Relativity

I've always been intrigued by manifestations of an everyday concept that can only be called relativity… although it has nothing to do with Einstein. I'm talking of the fact that an individual X might consider such-and-such a thing as important, whereas an individual Y might consider the same thing as trivial. That's to say, the thing is, or is not, important/trivial depending on the identity of its respective viewers. And that's why I suggest (rightly or wrongly, at a language level) that it's a case of relativity.

Ever since the inception of my Antipodes blog in December 2006 [display], its spirit has evolved constantly around the concept of an upside-down world in which certain folk seem to be walking on their heads… when viewed, that is, by folk on the other side of our conceptual planet.

I'm amazed whenever the ordinary universe reveals itself (above all, in the domain of quantum physics and cosmology) as extraordinary. Inversely, I'm amused when I see that dull phenomena (such as tourism in my native land) can be interpreted by their beholders as objects of planetary contemplation. I ask myself constantly: Why can't we all agree about what's important (and what's trivial), what's amazing (and what's run-of-the-mill), what's beautiful (and what's dull), what's precious (and what's cheap), etc.

Today, I'm convinced that this theme of everyday relativity is all-important, because it determines whether or not we're talking on the same wavelength, or even talking about the same issues. Back in 2006 in Sydney, I shall never forget the experience of describing with enthusiasm, to my uncle Peter and his wife Nancy Walker, the reasons why it was so fundamentally important for me to make this pilgrimage from France, back to Australia, to visit our ancestral Braidwood. After listening to my profound explanations, Peter said to me: "William, you must realize that nobody gives a screw about all that you've just been saying." I remember, above all, the term "screw", an euphemism for "fuck" (since Peter never used bad language). He was right, in his tiny narrow-minded way. But, in most ways, Peter was utterly wrong, for he had sadly misjudged (underestimated) what makes the world go round. In a nutshell: Our constant challenge of evaluating what went wrong in the past, and trying to improve things for the future. That, my dear ignorant uncle Peter, is what people have been giving countless literal fucks about for the last few billion years.

Sadly, I never saw Braidwood, because there was simply nobody to take me there. For me, this was a gigantic disappointment... which accounts for much of the distaste I now express for that silly sunburnt country and its people that I used to love.

This relativity theme is so huge that I've lost steam (in criticizing my uncle) before I even got started. I'll get back to it in later blog posts...

I've been talking on about anything and everything for years, in this Antipodes blog, designed to evoke interesting responses from those around me, particularly my genetic relatives. Well, in all that time, I continue to find it utterly amazing that this blog has never recorded a single instance of a significant reaction from any individuals in that "genetic relatives" category. It's as if they all signed off as soon as they saw the first words of Antipodes. In fact, I don't give a screw.

Why do we like the things we like?

The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom is interested in big fundamental questions of an aesthetic or moral kind, such as: Why do we like certain things, but dislike others? Why do we consider that one thing is right, whereas another is wrong? In this entertaining 16-minute video, Bloom provides us with fascinating and often amusing cases of human likes and dislikes.

In the great debate of nature v. nurture, I'm pleased to discover that Paul Bloom is an opponent—like Steven Pinker—of the infamous "blank slate" theory [display]. He says: "A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life."

Aussie meal

These are salt-water crocodiles in the Northern Territory.

The little fellow is about 2.5 meters in length. As for the big reptile, the photographer Lyn Minchin and her friends in a boat decided that it would be unwise to wait around until they could witness the beast's full length, which appeared to exceed that of their 5-meter boat. Clearly, the big crocodile was hungry, and he decided to chew into the nearest food available: one of his mates.

Talk about winning, not disappearing

This man is our main hope of defeating Sarkozy and bringing the French nation back onto a road towards the republican goal of liberté, égalité et fraternité. But the fellow's already evoking (in the Italian press) the eventuality of the Socialists being defeated.

François Hollande must pay attention to his language, and start acting and talking exclusively in a positive style!

Is this guy crazy?

It's not unlikely that the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik is in fact "crazy"—as his lawyer Geir Lippestad is starting to suggest—and that "he lives in a bubble" where he depends upon pharmaceutical products in order "to be strong, to be efficient, to be awake". OK, fine (yawn). Let's suppose, then, that he's a lethally dangerous former citizen of a finely civilized Scandinavian society. The next question is: What should be done with this creature?

As I stated clearly in a previous post [display], he must be examined profoundly, clinically, above all, for his case and condition might alert us to future risks. The concept of punishment is anathema… but Breivik must be sentenced to silence. Society neither wishes nor needs to listen to a syllable of anything that this nauseating blond Viking might vomit.

The rest of the civilized world will be awaiting Norway's honest analysis of what might have gone wrong in their harboring such an individual—apparently unknowingly—in their midst. Maybe we're all potential lunatics capable of destroying everything that's precious. Personally, I've never been anguished nor even intrigued by such an idea, which I look upon as totally false, indeed ridiculous. Whenever I touch the tender head of one of my dear dogs, Sophia or Fitzroy, I'm profoundly aware that they are precious but fragile treasures, who must never be harmed, who must be caressed forever, and that the potential violence of my giant human paws must be controlled, and intelligently restrained. My dogs are not mad animals, fit to be killed by a madman... and neither am I. If Breivik's sick brain thinks otherwise, then researchers in psychology and neurophysiology must try to determine what has happened. What was it that apparently transformed this Norwegian citizen into a monster?

Distortions

When I was a 14-year-old kid hanging around in the rough competitive-cycling environment of my native Grafton and Coffs Harbour, the very idea of a cultivated gentleman cyclist such as Cadel Evans would have been unthinkable. Inversely, I eavesdropped on many uncouth conversations about sex. Retrospectively, I believe—although I can't vouch for it—that I had already, at that time, acquired sufficient algebraic knowledge and sexual self-awareness to appreciate a remarkable law of the dynamics of male nature: The angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat. That's to say, a cold penis will hang limply and vertically (angle zero), whereas a warmed-up hunk of meat will rise magically to a right angle, or even greater. What I didn't understand clearly at that time was that the warming-up process was a largely-cerebral affair, which only needed to be triggered by the vision of a nymph, a young angel, an ethereal creature with a seductive look… accompanied generally by a luscious mouth, attractive breasts and an enticing backside. In those days, people used to talk a lot about love, even divinely-consecrated eternal love… but I had to wait a long while before I started to hear intelligent talk—from brilliant happily-married intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker—about our inbuilt animal sex drives.

Concerning my former politico-economic hero Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I must admit that a cloud of disbelief engulfed me when I witnessed the female object that apparently heated his meat. I'm not talking of the complex human being named Nafissatou Diallo, herself, but merely of her image as a sexual challenge: an object capable of augmenting Strauss-Kahn's angle of the dangle.


Once upon a time, I revered the ethereal beauty and brilliance of Anne Sinclair, who appeared to me (that's to say, to my concupiscent regard) as the epitome of the French female. At that time, I didn't yet know that she was filthy rich, attached to the USA, and capable of falling totally in love with, and protecting, a powerful male. Today, I still admire Anne, of course, but she doesn't come through quite as angelically untainted as she used to. More precisely, I can't help wondering whether she might have been duped by the indubitable promises of DSK. Even more precisely, it would be good if Anne were to tell us simply (former admirers of the journalist and partisans of DSK) how she looks upon, globally, this whole "heat of the meat" subject.

Let me turn to another distortion: Rupert Murdoch.

[Click the image for an amusing Onion satire on Rupert's distortions of reality.]

I've always loved the Simpsons, who remain for me the perfect illustration of nasty life in God's Own Country. Apparently, there are evil-minded observers who would wish to see similarities between Rupert and the venerable Grandpa Simpson.

Personally, I'm profoundly attached to the past, particularly through my genealogical pursuits. On the other hand, I've always been terrified by the horrible eventuality of becoming, as my age advances, what my Aussie mates in Grafton would have labeled an SOB [silly old bugger]. For the moment, I'm sufficiently lucid, I believe, to know what I'm doing, especially in the domain of autobiographical writing, which forces me to be alert and perspicacious. But I'm terrified at times by the looming apparitions, around me, of certain former friends who seem to be transforming themselves inevitably—cerebrally, no doubt, but not knowingly, I'm afraid—into SOBs of the saddest ranting Rupert kind.

Sad London bye bye bye

Lovely mysterious Amy Winehouse, you told us you were trouble. But how come you couldn't get past 27 years?

Tour nostalgia

This afternoon, as I watched (on TV) the final ceremonial stage of the fabulous Tour de France parade on the Champs Elysées, I thought back to 1981 when I met up with Phil Anderson, who was the first Australian to wear the famous yellow jersey. At that time, I had the privilege of interviewing Phil and his mother Pamela, and my article was published in the Australian magazine People.









"When I ride the next Tour de France," Phil told me, "I plan to be the winner." This would not be the case. And Australia would have to wait three decades until victory, this afternoon.

Today, it would be good if my native land (Australia) could share with my adoptive land (France) the fabulous impact of this mythical sporting event, which is in fact a planetary cultural happening. For us, living in France, it's by far the greatest celebration of the summer season. It's a cycling championship, of course, but it's also, and above all, an active real-time celebration of the many marvels of a mystical Mediterranean (middle of the world) nation: France.

Cadel Evans is a quiet but great Australian sporting hero, who has always been in total control of his wonderful career.

Specimen to be analyzed

I used to be amused by the following sick joke. A Californian couple, retired tourists, are visiting an Eskimo settlement in Greenland. They strike up a conversation with an Inuit woman.

INUIT: Our son works in a Californian university.

CALIFORNIAN: Really! What's he studying?

INUIT: He's being studied.

If ever there were a Nordic guy who deserves to be sent to a university, to be studied, in California or elsewhere, it's the 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik.

This young Homo sapiens male individual is a healthy living specimen, amazingly preserved (maybe due to the cold remoteness of Norway), of everything that went wrong in the world during the 20th century. This unexpected creature merits in-depth examination by specialists in psychology, neurology, genetics, etc. In a way, this ugly but God-given Oslo specimen is precious, in that it might provide researchers attached to civilized European society with insights into mysteries surrounding the birth and proliferation of Nazism. Humanistic science must step in.

Red and black

The city of Grenoble (half an hour away from where I live) was the birthplace of the French novelist Stendhal [1783-1842], whose most celebrated title was The Red and the Black. And red and black were the colors, during this Tour de France, of the jersey of Cadel Evans.

After this afternoon's time trial at Grenoble, Cadel changed his colors from red and black to yellow. Normally, tomorrow on the Champs Elysées in Paris, Cadel Evans will be the first Australian cyclist to win the Tour de France.

When I was a teenager in Grafton, I would hear about this fabulous race through French cycling magazines that my uncle Charles Walker used to receive, in his capacity as the president of the Coffs Harbour cycling club. Not yet capable of reading French, I nevertheless admired the photos of champions named Fausto Coppi, Louison Bobet, Raphaël Géminiani… Much later, on 8 July 1963, I happened to be hitchhiking through Grenoble when the 15th stage of the Tour de France arrived there, won by the Spaniard Federico Bahamontes.

Watching the time trial on TV this afternoon, and seeing Evans obtain the yellow jersey, I had the impression that I was witnessing a momentous event in Australian cycling history.

The queen and I agree

It's not often that I share the tastes of Elizabeth II in the domain of beauty, art, fashion and that kind of stuff. I've never liked her hats, for example, and it's quite likely that she doesn't like mine. Today, however, we both seem to agree that the Buckingham Palace presentation of Kate Middleton's wedding gown is pretty awful, indeed spooky.

"Horrid, isn't it?" said the 85-year-old queen to her 29-year-old granddaughter-in-law, pointing at the funereal headless thing with a ghostly halo. "Horrid and dreadful!"

My immediate impression: It looks like an exhibit in a crime museum.

Robot bird

Many people have considered, for a long time (at least since the invention of the wheel, say), that engineers should not go out of their way to imitate Nature, since the hit-and-miss processes of evolution do not necessarily result in exemplary designs. The following amusing demonstration proves, however, that engineers can in fact—if they set their minds to it—create an impressive bionic artifact.

Pain in the arse

To stigmatize an annoyance that's too fuzzy to be pinned down, colloquial English has retained a marvelous but illogical expression: a pain in the arse. In France today, our notorious pain in the arse of French politics is a pale frail bony female named Tristane Banon.


This excruciating disturbance encompasses her French lawyer, David Koubbi. This pair of tiny-brainers has dared to take on very big protagonists, in a flamboyant style, since the flashy young French lawyer has even associated his venom with that of the mad Manhattan lawyer Kenneth Thompson defending Nafissatou Diallo.

It's clear that all these silly actors will be swept away mercilessly, sooner or later, by the forces of objective history, intelligence and vicious politics. Fleeting clowns, they're attempting absurdly to get their acts accepted by Posterity (with a capital P like Pain in the arse) before the curtain falls on their mediocrity and lack of facts.

Fitzroy socializing

I don't have any photos, because it all happened unexpectedly. Towards the end of Monday afternoon, my new Gamone neighbors phoned to inform me that they were about to throw a house-warming party, and that I was invited. Realizing that I had less than an hour to get shaved, showered and spruced up for a social evening (local etiquette), I darted away to St-Jean-en-Royans to purchase a couple of bottles of wine. Returning to Gamone at about 7 o'clock, I had a single thought in mind: lock up Fitzroy in the kitchen, along with Sophia, so that the dogs wouldn't follow me up to my neighbors' party. But Fitzroy was nowhere in sight. So, I set off on foot, with my bottles of wine. On the way up to the lovely new home of Jackie and Marie, Fitzroy was there to greet me. He had already sensed that a party was underway, and he got up there early, without waiting to be invited along by me or anybody else.

Well, to cut a long story short, it was a wonderful evening, both for Fitzroy and for me. My dog was socially faultless. And he even had an opportunity (a must for every French dog) of tasting bones of frogs' legs. I drank glass after glass of rosé wine, and talked on with guests from Louisiana. The former owner, my friend Bob, was present, along with his companion Kiki. Towards the end of this marvelous evening, we all sat around a log fire, looking out over the Cournouze. Then I strolled back home with Fitzroy… who had behaved excellently, won many friends, and succeeded brilliantly in his social coming-out.

Asleep in the kitchen, Sophia was totally unimpressed, indeed uninterested, by our descriptions of this splendid evening of frogs' legs, rosé wine and a log fire. It's a fact: Sophia has never been a socialite.

Comfortable dog bed beneath the foliage

Inside the house, whenever Sophia leaves her big wicker basket empty, Fitzroy has the habit of hopping into it, and often falling asleep. Fortunately, Sophia seems to find it perfectly normal that her basket should be borrowed, from time to time, in this way. As I've often said, she's imbued with a profound Christian spirit of charity. Outside, Fitzroy has always had a fine kennel, but he prefers to sleep out in the open, on a thick wad of straw in front of the wall of the house. This afternoon, for the first time ever, I was amused to discover that Sophia had borrowed Fitzroy's bed for a short nap.

It certainly looks like an attractive place to rest on a summer afternoon. The straw is surrounded by lavender, in full bloom. The shrub on the right is a white-flowering wisteria, whose foliage is sufficiently thick, at this time of the year, to act as a canopy capable of protecting the dog from rain. The plant on the left is a wild dog rose (Rosa canina, called églantier in French), which produces pale pink flowers.

I was wondering why the name of this wild rose (apparently the ancestor of cultivated roses) evokes dogs. In ancient times, people believed that the root of this plant could cure a person who had contracted rabies, after being bitten by an afflicted dog. I'm always amazed when I hear tales like that. I try to imagine the scenario: A gravely sick individual, on a stretcher, is carted along to an apothecary who—for reasons that are hard to fathom—gives the patient a concoction containing the ground-up roots of a wild rose bush. How and why did apothecaries decide that such a preparation might play a positive role in healing such a serious affliction as rabies? More to the point: Did the concoction actually produce positive results?

Maybe, an ancient apothecary happened to notice, like me, that his dogs liked to lie around outside on a bed of straw surrounded by lavender, in the shade of Wisteria and wild rose bushes. So, when one of his dogs went mad and bit people, the apothecary might have asked himself: "Before that animal went mad, what were the plants and flowers associated with its normal state of harmonious well-being?" And maybe the apothecary imagined that these same plants and flowers might play a role in restoring the health of victims of rabies.

Bachmann and Palin

In God's Own Country, are female Republican celebrities really as disastrous as Bill Maher makes them out to be? I guess so.

Talking about American women (which I wasn't really), the great Richard Dawkins made a lot of bad friends recently when he published this little satirical bombshell:

Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself "Skepchick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so...
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard

US feminists, skeptics and atheists found it hard to believe that the celebrated English professor would dare to make fun of their outspoken sister Rebecca Watson [click the photo to access her Wikipedia description], who was forced to decline a brutal middle-of-the-night invitation of a fellow she encountered in a hotel elevator. Rebecca attempted to transform her terse refusal into a feminist cry—Don’t do it, guys!—that might have shaken the male world. Were it not for Dawkins, Rebecca's sordid affair might have fizzled out into much-ado-about-nothing.

A year or so ago, intrigued by this weird woman who seemed to have charmed certain US intellectual circles whose ideas I respected, I decided to follow her personal videos. One day, she offered us a home-made thing that consisted solely of a dense self-analysis of the lady's own facial features. This narcissism nauseated me, and I promptly ceased to follow her superficial stuff.

I'm aware that I shouldn't dare to talk about US females such as those whose names appear in the present blog post, because my comments are devoid of any kind of reliable personal knowledge or experience. The truth of the matter, for me, is that such women are Martians.

State of things

It's hard to single out the nonfiction book that marked me most when I was a young man. Objectively, I would probably have to say it was History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, since I discovered Russell's rambling and sketchy compendium in Paris in 1962 and, up until today, it has remained one of my bedside books.

Before then, a science book that made a huge and lasting impression upon me was The Nature of the Physical World by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington, written in 1928. He was a Quaker (which might have aroused my suspicions), but Eddington was also, after all, one of the first and finest interpreters of the newfangled theories of Albert Einstein. So, I was most impressed by his excellent style of science writing.




What I liked most about Eddington's views on the cosmological state of things was the fact that he left a tiny window open for spiritual beliefs and religious faith. I remember saying to myself, as it were: "OK, Eddington's explanations on the nature of the Cosmos are fine for the moment, even though they're obviously inadequate. But there's a good chance, hopefully, that we'll get around to finding God, one of these days, in the interstices." In fact, I was both a naive and lazy thinker.

In a nutshell, that's truly what I believed for years, for decades… even during the time that I fell in love, upon my arrival at Gamone, with the fabulous tale of Master Bruno, founder of the Chartreux monastic order. But the truth of the matter is that we're no longer in the same peaceful ballpark as Bruno and company. In the course of the few decades that separate me from my reading of the charming Quaker Eddington, Science has started to come apart at the seams, while Religion has been eternally rubbished.

We're awaiting news, not from a religiously-inspired science-writer, and even less from the Holy Spirit, but from the Large Hadron Collider, which talks to us in terms of String Theory. But will we necessarily understand the sacred Word of the Collider? Probably not, at least neither exactly nor explicitly, because it's all a matter of ethereal mathematics, which is akin to a mixture of abstract art and poetry. But it's infinitely better than the supposed Word of God, horribly fuzzy and irrevocably has-been.

The following video is a talk on cosmology by an amazing US intellectual, Lawrence Krauss. It lasts an hour, but I strongly urge you to get settled comfortably in front of your computer to watch it from the beginning to the end.

Gamone lies within Natura 2000

This morning, I received an official letter from a fellow-citizen reminding me that my property at Gamone is located within one of the ecological zones defined in the context of a European chart, Natura 2000.

The following map indicates, in dark green, all the Natura 2000 zones (26 in all) in the Rhône-Alpes region, which includes many prestigious landscapes and extraordinary sites.

[Click to enlarge]

Our tiny local zone, in the middle of the map, has an exotic official label: Prairies of wild orchids, tufa deposits and Gorges of the Bourne. Here is the exact location of the zone that includes Gamone:

[Click to enlarge]

It's funny to learn that you're living in the middle of some kind of ecological museum. Normally, after next week's meeting in the municipal hall at Choranche, I'll know more about the down-to-earth implications of this affair. In any case, I'm such a profound admirer of my magnificent adoptive abode that I could hardly love and respect it any more than I do already. I even get around to thinking that the situation might be reversed. Maybe this wild and glorious land should have a little bit more respect for an awkward but intrepid old Antipodean such as me, living dangerously at times, who will never conquer its challenges, master its mysteries, nor fully behold its beauty.

Insulting religion

When he criticizes religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), this 61-year-old English comedian, Pat Condell, expresses himself in a beautifully clear and persuasive manner:

He's definitely a healthy and explicit no-bullshit artist (you can Google his credentials, which include six years working as a logger in Canada), described by Richard Dawkins in the following terms: "Pat Condell is unique. Nobody can match his extraordinary blend of suavity and savagery. With his articulate intelligence he runs rings around the religious wingnuts that are the targets of his merciless humour. Thank goodness he is on our side."

Perrier commercial

This outstanding video is being shown regularly on French TV:

What's more, Perrier is an outstanding drink.