouts who haven't respected their Be Prepared motto—they're overwhelmed by the consequences of sudden unexpected passion. They've never envisaged using condoms, which makes them perfect candidates for unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

My second joke is a nice little Xmas tale.

A young girl has just been examined by her doctor (or physician, as they say in the States).

DOCTOR: Well, young lady, I have good news for you and your male companion. In about eight months' time, you'll be the parents of...

GIRL: Excuse me for interrupting, Doctor, but I don't have a male companion.

DOCTOR: Let me put it another way. You'll be able to inform your most recent male partner that you're now...

GIRL: I'm sorry to correct you, Doctor, but I've never been involved with a male partner. I've never had any kind of relationship whatsoever with males.

DOCTOR: Then you've surely been receiving treatment in artificial insemination from a gynecologist...

GIRL: I'm sorry, Doctor, but I have no idea what you're talking about.

The doctor walks to the window, opens it and starts staring silently up at the sky.

DOCTOR: The first and last time this happened, long ago, a fabulous star appeared in the sky. This time, I don't want to miss it.

Day of death in the Holy Land

It's absurd to apply the expression "Holy Land" to the tiny segment of hell on Earth named Gaza, where dozens have been dying in the wake of the alleged anniversary of the birth of a man of peace and love. In this bloody conflict, Palestinians in Gaza have been dying under Israeli missiles: some 200 according to this afternoon's count.

BREAKING NEWS, MONDAY MORNING: The Israeli blitz has so far killed over 310 Palestinians, including 51 confirmed civilian casualties, including women and children. There are more than 1400 wounded.

Here's a horrible haphazard video, with a taste of death:



For ages, people have been tiring themselves talking about what might be done to put an end to the terrible conflict between Israel and Palestine. Should there be two autonomous nations? Should a corner of Jerusalem be set aside as the capital of a future Muslim nation named Palestine? Should Israelis cool down a little about their alleged biblical rights to the land of milk and honey? Should Palestinians relinquish their matter-of-fact birth rights? What can be done to make these people, if not love one another, at least cease to hate themselves mortally? Is there any solution?

A first step in the direction of seeking a solution to all this hatred and bloodshed would consist of eliminating ancient religious antagonism. The planet Earth would need to have the political power to urge citizens of the world to wake up to life. Would this be possible? Sadly, I don't think so. Humanity is a tragedy.