Aussie psychologist creates monsters

This is really weird stuff. And so it should be, because the Queensland psychologist Matthew Thomson has hit upon a way of transforming portraits of ordinary individuals into fleeting images of monsters.

Should we be surprised by the fact that this bright young Fullbright scholar happens to be an expert in criminal fingerprinting, who'll soon be comparing notes with the Los Angeles police and the FBI? No comment… except to suggest that it might have been nicer if Matthew's monsters had sprung into existence, say, in the course of an artistic career devoted to the production of ghost movies for Aussie kids. But psychologists are psychologists, and they need to earn their living in the most propitious manner.

Let's look at the monsters. You might click around in such a way as to fill up your entire screen with the following video. Then you should watch it at least twice.

• The first time, keep your eyes on the cross in the middle of the screen, and try to recollect your impressions of the kind of unrecognizable faces that are fleeting past you on both sides of the cross. You'll probably feel that these fleeting images are monstrous.

• The second time, verify calmly the look of the various portraits on the left and right of the cross. You'll be astonished to discover that they weren't really monsters at all…

Matthew's diabolical secret? The eyes have it. From one portrait to the next, the eyes remain exactly in the same position on your computer screen. And this is what gives the impression that the faces are being expanded, distended, stretched, compressed and distorted grotesquely around those lovely fixed eyes.

In real life, I have no reasons to believe that Matthew's not a nice guy. But I can't help imagining him as a distorted monster in a Queensland police uniform on a motor bike. In a nightmare, I see the Fullbright scholar pulling me over to the edge of a Gold Coast highway and informing me that I don't look like a normal law-abiding citizen.

EMPTY AFTERTHOUGHT: Jeez, it would be fucking lovely if Australian scholarship, particularly in a domain such as psychology, could move away forever from prisons and police, and our historical heritage as an end-of-the-boat-ride dump for the poor bastards who prevented English aristocracy from living perpetually in a land of fairytale princes and princesses. In the 18th and 19th centuries, long before the psychologist Matthew, vicious Poms had already invented the vision of ordinary folk as monsters.

Sydney stables

This blog post is intended primarily for members of my family out in Australia. I've just been informed by my cousin Margaret (daughter of the World War I hero "King" Pickering) that her son Gregory, a prominent horse trainer, now has a website.

Ah, I imagine the great pleasure that certain relatives (my grandparents in Grafton, for example, not to mention my father) would have surely experienced if they had known that a member of our clan was training racehorses out at Warwick Farm.

Margaret has been assisting me constantly (along with other members of the Pickering family) in my research for They Sought the Last of Lands [display].

Background culture

Obviously, you can only perform a certain activity correctly, or appreciate something you hear or read about, if you possess a minimum of awareness of the subject in question. I call this background culture, and I think it's a tremendously important phenomenon in our modern world. In many cases, if an adult didn't happen to pick up this background culture when she was a kid, then she'll probably never get around to acquiring it. This is particularly true, as we all know, in the case of foreign languages. Consider twin boys born to an Australian couple settled out in the bush. If one child were to be whisked away to Japanese foster parents in Tokyo, then the kid would surely grow up like a typical Japanese teenager, speaking faultless Japanese… and incapable of communicating fluently with his sibling who remained down in the Australian bush. Now, when I talk that way, readers might imagine that I'm defending the theory of the blank slate, which Steven Pinker spent an entire book in demolishing.


I might seem to be saying that a bush baby in Australia (like me, if you insist on making things personal) is born more-or-less "empty-headed", and that you only have to drop him off in a place such as Tokyo, and let nurture get to work, if you want your kid to evolve, say, into a sophisticated citizen of the Land of the Rising Sun… who might later decide to return to his birthplace Down Under and amaze all the locals, with the help of his twin brother, by setting up a genuine sushi restaurant.

Well, this impression is partly right, and partly wrong. All the Japanese stuff is perfectly correct. What's totally wrong is the suggestion that the Aussie bush twins were born more-or-less "empty-headed". On the contrary, the twins were born with an all-important stock of genes, of all kinds, inherited from their Australian parents. And, if the Japanese-speaking sibling who grew up in Tokyo turned out to be smart enough to imagine the idea of returning to Australia and setting up a sushi restaurant with his English-speaking brother, then we can surely conclude that they two fellows were equipped, right from the start, with an excellent set of genes tuned to imagination and business creativity.

In my personal case, the fact that I never heard people speaking French until I was 21 years old means that I missed out on the nurture deal as far as my accent is concerned. That's to say, I'll always speak French with a foreign accent. On the other hand, I can communicate correctly with French people on all kinds of subjects, which suggests that I arrived on the scene here in France with a set of genes enabling me to learn how to translate efficiently from one language into another… which was the same set of genes that allowed me to work professionally in computer programming.

These days, I'm constantly amused to realize that much of my background culture, enabling me to appreciate various intellectual challenges, was of an accidental acquired kind, rather than primarily genetic. Out in Australia during the five-year period between my leaving school (1957) and my departure for Europe (1961), I had the chance of picking up cultural baggage in science that is still "fueling" me today. Let me give you an example of what I'm trying to say, in an unexpected domain: games. If there's a human activity in which I have no skills whatsoever, and even less in the way of enthusiasm, it's surely the field of games. I'm quite incapable of conjuring up any kind of competitive spirit, or will to win. I'm simply lousy at playing games. Besides, I hardly ever do so. I've never played cards, or bridge, or video games. Scrabble and crossword puzzles, like chess, bore me greatly. I seem to be lacking the genes that push other individuals to play with a will to win. And this apathy extends to all kinds of games, from competitive sports through to business. I'm not exactly a loser; I'm simply a lethargic non-player, with no deep desire to win anything whatsoever.

Now, this is funny, because my son François seems to be quite the opposite. He has recuperated genes that make him a skilled competitor in quite a few domains, including billiards. I don't know where he obtained these genes, but it's surely through his mother, whose family background includes at least a couple of solid known cases of entrepreneurial success… which are lacking in my family environment (with the possible exception of my paternal grandfather's small automobile business). There are no outstanding merchants among my recent ancestors. Meanwhile, the only successful sportsman—my uncle John Walker, the track cyclist—had so little will to win that a Grafton journalist once said that he had to be "psyched up" (by encouragement from his brothers) to have any chance of winning… and I knew my late uncle well enough to understand that this was surely the case.

Now, why am I painting this utterly dismal image of myself in the games arena? Well, there's method in my madness, which I shall now attempt to explain. In a nutshell, it's a matter of a fortuitous encounter with a fundamental element of scientific culture, when I was a young man working with IBM in Sydney.

I've already evoked John von Neumann in my blog article of Christmas Day 2006 entitled The meaning of life [display]. He's the fellow who invented the idea of programs stored in the memory of a computer. He also put forward a theory of replicators (which he referred to as self-reproducing automata), and we now know that the spiral helix mechanism of the DNA molecule is indeed such a replicator, at the origin of all life on the planet Earth.

Well, von Neumann had yet another claim to fame. With Oskar Morgenstern [1902-1977], he was the coauthor of a pioneering book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior… a copy of which happened to be hanging around in the offices of IBM Australia, in North Sydney, when the company hired me as a computer programmer in 1957. At the time, I was amazed to learn that what I looked upon as a relatively superficial activity, playing games, could become the object of mathematical theories. In any case, while I continued to have little enthusiasm for games themselves, I was enthralled by the theories that had been invented to explain them.

Now, things might have stayed like that for me, permanently, were it not for the ingenious insights of an English evolutionary biologist and geneticist, John Mayard Smith, who decided to apply games theory to the biggest game of all—the greatest show on earth, as Richard Dawkins put it—namely, evolution. Unfortunately, it would be beyond the possibilities of my blog to tackle the precise ways in which, say, a college student on a date might be exploiting a strategy (unconsciously, in most cases) akin to a poker player. Dawkins introduces this gigantic theme, in a typically brilliant fashion, near the beginning of The Selfish Gene.

To be quite honest, I must point out that it can become mentally tiresome to follow the mathematical mechanisms of a games-theory interpretation of activities in the domains of courting, love and marriage, and rearing children. As I said at the beginning, it helps a lot if you happen to possess a minimum of background culture in the theory of games.

Van Gogh drama

This is a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh [1853-1890]:

Up until recently, the following painting was also thought to be a self-portrait, but it has now been reassessed as the artist's only depiction of his beloved young brother Theo van Gogh [1857-1891], an art dealer:

Vincent shot himself at the age of 37, and Theo died of syphilis and sadness, six months later, at the age of 33. Theo's great-grandson, also named Theo van Gogh, was a movie director who became an outspoken critic of Islam.

In 2004, at the age of 47, he was gunned down in Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim.

In a recent blog post, I evoked what Miguel de Unamuno referred to as "the tragic sense of life" [display]. These three members of the van Gogh family certainly rose to summits in that dramatic domain.

French cycling legend

Saint-Denis-de-l'Hôtel is a sleepy village on the right bank of the Loire, opposite Jargeau, not far from Orléans, in the heart of the Val de Loire region that was inscribed in 2000 on the list of Unesco World Heritage sites.

The population of the village is less than 3000, but they can boast of a fine velodrome, which was spruced up for this year's French track championships.

Yesterday, on that track, Jeannie Longo won her 59th national title: female points-race champion of France.

Jeannie—who lives on the outskirts of Grenoble—is 52 years old. In other words, when she was born in Annecy, I was still a teenager out in Sydney. She has won 13 world championships, and is thinking about competing in next year's Olympic Games in London. Jeannie Longo also happens to be a skilled pianist, who competed six times (between 1969 and 1975) in the annual piano competition at Besançon.

Poet assassinated

Last night in Guatemala, the celebrated 74-year-old Argentinian composer-singer Facundo Cabral was gunned down by unidentified assailants in a passing motor vehicle.

In the 1970s, Cabral was made famous by his poem No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla (I am not from here, nor from elsewhere).

During the military dictatorship in Argentinia [1976-1983], Cabral was exiled in Mexico. Then he wandered throughout the world as a troubadour. In 1996, Unesco named him a World messenger of peace.

Why is a poet assassinated? A poet of peace. Adios, amigo.

Planning for emergencies

Thankfully, here in France, we don't have to worry too much about the end of the world, programmed for 2012, because we can simply drive down to the magic mountain alongside the village of Bugarach, which will be saved from the Apocalypse.

[Click the photo for an English version of the fairy tale.]

I still feel it's a little too early to release the news officially, but I have strong reasons to believe that there has been an error in the geographical calculations of the people who started to talk about Bugarach. The true magic mountain that will be saved from Armageddon next year is in fact the nearby Cournouze, just opposite my home at Gamone.

Be that as it may, there's another emergency situation that must be handled urgently. I'm talking of zombie invasions.

I've just heard that the city of Bristol in England—home of my pious ancestor John Harris [1722-1801], who may have dabbled in the notorious slave-trading industry—has announced a plan to deal with zombie contingencies.

[Click the image for an English article on this theme.]

With all these nasty threats looming on the horizon, it's a bloody shame that News of the World will no longer be available to provide our dear English cousins with reliable in-depth information.

Good riddance to rotten reporting

Although I've never been proud of the fact that my native land has bred a fellow such as Rupert Murdoch (whom I'm incapable of admiring, to put it mildly), it would be illogical and indeed wrong to equate him with the tabloid that he himself has just boldly eliminated.

Over the last few years, the behavior of some of the people at News of the World has apparently been frankly disgusting at times. Here in France, I have the impression that various "crash barriers" exist, making it unthinkable that would-be "journalism" could ever sink to such a degrading level, with certain operations akin to sadism.

POST-SCRIPTUM:


Click the photo to access a short article that tries to explain who's who in this fascinating family.

Franco-American movie script

The casting, up until now, has been superb. At the center, the villain is a prosperous and powerful French Jew, operating in the sphere of international finance. And his wife is an immensely wealthy French celebrity journalist. The victim is a poor Manhattan maid from Africa. And the accuser is a Wasp whose celebrated Daddy got him his job. The villain is defended by a Manhattan Jew whose son's a rabbi in Israel. And the victim is defended by a wild black guy who likes to do his crazy lawyer act brilliantly in the street. All that was missing was a naive romantic touch… which is henceforth supplied by the fragile Tristane, a Parisian writer (?) who's determined to tell the world how she almost got sodomized by the monkey-like villain some eight years ago.

There'll be a challenging transition in the movie script, when the story has to move from Miss Banon having her pastel panties ruffled in Paris to the tough stuff of Nafissatou getting grabbed by the cunt and spitting out sperm in Manhattan. Ideally, the scriptwriters will need to insert a few intermediate scenes and victims… who should be easy to find. In any case, the primary rule in porn scriptwriting is that you've got to invent plausible actions to draw out the story, and make it flow. Between the moment when the main character is tearing off panties in Paris and when he's splashing out sperm over New York hotel carpets.

On this 4th of July

Bernard-Henri Lévy (often referred to as BHL) is a brilliant French intellectual who has played a political role in several international contexts of a conflictual nature.


In The Daily Beast, BHL proposes
5 Lessons of the DSK Affair.

Levitating Chinamen

We're all accustomed to incredible demonstrations from Chinese magicians of all kinds. So, we shouldn't be surprised, let alone annoyed, by the following photo:

Chinese officials have developed an extraordinary technique enabling them to inspect a newly-laid road while the macadam is still warm and sludgy. Like Jesus walking over the waters of the Sea of Galilee, these fellows are phloating fotoshopically over a new Oriental Highway of Truth. For God's sake, don't stick a pin in the image. It might burst, and the inspectors would fall onto the steaming macadam.

Femme fatale

This photo reappeared this morning on the website of Le Parisien, alongside an article by Jean-Marc Ducos revealing the "doubts" of the Guinean community in the Bronx concerning Nafissatou Diallo, the alleged victim of the DSK affair. It's a photo that was published for the first time, three weeks ago, on the cover of Paris Match. Curiously, for reasons of which I'm unaware, this portrait has now disappeared from the above-mentioned article in this morning's Le Parisien.

Over a month ago, in my blog post of May 26, 2011 entitled Golden nail in the coffin [display], I stopped just short of evoking a prostitution/extortion scenario in the case of Nafissatou (referred to, at that time, as Ophelia):

I persist in believing that DSK's lawyers are likely to find sufficient evidence to demolish entirely the credibility and claims of "Ophelia", the plaintiff. I've heard rumors, over the last day or so, that she may have been perfectly aware of the identity, reputation and wealth of DSK, and that she attempted naively to use her charms, followed by a rape scenario, to extort money from him.

Yesterday, I was pleased to discover that the New York Post has got around to talking exactly the same language as me.

What's more, that warm-blooded Manhattan daily was apparently so happy to receive a comment from France (a land they love) that they placed my naive questions at the top of a vast list of comments.

So, there we have it. Everybody, little by little (in spite of our respective prejudices), is getting around to calling a spade a spade (or a cat a cat, as they say in France). My questions have not yet received any answers, but they are fundamental. Is it thinkable that hotel management might have been aware of Nafissatou's operations? If so, is it thinkable that occult anti-DSK forces might have guided the prostitute towards the room of our hero, à toutes fins utiles (for whatever useful benefits that might ensue)? That's a summary of the present state of my DSK cogitations… and I'm not alone in thinking such thoughts.

FLEDGLING CONSPIRACY THEORY: We're likely to be hearing more about the Sofitel New York Hotel and its owner, the French group Accor, "the world's leading hotel operator".


BREAKING NEWS: A courageous Socialist lady, Michèle Sabban, has been evoking various things, in the primordial context of the DSK affair, that simply don't add up.

From the very first instants of the DSK affair, French observers were intrigued by the rapidity of pertinent on-the-spot communications between Manhattan and Paris. Today, retrospectively, these amazing coincidences have not yet been explained satisfactorily.

Friends advise me to stay indoors

What people like Madeleine and Dédé are actually saying is that I should think twice before stepping out onto the slopes of Choranche equipped with a chainsaw. I remain nauseated by thoughts of what happened to me the day before yesterday, and traumatized above all by thoughts of what might have happened to me. So, I ask my readers to forgive me for not going into details. Let's summarize by saying that I made four huge blunders, simultaneously:

1. I went out onto the slopes to cut wood, without informing anybody of my intentions.

2. I failed to carry my iPhone with me.

3. I used my chainsaw to slice through a branch of a fallen tree, without realizing that the branch in question was keeping the huge trunk in equilibrium on the slopes.

4. When the huge trunk started to roll towards me, I was on the wrong (valley) side.

I prefer to refrain from describing the hour-long terror of being pinned beneath the trunk, and screaming for help. My Choranche neighbors Michèle Berger and Jackie Ageron were directly responsible for saving me. I enjoyed on-the-spot treatment from my wonderful doctor Xavier Limouzin, and a group of friendly firemen from Pont-en-Royans, followed by a ride to the hospital at Romans in the back of an emergency vehicle, followed by X-rays and medical examinations.

Today, I have almost recuperated all my physical faculties, and I'm thankful to be alive. No bones were broken. Just a few sore bruises. The dogs, too, seem to express their gratitude for my continued existence. Tineke and Serge have been like guardian angels.

I realize that there are certain "ordinary" activities at Gamone that must be banned totally, permanently. Thankfully, I love to work in front of the computer in my bedroom.

Lady lies

I know little about typical values and attitudes within the US legal system, but I've always had the impression that they don't like liars. Besides, once a person is caught out lying about little things, they're considered capable of lying about big things.

Last night in New York, "questions surfaced about the believability" (as the Los Angeles Times put it) of the 32-year-old woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape. I'm amazed to observe that US media persist in refraining from ever stating the woman's name, Nafissatou Diallo, and that Aussie media seem to parrot mindlessly this habit. There is no law behind this refusal to indicate the plaintiff's name, and no obvious moral justification… in a society that was adamant about justifying the degrading post-arrest perp walk of an accused and handcuffed individual such as DSK.

The lady apparently told investigators that her application for asylum in the USA mentioned a previous rape allegation. When the investigators examined Diallo's asylum documents, however, there was no such mention. The lady had lied. And this could well be one "rape" too many. She also told investigators that her asylum application mentioned the fact that, back in her native Guinea, she had been the victim of customary genital excision… but the actual documents contained no such story. So, once again, the lady had lied. Add to this the fact that Nafissatou Diallo appears to be closely attached to an incarcerated drug dealer, to whom she appealed by phone, the day after the DSK affair, for financial advice.

This afternoon (French time), we'll see what happens during a rapidly-convened confrontation between DSK and the judge Michael Obus. Meanwhile, in France, supporters of DSK are thrilled by this unexpected evolution of the affair. People are even starting to dream about the remote possibility that DSK could emerge in time for next year's presidential election. If ever the case against DSK were to be attenuated or even dropped, we must hope that the personal career of the Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance would not suffer adversely, so unfairly, just as we should hope that visceral anti-Americanism would not go viral in France.

REMINDER: Over the last few hours, articles on this latest bombshell in the DSK affair all cite the New York Times report that broke the news: Strauss-Kahn Case Seen in Jeopardy [access] by Jim Dwyer, William Rashbaum and John Eligon. Funnily enough, the latter two journalists were among the seven professionals who contributed to an earlier article, From African Village to Center of Ordeal, enhanced by a romantic image of the kind of simple dwelling in which Nafissatou Diallo (unnamed, of course) was born.

[Click the photo to access the earlier NYTimes article.]

This earlier article painted an idyllic image of the Rousseau-like blank-slate fairy-tale existence of the innocent village girl who was finally brought face-to-face with evil, personified by an illustrious Frenchman, in Manhattan on May 14, 2011. How come the seven NYTimes professionals failed to find anything whatsoever of an alarming nature in the background of their pure unnamed creature named Nafissatou Diallo? Clearly, their capacities as investigative researchers fell far short of the talents of people employed by George W Bush who revealed, once upon a time, the likely existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

AFTER THE HEARING: In speaking to journalists in front of the tribunal building, the defense attorneys William Taylor and Ben Brafman were calm and brief. Brafman even slipped in a word of praise for the courage of Cyrus Vance, and concluded poetically by saying that, on July 4, Independence Day, there would be celebrations concerning the "personal independence" of DSK and his family. Wow, that's a distinguished reference applied on American soil to a newly-liberated Frenchman! I was half hoping that he would go one step further and declare that, shortly after July 14, Bastille Day, the former prisoner would be freed definitively from the yoke of injustice. When the Afro-American lawyer Kenneth Thompson stepped up to the microphones, I wouldn't have been unduly surprised if he had broken into a moving oration on the abolition of slavery.

Instead of that, he started to develop a forensic explanation of the violent ways in which DSK is alleged to have attacked the innocent maid, designated systematically as the victim. To add a dramatic effect to his description of DSK grabbing the maid's breasts, Thompson mimed that act on his own chest. He was a top-class showman. At one stage, the black lawyer made such a vivid presentation of the way in which the strong hands of the aggressor had groped the victim's vagina that listeners were surely ready for almost anything in the way of nasty details. Were we about to learn that the aggressor's fingerprints were clearly etched on the smooth dark skin of the lady's loins? Worse still, on the scale of horrors, was the lawyer going to tell us that this part of the lady's anatomy had been rendered fragile by the excision operation, and that an entire vulval section had been ripped away from her body by the rapist, whose physical force was akin to that of a champion wrestler?

No, Kenneth Thompson didn't actually say that. Instead, he thought it preferable, after his clinical descriptions of the alleged crime, to accuse some of the prosecutor's men of having dealt roughly with the victim. He even declared: "Our concern is that the Manhattan district attorney is too afraid to try this case. We believe he’s afraid he’s going to lose this high-profile case." To what audience was Kenneth Thompson addressing his dramatic performance out in front of the court building? To me, that's a mystery. He couldn't have been pouring out all those dirty details for Cyrus Vance, since we can suppose that the district attorney has already heard everything that can possibly be said about what might have happened. Maybe he was talking to TV viewers who might influence—directly or indirectly—a future jury decision. Or maybe he was simply talking to nobody in particular, merely because he felt he was expected to say nasty thinks about the accused. Maybe he has his back to the wall, and he needed to let off a bit of steam.

Brilliant French lady becomes IMF chief

This afternoon, Christine Lagarde was still in Paris, working at her everyday job as minister of Finance in the government of François Fillon. When a French TV news phoned her concerning the imminent announcement of her appointment as head of the International Monetary Fund [IMF], Lagarde replied with typical elegance that she was hoping that the announcement would be made in time for the evening TV news, so that she would be able to share her limelight with another splendid French woman: the Socialist chief Martine Aubry, who had indicated today that she would be a French presidential candidate. Lagarde's behavior was exemplary in a gentlewomen's spirit, in that Aubry is an opponent of Nicolas Sarkozy, who could be considered (up until today) as Lagarde's superior.

[Click the photo to access an Al-Jazeera video announcing Lagarde's appointment.]

I was surprised and disappointed to learn that my native country, Australia, had backed the Mexican candidate Agustin Carstens for this job. At a moment when the eyes of the world are turned towards the financial problems of Greece, in the context of the European Union, I believe that Australia's choice reflects the political naiveté and lack of economic vision of prime minister Julia Gillard and her advisors.

Tragic sense of life

As a young man in Paris, I was impressed by this book by a great Spanish writer, which I used to read in an elegant English translation. The small volume is still present in my bookshelves. These days, however, I rarely reopen this category of old-fashioned stuff.


Initially, the title alone had seduced me: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida. Then I admired the art and skill with which Miguel de Unamuno—a resolute aficionado of Don Quixote—could juggle with reverential references to Jesus Christ, Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila without ever telling us explicitly whether he did or did not believe in the god of Christians. Today, of course, it would be unthinkable for a popular philosopher to remain so wishy-washy, no matter how noble his prose. Unamuno signed his masterpiece in 1912, before the madness of the Great War. He died a quarter-of-a-century later, in 1936, a broken-hearted witness of events, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, after a violent public confrontation with the Falangist general José Millán Astray concerning the terrible oath "¡Viva la Muerte!".

In a different context, at a later point in time, Unamuno might have evolved into an Albert Camus. Instead, he remained an elusive Basque observer of a world that had become too complex, too chaotic and too terrible for him to understand. Nevertheless, he stood up firmly and courageously, like a matador awaiting the charge of the black toro. Finally, though, a las cinco de la tarde, the blood stains on the sand of the arena of History were those of Unamuno's Romantic "philosophy". Six months before Unamuno's death in Salamanca, the 38-year-old poet Federico García Lorca had been shot stupidly, on 19 August 1936. Yes indeed, in those days, life had assumed a tragic sense.

So embarrassed

Back at the time I took my daughter and son out to my birthplace for the first time, they were greatly amused by a conversation they had overheard between giggling Australian schoolgirls. After relating a trivial anecdote that terminated in an innocuous remark from her boyfriend (I forget the details of what they might have been talking about), the story-teller exclaimed to her impassioned listeners, in a peculiar drawn-out Aussie accent: "I was so embarrassed!" For years afterwards, whenever my daughter alluded to amusing personal relationships in Australia, she would punctuate her stories with that exclamation, pronounced appropriately: "I was so embarrassed!"

Well, that's what I felt like saying when I saw this demonstration of an Aussie TV talk-show host, Karl Stevanovic, who made a failed attempt to tell an insipid joke to the Dalai Lama. Somebody found a delightful adjective to describe this TV guy: goofy. I know nothing about Karl's culture and credentials, but his behavior in front of the Dalai Lama was stupid, indeed vulgar. It's tactless to tell a silly joke in the presence of, and about, a distinguished visitor from a different social community, particularly when that joke uses Down Under vernacular.

The supposedly hilarious theme of the joke (which to me, a native speaker of Australian English, isn't the least bit funny) is the idea of the Dalai Lama saying to a pizza man: "Make me one with everything." Already, in a genuine pizza context (with which the Dalai Lama may or may not be familiar), this vague "with everything" request would be stupid. Pizzas come in countless varieties. In Australia, you can even find so-called gourmet pizzas with kangaroo and crocodile meat. The uninspired creator of the silly joke was thinking rather of a takeout (takeaway) hamburger or meat pie situation in which the purchaser can request extra sauces or vegetables such as fried onions or mashed potatoes. In that narrow context, the "with everything" request might be meaningful, indicating that all the extras are to be included. Years ago, I got into the habit of making that kind of request in the Rue des Rosiers in Paris, where I used to buy Israeli-style falafels.

From a religious viewpoint, it's not at all certain that the Dalai Lama would ever imagine the idea of praying to a divinity and including a naive request: "Make me one with everything." To my mind, that doesn't sound like Dalai Lama talk, more like Aussie media talk.

If I'd been in the position of the goofy TV guy, and felt an urgent need to tell the Dalai Lama an Aussie joke, I would have chosen my pie story.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when Australia had a huge intake of immigrant laborers for massive civil-engineering projects, many of these so-called "New Australians" spoke little English. In the case of Luigi, from Sicily, his English was so poor that he was ill-at-ease about entering a shop to buy something to eat. Fortunately, his compatriot Aldo was able to help Luigi by teaching him how to say "apple pie".

[Part of the funniness of this joke, when told aloud in an Aussie pub setting, stems from Luigi's awkward pronunciation of this expression: "ah-pull pah-ee".]

In the beginning, Luigi was thrilled to be able to step into shops and ask for an "ah-pull pah-ee". But soon he was fed up with dining exclusively, for days on end, on apple pies. So, he asked Aldo to teach him another expression. Aldo told him how to say "meat pie"… which Luigi pronounced quaintly as "mit pah-ee". So, Luigi stepped confidently into a shop in the hope of obtaining a meat pie. But the reactions of the shop lady were unexpected…

[This is the part of my joke that links up with the incident concerning the goofy guy's joke. In the case of my joke, I would have to explain to the Dalai Lama a trivial Aussie habit. Some people eat their meat pies daubed with tomato ketchup, whereas others prefer their pies without this sauce. So the person selling a meat pie would ask the client to indicate his/her preference. Now, this was such a familiar aspect of the Australian meat pie situation that the sales person would often simply ask: "With or without?"]

SHOP LADY: "With or without, love?"

LUIGI (not understanding the lady's question): "Mit pah-ee."

SHOP LADY: "Yeah, I understood you, love. But with or without?"

LUIGI (totally baffled, repeats his request): "Mit pah-ee."

SHOP LADY (annoyed): "Jeez, would you mind telling me, with or without?"

LUIGI: "Ah-pull pah-ee".

I authorize Karl Stevanovic, if he so desires, to try out my pie joke on the pope, when he next visits Australia.

Smoked donkeys

This morning, I started to burn some of the dead wood that has been lying around for ages down in the donkeys' paddock.

An hour later, I was surprised to find the donkeys standing out in the sun alongside the smoldering wood, with smoke often wafting over them. I think I know what's happening. The smoke from the dry walnut wood is not particularly acrid: neither for me nor, I suspect, for the donkeys. But it seems to keep flies and other insects away from the donkeys. The proof: they're not even wagging their tails, as they normally do, constantly, to brush away flies and insects. OK, it's surely not an ideal solution, but the donkeys appear to find it efficient, at least for a while.

Sudden surge in readership

A counter located in the right-hand column informs me that my Antipodes blog usually receives about a hundred visits a day. On Friday evening, I happened to notice that this counter had started to surge abruptly, in an exceptional fashion. Yesterday (Saturday), the counter continued to indicate an unusually high volume of visits, so I started to investigate what might be happening. My immediate reaction was that it might have something to do with my blog post entitled Hacking [display]. Maybe certain Internet authorities had decided that I might be mixed up with groups of hackers, and they had broadcast some kind of directive asking their investigators to follow me. Maybe it was Badger who had ordered his international matrix of groupies to invade my blog. Maybe the Aussie minister of communications was using his hounds to find evidence of unAustralian thoughts in my blog, enabling him to put me on his blacklist (if ever I weren't there already)...

In fact, I soon discovered that the surge in Antipodes readership had been brought about by my short blog post about a tribe of natives in Papua New Guinea who had been filmed during their first encounter ever with pale-skinned visitors from the outside world [display]. Basically, this story—which I had picked up in a French news website—was an excellent candidate for Antipodes, since the fabulous theme was universal, while the background information existed apparently only in French. Yesterday, observing that my readership was still mounting (up to over 1500 by the end of the day), I struggled to correct factual errors that had existed in the French source, while rapidly supplying my readers with summaries of two basic French-language documents concerning this affair. Meanwhile, there was a lot of discussion on the Internet (which I had helped to provoke) about whether this "first encounter" had been a genuine event or rather a fake happening staged for the production of a spectacular video.

During my investigations, I was alarmed to discover that, back in 1997, a prominent critic of the video had been convicted of slander. Although I didn't know the circumstances in which such a trial had taken place, I decided immediately that I should abandon this subject on my blog, while backtracking concerning any suggestion that the video might not have recorded a genuine event. I realize that my reaction surprised certain readers, but that's simply because they're not familiar with the French legal system. Unfortunately, here in France, we do not have total freedom of speech of the kind that exists, say, in the USA. Consequently, if a distinguished anthropologist were to deny, say, that any unknown stone-age tribes remain hidden in the jungle, then he could be attacked for slander by somebody who declared that such tribes did exist. Now, that is the kind of legal battle that's lost in advance by the deniers, because it's logically impossible to produce evidence proving that such-and-such an alleged entity does not exist. We're in the domain of Bertrand Russell's famous celestial teapot that has been orbiting the planet Earth for ages.

If somebody were to claim rashly that this artificial satellite is a figment of the imagination, which does not exist, how he could he possibly prove his negative belief? Teapot believers would simply point out that the non-believer had never been at the right observation point at the right time, otherwise he could not have avoided seeing the teapot gliding along its itinerary through the heavens. These days, atheists have imagined a kind of divine variation on Russell's teapot theme: the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If I were to declare that this creature does not exist, and that anybody who believes in it is surely crazy, then members of the Congregation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster might decide to take me to court for slander. I would explain to the judge: "How do you expect me to prove that this creature doesn't exist? That's a logically-impossible task." And the judge might reply: "My poor fellow, you've misunderstood the sense of this trial. We don't expect you to prove that the creature doesn't exist. Besides, the plaintiffs know that no such proof could be forthcoming, for the simple reason that they're absolutely convinced that the creature does exist. But I would like to see you condemned nevertheless, because your harsh denials have gravely offended and distressed the innocent members of the Congregation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by implying that they lack intellectual discernment."

Normally, caricatural situations of that kind don't arise in our everyday existence. But there have been exceptions. And, when such a situation arises, there's no sense in trying to defend yourself, or even argue, because your opponents simply don't believe fully in logic. Personally, in such a predicament, I find it advisable to shut my mouth and get the fuck out of the place.

Curious seventh singer

Some of my readers are likely to wonder whether I found this story by hanging around sleazily on websites about Japanese adolescents. In fact, it was a tweet from the British New Scientist magazine that provided me with the initial link, since the technological feat in question is quite astonishing, along with its artistic and cultural repercussions.

That's a photo of the seven members of a Japanese girls' band named AKB48. In the middle, you have the lead singer, named ‪Eguchi Aimi‬, whose harmonious facial features can be admired in this portrait:

For a while, the group was composed of only six girls. Then they were joined by Eguchi Aimi, and one of the first performances of the enlarged group was a video ad for candy, seen here:

Fans of the AKB48 group were recently flabbergasted to learn that the charming lead singer ‪Eguchi Aimi‬ is in fact, not a real human being, but rather a synthesized screen-only creation. In other words, a virtual singer. But the most amazing thing of all is the way in which this artificial singer was assembled. The design team "borrowed" features from each of the real singers, and then scrambled them all together to give birth to ‪Eguchi Aimi‬. For example, the eyes of Eguchi (on the left) come from the real-life young lady on the right:
Eguchi's sensuous mouth has been taken from another member of the group:

Her nose comes from yet another genuine singer:

Here's a fascinating video that provides you with a taste of ‪Eguchi Aimi‬'s talents as a performer, while showing you briefly how she was put together:

 

In any case, she's an attractive girl, she sings quite well (using God only knows whose voice), and she's certainly a natural seventh member of the group. If Eguchi Aimi didn't exist, it would surely be a good idea to invent her…

CORRECTION: Since writing this blog post, I've discovered that AKB48 is not simply a small girls' band, as I mistakenly imagined, but an entire cabaret company of some 60 performers, with their own theater in Tokyo. The Japanese are so well-behaved that no Japanese cabaret audience would ever dream of standing up and crying out for a live on-stage appearance of Eguchi Aimi. Fortunately...