There are some fine sites in France that this refined lady should visit, or at least admire from the outside. Here's a historic place in Grenoble:
At Gamone, the nec plus ultra (as far as I'm concerned) is pissing in the open air while admiring the landscape. For indoor operations, my upstairs loo is positioned in such a way that you can enjoy a magnificent view of the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek, crowned by the cliffs of Presles.
Although I'm not an obsessive tweeter, I remind readers that you can communicate with me at the address
Consequently, one must be extremely cautious of the power of such a communications device.
Then Palin expressed herself on Twitter in an even more explicit style:
No, not at all. If each citizen, in his daily preoccupations and activities, were to make a point of refraining from exploiting resources that had been created or obtained in ways that didn't necessarily conform to his personal convictions, then he would be condemned to sitting passively on his backside and waiting for events in the world to metamorphose magically into his ideal vision of reality.
The problem—unless I'm dumb—is that it doesn't seem to be possible to obtain a list of all entries sorted by date. This was annoying in that I wanted to know at what dates we start to find church records for individuals named Skeffington, Skevington, Skivington, etc. So, I decided to play around manually with the various Mormon IGI entries, using the excellent BBEdit text editor, with the intention of processing and examining all the available data... which has taken much time. My findings are summarized in the following chart:
After primitive Latin-inspired versions of the name—such as Sciftitone (Domesday Book of 1086) and Sceftinton (Leicestershire Survey of 1125 and Leicestershire Pipe Rolls of 1165 and 1192)—the earliest "modern" spelling was undoubtedly Skeffington, which appears in a Mormon IGI record dated 1315. The spelling with "ev" instead of "eff" appears a century and a half later, in 1478, and the "e" vowel is replaced by an "i" for the first time in 1563. The respective volumes of the various spellings present in the Mormon IGI are no doubt significant in a rough way. As you can see, there's a large package of Skevington entries, particularly for the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas the volume of Skivington spellings remains relatively low.
In some cases, such as the earthquake in Haïti, we remember above all the huge death toll.
In other cases, such as the Icelandic volcano whose smoke blocked international air traffic, we recall extraordinary images and an exotic geographical name that few people could pronounce.
In one case—the fires in Russia—the catastrophe concerned such a vast territory that nobody knew how to handle it. The same could be said in the case of the explosion of an oil platform off the US coast. If the year had not ended already, the great flooding in Queensland would have surely deserved a spot in this tragic documentary.
In the context of this kind of movie, scriptwriters are wont to get carried away with the poetic theme of the colossal inhuman forces wielded by our planet Earth, in the face of which we remain almost powerless. In the Korn-Brzoza documentary, fortunately, there was no insipid poetry, but rather a constant series of questions concerning the alarming hypothesis that global warming caused by human activities might be largely responsible for much of this suffering and terror. I find it appalling that certain bone-headed observers (often calling themselves "professors" of this or that) persist in rejecting this hypothesis.
This morning, observing the black horse grazing contentedly in a sea of apples, I thought about Will's wise words. Later on in the day, the two horses stood calmly upon the slopes of Gamone and gazed down at me as if this were their new home… as it is, for the moment.
I'm looking forward to the next time one of these huge beasts rolls over onto its side and falls asleep.
A local 32-year-old producer, fed up with repeated thefts of his precious truffles, went out in the night, armed with a pump-action shotgun, to make sure there were no intruders. Suddenly, in the shadows, he saw an individual who appeared to be wielding some kind of weapon. So, he fired twice in the direction of the shadowy form. Alas, he soon realized that he had just killed an intruder who was wielding nothing more dangerous than a small trowel used to unearth truffles. In other words, he had in fact come face-to-face with a truffle-thief, but the killing of this defenseless intruder with two cartridges fired from a pump-action shotgun amounted to premeditated murder. At that moment, the killer made a second stupid mistake. He asked his father to hide the pump-action weapon, and to replace it by an ordinary hunting shotgun. When the gendarmes arrived on the scene, they lost no time in concluding that the killing had been carried out by means of a pump-action gun, rather than the standard gun that the alleged murderer was holding. Furthermore, tests are being performed to ascertain that traces of the victim's DNA can be found on the trowel, to make sure that this tool wasn't simply placed subsequently alongside the corpse of the victim. So, the accused man will be tried for murder, while his father will be charged with deliberate modification of a crime scene. Insofar as the 43-year-old victim was reputed to be a regular truffle thief, all the local folk are on the side of the producer, as is usual in this kind of rural affair.
Today, I don't have details on the kind of weapon used by the truffles producer in France, but it may well have been a less expensive 12-gauge arm, based upon the soldier's weapon (and superficially identical to a casual observer), known as the Mossberg Maverick 88. This easy-to-use pump-action shotgun (which I know quite well), manufactured in Texas and popular in France, is blue-finished, with a synthetic stock (rather than wood) and a cross-bolt safety lock. Ownership of this self-protection arm (which can be loaded with rubber-ball cartridges, nevertheless lethal at close range) is legal in France, but it goes without saying that you don't go out parading at night with such a device… and you don't point it and fire at anything that moves in the dark.
In a totally different context, over the last few days, a delightfully-crazy second-rate French comedian named Michaël Youn has been on the front pages of French news media because his Parisian apartment was robbed recently, and even his cherished Hummer was included in the stolen objects. It appears that this guy talked so much on the social media (Twitter and Facebook) about himself and his Parisian residence that it was almost inevitable that thieves might decide to pay him a visit. What is far more surprising (indeed almost unbelievable) is that the comedian used these same social media to ask the thieves to kindly return all his personal stuff, including the Hummer… and they did! For the moment, I'm not at all sure that I should believe this tale, which sounds like a publicity stunt. On the other hand, in the case of anybody who has got into the habit of talking a lot about himself on the Internet, I think it's vital to weigh one's words, and to transmit significant messages... which is what I've tried to do, between the lines, in the present blog post.
At a glance, it looks a little like the familiar radar machines installed on the edge of highways.
But the rectangular openings are quite different, and the black-and-yellow stripes around the edge of the empty box are not slanted. The fake radar nevertheless had the desired effect. Vehicles now rounded the corner at 20 km/hour. The local gendarmes were impressed by the efficiency of this device, but they could hardly be expected to condone its use, particularly since many tourists were now stopping their cars on the corner to take photos of the fake radar. So, they asked the fellow to remove it.
I worship the great goddess Gamone—day in, day out—just as I celebrate constantly the Cournouze. Don't bore me with stupid questions in this domain. If you must know: Gamone is indeed divine, and the Cournouze (like the Holy Ghost) is her messenger, her spirit.
Then, in the evening, I was invited by Serge Bellier and Tineke Bot at Choranche. In fact, it turned out to be too much… and I was ashamed to admit gastronomic defeat before Tineke's fabulous truffle-based dishes. The most marvelous aspect of the first rendezvous, in the frighteningly Siberian conditions of Presles, was the encounter of Fitzroy's family of Border Collies.
Returning home in the damp dark, I tried to unfathom sympathetic but disappearing Internet transmissions from my sister Anne Skyvington in Australia… who finally explained this mess, curiously, by saying that she hoped for a "spiritual awakening" on my my part. As if this were not enough, a friendly fellow took offense at my blog article in which I referred to the alleged Shroud of Turin as bullshit… which remains, of course, my (perfectly uninteresting) opinion.
This fabulous beast spends most of its prehistoric time down at the bottom of the dark waters, but it emerges during periods of media inactivity at the surface of Loch Ness. In other words, if you see an article about the Loch Ness Monster, chances are that there's fuck-all to talk about in the media.
Serious historians have known for ages that this medieval cloth, with its curious symmetrical stains, is no doubt a clever piece of skulduggery that could have been produced by myriad techniques, known and unknown. Meanwhile, it's utterly ridiculous to imagine that this cloth might have received some kind of photographic imprint of the crucified body of a certain Jesus of Nazareth. One would have to be crazy to accept such tripe. But there exist indeed hordes of crazy individuals—known as Roman Catholics—who are prepared to believe in such bullshit. And lazy journalists, in this empty season, can easily tune in to such folk to create superficial media buzz.
In Australia, people drive, of course (because our dominant forefathers were English), on the left-hand side of the road. The typical section of the road seen in the photo is pleasant enough, but it's a bit frightening to see that there's a single lane on that curved descent, and that the road is only visible for a couple of hundred meters.
That's what they refer to, in Australia, as a B-double tanker. There are lots of them on Australian roads, and a vehicle of this type can carry some 40,000 liters of fuel.
Hours later, after the intervention of a hundred fire fighters, fuel was still burning in the vicinity of the accident. Police suspected that the driver had disappeared in the holocaust.
Back at Gamone, I noticed that my car had ice stalactites attached to the body. My daughter met up with Fitzroy. After lunch, Sylvie and William turned up here, to see how the horses were getting along.
They were accompanied by Fitzroy's sister, mother and grandmother. (With all four black-and-white Collies darting around in the snow, I found it hard to distinguish who was who.) So, within an hour or so of her arrival at Gamone, my daughter had met up with everybody. Also, it was the first time ever that Emmanuelle had seen the property covered in snow.
Since Xmas eve, my donkeys are sharing their paddock and their hay with William's two horses. If ever there were any antagonism between the animals, I had planned to put the horses in an independent paddock, with their own hay. But everything seems to be going smoothly. And why not? The donkeys and the horses are like the Denisovans and the Melanesians. They appreciate company.
In 1875, 18-year-old Havelock Ellis left his native London aboard a ship—captained by his father—bound for New South Wales. In spite of his lack of teaching credentials, he succeeded in convincing a grammar school in Grafton to hire him as a master. Soon after, the school's headmaster died, and Ellis inherited his job, which he managed to keep for a year... up until his incompetency became blatant.
As his given name suggests, Grafton Elliot Smith was born in my future native town in 1871, and he went to school there (where his English-born father was the headmaster) up until the age of 12. He studied medicine at the University of Sydney, and was a resident at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He specialized in brain anatomy, and went on to become a distinguished professor of anatomy in the UK. In an unexpected career switch, he turned to prehistoric anthropology, and even wrote a book on the pharaoh Tutankhamun. Unfortunately, the eminent scholar made the mistake of being bamboozled by a "discovery" that turned out to be a notorious hoax.
That affair had a distinctly negative effect upon the reputation of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. His so-called diffusionist theories on the spread of human culture had also finally gone out of fashion. Before his prestige paled, Smith had influenced a fellow-Australian scholar who would go on to make a gigantic discovery in paleontology.
Raymond Dart was born in Brisbane in 1893, and he studied medicine at the University of Sydney, where he was a resident of Saint Andrew's College. (I happened to spend 1956 at that college.) In much the same way as Grafton Elliot Smith, Raymond Dart started to get interested in paleontology. In 1924, he discovered an extraordinary skull of a three-year-old child at a place named Taung in South Africa. Around its human-like eye sockets, the skull bore beak marks, suggesting that the Taung Child had been devoured by an eagle. This upright-walking creature had lived 2.5 million years ago, but its brain was as small as that of a modern chimpanzee.
Raymond Dart decided that this creature—part simian, part human—deserved a new genus name. Unfortunately, he invented a clumsy term: Australopithecus, which means "southern ape-man". So, the official name of the Taung Child was Australopithecus africanus. Here's an artist's impression of what the distraught parents might have looked like, as they watched in terror their child being borne away on the wings of an eagle:
Trivial anecdote: When I started to work as an assistant English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris in 1963, I was intrigued to discover that all the students were familiar with the ugly French translation of this stupid generic term, Australopithèque, which sounds as if it has something to do with Australia. So, it was inevitable that I should receive this term, invented by my compatriot Raymond Dart, as a nickname. How's that for a ridiculous situation? It was hard for me to explain that we Australian citizens—already associated with the people that the French often refer to erroneously as "Arborigènes", since they imagine vaguely that the indigenous tribes of Australia once lived in trees (arbres in French)—had no direct links with so-called "southern ape-men" in Africa.
Not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable to draw any profound conclusions from such an insignificant element. How can we even be certain that it is indeed a human tooth? Well, in fact, it isn't! Analysis of the mtDNA and comparisons with the human and Neanderthal genomes indicate that these so-called Denisovan creatures, who lived in Siberia some 30,000 years ago, were in fact closer to Neanderthals than to the Homo sapiens species.
Both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans had a common ancestor (shown in red) located on a branch that was parallel to that of our human ancestry. But the most extraordinary finding was that these Denisovans (whose known relics were found up in Siberia) apparently did some casual rocking and rolling with the ancestors of present-day Melanesians, in the Antipodes.
God only knows where they held their parties, because it's a long way from Siberia to these Pacific islands to the north-east of Australia. We can be fairly certain, however, that future DNA finds will reveal the addresses of such encounters between humans and Denisovans, no doubt somewhere in Asia.
And here's a nice shot of the Pont des Arts, running into the Louvre:
A French humorist once said (more or less): "The Parisians love to go out on excursions into the surrounding countryside. To make life easier for them, let's import the countryside into Paris." You can't deny that it sounds like a Very Good Idea. Thanks to global warming, we're moving rapidly into a situation of that kind. Up until now, only wealthy people such as retired bank managers could afford to go on winter vacations up into the polar regions. These days, as a consequence of global warming, it's the Arctic that's moving down to places such as Paris. And Parisians no longer need to call upon a tourist agency to book an expensive Arctic voyage. They can merely step outside in the bleak air and try to get to their work location, then back home at the end of the day.
In the future, there should be good commercial openings, particularly in the Paris suburbs, for an efficient system of Arctic transport.
I'm presently looking into the idea of moving back up there with my donkeys Moshé and Fanette (and my dogs, of course), in the hope of setting up a small suburban transport system that should normally make me a millionaire in the near future.
This photo is interesting in that it demonstrates how, in a mountainous region, a field of vision can change abruptly from one spot to another. In the case of this scene, somebody down in front of my house, just a few meters away from where I was standing to take this photo, would fail to see that giant cliff up in the top left-hand corner.
I've adopted the convenient solution of storing the hay in dry conditions at a spot (50 meters up beyond the house) that's out-of-bounds for the donkeys. Twice a day, I put a small heap of hay onto a tarpaulin and drag this light load down the road to the donkeys' paddock.
In that way, we waste as little as possible of the precious fodder. Whenever I smell the wonderful aroma of this top-quality hay (which was mowed last spring up on the Vercors plateau near Vassieux), I'm reminded of my childhood days on the farm of my Walker uncles on the outskirts of South Grafton. They used to do their mowing using a pair of draft horses, and the hay was piled up in a single giant heap inside a wooden barn. For hens, the hay stack was a favorite spot for laying eggs. I don't think my uncles were in dire need of winter fodder for their herd of dairy cows, who could generally find enough grass to eat all year round. Maybe it was useful to have this stock of hay in the case of an exceptionally dry spell.
Moshé and Fanette are now covered in thick fur, like a pair of baby mammoths. They stay out in the open, no matter what the weather's like. There's a shed in which they could be protected from falling snow, rain and sleet, but they never use it.
I intend to construct a small system for holding the hay up off the ground, with a roof. I ordered the four posts of Douglas pine a week or so ago, and they're waiting to be picked up at the sawmill (as soon as the snow disappears, and I can drive into town).
I've been amazed to discover that my dog Fitzroy, who consumes huge quantities of the finest dog foods (pasta and croquettes for pups), likes to round off his meals with bird seeds. He doesn't digest them, since the seeds reappear all over the surface of Fitzroy's turds, which look a little like Oriental pastries covered in sesame seeds.
