Sustainable driver

I grew up in the midst of four-wheel vehicles. (I was also immersed, from as far back as I can remember, in an exciting environment of vehicles of a two-wheeled kind: track-racing bicycles, but that's another story.) My grandfather Ernest Skyvington was the Ford dealer in Grafton, and his son Bill (my father) was employed for a while as a mechanic in this business. In the late '40s, my mother, Kath, used to drive us to school in a Jeep, while her Walker family (dairy farmers in Waterview, South Grafton) even got around in an old Pontiac.

Well, in spite of this, I never acquired any kind of lust for automobiles. I obtained my driver's license before leaving home but, during my time in Sydney, when I was employed as a computer programmer with IBM, the idea of purchasing a car never entered my mind. Apart from racing bikes, my only objects of fascination and desire (to call a spade a spade) were computers and romantic female nymphs who played the piano. It was only in France, after seeing Christine at the wheel of a primitive Citroën, that I finally got around to purchasing my first car.

These days, I believe that one of the most noble roles of an automobile in rural France consists of taking you to a nearby train station where you can maybe hop on to a fabulous TGV (high-speed train) to travel rapidly to another corner of the land. Besides, if your car happens to be rather ancient (like my 1996 Citroën ZX), then you can leave it parked near the train station with no worries that it might get scratched or bumped or stolen.

Here at Gamone, there has never been a garage... because automobiles didn't even exist at the time my house came into existence. So, my car has always stayed out in the open, in the sun, rain, hail, ice, snow, etc. At certain times of the year, oil drops from the blossoms of my giant linden trees and leaves a dirty black stain on the roof of the car. At other times, it gets covered in red dust blown across the Mediterranean from the deserts of Africa. Once, I used to scrub the car clean every so often. But now, I generally wait for the rain to lend a helping hand, and I only intervene when it's impossible to see out through the windows.

At the height of summer, it's a luxury to be able to invite Sophia to jump into the car for a trip down to the Bourne, for a swim. Then, on the return trip, the soaked dog, with muddy paws, lies down on the upholstery of the rear seat to dry herself. Later, I end up taking out my vacuum cleaner to remove a thick coating of dog hairs from inside the vehicle. Another luxury consists of being able to use my car as a utility vehicle for transporting rubbish, or for picking up a few bags of cement. For bulkier stuff, I hook on a light trailer.

Christine once remarked that the old façade of my house at Gamone (before restoration) bore scars, like an adventurer who had traveled through many dangerous lands.

This is not surprising in the case of a modest residence that was probably erected shortly after the French Revolution of 1789. My car, likewise, has collected a respectable set of scars, picked up mainly in Grenoble, Valence and various Dauphiné villages.

During the time that I've owned my Citroën ZX, my former neighbor Bob has got around to consuming his fifth vehicle. I have no trouble understanding why that's the case, because I've been in cars with Bob at the wheel (including my own). He's convinced that I'm an untalented and frustrating driver, because I don't whip my vehicle like Ben Hur in his chariot. Bob considers that, since the resale value of my Citroën is now zero, and since it still runs perfectly (in spite of its mileage: some 260,000 kilometers), then the logical economic solution is to carry on driving it until it falls to pieces. I agree with him. I'm the proud owner of a sustainable automobile.

This afternoon, I took the old Citroën along for its obligatory annual technical inspection. At the end of his 30-minute procedure, using all kinds of sophisticated gadgets, the fellow said: "Everything's perfect. The ZX is a sturdy Citroën model. Normally, you should be able to get another 100,000 kilometers out of yours."

Over the years, there have never, of course, been any miracles. Various parts of my Citroën have indeed given up the ghost from time to time. But, instead of throwing up my arms in anguish and rushing out to purchase a new automobile, I simply get the broken parts replaced in an excellent little Speedy garage alongside the Leclerc supermarket in St-Marcellin. I've got to know the mechanics fairly well, and they never try to cheat me on their invoices. Besides, they use an excellent computer system, built by their colleagues in Paris, which enables them to track down required spare parts efficiently and quickly.

In fact, the ultimate luxury for an automobile owner such as me is to leave the vehicle at home and go out on foot for a stroll to the village or in the hills, accompanied by my dog.

I've often said that I would wait until I had a garage here at Gamone before contemplating the replacement of my old car. Well, as of this morning, after an intense 24-hour period of earth-moving operations carried out by my friend and neighbor René Uzel, there's a broad ramp of rocky earth (very muddy for the moment) leading up to a corner of the house, which could soon become my garage. Observers wonder if it's wide enough for a garage. My Citroën has an external width—between the tips of the rear-view mirrors—of 2 meters. The distance between the stone wall of the house and the concrete pillar is 2.5 meters, and it's 6 meters deep.

Up until now, it was quite impossible to see the entire northern façade of the old house from this viewpoint. The roof on the right has been recently renovated, as you can see from the pale-colored wood. The empty zone beneath the western side of the house (where you can see a tall metal ladder leaning against a roof rafter) was used by former owners of Gamone as a hay loft. Besides the future garage, there's an available area of 60 square meters, much of which lies above the ancient stone cellar that was used as a winery. The following photo, taken at the southern side of the house by my daughter Emmanuelle in the summer of 1994, shows me dragging out this hay to burn it. I didn't yet own any farm animals, and I was afraid that the hay might catch fire.

One of these days, I would like to board in the upper part of the garage opening, and install a pair of big wooden doors. I would also cover the ugly new concrete pillar by a layer of stones.

I had intended to build a firewood-shed to the right of the new ramp, up against the embankment. In facts, I now hesitate, because I'm not sure that this view of the ancient house should be marred by the presence of a flimsy new wooden structure for storing firewood. There's an obvious constraint concerning the location of a shed for firewood. It must be located not far from the spot where my neighbor Gérard Magnat drops off from his big truck. That's to say, the shed must be near the road... since I don't want to find Gérard driving across the "lawns of Gamone" (where the inverted commas highlight the fact that my modest lawns have little in common with those, for example, of Windsor Castle). Maybe I could erect my future wood-shed (dimensions of about 1.5 m x 4 m) on the flat area to the left of my mail-box, which I have been using, up until now, as a place for hanging out my washing.

One hesitates (as Christine knows full well) before introducing any kind of new constructions into an ancient place such as Gamone. Even though it's a quite humble site (that adjective pleases me), with no pretensions towards esthetic splendor, I dislike the thought of polluting inadvertently this ancient environment, of a beautifully minimalist and austere sub-Alpine nature, with my Mickey Mouse erections.

BREAKING NEWS: I agree with Christine (who has always been my guide at Gamone) that the stark frontal aspect of the house, viewed from the north (as in the above photo of the new ramp), should not be disfigured by any kind of construction, neither up against the new embankment nor in the vicinity of the mailbox. The rustic charm and spirit of the place reside in its basic austerity, which must remain unaltered. We therefore have the impression that a convenient and inconspicuous spot to stock firewood might be beneath the overhanging roof on the slope to the right of the house.

I often think that my property at Gamone is a reflection of my life. Over the last few years, in the style of a Buddhist monk (which I'm definitely not), I've been whittling Gamone down to its bare but essential sustainable elements: me, for example.

Tomorrow's computing concepts

Many years ago, when I was visiting the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston for French TV, I recall meeting up with a young guy on the staff of their AI (artificial intelligence) group who was apparently paid to do little more than dream up ideas of a science-fiction kind about the future of computing. This friendly one-man think tank gave me a copy of his latest paper, which was a lengthy list of possible inventions, described with an abundance of freshly-coined technical words and abstract philosophical expressions. I remember that he used the AI acronym as a noun, designating what most people at that time would have called a robot. Apart from that, though, little else in his futuristic wish-list was within my conceptual grasp.

Apparently this tradition still exists at MIT. Yesterday, my friend Brahim Djioua (himself an AI researcher at the Sorbonne) sent me a link to a fascinating video about a visionary fellow named Pranav Mistry, a graduate of the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) who went on, while working on his doctorate at MIT, to dream up a fabulous approach to computing as it might exist in the near future. The following video speaks for itself, since Pranav has actually implemented many of his dreams in the form of real devices, but you may have to watch the video several times (as I did) for the astonishing messages to get through clearly.

Nativity rites

Jean Sarkozy, the president's son, married his adolescent sweetheart, Jessica Sebaoun-Darty. The following photo shows the father and the son, accompanied by their respective wives.

A son, Solal, was born to Jessica and Jean on 13 January 2010. A few days ago, I saw in the press that the baby was subjected to the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which I find archaic and physically revolting. The Christian rite of baptism is less bloody, but just as stupid today, at the start of the third millennium. In both cases, an innocent child is being enthroned as a member of an elite body of religious believers, and this membership is being established solemnly at a time when the tiny creature at the heart of the ceremony is not yet capable of any degree of intellectual discernment. What utter nonsense, perpetrated by mindless adults!

In a recent article entitled Little gods [display], I mentioned my reading a book by the great atheist author Christopher Hitchens. On the question of circumcision, I was moved by the parts of that book in which Hitchens condemns "child abuse" in the form of "sexual mutilation". He even gives us the gory details of the way in which circumcision has been performed, as recently as 2005 in New York, by certain Hasidic fundamentalist foreskin-removers. Nasty stuff!

I predict a day in the not-too-distant future when a joyful nativity rite of a new non-religious kind will become, as it were, standard practice. The DNA of the newly-born individual will be examined and stored permanently (as permanently as possible) in a great database of the kind that would bring joy to the heart of a Mormon genealogist. And this rite would symbolize (literally, you might say, since the DNA sample is in fact a huge set of symbols) the baby's passage into the great planetary congregation of humanity.

For the moment, those who come closest to this nativity rite are the researchers in genealogy who get their DNA tested (like me). But it remains a relatively superficial affair, since only the Y-chromosome of males and the mitochondrial DNA of females are in fact examined. And it's a private firm that holds on to the DNA samples. So, I can't really count upon the hope—if ever that were my intention (which it isn't)—of my being cloned at some future time.

No sooner had I finished writing this article than I came upon a CNN story [click the baby photo to display it] indicating that US babies appear to have their DNA tested systematically, with medical reasons in mind... much to the distress of certain parents.

Insofar as humans seem to like ceremonies based upon rites of passage of various kinds (birth, marriage, death, etc), I can well imagine creative Americans (the sort of people who have transformed Halloween into a planetary event) who would find ways of transforming the baby's DNA test into a kind of celebration, with music, food and drinks, solemn speeches and even short readings from the books of Dawkins, performed by students of genetics. This new nativity rite could be called DNAtion (rhymes with creation, confirmation and ordination).

Choranche Circus

At the Choranche Circus, don't expect to see any clowns... apart, maybe, from me. I shouldn't really have to make an excuse of that kind, because tourists who drop in on Piccadilly Circus won't normally see too many clowns. In the everyday language of the Ancient Romans, known as Latin, a circus is a round ring. And the mountains and cliffs around my adoptive village of Choranche do indeed form an oval.

Critics might point out that the Cournouze mountain, on the southern side of the Bourne, is located on the territory of Châtelus, not Choranche. They would be wrong, in fact. The upper surface of the mountain lies within the commune of St-Julien-en-Vercors, in the département of the Drôme. But what the hell about administrative boundaries. For me at Gamone, the Cournouze—as I've often pointed out—is my own sacred mountain: my mythical Uluru... which happens to be the first magnificent specimen of godless Creation that I witness every morning, as soon as I look out of my bedroom window.

In my recent article entitled Second look at iPad weaknesses [display], I evoked the immensely rich Flash approach to website creation... which is not reflected, unfortunately, in either the iPhone or its miserable big half-brother iPad.

Admittedly, at Gamone, this is the wrong time of the year to get involved in landscape photography. The lighting is minimal, and everything looks uniformly grayish. But, this afternoon, I had a sudden urge to wander up the road with Sophia to take a few photos, which I then patched together with Photoshop and inserted into a Flash context. If you click the above winter photo of the Cournouze, you'll see the resulting website: a sweeping half-circle panoramic view from Gamone towards the Vercors plateau, the eastern edge of the French Alps. To stop the horizontal scrolling, move the cursor to the middle of the image. I would hope that this modest Flash exercise might have the merit of providing you with an approximate visual idea of the mountains and cliffs that enclose and enthrall me. Nothing, of course, beats being here with me and Sophia.

Sister's blog

My sister Anne Skyvington, whose married name is Onslow, has just started a blog called Philomel. [Click the banner to access Anne's blog.]

Anne lives in Coogee, on the coastal outskirts of Sydney. Her husband, Mark Onslow, is a university professor who has become a world expert in the domain of stuttering therapy. I shall publish details on my Antipodes blog, as soon as they become available, concerning the professional and cultural activities of my sister and her husband.

Second look at iPad weaknesses

Concerning Apple's iPad, my recent article entitled Latest creation [display] was inadvertently but grossly over-enthusiastic. Preoccupied by the amusing phenomenon of Steve Jobs presenting his latest Apple baby, I did not even attempt to say what I thought personally about this new device.

Well, having looked into this affair a little more closely, let me now say that I fear the iPad will be a total marketing flop. Why? For the simple reason that I can imagine few reasons why anybody would ever want to use such a gadget.

For a moment, I had imagined the iPad as a blown-up version of the iPhone. This, of course, was poor thinking on my part: I was forgetting that you can't make phone calls with an iPad. Located midway between an iPod touch (an iTunes reader and portable game player) and a full-blown computer such as a MacBook, the iPad might be thought of as combining the advantages of both. Well, I now believe that this is not in fact the case. In trying to be a little bit of a mobile device, and a little bit of a true computer, the iPad turns out to be neither!

A particular aspect of the iPad shocks me greatly. Like the iPhone, it won't display Flash websites. From that point of view, the iPad reminds me of a French novel entitled La disparition, written by Georges Perec [1936-1982], which doesn't contain a single instance of the letter "e", which is normally the most widely-occurring vowel in the French language. In the same way that I wouldn't rush to buy a gimmick novel that doesn't contain the letter "e", I wouldn't rush to purchase a gimmick Internet machine that doesn't offer Flash.

And why exactly is it so important for me (as for millions of other web-users throughout the world) to have a computer that can handle Flash? Let's start with this blog. Normally, in the right-hand column, there are various small banners pointing to my associated websites. Well, if your computer can't read Flash stuff, you simply won't see any of these links. Over the last few years, I've built a score of websites on all kinds of subjects ranging from my personal genealogy through to cultural stuff about the medieval hermit Bruno who's considered today as the founder of the Chartreux order of monks. Well, without Flash, you won't be able to examine the slightest element of all this work of mine. And a corollary of this antiquated state of affairs is that I wouldn't be able to use an iPad to modify anything whatsoever in my web creations. So, to my mind, the iPad gadget is strictly for exotic individuals with specialized computing needs such as Beefeaters in the Tower of London, Druids, Mormons, six-day bike-riders, Creationists and other yokels.

Having said this, I hasten to add that, if anybody were to send me an iPad as a gift, I would be immensely happy to receive it. I would pass it on immediately to the neighboring kids in Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne, who love to play games. As for me, I'm too old for that. Besides, in all my life, I've never, at any moment, been an inveterate games-player. For me, there has always been only one big game, with fascinating and mysterious rules, called Life. Nothing to do with iLife.

POST-SCRIPTUM: Somebody extracted all the positive words and expressions employed by Steve Jobs and other Apple executives during the recent presentation of the iPad, and strung them all together in the following video:



It's hardly reassuring to find that a new product needs such excessive verbal icing sugar.

Irish ancestors

This little American girl, Ann Dunham [1942-1995], had an ancestor named Mary Kearney.










Meanwhile, this little Aussie girl, Kathleen Walker [1918-2003], also had an ancestor named Mary Kearney. However the two Marys belonged to different generations, separated by half a century.

Jumping back in time to the end of the 18th century, we find that the Kearney ancestors of both girls were Irish. Ann Dunham had an ancestor Joseph Kearney, born around 1794 in Co Offaly (province of Leinster). One of Kathleen Walker's ancestors was a Michael Kearney, born around 1785, probably in nearby Co Clare (province of Munster). Admittedly, Kearney is not an unusual surname in Ireland. Nevertheless, with a minimum of speculation (which remains an essential ingredient in genealogical research), one could well imagine that these Kearney males were cousins, if not brothers.

Let's jump forward in time, to 1961. In Hawaii, Ann Dunham married a Kenyan gentleman named Barack Obama. This photo shows Ann holding their son named Barack Obama II, born on 4 August 1961:

As for the other little girl, Kathleen Walker, she was my mother.

It's a fact that both Ann Dunham and Kathleen Walker, brought up in continents on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, can be identified as great[3]-granddaughters of Kearneys settled in south-west Ireland at the end of the 18th century, within a radius of a hundred kilometers or so. As I've pointed out proudly in chapter 4 of my monograph entitled A Little Bit of Irish [display], the Kearney ancestors of my mother Kathleen Walker lived in the legendary village of Spancil Hill.

Old phoney has finally gone

Over the last couple of decades, it was hard for a former fan such as me to believe that the goddam old guy still actually existed somewhere in flesh and blood, in a remote corner of his native land. For ages, the great US novelist J D Salinger—who happened to have been present as a soldier at Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day—had become a recluse, who shunned contacts with the outside world.

Like countless adolescent readers throughout the planet, I was convinced that the teenager Holden Caulfield, hero of The Catcher in the Rye, was indeed my alter-ego. Fortunately, though, by the time I got around to reading this ground-breaking work of fiction, I had already left school, so my parents and former teachers escaped the unpleasant ordeal of enduring an obnoxious Caulfield imitator swaggering around and using coarse American slang. But I'm sure that younger school generations of brooding adolescent fans of Salinger filled in for me amply.

I was particularly fond of Salinger's novellas featuring the weird but wonderful siblings of the Glass family: Seymour, Buddy (the narrator), his sister Boo Boo, the twins Walt and Waker, and the two youngest children Zooey (male) and Franny (female).

Last Wednesday, when the old story-teller finally locked for the last time his secret vault of tales, it might have been a great day for Steve Jobs and his iPad, but it was definitely a bad day for Bananafish.

Smear trial

I've already mentioned a messy high-profile court trial in Paris referred to as the Clearstream affair, because of the name of a Luxembourg bank [display]. Nicolas Sarkozy saw himself as the victim of a smear campaign in which Jacques Chirac's former prime minister Dominique de Villepin seemed to have played an evil role.

Sarkozy had even committed the fault, at the start of the trial, of publicly stigmatizing DDV (as Villepin is often called) as "guilty". And he had also threatened to have the culprit hung up (metaphorically, we assume) on a butcher's meat hook. Well, the verdict was announced this morning, and DDV was cleared of all charges. Needless to say, this outcome is a significant moral blow for the president.

Sarkozy reacted by announcing that he did not intend to lodge an appeal. On the surface, that looked like a charitable decision, designed to end the feud and bring about appeasement. In Sarkozy's announcement, however, there's just one tiny mistake of a legal nature, which is quite unexpected in the mouth of a former professional barrister. In this kind of trial, French law simply does not allow the plaintiff (seeking symbolic damages) to lodge an appeal. This blunder, while of no practical significance, is surprising. Is the president flustered? Does he need a holiday break?

BREAKING NEWS: The state prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin has just announced that an appeal (emanating, not from Sarkozy, but from the prosecutor's office) will indeed be lodged. It will be interesting to see whether this extra display of judicial ferocity will have a favorable influence upon Villepin's thinly-disguised plan to be an opponent of Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2012. The former prime minister might end up being cast in a positive underdog role. Having said this, I should point out that the term "underdog" doesn't sound quite right in the case of a distinguished Gaullist gentleman and former French diplomat whose full name is Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. Son of a senator, Villepin is not in fact a member of the French aristocracy. It was only during the 19th century that this high-sounding name was concocted out of the quite ordinary surnames of paternal and maternal ancestors. But his elegant style as an orator, his noble political principles (concerning, for example, the US invasion of Iraq) and his silvery mane of hair make him out to be a most racy underdog.

All the way from the Sun

Old-timers of my generation still have a slight moral problem adjusting to Germany. If my parents had told me an unbelievable bedtime story (which they never did, because they weren't that kind of parents), it might have been about Auschwitz. Memories of Hitler still alarm me viscerally, and prevent me from opening up my heart spontaneously to any and all messages that might be designated as Teutonic. Having said that, I must talk of today. It goes without saying that we can now listen—we must listen—to sounds that are infinitely removed ("all the way from the Sun") from the Nazi era. The Scorpions, for example:



The pure Germanic voice (in English!) of their vocalist Klaus Meine is surely that of Goethe, before the Fall. He might be Young Werther. In any case, Klaus Meine and his Scorpions are surely Young Europe. And they're about to set out on a final world tour.

Latest creation

In some twenty minutes, Apple founder Steve Jobs will unveil the company's latest creation, which has been the subject of broad and intense speculations over the last few months. Everything leads us to expect the announcement of a new product midway between an iPhone and a portable Mac.

There are still certain dull journalists and commentators who have not yet grasped the profound sense of the Apple phenomenon. They refer to Apple buzz as "hype", and they imagine that people who get excited about forthcoming new products are mere groupies or Apple addicts. In fact, this excitement stems from an observed fact: Apple products have a habit of being revolutionary.

Back at the beginning of the '80s, as a freelance journalist in Paris, I received an invitation from Jean-Louis Gassée to test a product from his newly-created company, Apple France. It was an Apple II computer. Jean-Louis told me: "William, this machine is going to change your life." Insofar as I was already enraptured by computers of all kinds (having started my professional career as an IBM programmer in Sydney in 1957), I half-believed Jean-Louis. Today, retrospectively, I can believe him totally. Apple products have indeed changed my life.

People are excited about Apple announcements for the simple reason that they suspect that new products, about to be seen, could indeed change their lives in significant ways. We're not necessarily talking about profound changes of the philosophical kind experienced when you read a book by Richard Dawkins, for example. Personally, though, I'm convinced that the two kinds of changes—the Dawkins revolution and the Apple revolution—are not actually as remote from one another as might be imagined. In both contexts, there's the same kind of spirit of change in the air.

Now, let's see what Steve Jobs is about to offer us...

BREAKING NEWS: So much more intimate than a laptop:

iPad

I find this whole thing absolutely fabulous. The live media coverage (audio/text only, unfortunately) recalls the arrival of man on the Moon. Magnificent!

"Holding the Internet in your hands,
it's an incredible experience!"

Little gods

I've been reading a fine book, god is not Great, written by Christopher Hitchens and published some three years ago, at roughly the same time as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Respecting the author's choice, I've reproduced the title with a small g at the beginning. In fact, Hitchens might have used a plural title, gods are not Great, since his explanations of "how religion poisons everything" could be applied equally well to Judaism's Yahveh, Christianity's God or Islam's Allah. No matter which god you happen to have got involved with, the poison is equally ubiquitous and noxious, and the only healthy antidote is atheism. In fact, the latter medicine is not at all nasty, particularly when it's dissolved in a large volume of science, poetry, art and love of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small (including one's fellow humans).

Hitchens is engaged upon exactly the same battlefield as Dawkins, and he's an equally formidable warrior, but I had the impression that the journalist and the professor are probably not fighting side-by-side in the same battalion. Both men are products of England's great Oxbridge system, and they both write brilliantly. The vast scientific erudition of Dawkins causes him to be seen inevitably as a kind of refined donnish gentleman, never too far away from his cherished ivory tower. Hitchens, on the other hand, comes across as a more worldly chap, who has rubbed up against all sorts of personalities and ordinary people, while never suffering fools gladly (as St Paul put it).

He paints a particularly black portrait of individuals who were notorious for having a dark religious side. This list includes the Biblical personage known as Abraham (of whom Hitchens talks, surprisingly, as if he really existed), John Calvin (described as one of the "really extreme religious totalitarians", and "a sadist and torturer and killer"), Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Pope Pius XII (who sent an "evil and fatuous message" to Hitler in 1939), Mother Teresa (whose claims to sainthood would appear to be based upon a false "miracle"), the Dalai Lama (who "tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her"), the US preacher Billy Graham ("whose record of opportunism and anti-Semitism is in itself a minor national disgrace") and the new pope Joseph Ratzinger ("who recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain 'remission of sin' to those who attended"), etc. The handful of famous figures who emerge unscathed by the wrath of Hitchens (whose Twitter name is hitchbitch) have the allure of atheistic angels or saints, if such creatures could be deemed possible. I was thrilled to discover that the following six members of this elite have always counted among my personal intellectual heroes: Socrates, William of Ockham, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King and Bertrand Russell.

Above all, the literary voice of Christopher Hitchens is, not only invigorating, but indeed cathartic. He's truly a "no bullshit" writer, who generally has firsthand knowledge of the topics he tackles. I find it reassuring to hear that this leftist polemicist (a naturalized American since 2007) has gone to the trouble of actually visiting places such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Anniversary date: January 26

Today is the 70th anniversary of the marriage of my parents, King Mepham Skyvington [1917-1978] and Enid Kathleen Walker [1918-2003]. Their marriage was celebrated on 26 January 1940 (in the middle of the period in Europe known as the phoney war) in the Anglican cathedral of Grafton (New South Wales, Australia). As for me, I was born eight months later, on 24 September 1940.

A quarter of a century ago, my grandfather Ernest William Skyvington [1891-1985] died on this same day, 26 January 1985.

In a more recent domain, today is the 16th anniversary of my purchase of the Gamone property at Choranche. On 26 January 1994, the former owner, Marcel Gauthier, sold me his place through a transaction drawn up by the notary François Guiliani at Saint-Marcellin.

Today is also, of course, the 222nd anniversary of the arrival in Sydney Harbour of the eleven vessels known as the First Fleet, under the command of Arthur Phillip. Aborigines consider that this anniversary marks the sad moment when their ancestral land was taken out of their hands forever by intruders from the other side of the planet Earth.

Let us hope that, one day, new events will replace the present anniversary.

A Republic of Australia with a new flag, a new national day, an appropriate relationship with the indigenous people of the continent, and a renewed spirit of audacity!

Handmade French ovenware

In my article of 7 November 2009 entitled Memorable cassoulet [display], I may have misled readers at the level of the illustration. It wasn't a photo of a cassoulet that I myself had actually prepared, but rather an image that accompanied the cassoulet recipe I had found on the web. If I refrained from showing you a photo of my own cassoulet, at the moment I wrote that blog, this was mainly because my production was stored away in the freezer in three or four Pyrex dishes.

The photo I borrowed was excellent in that it shows clearly the various ingredients: beans in a light tomato sauce, fragments of pork ribs, Toulouse sausages and pieces of duck confit. [Click here for an explanation of the latter product. If, instead of paying a fortune for duck confit in cans, you wish to learn from a US website how to prepare it yourself, then click here.] But that photo was slightly misleading, too, for a reason I shall now explain. The final stage in the preparation of a dish of casssoulet, just prior to its being served, consists of smothering it in bread crumbs and baking it until the sauce starts to bubble up through the crust. In other words, when the dish of cassoulet is placed upon the dining table, it's not particularly photogenic, since you can't really see any of its ingredients, which remain hidden beneath the brown crust of bread crumbs.

There's yet another reason why I preferred to borrow that photo I found on the web. It's almost sacrilegious to present diners with a cassoulet that is not served up in the familiar brown ceramic earthenware dish used traditionally down in Gascony. Here in the Dauphiné, I was totally incapable of finding this kind of cooking dish in supermarkets or crockery shops. It was only yesterday, after having used the web to track down a producer of ovenware, that I finally obtained several beautiful specimens of handmade dishes for cassoulet.

The pottery firm Digoin, located in Burgundy, dates from 1875... but they've never got around to dealing directly with retail customers. Besides, their French website [display] remains rather rudimentary. Here's a presentation of some of their typical earthenware products:

One of their specialties is this splendid old-fashioned vinegar jug:

Finally, I had to order my Digoin cassoulet dishes through a crockery shop in Saint-Marcellin. The amazing thing is that the beautiful handmade cassoulet dishes (each of which comes in its own unique shades of brown) were not particularly expensive: less than ten euros each. I'm amazed and thrilled to discover that ancient manufacturers of this kind still exist in the modern world.

Now, having said all this, I must point out that I'm still not ready to show you a photo of a steaming Digoin dish of Gamone cassoulet. The reason, this time, is that cassoulet is simply not on my personal menu for the next few days, since my refrigerator is stocked with lots of fresh food that I must eat before starting to take stuff out of my freezer. Besides, as you might have gathered, a dish such as cassoulet—combining beans, sausages, pork and duck—is primarily a tasty and tempting source of calories to be consumed (washed down with red Bordeaux) when it's freezing outside. Today, the weather at Gamone is quite mild: not nearly chilly enough for cassoulet.

Latest avian construction

Alongside my bird-house, I've just erected a bird-post, designed to carry three balls of fat and seeds at a height that Sophia cannot attain.

Both the bird-house and the bird-pole are both becoming popular places for mésanges [tits].

Now, if you want to see what my compatriots think of the perfectly normal English term tit, to designate birds of the Paridae family, use Google with the words "Australia tits".

Last night, there was a small New Year ceremony at the town hall of Choranche, which enabled residents to obtain the latest news about the risks of rocks rolling down from Mount Baret. I asked Bernard Pérazio, the locally-elected regional councilor, whether a project for a tunnel beneath the Trois Châteaux promontory above Pont-en-Royans was a purely science-fiction affair. First, he informed me (surprisingly, needless to say) that his only recollection of such a project was a vague line that somebody had once traced on a local map, which he had seen furtively many years ago. In other words, our man in charge of all past, present and future civil-engineering projects in the region was apparently unaware that such a project might be feasible. Nevertheless, he answered me precisely: "William, from a technical viewpoint, the project you evoke is not at all science fiction. But it soon becomes science fiction... from a financial viewpoint." Fair enough. That was better than hearing him say that I didn't know what I was talking about. I ventured a comment concerning the current situation: "Bernard, if we had a short tunnel from the other side of Pont-en-Royans through to Choranche, the current problem due to rocks rolling down from the summit of Baret would not bother anybody." Bernard's instantaneous reaction proves that he's totally obsessed by the threat of falling rocks. "We would soon have rocks rolling down from the Trois Châteaux onto automobiles emerging from your tunnel." I didn't bother trying to get into any further discussion with Bernard, who's obviously in a constant state of anguish A few minutes earlier on, he had admitted, in front of us all: "Whenever my phone rings during the night, I'm always afraid that it's somebody who's about to inform me of yet another rockfall."

At the end of the speeches, we all gut stuck into delicious traditional Epiphany tarts, made with ground almonds. They were accompanied by sparkling white wine [called Clairette] from the town of Die [pronounced dee], down on the edge of the Provençal Drôme region. I was amused to find that Monica, the ex-wife of a former mayor of Choranche, was running around collecting all the crumbs from the Epiphany tarts. "It's for my mésanges. Throughout winter, I have to feed about fifty of them in my garden." I was almost jealous, but I didn't say so. At Gamone, at any one time, I never have more than half-a-dozen mésanges in my garden. The difference, I think, is that Monica's garden lies just alongside the River Bourne, with dense woods on the far side. So, it's an attractive setting for tiny winged visitors... including bats, apparently. Maybe, though, I might look into the idea of baking Epiphany tarts for my bird-house.

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.