[Click the image to see the trailer.]
Hey diddle diddle,An audacious American flight pioneer (maybe of non-British descent) was apparently deprived of this cultural background, which left him ill-prepared for an ordinary calamity.
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
This "latest US news" illustration from Le Petit Journal is an offering from the online Gallica service.
I was a naive lad of 17, enrolled as a science student at the University of Sydney, when I stumbled upon a book that would influence me greatly, at an intellectual level, for the rest of my life: Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
It's really weird (for want of a better word) that our two cerebral hemispheres function like a pair of complementary but quite different machines. Together, they provide their owner with the mysterious illusion of an entity that he/she refers to as "me". What's spooky in Weisman's story is the fact that this "me" feeling (I was going to call it "me-ness", but this neologism looks crazy) can gaily shunt out an entire cerebral hemisphere, as if it were an undesirable—or, in any case, unrecognizable—alien.
Both books have been written by the same scholars: an Israeli, Israel Finkelstein, and an American, Neil Asher Silberman. And they're "better than the Bible" (a sentiment that brings to mind John Lennon concerning the relative popularity of the Beatles with respect to Jesus Christ) in the sense that Finkelstein and Silberman don't beat around the burning bush. You don't have to worry about the authenticity of their explanations. They go straight to the facts, and demonstrate that the Biblical stories cannot possibly be descriptions of historical realities.
Today, few serious scholars persist in imagining that the stories of the Hebrew Bible describe real historical events. And there's no authentic factual evidence whatsoever (apart from the words of the Bible) enabling us to consider that real individuals such as Moses, David and Solomon, etc, actually existed once upon a time. Does this mean that everything in the Bible is make-believe? Not exactly, because the inspiration for most of the Biblical stories was surely derived from various real events and iconic personages. So, we have no right to say that everything's pure fiction. But neither does anybody have the right to claim that the books of the Bible relate authentic history.
In Australia, on the other hand, a dynamic consumer movement opposing the palm-oil industry has existed for quite some time.
The product is potentially "deadly" both for human beings with cholesterol problems, and for the jungle creatures (such as orangutans) affected by deforestation followed by palm plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
To be perfectly coherent in the environmental combat against palm oil, we should even abandon a splendid old French product: traditional Marseille soap. Now I have a friend down there, in Marseille, who won't be too happy when she hears me saying that. In fact, Natacha recently gave me a stock of this fine soap that's large enough to keep me clean for years to come.
They've just produced a report, based upon their so-called uSwitch Quality of Life Index, which concludes that "the UK and Ireland are the worst places to live in Europe, while France and Spain are the best".
Naturally, Sophia often seems to wonder what it is that drives Fitzroy to run around crazily all the time, instead of sitting calmly on his backside and meditating.
Meanwhile, Fitzroy uses his little snout and sharp teeth to pick up, and maybe tear apart, anything he finds, such as this lavender bouquet.
Leaves (in no shortage at Gamone) are interesting light-weight acquisitions.
My ex-neighbor Bob is impressed by the apparent happiness of Fitzroy. As my former rugby-player friend puts it: "Clearly, that dog's not traumatized by his arrival at Gamone!"
He could be asking me what it's all about, or whether I'm in control of the situation. He might be curious about my background, and my credentials for looking after dogs. He might be saying to himself: "What a splendid male specimen!" (Me, that is, not the dog.) Or rather: "Jeez, what a dumb-looking master!" In fact, Fitzroy's stare is probably no more than a visible indication of his simple desire to exist calmly and confidently, without wondering about anything in particular. Often, as I approach my 70th birthday (the day after tomorrow), I've said to myself that it would have been great to be born a dog. In fact, though, I don't regret anything.
Let me offer Rabbi Rabbit the following energy-inspired video sequence, by the great French stand-up comic Pierre Desproges. It's a parody of the famous Duracell publicity, which featured a tireless little pink rabbit who remains active long after all the competitive batteries have worn out their steam and ceased to function.
Monday morning offering from Gallica. A fragment of the Fugue in F minor of the Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti [1660-1725] is played on the harpsichord by the Belgian performer Aimée Van de Wiele [1907-1991].
For reasons unknown, my previous post about the shipping of the electronic version of my novel All the Earth is Mine [display] was premature. Finally, Smashwords has confirmed that they shipped it off yesterday to Apple. So, once again, I repeat my request to US readers to let me know, in a week or so's time, whether they can find my book in their iBooks catalog (which remains invisible for an individual such as me, residing here in France). If senders include an email address, I'll be pleased to forward them a PDF version of my novel.
Watching this amateur video of Richard Dawkins standing up in a London crowd and speaking out against the pope, I was immediately reminded of the great Bertrand Russell, back in the Cold War days, addressing the throngs at Trafalgar Square on the dangers of nuclear weapons.
There were several reasons for my surprise:
Readers should visit the website of the excellent Australian organization handling this project. You'll be able to reach your own conclusions concerning this project in Australia… and I'm aware that you won't necessarily react negatively, as I have done. I'm not suggesting for a moment that there's anything wrong with this plan to hand out cheap laptops to kids in Australia. I'm merely pointing out that it's a charitable enterprise, initially designed for Third-World inhabitants, and that it's weird to see my native land falling back upon international US-inspired charity in order to solve internal educational problems.
Admittedly, if poverty has reached the point at which, due to malnutrition, it's impossible to find a sturdy cyclist, then we're stuck with a real problem. I must talk with Lance Armstrong, one of these days, to see if he has any worthwhile ideas on this question...
Lovers of religious art might marvel at the sensitivity and tenderness behind this flowery "Mary and child". The Virgin appears to be depicted as a gypsy woman. From a physical viewpoint, she's the kind of female who might be put aboard an airliner bound for Romania if Sarkozy's police were to find her hanging around in France today.… a professor handed him back his portfolio, saying that his work was ludicrous. And there was another young man in rags there, and he, too, had his portfolio returned with scorn.
His name was Adolf Hitler. He was a native Austrian. He had come from Linz.
And Father was so mad at the professor that he got his revenge there and then. He asked to see some of Hitler's work, with the professor looking on. He picked a picture at random, and he said it was a brilliant piece of work, and he bought it from Hitler for more cash on the spot than the professor, probably, could earn in a month or more.
Only an hour before, Hitler had sold his overcoat so that he could get a little something to eat, even though winter was coming on. So there is a chance that, if it weren't for my father, Hitler might have died of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910.
The subject of the painting purchased by Otto Waltz was the Minorite Church in Vienna. I believe that Hitler's painting of this place exists in reality (maybe in the hands of a private collector), but I can't find a copy of it on the web. Meanwhile, people tend to forget that Hitler was a painter of religious subjects, just as they tend to forget his love for children.
I can't imagine why Joseph Ratzinger has tried to give the impression that Hitler didn't even believe in God, that he was an evil atheist.
Well yes, I can in fact imagine why the pope has talked this way. He's playing his role as the descendant of Saint Peter, the great fisherman. In fishing terms, Ratzi's allusions to atheism and secularism might be thought of as bait, designed to catch his critics. He knows that we'll all get caught by starting to waste our time (as I've been doing) producing evidence to prove that Hitler and the Nazis were not at all atheists. And while everybody's talking about atheism and secularism, they won't be talking about the sexual abuse of minors. Well played, Ratzi! But we haven't really been duped.
It's the local ambulance station. As a boy of eleven, I used to ride my bicycle past this building of a Monday evening, for the weekly get-together of the Wolf Cubs, which took place in a hall just behind the ambulance station.
The symbol on the façade of the red-brick building is a Maltese cross. Indeed, many ambulance services in my native land have been created by a 19th-century British-based charity organization, of an Anglican flavor, known as St John Ambulance.
Now, how and where does Saint John fit into this picture?
Before attempting to answer that question, let me jump back to the starting point in my title: a medieval scholar named Bruno, whose life and actions inspired the foundation of the order of Chartreux monks. [Click the image to access my presentation of this man.] In 1084, Bruno arrived in the Cartusia mountains (not far from where I live), ostensibly to set up a secluded hermitage with a handful of Christian companions. The official tale is that this middle-aged German-born scholar moved abruptly, for spiritual reasons, from his comfortable ecclesiastic quarters in Reims to the wilderness of Cartusia. This account raises certain credibility problems. Personally, I've never believed that story… which necessitates furthermore a miraculous event: a dream in which the geographical location of Cartusia is made manifest. So, what were the authentic reasons for Bruno's arrival in this part of the world? The answer is linked, I believe, to an extraordinary project imagined by one of Bruno's former students, Pope Urban II. That project consisted of organizing a gigantic military expedition aimed at chasing the Muslims out of the Holy City of Jerusalem. The First Crusade...
I've always imagined that the pope had sent Bruno to Cartusia on a geological mission, to negotiate the extraction of iron ore for the manufacture of crusader weapons… but that hypothesis is too complex to be developed here in my blog. Meanwhile, I tend to think of Bruno (perhaps unfairly) as the individual whose teachings apparently motivated the minds of the men who invented the crusades.
This photo shows the majestic stone portal of the Hôtel-Dieu, with a poster indicating its new name: Espace Van Gogh. In France, the former expression (literally, God's hostel) designates ancient hospitals, often alongside a cathedral, in various great cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes and Angers.
In Arles, on Christmas Day 1888, Van Gogh used a razor to slash an ear lobe. Several months later, observing the painter's abnormal mental state, people in Arles signed a petition to have him interned at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. The other day, I took a couple of photos of the hospital courtyard, covered in flowers.
Van Gogh did a painting of this same courtyard.
Two other Van Gogh paintings present the bridge at Trinquetaille.
This is the bridge that Christine's grandfather Paul Marteau would have crossed regularly, as a youth, when walking back and forth between his native Trinquetaille and the main city of Arles. It was destroyed by Allied bombers in August 1944. When Christine and I were strolling between Trinquetaille and Arles the other day, we were using a bridge that was built in 1951 to replace the old one.
At a seaside resort in Brittany, a few female visitors had got into the habit of strolling back to their residence while still attired in their bathing outfits. The local women, wearing their traditional costumes (including bonnets, flowing skirts and clogs), decided to flagellate the bathers with bunches of stinging nettles and thorny blackberry branches. The crime of the bare-legged bathers, for which they were being chastised, had consisted of attracting the lusty gazes of the husbands of the Breton women.
If so, then this suggests that bloggers such as Myers (whom I read regularly) are not necessarily crying out futilely in the wilderness.
