Simple problems

There's an amusing article in The Wall Street Journal [display] about a Nobel Laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman, who's a professor of psychology at Princeton.

Apparently Kahneman is intrigued by the fact that many people are surprisingly irrational… which would seem to be a polite way of saying that they often react in a foolish manner, as if they were incapable of reasoning correctly. Kahneman has the habit of asking allegedly smart individuals to answer extremely simple questions. Here's a specimen:

A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs $1 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

According to the article, about half the students of Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology give the wrong answer. That's amazing! Personally, although I'm not particularly bright (as friends and members of my family know), it took me no more than a dozen seconds of mental arithmetic to obtain the right answer.

How about you?

I'm a little troubled, though, by the fact that, in handling questions of this kind, I immediately resort to basic algebra, rather than trying to find a solution intuitively, using so-called common sense. I'm disturbed because I have the impression that I'm cheating. I know beforehand that, as soon as I say "Let's refer to the unknown as x", I'm absolutely certain to find a solution, rapidly. Funnily, I would feel more like an honest citizen if I were to force myself to stagger around in the sludge of common sense for a while, waiting for a solution to drop down upon me like the gentle rain from heaven. In using mental algebra, I feel like an exam student who's exploiting stealthily his iPhone to obtain vital data.

Am I an abnormal cheat?

CORRECT ANSWER: The ball costs 5 cents and the bat, $1.05.

Cooking experiment

Last Saturday, my daughter took me to a wonderful restaurant in Tain-l'Hermitage, Le Quai, on the banks of the Rhône.

That was the view from our table. The old suspension bridge enables pedestrians to stroll across the river to the neighboring right-bank town of Tournon. In doing so, you move from the Drôme department into Ardèche. These two communes—Tain l'Hermitage and Tournon—are located at the heart of an exceptional viticultural territory, whose wines are labeled Côtes du Rhône.

Emmanuelle and I order the same main dish: carré d'agneaux (lamb cutlets) and gratin dauphinois (sliced potatoes roasted in cream). It was delicious. Amazingly, although that celebrated potato dish bears the name of the ancient French province in which I've settled down, the Dauphiné, I realized (with shame) that I had never actually cooked it at Gamone. So, I had to make amends for that laxity.

Inevitably, by the time I got around to preparing a dinner of lamb cutlets and potatoes at Gamone, my daughter had returned to her busy existence in Paris. So, she'll have to evaluate my culinary achievements solely from the following photos. For the lamb cutlets, I adopted a recipe based upon breadcrumbs, mustard, olive oil and aromatic herbs.

The authentic recipe for gratin dauphinois is surprisingly simple. The essential ingredient is Charlotte potatoes, which are particularly firm. (I must admit that I don't know if this ideal licensed variety exists outside France… and, if so, under what name.) And you need half-liquid cream of the kind sold in plastic bottles.

Slice the potatoes as thinly as possible. In an ovenware dish, place a layer of sliced potatoes, apply salt and pepper, and cover with cream. Repeat this to obtain four or five layers. Roast slowly: an hour at 150°. So, if you're cooking the lamb and the potatoes in a single kitchen oven, you'll need to insert the potatoes well before the lamb.

The sauce is obtained by the usual technique of déglaçage (deglazing). This consists of scraping up everything from the ovenware dish in which the lamb was roasted, transferring it to a frypan, applying heat for a few minutes in order to get rid of grease, and finally adding a bouillon concocted with a vegetable cube of the Maggi or Knorr kind.

My cooking experiment was totally positive. But, at Gamone, two elements were missing: the company of my wonderful daughter, and the view of the Rhône. On the other hand, Sophia and Fitzroy each got a bone and a bit of sauce.

Closed valley

I took this photo this morning:

[Click to enlarge slightly]

French air-force jet fighters often fly low over Gamone and head towards the horizon at the far end of the valley, in the direction of the Vercors plateau, the Alps and finally Italy. Such fighter pilots would do well to resist the temptation to swoop down, for fun, through those low-floating fluffy clouds at the end of the valley. This is the scene on a less cloudy day:

I guess they have gadgets enabling them to avoid crashing into concealed cliff faces.

Elegance and responsibility

Those are the lovely words—elegance and responsibility—employed by François Hollande as a reaction concerning the electoral exhortations of his ex-wife, Ségolène Royal, who encouraged her political supporters to give their votes to the leading Socialist candidate, who happens to be her ex-husband.

Marital divorce, despite its inevitable bitterness, should never be the end of the world. On the contrary, I'm convinced that Ségolène's explicit gesture will go a long way towards replacing the tears that overwhelmed her, Sunday evening, when she learned that her former voters had dwindled to a handful.

I've always believed that she's a splendid woman, even though she probably never had the mettle to become a president of the French République. Her courageous gesture in coming out affirmatively in favor of the father of her children is an act that will surely guarantee the endurance of Ségolène Royal on the French political scene… where we'll need, of course, the presence of wonderful women.

My brother

If Don Skyvington were alive today, he would have turned 70.

Our father Bill Skyvington happened to die at this same date, four days short of his 61st birthday: October 12, 1978. In other words, I see myself today (absurd arithmetic) as ten years older than my father at the time of his death.

The last time I saw Don was in 2006, at the same pleasant place in Brisbane—the Georgina Hostel at 694 Wynnum Road, Morningside (destined to receive indigenous oldtimers)—where Don would finally die of fatigue (brought on by a mysterious affliction that had pursued him for decades) on June 7, 2009.

[Clicking the image won't, unfortunately, remove the telephone post.]

I've always considered this song by John Williamson as a perfect celebration of Don's life:

Today, most of the actors in Don's existence seem to have disappeared, apart from our sisters Anne, Susan and Jill (all residing in NSW) and my cherished friend Bruce Hudson (in the NSW town of Young). And me, of course.

One more thing…

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [Wired, February 1996]

Click the graphic to watch an insanely-great video:
How to live before you die.

Demoiselle or dame, that is the question

The great Jacques Brel (in my humble opinion, one of the most amazing French-language artists of all time) once created a song that was based solely upon the Latin declension of the word for rose, rosa.

When I started to learn Latin, I was an 11-year-old kid at Grafton High School. Funnily, I've never forgotten my first lesson. Our teacher, Robert Sinclair (whom I met for the last time when I was out in Sydney in 2006, not long before his death), taught us the declension of the noun dominus, meaning master.

Now, if I had been brought up in the Roman Catholic church, I might have encountered the term dominus as a familiar reference to the Lord Jesus. As it was, I learned that a dominus (master), in the Roman context, was a man in charge of a domus (household). In modern English, we have everyday words from these two origins: the adjective "dominant" is derived from dominus, whereas "domestic" comes from domus. On the surface, it looks a bit like a chicken and egg situation. Which came first, the dominus or the domus? A master only comes into existence when there is a household over which he rules. But a household only exists as such when it has been created by the presence of a master. The Roman statesman and orator Cicero evoked the relationship between these two concepts: nec domo dominus, sed domino domus honestanda est (It is not the house that must honor the master, but the master who must honor the house).

Ever since I've been living in France, I've admired a basic feature of French language usage: the existence of convenient words that normally enable anyone to speak directly and politely to any other person. If the latter person is an adult male, you address him as "monsieur"; if an adult female, you address her as "madame". If you wish to speak to an officer with captaincy rank, say, you address him as "mon capitaine". Back in the days when religion was an omnipresent phenomenon in France, you addressed a priest as "mon père", and a nun as "ma sœur". In all these terms and expressions, the "mon" and "ma" prefixes mean "my", but this use of a possessive adjective is a mere sign of politeness, as in the old-fashioned English terms milord and milady. In a French context, when a citizen addresses a high-ranking military man as "mon général", that usage does not imply that the citizen is truly under the orders of the general. In the same way, an atheist such as myself sees no conflict in addressing a priest as "mon père". He's certainly not my personal reverend father (as if I were a member of his congregation), but rather a professional churchman, often of a friendly disposition, with whom I sympathize to the extent of recognizing, at least, his social status as a priest.

Unfortunately, in certain administrative sectors of French society, there's a nasty habit of retaining the term "mademoiselle" for female adults who don't happen to be officially married. This situation is blatantly wrong, since the marital status of a woman or a man should not impinge upon their social identity. So, I agree with French feminists that there are solid grounds for eradicating, in a draconian manner, the term "mademoiselle". But it would be a great pity to throw out the baby with the bath water. What I'm trying to say is that terms of address such as "monsieur", "madame" and "mademoiselle" have an etymology that deserves respect, since they are mirrors of a certain history of France.

Indian summer

Here at Gamone, certain leaves confirm by their color that it's well and truly autumn.

But the recent weather has been splendid. I'm too far away from the sea to go bathing, but I don't suffer unduly from that privation. I've always remained a little wary of the sun, sand and surf ever since my childhood experiences of getting severely sunburned at Yamba. If ever I were to go bathing today at a sunny beach resort, I would be obliged to wear constantly some kind of hat. So I guess my surfing days are over. Meanwhile, the dogs and I are perfectly happy here in the mountains.

As usual, Sophia spends her nights inside the house, in her vast wicker basket (lined with a new hessian mat purchased recently at Ikea), while Fitzroy sleeps outside, in his self-made bed beneath a wisteria and a wild rose bush. In a July blog post [display], I included a photo of Sophia occupying Fitzroy's splendid abode. Meanwhile, during the warm season, Fitzroy uses his luxurious kennel solely as a dining hall, where he can eat calmly, with no danger of having his food stolen.

Of a morning, when I open the kitchen door, Fitzroy leaps with joy to find Sophia and me emerging from the house. For months, he used to jump up at me, in his typical manner (which I've never tried to discourage). These days, I'm thrilled to discover that Fitzroy's morning bounds are aimed exclusively at Sophia. It's the presence of his great-aunt Sophia that provides Fitzroy with the enthusiasm to start off a new day, just as his prancing and gentle biting seem to wake up aging Sophia, who growls with mock anger, while snarling sufficiently to let the young male know that she's still the chief of their two-dog pack.

In this beautiful season, I learned this morning that my great friend Tineke Bot slid on a rocky ledge in her magnificent botanic park just up the road, and broke a bone in her left shoulder. So, I've spent part of the day lending her a hand.

New blog-display formats

In the latest version of my BLOG VIEWS menu (in the right-hand column, just below the biographical block with my photo), you can now choose between 7 possibilities.

The classic and magazine formats are new.

BREAKING NEWS: When you choose the classic format, you'll find that there's room on the page for a wide ad, of a size that you don't usually encounter in my blog. Worse still, at present, this ad space seems to be occupied (at times) by the following publicity:

I've just submitted a complaint to the Blogger forum stating that I don't approve of the presence of this ad in the middle of my blog. Meanwhile, I advise my readers who use Macs to be very wary of this MacKeeper product. What does it mean to "clean" a Mac? What exactly is a "dirty" Mac? I've just heard of a case (my ex-wife's Mac) in which the above-mentioned product seems to remove stuff that's not really "dirt" at all. On the contrary, the shit can start as soon as this stuff has been grossly removed from your Mac.

FINAL DECISION: I've finally decided to request the complete removal of ads from my blog.

Ask for evidence

The British charitable trust Sense about Science has just launched a promotional campaign on the theme of the constant necessity to ask for evidence, about all claims.

Normally, among rational human beings, this necessity should itself be evident. Sadly, though, we know it isn't. Mindless believers, Taliban-like fundamentalists, quacks and snake-oil salesmen abound. Their common characteristic, which they often share unwittingly, is a total disrespect for evidence.

Last night, in the USA, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis.

There was no evidence proving that this man had ever committed the murder for which he was condemned.

Front page of the New York Times

The English biologist Richard Dawkins was featured yesterday on the front page of The New York Times, and the excellent article was prefaced by a casual video.

Métro animals

Readers have often heard me evoking the fascinating concept of an upside-down world [display] in which people, animals and other things don't seem to be in their right places. I've also pointed out that this concept has in fact inspired my Antipodes blog [display], right from the start. Viewed from France, folk in Australia seem to be walking with their feet in the air. And I would imagine that French people, seen from a Down Under viewpoint, would appear to be behaving similarly.

In French literature, the upside-down theme of anthropomorphic animals reached a summit in the celebrated Fables of the poet Jean de la Fontaine. In fact, they were an evolution of the oral fables attributed to the legendary Greek author Aesop. Every French schoolchild has heard these fables, and know some of them off by heart. So, the notion that moral tales involving animals can teach us virtue is deeply integrated into the French mindset. It's not surprising that authorities concerned about the decline of civility in the Paris métro have resorted to animals to obtain illustrations of bad manners.

This buffalo, barging into the compartment with his head down, is preventing people from getting off.

In a crowded compartment, this lazy sloth wants to sit down and spread his legs out:

This chicken is screeching out on her mobile phone:

Instead of paying for a ticket, this frog prefers to jump over the turnstile:

And, in a corridor of the métro, this llama is spitting out chewing-gum:

It's a pity, I feel, that the creators behind this campaign didn't think of looking around, on the contrary, for exemplary illustrations of nice animals behaving in a perfectly correct manner in the Paris métro.

Elixir for next Saturday in Auckland

It's an ancient French beverage, made from grapes. In my native Australia, it's known as plonk.

Full of this stuff, the French fellows won't let the Blacks mess around with them. They won't necessarily win the match… but they wouldn't feel too bad about losing.

Phantoms of a lost paradise

Once again, I've finished rereading the excellent book on Provence by Lawrence Durrell, Caesar's Vast Ghost, published in 1990 just before the author's death.

And, once again, I'm trying to analyze the contents of this remarkable book—probably Durrell's most profound work, to my way of thinking—in order to set the various themes in their right perspective, and to determine why he decided to blend together several quite different styles of writing, ranging from travel and tourism through to history and philosophy, with twenty original poems and two or three hefty blobs of pure fantasy.

Back at the time that Durrell brought out The Alexandria Quartet, readers were warned amply that the novelist had in fact invented the people and the places that he wrote about. In other words, a visitor to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria would not encounter anything, today, that might be associated with the exotic context of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. Even in the case of Durrell's so-called travel books inspired by such places as Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus, readers should not imagine that they are being offered tourist guidebooks. Durrell's tales are hinged around the author's special relationships, not only with exceptional places, but with various colorful individuals. And a typical site, deprived of the author and his contacts, can become rather sterile. I'm reminded of the idea of considering the Bible as a guidebook to the modern land of Israel. Unfortunately, all the biblical personages disappeared long ago. And today, the places and people you encounter as a tourist in the Holy Land are not necessarily particularly "biblical" (whatever that might mean).

In the case of Caesar's Vast Ghost, on the other hand, I believe that we can truly take advantage, in a pragmatic sense, of Durrell's profound awareness and vision of Provence.

Durrell's book has little in common—at the level of both its form and its content—with a conventional guidebook such as, say, the excellent Michelin guide to Provence. They're not at all in the same writing category. But, although Caesar's Vast Ghost does not appear to be a tourist guidebook, I look upon it as a wonderful guiding book for visitors who would like to acquire a set of basic notions concerning the historical and cultural foundations of Provence, and the essence of this fascinating region. Without these notions, a newcomer to Provence runs the risk of being waylaid, sadly and superficially, by caricatural images of Provence. I see this happening constantly in the case of visitors who imagine naively, for example, that Provence is primarily a romantically pretty land for photographers. (See, for example, the olive tree and field of lavender on the cover of the Green Guide.) While it's a fact that sunny Provence can indeed be an ideal subject for photographers, it would be silly to imagine this fascinating region as little more than a giant set of colorful postcard images, whose inhabitants are generally beautiful, glamorous, quaint, rich, famous…

From the very first paragraph of Durrell's book, I was struck by the familiar tone of his description of his arrival in Provence, which evokes my personal memories of the '60s. Here are Durrell's opening words:

"My own version of Provence is necessarily partial and personal, for, like everyone else, I came here to fall in and out of love long ago, entering old Provence by the winding roads, the only ones, the old Routes Nationales, down the interminable corridors of cool planes in leaf, at the turn of the harvest moon…"

The most famous road, for visitors driving down from Paris, was the Nationale 7.

Generally, it led us through rural settings, and countless villages. But often, it forced us to drive through the main streets of busy towns.

Durrell arrived in Provence around 1957 with his future wife Claude, and they lived for a while in a house in Sommières, the Villa Louis.

A year later, they moved to the stone house north of Nîmes called the Mazet Michel, mentioned in my recent blog post entitled First encounter with Durrell [display]. And it wasn't until 1966 that Durrell and Claude moved into the big house in Sommières… where Claude died in 1967, and where Lawrence Durrell finished Caesar's Vast Ghost in 1990. This is the place at 15 Route Saussine mentioned in an earlier blog post entitled Old house in Sommières [display].

Durrell suggests that "the best way to strike up an acquaintance with […] Provençal towns is to arrive around daybreak, preferably on a market day when the place is full of sleepy vendors unloading their vans and trucks of everything you can imagine from pigeons and hams to olives and plums".

Early in his book, Durrell introduces us to two of his mates, Aldo and Jérôme, who are talking about the idea of writing a book on Provence. Aldo is said to be the owner of a dilapidated castle and vineyard near Beaucaire, and Jérôme is a beatnik of the kind that moved away from cities and roamed around in the south of France in the '60s. Frankly, though, I have the impression that these two personages are largely make-believe, made necessary by the author's desire to present the back woods of Provence as a decadent and decrepit place, on a par with Durrell's mythical Alexandria. Durrell attempts to make his readers believe, for example, that Aldo had once studied medicine, and that his passion for embalming led him to gold-plate dead human foetuses, which he would sell to a gypsy whom he had met at the famous fête at Saintes Maries de la Mer. One of Aldo's friends was "an old and somewhat impoverished Roman Papal Count", Reynaldo de Saturnin, who had asked Aldo to embalm the body of his daughter, so that he could keep her in a glass case.

Another of Aldo's strange former companions was a painter named Zoravis. When a bistro in Montparnasse claimed to be able to supply any beverage whatsoever that their clients might request, Zoravis asked for a glass of bull's blood. As soon as it was finally delivered (by a servant on a motor-cycle), the painter confirmed his virility by gulping down a glass of warm blood in front of his admirers. To my mind, those are the kinds of tall stories that Lawrence Durrell liked to spin in order to persuade his readers that he led a most exotic existence, surrounded by weird folk. Let's forgive him for this urge to invent unlikely characters. After all, Durrell was a story-teller.

Durrell analyzes brilliantly the ancient role of several forms of bull-worship in the culture of Provence, which emanated probably, in Greek and Roman times, from the religion of Mithra.

Since then, bull-worship has evolved into bull-fighting of one kind or another. In the arenas of Provence, there are both Spanish-style combats in which the bull is actually killed by a matador, and French-style events in which young fellows taunt the bulls while trying to flee without getting hurt.

In the midst of splendid places such as Marseille, Aix, Nîmes, Avignon, Orange, Vaison la Romaine, Saint-Rémy, Carpentras and Cavaillon, Durrell seems to consider that the heart of Provence is "dusty, sunburnt Arles at the end of its cobweb of motorways". And I agree with him totally. He draws attention to "the beauty of the Arles girls: each looks as if she had been freshly wished and love-minted to order".


Towards the end of Caesar's Vast Ghost, Durrell devotes an entire chapter to an amazing historical subject that is little-known in the English-speaking world: the evolution of the medieval art of courtship, as practiced by troubadours in the so-called "courts of love" in places such as Baux de Provence. This phenomenon was described in a celebrated book by the Swiss intellectual Denis de Rougemont, who was one of Durrell's close friends.




Durrell writes about so many fascinating themes in his book that I cannot hope to mention them all here in this short blog post. The most profound theme of all is the fact that most of the man-made marvels of Provence, creations of Caesar and Augustus, have lost their pristine splendor. Today, we witness no more than the remnants: a pale ghost of the Roman paradise.

As for the concluding chapter of Caesar's Vast Ghost—with a French title, Le cercle refermé—I've worked through Durrell's surrealist pages several times, trying to grasp what he was trying to say. I remain dumbly confused, however, by the author's weird descriptions of his romantic idyll in the company of the doll Cunégonde. It's worse than attempting to grasp the kind of relationship that might have existed fleetingly between a celebrated international economist and a humble hotel maid. The jumble of crazy words brings to mind a fuzzy derogatory expression that I remember hearing long ago, when I was a student: literary masturbation. The writer rambles on in an orgy of images, trying vainly to arouse his senses by the mounting fever of his choice of words. In the middle of this curious chapter, there are even smatterings of colloquial French, suggesting that Durrell has forgotten momentarily that he was writing an English-language book about Provence. There is much stoical despair in these 19 pages, as if the author were conscious of the fact that he was penning a testimony. But I can't help wondering whether Durrell would have retained this effusion of sad sexuality if he had been offered the luxury of calmly reworking his typescript in the company of competent editors and critics.

A trivial anomaly in chapter IX (Woman in Provence) of Caesar's Vast Ghost, concerning Durrell's friend and lover "Marie M-D", suggests that no such final editing ever took place. Durrell wrote:

… I knew the measure of her love because once she woke me long after midnight with a phone call, arriving almost at once in a taxi with a bottle of champagne and flowers to tell me: 'Darling, Anaïs is dead. I didn't want you to hear the news from anyone but me.'

There's a problem here. Marie Millington-Drake died in 1973, whereas Anaïs Nin didn't die until 1977. So, the messenger who arrived at Sommières in the middle of the night in 1977 was either Marie's ghost or another of Larry's girlfriends. Or maybe Cunégonde.

Corny French train movie

I'm not sure what this dual movie—apparently produced by the SNCF (national French railway system)—is supposed to prove… because I didn't have the courage to watch it through to the end.

You can click to make the movie fill up your entire screen, so that you won't miss out on any of the fine graphic details. And you can also click to highlight one side of the dual screen rather than the other. Besides, if you click the ABOUT button, you reach a page that invites you to download, for free, the original music of the movie.

Please let us know if you think this movie should be nominated for some kind of cinematographic award…

Good idea for a hat

Here's a picture of the kind of hat I have in mind:

Let me refer to it as an iHat (even though I would imagine that this term is already being used out in the wide world). The top hat style—which is just one suggestion among others—has the advantage of offering a rigid lightweight structure to house both the electronic components and the wearer's skull. The size of the hat and the position of the flat screen would have to be adjusted so that it could be worn by people who don't necessarily have receding Neanderthal foreheads.

The front section of the hatband conceals an elegant pull-down keyboard. Inside the crown of the hat, above the top of the wearer's head, there would be ample room for the power source and a rich assortment of components.

To help pay for the high-tech hat, the wearer might decide—from time to time, when he's not himself working with the iHat—to display publicity in the style of TV ads, aimed at viewers seated opposite him in public transport, waiting rooms, etc. At sporting events, the screen might display the colors of the team that the wearer is supporting.

Interesting and beautiful variants of the iHat could be designed for special occasions, such as weddings or horse races of the Ascot kind.

Naturally, people wearing particularly exotic iHats equipped with high-powered electronic devices emitting intense electromagnetic radiation would be advised to have their brains scanned from time to time, just to be sure there's no damage.

It would be advisable to secure the iHat to the wearer's neck by some kind of metal chain or cable. It would be silly if a valuable iHat were to be blown off by the wind and crushed by an automobile, or grabbed by an evil strike-and-run hat thief.

No problems

It's easy if you try.

Glowing cats

Over the last week or so, countless articles in the media have described the use of fluorescent kittens in a US laboratory—the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota—that carries out research aimed at protecting humans against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

I'm amazed and happily impressed by the apparent absence of critical fuckwit comments of the following kind:

— Fluorescence isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible. What is God going to think of this diabolical research?

— What are cats going to think about the nasty idea of being fluorescent? Won't it screw up their ability to sneak up on mice?

— What are certain human beings going to think about being expected to glow in the dark if they want to avoid catching AIDS?

— Isn't there a danger that this green fluorescence might rub off onto the hands of children who cuddled such cats?

Seriously, many articles fail to explain—not clearly enough, in any case—that the jellyfish gene responsible for the fluorescence has nothing whatsoever to do with the monkey gene (obtained from a Rhesus macaque) that is being tested, using laboratory cats, in the fight against AIDS. The fluorescence thing is a mere marker. The kittens have been genetically modified in such a way that, either both genes—the jellyfish gene and the macaque gene—are present together, simultaneously, or both genes are absent. When lab workers, using a microscope, come upon cells that glow (extracted, in that case, from a kitten that was fluorescent when illuminated by a light source), then they can be sure that those cells also contain the all-important monkey gene. For the moment, the experimental work is carried out only upon fluorescent cells, to determine that they do indeed resist AIDS. Later, the moment of truth will be attained when live glowing kittens are injected with the feline form of HIV, referred to as FIV (Feline Immunodeficiency Virus). If everything worked well, it would be good news for cats. And the next step would consist of seeing whether the monkey gene could be used successfully upon humans… none of whom would be expected, of course, to glow in the dark.

Finally, I'm not sure that my brief attempt at explaining this research is any better than what you find in tabloid stories about fluorescent cats.

Feathers in Sarko's hat

It's a bit scary to see that Nicolas Sarkozy is visiting Libya today, at a weird moment when the ousted dictator Gaddafi still remains at large, apparently protected by a certain number of supporters. But it's easy to understand why Sarkozy finds it a good idea, at this precise moment, to fly in and out of this Mediterranean land.

With the French presidential elections looming, liberated Libya will be a fine feather in Sarko's campaign hat. Besides, images of the visit will no doubt dominate this evening's TV news in France, at exactly the same moment that viewers are getting ready to watch the very first debate between the six candidates for the Socialist primary.

Here are the results of the latest opinion poll, published this morning in the French press:

Incidentally, on the subject of Sarko, it's interesting to discover that the poor man's hair is rapidly turning gray.

That, too, will be a significant asset in the forthcoming presidential campaign. The Socialist favorite François Hollande is some six months older than Sarko, and he has a receding hairline. But I can already visualize the wise old gray-haired Sarko treating Hollande condescendingly as a politically-inexperienced youngster.

Myths versus truth

In my recent blog post entitled Children's books [display], I indicated that Richard Dawkins has a book for children coming out soon, on the theme of evolution. Last night, he was interviewed on this subject by the BBC.