Unwitting crusaders

If you're thinking about using a gun to commit a murder, and you need some inspirational words to accompany the deed, you only have to dig around in the Bible and you'll surely find everything you need. The cultivated killer played superbly by Samuel L Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction had the habit of calling upon the godly exclamations of the prophet Ezekiel (submerged in a sauce of f-words) to preface his executions.



US soldiers in Afghanistan were surprised to learn that mysterious letters and numbers inscribed on the gunsights of their personal combat weapons were in fact references to passages of the Bible.

In the above photo, for example, the reference JN 8:12 guides the soldier to the gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 12, in which Jesus says: "I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." An observer must imagine, of course, that the light of life is reserved for the guy squeezing the trigger, not for the unfortunate fellow at the other end of the bullet's trajectory. Besides, you get a certain idea of the sense of the biblical quote if you replace the word "light" by "sight" (short for gunsight), and "walk" by "fire". And maybe the final expression, "light of life", should be replaced by "sight of death".

These gunsights, manufactured by a family company named Trijicon [click the logo to visit their website] based in Michigan, were supplied to US, British, Australian and New Zealand troops fighting in Afghanistan. Funnily enough, not even their superiors seemed to be aware (so they say) that these soldiers were unwitting latter-day crusaders, whose arms were protected symbolically by the fighting words of a Christian god.

Journalists are already referring to weapons bearing such references as "Jesus guns". One US official even compared this affair with the trivial but notorious phenomenon I mentioned in my article of 28 December 2009 entitled In God we don't trust [display].

Why can't Americans leave God alone (along with the ungodly) and get on with their business?

Beautiful burqas

Maybe burqas might be nicer if they came in an assortment of different colors, like those delicious French cookies called macaroons, made of egg whites and ground almonds.

Dumb cops

Just in case certain readers of Antipodes have been busy navigating their space ships in remote corners of the galaxy over the last few days, preventing them from keeping up with the latest fantastic news on the planet Earth, here's a summary of a recent hilarious fiasco within the most powerful and advanced nation in the world.

As everybody knows, the great US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been getting ready to pounce upon one of America's most notorious public enemies: Osama bin Laden. Click the FBI seal to access the list of their most wanted fugitives, where bin Laden appears in third position.

Back in the days when an authentic flesh-and-blood bin Laden had the habit of posing in person to get his photo taken, he looked like this. But that was long ago. For years now, like a movie celebrity or a princess chased by paperazzi, he has made a point of avoiding photographers. During this time, he has no doubt aged, and we would like to have an idea of what he looks like today. Consequently, FBI image specialists have exploited high-tech equipment to produce the following plausible portraits of present-day bin Laden... with and without a beard.

Nice work. It's amazing to see the miracles that can be achieved when skilled US specialists use nec plus ultra state-of-the-art electronic devices capable of artificially aging the image of a fugitive who has disappeared from the daily scene. The only problem is that this resuscitated bin Laden appears to have an identical twin, as revealed in the following exhibit:

This bold fellow who dares to usurp the appearance of Osama bin Laden is a Spanish politician, Gaspar Llamazares, the former leader of Spain's United Left communist party and the caucus spokesman in the Spanish parliament. Not surprisingly, he wasn't too happy to find his face on the FBI's latest wanted-dead-or-alive poster. Besides, the Spaniard reacted in a strange unsportsmanlike way to this masterpiece by America's cutting-edge cops: "Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this, but mine certainly is." Really, how dumb can you get?

Snake oil

I've always suspected that one of the reasons why certain disgruntled customers complain that snake oil doesn't cure all their ills, as it's supposed to do, is that they simply forget to obey the all-important instructions on the label: Shake well before use! Applying a reputable brand of snake oil without having shaken the bottle vigorously for a sufficiently long period of time would be as silly as swallowing a suppository instead of inserting it into an appropriate orifice... or vice versa in the case of an aspirin for a headache. I think it was Confucius, or one of those wise old guys, who put it nicely in his famous dictum about not stuffing pearls up the rear end of swine, or something like that.




I've just heard that, on the final day of January, in the UK, there'll be a massive happening that's as potentially dangerous, for each of the 300 participants, as it would have been to drop in for a cocktail and salted peanuts with Jim Jones at the Peoples Temple in Guyana back in 1978. The event that's planned at 10.23 am on January 30th is a little like a cross between Russian roulette and a nation-wide rave party. Let me give you the ghastly details of what all these crazy folk plan to do. All together, at exactly the same instant, they're going to stage a mass homeopathic overdose session. In other words, they plan to gulp down, deliberately, huge quantities of homeopathic products: enough milligrams to cure a horse of herpes.

And why are they doing this? Well, in a nutshell: simply to let the world know whether or not they can survive this terrible ordeal. Statistically, some of the participants will have indigestion or back aches at the start of the experiment, whereas others are likely to be constipated or maybe suffering from flatulence. Well, believe it or not, they don't even care whether this massive homeopathic treatment will cure them or not. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. Who knows? Maybe there'll be miraculous switch-over cases in which a fellow who hasn't achieved anything whatsoever on the throne for at least a week will suddenly find himself gurgling melodies like the Paris Pétomane. [If ever you've never heard of the latter gentleman, click here to obtain information about him on Wikipedia.] As I said, the daring participants have nothing to win or lose. They're participating altruistically in this operation for science alone, like Louis Pasteur inoculating himself against rabies. [Did he really do that? I'm not sure he did. Maybe I'm confusing him with another hero. But it sounds like a nice idea, whether or not it's a fact.] Through the selfless participation of these 300 brave souls in this operation, future researchers will have access to vital raw data revealing what happens when a group of volunteers receives a massive overdose of homeopathic snake oil. In any case, I suggest that it would be fitting if we onlookers were to accompany them, in this ordeal, with our prayers.

Sophia's mother

Whenever I find myself reminiscing seriously with Sophia about personal matters, I take pleasure in reminding my dog that, once upon a time, I was a close friend of her dear mother Laïka. This reddish animal of no obvious race, who belonged to my neighbor's daughter Anne-Sophie, was truly the dearest dog I could have ever imagined. I got to know her well, as a visitor and intermittent well-fed guest at Gamone, long before the birth of Sophia. There's a simple anecdote that I adore. When Anne-Marie got married, I was invited to the civil ceremony on a nice spring morning up in the village of Presles. When I arrived, guests were strolling around on the village square, waiting for the mayoress of Presles to call us in to the tiny town hall. Suddenly, I received a thump in the back, as if I had been hit by a football. It was the paws of my friend Laïka, who had recognized me in the crowd, and wanted to welcome me to her mistress's marriage.

Shortly after Laïka's puppy was born, Anne-Sophie phoned me to announce that they had a dog for me. It was a total surprise for me, but Anne-Sophie was aware of my friendship with Laïka, and she had decided unilaterally that I should receive one of Laïka's puppies.

I chose the name Sophia, not because of Anne-Sophie, but because it has always been—in my mind and in my ears—the sweetest Greek word that exists: wisdom as in philosophy (literally, the love of knowledge).

No sooner had I received my puppy than Anne-Sophie ran into some kind of a personal problem, and she asked me to take care of Laïka for a couple of weeks. So, Sophia's earliest days at Gamone were spent in the reassuring presence of her mother.

Finally, Laïka left us, and my puppy became the unique mistress of Gamone. Later, Sophia herself had a splendid daughter, named Gamone, who lives with Christine in Brittany... where she has received Sophia's old kennel (seen above). So, I've been acquainted with a beautiful dynasty of three females: Laïka, Sophia and Gamone.

Like God, the G-spot doesn't exist

My son François found that this cover of the excellent French weekly Charlie Hebdo, with a drawing by Charb, brings to mind my article entitled Fashion lexicon [display]:

[Click the drawing to visit the French website of Charlie Hebdo.]

Can we talk of anything else?

The latest news from Haïti evokes a third of a million homeless and starving. At the present moment, in our smart little blogs, can we talk of anything else?

Is there anything else to talk about, at this instant in 21st-century time, when countless human sisters and brothers are lingering over there in Haïti, in destitution, pain, hunger and appalling helplessness?

A news item that shocked me greatly mentioned local people using human corpses to build barricades against an unidentified enemy.

I have a terrible feeling that we Westerners are living comfortably through a period comparable to the time when Hitler was burning masses of human bodies just down the road, and refined neighbors carried on talking about nice things to avoid admitting that their delicate nostrils detected the stench, or that their delicate minds detected unspeakable evil.

The only way out of this calamity will consist of taking that entire land under the guardianship of certain wealthy nations. But which countries will in fact be prepared to assume this role? And under the guidance of what authority? Needless to say, these future would-be tutors must not be mere scavengers, gourmands of Caribbean carrion.

Meanwhile, as I said: Can we indeed talk decently of anything else?

Caribbean tragedy

My humble Antipodes blog can do nothing, of course, to alleviate the suffering of the survivors of the Haïti tragedy. Besides, the purpose of such a blog is not to attempt to solve problems of any kind whatsoever, but merely to engage in the apparently futile preoccupation of recording one's fuzzy impressions of what seems to be happening in the Cosmos, both at home and afar. And what has happened in Haïti is a huge tragedy that is making a profound emotional impact—through contemporary communications channels, including the Internet—upon observers throughout the planet. An emotional impact is one thing, though, but we remain frustrated through our incapacity to be anything more than passive observers. TV spectators in many nations, seeing images of aircraft arriving at Port-au-Prince (landing under manual control, since the airport's infrastructure no longer exists), admire surely the decisions of their respective governments to fly in aid and professional helpers. Meanwhile, the situation evokes a single impression: confusion.

It is the inevitable confusion of a nation whose thinking and everyday actions have never been geared to handling predicaments of any human kind, let alone natural catastrophes. It is frightening to learn, on this evening's TV news, that one of the countless buildings destroyed by the earthquake was the central prison, and that all its former inmates are henceforth roaming the stricken countryside. In fact, even before the news about these escapees, nations flying in aid have been obliged to envisage comprehensive security systems to protect their operations and their operators. Already, in news reports, the terrible theme of looting has appeared.

We imagine naively that Man can generally collaborate with Nature, more or less, for the betterment of human society. But the situation becomes terribly tough when the enemy is suddenly both unleashed Nature and criminal Man. For once, global warming brought about by human industry is totally innocent.

Supply store raided

After being informed by Tineke and Serge that their wild birds seem to prefer a straight diet of sunflower seeds (rather than the mixture of many seed varieties sold in supermarkets), I adopted that solution for my bird house.

Inside, there's an ample stock of sunflower seeds, while balls of fat and seeds hang on nails around the perimeter of the structure. For the birds, it has become a popular supply store. Funnily, visitors often tend to wait their turn to enter the store. When a rapid flyover detects the presence of an unidentified bird inside the store, a new visitor often perches in the branches of the little tree seen in the lower lefthand corner of the photo. The store has front and rear doors. So, as soon as a bird leaves from one door, another bird enters through the other door.

Early last night, in the darkness, an unexpected intruder raided the birds' store, consuming two balls of fat and seeds. Fortunately, I was able to identify the raider as she was strolling back towards her warm wicker basket in the kitchen, grasping a third ball in her snout, in anticipation of a late-evening supper.

It remains a mystery whether Sophia actually ate the seeds along with the tasty (unidentified) fat, or whether she spat them out, one by one. In any case, my rose pergola has also become a popular meeting-place for birds. So, that would be an ideal dog-proof place to suspend a new stock of balls.

Lance Armstrong's team

This is an amusing presentation of Lance Armstrong's new RadioShack team:



Lance has just arrived in South Australia to start preparing for the forthcoming Tour Down Under. He's constantly active in the Twitter arena, where his address is lancearmstrong.

Religious no longer a protected class

I've just finished reading a fine book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, written some fifteen years ago by the US philosopher Daniel Dennett. Last year, I had encountered an extract of this work in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins.

A short article by Dennett, entitled Religious no longer a protected class, has just appeared in The Washington Post [display]. He sums up his theme as follows: "Activities that would be condemned by all if they were not cloaked in the protective mantle of religion are beginning to be subjected to proper scrutiny." Dennett points out the existence of a "double standard that exempts religious activities from almost all standards of accountability", and he insists that it be dismantled immediately. He compares the violence done in the name of religion to "crimes of avarice", and he looks forward to the day when clergy who are "telling pious lies to trusting children" and "making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer" might be convicted of fraud.

Dawkins has commented: "What an utterly splendid piece by Dan."

Fashion lexicon

In France, certain mediocre journalists throw around technical terms from the clothing world without going to the trouble of making sure that their language is correct. Concerning garments that have recently been at the heart of lengthy discussions here in France, the following images indicate clearly the difference between a niqab and a burqa:

As you can see, a niqab is a far more revealing robe than a burqa, in that outsiders can actually see the wearer's eyes and distinguish vaguely the shape of her skull. Now, the reason I've brought up this fascinating subject is that I'm intrigued by an enigma that Christians might describe as Byzantine:

If a naked female were to drape herself in a see-through burqa (or niqab, for that matter) and stroll down the Champs-Elysées, should she be hailed as a militant feminist or arrested for indecent exposure?

Dawkins interviewed by Riz Khan

There's a nice and intelligent two-part interview of Richard Dawkins by Riz Khan on Al Jazeera English.





I found this splendid graphic on the Dawkins website:

A devil's advocate might point out that the message of the graphic works in both directions. Reading it from right to left, we might imagine an atheistic researcher in molecular biology who's suddenly transmogrified (I like that verb) by the pope's latest homily. He rips off his white lab coat and dashes crazily in the direction of the nearest store that sells Catholic supplies, so he can purchase a brand-new set of Rosary beads. Then he whips out his iPhone with the aim of finding the closest church. He arrives, panting, on the threshold of a lovely old stone edifice, where a priest rushes out magically to welcome him...

Like my blogger friend Badger [display], I still have the heart of a child. I love far-fetched fairy tales... particularly when it's me who invents them.

Irish folk

And here's to you, Mrs Robinson.
Jesus loves you more than you will know.
Woah, woah, woah.
God bless you please, Mrs Robinson.
Heaven holds a place for those who pray.
Hey hey hey. Hey hey hey.

Simon & Garfunkel

BREAKING NEWS: I knew I wouldn't be particularly original in associating the famous song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel with today's tale of the Irish couple. In Ulster, over the last week, downloads of this song have apparently shot up by a factor of twelve. Other joyful fallout from this affair is the sudden fame of Mrs Robinson's 21-year-old friend Kirk McCambley, who has become a new gay icon in the UK. Gay, this youthful gigolo? No, not at all. The reasons for his fame are a little more subtle. Iris Robinson had become an arch-enemy of the gay community when she declared on the BBC in 2008 that homosexuality was an "abomination", and that she knew of gay men who had been successfully transformed into heteros through medical therapy. Today, the gay community sees poetic justice in the fact that Mrs Robinson has been metaphorically screwed by Pretty Boy Kirk.

Donkeys in the snow

With a thick blanket of snow covering the slopes for the last two days, my donkeys Moshé (right, with a beige head) and Mandrin (left, with a gray head) were no doubt starting to get a bit hungry. But they're perfectly capable of scraping away the snow with their hoofs and then burrowing in with their snouts to find good green grass.

They nevertheless appreciate a bit of hay. Here, they're standing with their hind legs on a sloped embankment, which distorts the shape of their bodies. Seen from behind, they're both about twice as fat as any self-respecting donkey should be... so, I'm not really worried about the possibility of their being undernourished because of the snow.

They're Provençal donkeys, which were used by shepherds during the seasonal migration of their sheep to summer pastures up on the slopes. Judging from their hairy mammoth look, I reckon that the ancestors of these delightful beasts knew a thing or two about wintry conditions.

In this photo, you can make out the dark cross on Moshé's back. When I purchased my six-months-old friend in 1994, the farmer who had bred him told me that my donkey was marked with this cross because he belonged to the same race as the animal that had carried Jesus into the Holy City on Palm Sunday. It's the donkey equivalent—you might say—of the stigmata. So, to respect the noble religious ancestry of my baby beast, I named him Moshé (Hebrew for Moses). Since then, I've discovered that all Provençal donkeys have a dark cross on their back. They form a vast ecclesiastic order, like the White Monks. But I don't know whether all these blessed donkeys have remained pious believers.

Cols

When you're talking about shirts and sweaters, the French noun col means collar. For a French bartender drawing beer from a tap, the col is the head that must appear at the top of the glass. For somebody serving wine, the col is the neck of the bottle. For a woman giving birth, the col of her uterus, through which her baby will encounter the world, is the narrow necklike part of her anatomy known in English as the cervix. So, col is a word that reappears in all kinds of contexts.

For people who live in mountainous regions, a col is a gap in the cliffs that can often be used as a pass enabling animals and humans to move from one valley to another. From my house, I can see two such mountain passes. To the north, the Col de Toutes Aures—literally, the "pass in several directions"—is an intersection of four roads on the territory of Choranche, one of which leads up from the vicinity of my house, while another takes you down into the valley at the delightful neighboring village (with a small castle) of St-André-en-Royans. To the east, on the other side of the Bourne, the Col de Mézelier separates the two mountains that I see from my house: the Cournouze and the Baret.

The reason I'm talking about nearby mountain passes is that the mayor of Choranche, Bernard Bourne, dropped in at Gamone a couple of days ago to give me news about the road down to Pont-en-Royans, which remains closed because of threatening rocks up on the slopes of Mount Baret. In particular, he informed me that certain people are contemplating a project for opening up a road that would enable the residents of Choranche and Châtelus to reach the valley through the Col de Mézelier. Now, that idea pleases me, not only for practical reasons, but because of the historical dimension of this itinerary. That was the route that enabled the Chartreux monks to travel to and from their vineyards at Choranche.

Their monastery of Val Sainte-Marie was located a dozen or so kilometers to the south of Choranche, at Bouvante in the Drôme, just beyond St-Jean-en-Royans. In 1543, they purchased a property at the Clos de Salomon (now known by two names: the Chartreux or Choranche-les-Bains), a few hundred meters away from Gamone. Their building is still standing today:

The track between le Val Sainte-Marie and their vineyards at the Clos de Salomon was known, for centuries, as the Path of the Chartreux, and it went over the Mézelier mountain pass. The following diagram indicates the general layout of this area:

In this diagram, I've only indicated the presence of the two most prominent mountains: Baret and the Cournouze. But readers must realize that most of the white area in this diagram (which is not drawn to scale) is a maze of cliffs and steep mountain slopes, with the two rivers flowing down from the right to the left. For the last century or so, a road has existed between Choranche and the region in which the Val Sainte-Marie monastery (now in ruins) was located. An observer, today, finds it difficult to understand why the monks didn't simply skirt Pont-en-Royans, to the left of the Baret, on their way to the Clos de Salomon. We are so accustomed to the modern road that we easily forget that this itinerary was unthinkable at the time of the monks. Arriving from the south, the monks would have had no problem in coaxing their mules across the Vernaison, a little further upstream from where today's road crosses that river. But, from that point, they would have found it impossible to climb up towards the Picard Bridge that leads out of Pont-en-Royans. Instead, they made their way up to the Col de Mézelier. After moving through the pass, it's quite likely that they crossed the shallow waters of the Bourne in the vicinity of the present-day Rouillard Bridge, before continuing their journey eastwards to the Clos de Salomon.

Today, this itinerary is once again "unthinkable", temporarily... because of the danger of rocks in the section of the road that lies between the two bridges over the Bourne. And that's why I'm thrilled by the idea that the Path of the Chartreux, through Mézelier, might be opened up for modern vehicles.

POST-SCRIPTUM: Readers in faraway lands such as the USA and Australia are likely to find the above details quite boring. I ask them to realize that I'm talking of primordial preoccupations for the residents of this secluded valley. So, please forgive me for being parochial.

Snow gauge

My marble-topped café tables make a perfect snow gauge for Gamone.

The thickness of the snow layer, this afternoon, was 30 centimeters.

Making a movie about a poet

For ages, I've imagined the idea of creating a movie adaptation of an enigmatic and beautiful book by Rainer Maria Rilke with a curious title: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In my article of 19 June 2009 entitled Work in progress [display], I described my project in this domain. Since the end of summer, when I finally got around to completing a French-language movie script, I have imagined naively that I would rapidly encounter individuals who would be delighted to collaborate with me on this project, or to at least encourage me in various ways. Sadly, this has not been the case. Certainly, Christine has helped me greatly with the technical task of producing decent French, but she remains essentially opposed, I believe (for reasons that I can vaguely fathom), to the very idea that Rilke's novel should or could be brought to the screen.

I was reassured to learn that the New Zealand Academy Award winning cinéaste Jane Campion has created a movie about the English poet John Keats [1795-1821].

Here's the trailer:



Jane Campion explained to a journalist: "When I was blocked by such-and-such a situation, I asked my fifteen-year-old daughter Alice for advice. She is sensitive and intelligent, and she's not afraid of expressing her emotions and her sentiments. That spontaneity, that freshness and that naturalness were most useful for me."

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to develop my script on Malte in such a sympathetic environment. And yet I'm persuaded that Rilke and his hero Malte are vastly more interesting personages than Keats, particularly from a cinematographic viewpoint. I remain confident. We'll see...

French Lady Chatterley

I spent the evening of January 1 watching, on TV, the full-length version (2 hours 40 minutes) of a splendid French movie produced in 2006: Lady Chatterley and the Man in the Woods. It's a cinematographic adaptation, by the French director Pascale Ferran, of the second version of D H Lawrence's famous novel, whose third version is better known as Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The role of Lady Chatterley is played exquisitely by Marina Hands, daughter of the British stage director Terry Hands and the French actress Ludmila Mikaël.

A little-known French stage actor, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, plays the role of Parkin, the virile man in the woods. His performance is perfectly solemn and low-key, as befits this solitary personage who says little but senses profoundly everything around him.

As soon as the relationship between the lady and the lord's employee started to warm up physically, I wondered how Pascale Ferran was going to handle the explicit sexual scenes and language that had once shocked prudish English society in Lawrence's notorious novel. Well, I soon discovered that everything has been handled superbly, in a style of Garden-of-Eden innocence. And, when heavy rain pours down upon Eden, Adam and Eve are not afraid of getting wet.

When the movie first came out, in 2006, a critic said: "Every frame of the film seems alive with a sensuality that is both wild and intelligent." For a movie based upon the work of an English novelist, I would say that Pascale Ferran's film is astoundingly French. But was D H Lawrence really a typical English novelist? Of course not. He was a sensitive author of the world in the style of James Joyce and Lawrence Durrell. Nevertheless, the harsh class-conscious sentiments expressed by Lord Chatterley reflect faithfully the political setting of early 20th-century Georgian England. But the first two versions of Lawrence's novel, entitled simply Lady Chatterley, are not as tediously oriented towards society and politics as the third version, entitled Lady Chatterley's Lover. Personally, as a reader, I've always preferred this excellent French translation of the initial version, prefaced by the author's widow, Frieda Lawrence.

Talking about D H Lawrence, I wonder if many of my compatriots are aware that, in 1922, this great writer actually spent a few months out in the New South Wales seaside suburb of Thirroul, near Wollongong. This experience resulted in a plausible political novel entitled Kangaroo, published in 1923... which, in spite of its title, has nothing to do with bush marsupials.

Funny catwalk, amused cats

One of the funniest aspect of this video is the way in which two males can split their sides laughing at the problems encountered by a female wearing high heels.

Would women get an equally good laugh out of watching a guy trip over the long pointed toes of his Santiago boots?