You can lead a dog to water...

... but you can't necessarily make him dive in and swim. The presence of Emmanuelle at Gamone made it feasible to coax Fitzroy into the car and take him down to the Bourne in the village of Choranche. During the excursion, my daughter's role consisted of making sure that our dog wouldn't jump up onto me when I was at the wheel.

If Fitzroy's head appears to be a little wet, that simply means that I had cupped up water in my hands and annointed him. For the moment, in spite of French successes at the Olympic Games, Fitzroy seems to be quite uninterested in swimming. We must not forget that he's a mountain dog, born in the Alpine village of Risoul 1850, at an altitude (as its name indicates) of 1850 meters. Fitzroy is capable of scaling an almost vertical embankment in a few bounds, but he's apparently uninterested in the idea of jumping into a stream in the valley.

Dawkins on Mormon madness

We can count on Richard Dawkins to find the right words to fire at Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile, two other prominent atheists, Sam Harris and P Z Myers, have started firing stupidly at one another in the context of Harris's troubling comparison [here] of two evils: collateral damage in warfare and the torture of terrorists. You can follow this sad mutual flaming on the respective blogs of Harris and Myers.

Without wishing to take sides, I do have the impression that the brilliant biology professor Myers, over the last year, has been losing his grip on everyday reality and becoming cantankerous.

BREAKING NEWS: Dawkins has just stepped quietly and briefly into the Harris/Myers quarrel [here], no doubt in the hope of calming down the situation.

Magic water

In the domain of magic, maybe the most celebrated liquid of all time was mercury.

Medieval alchemists looked upon this weird substance as primeval matter—in the spirit of Aristotle—out of which all metals evolved. As a schoolboy at Grafton High School, I remember well my first encounter with this amazing but dangerous metal, under the guidance of our aging chemistry teacher Jerry Spring. Once upon a time, it was used by dentists: a bit like installing a toxic battery in the patient's mouth.

Questing after miracles, modern believers in the supernatural seem to be placing their trust in a far more humble liquid: ordinary water.

Jacques Benveniste was a distinguished French specialist in immunology. In 1971, he discovered an organic chemical substance known as PAF [platelet-activating factor], which plays a basic role in the process of hemostasis (the stopping of bleeding) and other vital physiological functions. Benveniste—maybe with a Nobel Prize in the pocket of his lab gown—might have gone down in medical history as a result of this discovery. Alas, the curiosity of Jacques Benveniste led him into an esoteric field of research, inspired by the beliefs of homeopathy. Working under contract for the French pharmaceutical company Boiron [click here to see my article entitled Herbal and homeopathic products], Beneveniste published a controversial article in a 1988 issue of Nature in which he put forward the hallucinating idea that molecules of plain water might possess a mysterious "memory".

If so, then it would be quite normal (!) that the functions of an active ingredient within an enormously-diluted homeopathic preparation might in fact be "remembered". Quod erat demonstrandum. When shit of this superior nature hit the science media fan, it provoked a huge scandal that I won't attempt to summarize here. [See the Wikipedia article on Jacques Beneviste.] The discoverer of "water memory" retired from the French INSERM medical research organization, and the scientific community wondered whether their prestigious colleague might not have been led astray... into ridicule. Today, few serious scientists believe that Beneveniste's speculations incorporate the slightest grain of objective truth.

Whereas Jacques Benveniste obtained nothing more than an ignominious pair of Ig Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1991 and 1998, the French biologist Luc Montagnier was awarded a genuine (shared) Nobel in 2008 for his discovery of the Aids virus, HIV. Since then, at the height of his scientific glory, Montagnier has made astonishing claims that homeopathy works, and that Benveniste might have hit the nail on the head. Once again, I leave my blog readers to follow up this affair through Google and Wikipedia.

Let us move from "water memory" to the equally-exciting theme of "water fuel".

Agha Waqar Ahmad is a 40-year-old Pakistani engineer who operates normally in fields that are far removed from the Nobel domain. This employee of the police department claims to have invented an automobile that runs on ordinary water. Ahmad's scientific credentials: a degree in mechanical engineering from a technical college in Khairpur, in the southern province of Sindh. Water is water, universal and ubiquitous, and it knows no geographical, intellectual or cultural barriers. So, it is tempting to to draw parallels between the magic homeopathic memory of Benveniste's water and the magic power of water as the unique fuel in Ahmad's experimental cars. In both cases, we are faced with phenomena that modern science refuses to accept.

In Pakistan, there was intense excitement after the release of demonstrations of Ahmad's water-fueled automobile. TV journalists presented him as a savior of Pakistan, stricken gravely by the energy crisis. Once again, I invite my readers to use Google to learn more about Ahmad's miraculous invention.

Meanwhile, I remain an old-fashioned adept of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which I once learned in 1957, as a student at Sydney University, in the celebrated textbook of Mark Zemansky, which has accompanied several generations of science enthusiasts. I therefore refuse to believe that you can obtain an energy advantage by attempting simply to extract the oxygen and the hydrogen that compose water. The challenge is real, but Ahmad's alleged solution is surely chimeric.

An amusing detail of the Pakistani affair was the high-level support given by the Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs, Khurshid Shah, who drove the engineer’s car during his demonstration and said he was amazed by the performance of the water kit.

It's unlikely that that the inventor Ahmad might have been aware of, let alone inspired by, our Judeo-Christian beliefs, but there's a strong case for alleging a possible infringement of Roman Catholic patent rights concerning the power of water. After all, we've been using this powerful stuff for ages in baptisms, and we continue to sprinkle so-called Holy Water upon the coffins of our deceased.

In a nutshell, if ever Vatican lawyers were smart enough to demonstrate convincingly that the sacred Popemobile runs purely (as we all believe) on Holy Water, then this Pakistani heathen will be well and truly screwed. Here at home, in Pont-en-Royans, we are proud (?) of our Water Museum, imagined by the mayor Yves Pillet.

Don't ask me, though, what on earth this local museum is supposed to exhibit. Homeopathic health-impregnated water? Pakistani energy-impregnated water? Exotic shark-infested waters from afar? Maybe simply the water of the Bourne? Or the wind upon the waters...

Roast pork "Bangkok-en-Royans"

In France, in a butcher's shop or in the meat section of a supermarket, when you buy a piece of pork to be roasted, you generally get a rolled cylinder of lean pork sheathed in a thin layer of fat, tied up with string. That standard solution is not the only kind of pork to be roasted. Every Friday afternoon, a local pig farmer, Emmanuel Micolod, opens up his modern butcher's shop in a wing of his old stone farmhouse.

See his French-language website at http://www.fermemicolod.com. Emmanuel's shop enables us to purchase cuts of top-quality pork and pork-based delicatessen foodstuffs. And you can phone up beforehand to make an appointment with Emmanuel's wife Maria Micolod to get your hair cut, in an adjoining wing of the farmhouse. (That's a frequent rendez-vous for my daughter Emmanuelle when she visits Gamone.)

For my roast pork, I simply ask for a big chunk of échine (shoulder). Back at home, I cut it into two or three strips, a few centimeters wide, then I call upon my magic Thai powder, purchased in the shop of a friendly Asian lady in Romans.

Apparently this is the product that Thais use to obtain their red roast pork. The pork is macerated in a solution made with this powder. The red color comes from the inoffensive E129 food dye, while the flavor is obtained from two strong spices: cinnamon and anise. Inevitably, like everything of this kind that comes out of Asia, there's some monosodium glutamate in the powder, but I don't see anything of a questionable nature in their list of ingredients. Once the pork has been macerated for a day or so, I simply slip the pieces into plastic bags and place them in my deep-freezer.

Before roasting, I let the piece of pork thaw out slowly in the sun. Then I placed it in a Pyrex dish and covered the meat in fresh bay leaves (from my vegetable garden). I roasted it slowly, for almost an hour, in an oven at 200°. And here's the final roast pork dish, which I've named "Bangkok-en-Royans":

The hot pork (straight out of the oven) is seasoned with green pepper grains and capers, and sprinkled lavishly with fleurs de sel and freshly-ground dried pepper grains of the Ducros 5 berries kind. The meat is accompanied by a few slices of my pickled walnuts macerated in honey and cherry brandy, and the greenery is simply tender parsley, straight out of my garden.

Exciting foot and leg wear

Recently, somewhere out in the wide wild world of fashion design, a genius came up with the following prototype:

Let's say that you could wear these shoes, for example, when you're out on a surfboard in the waters off the West Australian coast, waiting for a wave. There's no way in the world that a big hungry fish might try to snap off your snappy shoes, chained safely to your shins.

I imagine an elegant high-end steel-gray version of this footwear: the jailbird model.

Curiously, after their brilliant prototype, the designers of the Adidas model seem to have run out of imagination. They could have easily added extra chains, in colorful hues, extending up to the wearer's wrists and—why not?—his stupid neck.

Suddenly I'm reminded of a trivial but true anecdote, many years ago, in the family flat of our concierge (guardian) in the rue Rambuteau. One of the youths was trying to lower a heavy bed from a first-floor window to the pavement in the courtyard, several meters below the window. To support the weight of the bed, he had coiled the ropes around his shoulders and neck. All of a sudden, he lost his grip on the ropes, and the big bed jolted downwards until it was suspended in the air about two meters above the surface of the courtyard. Meanwhile, the ropes had tightened around the fellow's neck, and he was choking for breath. We terrified onlookers lost precious seconds while we climbed onto chairs and boxes to take the weight of the bed, enabling the silly bugger to unwind the noose that was strangling him and get loose. In fact, he had a few screws loose, as they say. Fascinated by firemen, he always got around in the rue Rambuteau wearing bits and pieces of a fireman's uniform... in spite of the fact that no self-respecting unit of firemen would ever accept such fellow in their ranks.

Kangatarianism

I learn with interest that kangatarianism is a new nutritional approach, popular in my native land, which consists of avoiding all meat... with a single exception: kangaroo meat.

Critics have claimed that kangatarianism tends to make its adepts somewhat jumpy, but I reckon that negative remarks of that kind come from jealous folk in remote lands such as Europe, Asia and the Americas where you can't simply step outside and get yourself a roo steak. (In retarded Australia, ordinary citizens don't have the right to carry guns, so the only legal do-it-yourself approach to catching a roo is to use your automobile.)

But the automobile approach can be more messy and costly than using an old-fashioned gun.

Talking about guns, it was only this morning that I learned about the existence of this fabulous weapon, made in the USA.

It's called the Bug-a-Salt (pronounced "bug assault"), it's not expensive, and I immediately ordered one. The following video demonstrates the power of this new kind of arm.

Personally, I can't work at my computer when there's a fly or a wasp buzzing overhead, nor can I go to sleep of an evening in such circumstances. I've always got a can of toxic spray alongside my desk, my dinner table and my bed. But I've never liked the idea of breathing in such shit. So, I'm all excited about soon becoming the proud owner of a high-tech Bug-a-Salt weapon. Already, I can sense that it's going to change my daily existence...

Maybe they have a superior model that would work on snakes, spiders, cane toads, etc. Maybe they might even look into the possibility of designing an effective hunting weapon for kangatarians.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell us kids that the best way to catch a wild bird was to sprinkle some salt on its tail. It's amazing to discover that an old-fashioned piece of "bush knowledge" such as that, handed down orally from one generation to the next, was in fact scientifically sound, and has finally been translated into an advanced technological device such as the Bug-a-Salt.

Domesday

The Domesday Survey was commissioned by King William I in 1086, two decades after the Battle of Hastings and the start of the Conquest. Today, the original Domesday Book is housed at Britain's National Archives in Kew, located about 15 km to the west of the heart of London (midway between the city and Heathrow airport).

Domesday has been wrongly described, at times, as a census. In fact, it was a nation-wide audit carried out for the assessment of taxes due to the king. The only human individuals whose names appeared in Domesday were noblemen and upper-class citizens who owned land. And, in the rigid class system that has always characterized England, ever since the Norman Conquest, these landholders formed a tiny minority of people.

You can examine the original Latin of the Domesday Book—filled with abbreviations and featuring all sorts of mysterious handwriting quirks—at the following fine website:

http://domesdaymap.co.uk

To understand what it's all about, I've just purchased the excellent English transcription of the Domesday Book published by Penguin, which arrived here in yesterday's mail.

I spent the entire evening studying the Leicestershire chapter, in the hope of receiving inspiration in my quest for the identity of the Skeffington patriarch.

From the outset, I've been obliged to discard a few false ideas:

— Back in those days, you couldn't become a landholder simply by saving up a few hundred quid (like my father did, out in Australia), and then waiting around for an attractive property to come up for sale. Things didn't work that way in ancient England. A prospective landholder had to be a distinguished individual (preferably a member of the nobility) with friends in very high places (preferably in the royal circle). Then, if you belonged to the Chosen Few, you might be granted land, like manna from heaven. Literally: a manor from above.

— The men, women and children who actually worked the land were all members of the vast category of peasants, whose nature and numbers varied considerably. But they had one thing in common: It was unthinkable that a peasant might rise in a spectacular fashion to the status of a landholder. Back in those days, there were no fairy-tales, and no inspiring stories of slaves breaking their bonds, or pioneers breaking their backs and providing demonstrations of what would be known later on (in the 19th century) as the Protestant Work Ethic.

— Prominent citizens such as the Skeffingtons of Skeffington (who appeared explicitly on the scene as early as 1164) didn't simply emerge from the mud, or crawl out of the woodwork of Skeffington Hall. It's possible that they were there all along, in Leicestershire, ever since the days of the Conqueror. If not, then we must accept the idea (less likely, to my mind) that they were distinguished Norman emigrants with powerful friends in high places in England.

— Last but not least, if the late Viscount Massereene, head of the Skeffington family, once told me that "the Skeffingtons came over with William I from Normandy and were granted land in Leicestershire at Skeffington", then maybe I should respect his words, instead of believing (as I have done for years) that he was simply talking snobbishly through his hat. If there seems to be no explicit evidence of future Skeffingtons accompanying the Conqueror, maybe this simply means that I haven't searched hard enough...

Last night, I made an effort to browse through the Leicestershire chapter in the Domesday Book like a Sherlock Holmes trying to dig up evidence. First, I pursued a perfectly simple and sound idea. In the centuries that followed the Conquest, we learn that the Skeffingtons possessed land, not only in the ancestral village of Skeffington, but in neighboring villages such as Billesdon and Rolleston (both of which lie a few kilometers from Skeffington). So, in looking for the elusive patriarch, we should investigate Doomsday landholders in such places. (Let me remind you that the unique landholder in the village of Skeffington, as indicated unequivocally in the Domesday Book, was King William I himself!)

Another approach is to use the familiar family-history trick that consists of following up given names that would appear to be traditional and popular in certain contexts. Inversely, whenever certain given names are totally absent within a family-history context that concerns us, then we can probably rule out possible ancestors who carried such names. Recently, this trick helped me greatly in the case of 17th-century Skevingtons and Skivingtons named George. In the context of Leicestershire after the Conquest, there were Norman families with given names such as Hugh, Roger, Bertram and Ralph. But I don't recall ever meeting up with these given names within a Skeffington family. So, I'm not inclined to imagine any genealogical links at this level.

Among the early Skeffingtons, there's no doubt that Geoffrey was a traditional and popular given name. Besides, as I said, later Skeffingtons inherited lands at Billesdon. Putting these two clues together, I was interested to find a section of Domesday that describes the land of Geoffrey Alselin in Leicestershire. The transcription reads:

Geoffrey Alselin holds of the king 6 carucates of land in Hallaton, and Norman [holds] of him.
[...]
The same Norman holds of Geoffrey 12 carucates of land in Billesdon.
[...]
Of this land, 3 knights hold 7.5 carucates...
[...]
The  same Norman holds of Geoffrey 10 carucates of land in Rolleston.
[...]
Taki held all this land with sake and soke.

Since a carucate was about 120 acres, this fellow named Norman, apparently a friend of Geoffrey Alselin, was in charge of a few big properties all around Skeffington. All this land was seized from a certain Saxon named Taki, the son of Auti. Maybe (I'm inclined to say certainly) Auti and his son Taki had been members of Sceaft's people, who gave their name to the future Norman village of Skeffington. What's more, Norman wasn't all alone as the new lord of the land. Alongside him, in Billesdon, there were three knights in charge of smaller properties. So, all of this sounds very much like a situation involving a nobleman who was a friend of the king (Geoffrey Alselin), his slightly less noble tenant named Norman, and several knights who probably fought for the Conqueror. And, in one way or another, from this community, there emerged a gentleman named Geoffrey de Sceftington who went down in our medieval family history, in 1164/5, as having fully paid an unidentified debt ("he is quit") of 15 shillings and 6 pence.

Incidentally, when Domesday says that Taki held all this land with sake and soke, it sounds a little as if Taki called upon the help of two mates, Sake and Soke. In fact, "with sake and soke" is a common but fuzzy medieval legal expression meaning vaguely that Taki had the right to act, within his domain, as a public prosecutor and judge. [Please correct me if I'm wrong, or if you can explain this expression more correctly and clearly.]

As a guess, I would conclude that one of Geoffrey Alselin's daughters (visiting or living in Billesdon, Rolleston or Hallaton) was probably impregnated by either Norman or one of the three anonymous knights. Later, with help from the girl's father, that new family acquired land in the neighboring village of Skeffington. Finally, Geoffrey de Sceftington would have been a descendant, born in the first quarter of the 12th century, whose given name was meant to recall the noble Alselin forebear. That sounds plausible, no? This is no doubt as close as I've ever come (and maybe as close as I shall ever come) to the possible identification of our Skeffington patriarch.

In any case, for the moment, I'll continue to use this charming little drawing of Norman knights as the cover illustration of my ongoing Skeffington One-Name Study.

Kitchen pliers

Do you mean to say that you use a pair of pliers when you're preparing a meal in the kitchen?

Yes, they're ideal for removing the last few bones from slabs of fresh salmon.

And that's helpful in the preparation of my sushi dish.

Maybe you're trying to identify those strange dark circular slices in the middle, surrounding the squirt of hot-as-hell wasabi. They're pickled walnuts. In fact, I picked green walnuts just a few weeks ago, pricked them and soaked them in brine for a week or so to remove the toxicity, let them dry in the sun for three or fours days, and then placed them in a mixture of clear pine honey and kirsch (cherry brandy) to macerate.

From my bathroom window

Often, when I look out through my bathroom window, I'm surprised to find an aircraft looking back at me.

It would be nice to know the preoccupations—the nature of the missions—of such visitors. But it would be hard to acquire such information. And hardly worthwhile. Most often, the aircraft disappear just as rapidly as they arrived on the scene.

I'm always a little worried, though, that low-flying aircraft might get tangled up in hard-to-see power cables that crisscross the Bourne valley. My late friend Adrian Lyons—a skilled pilot until he went down in England on 1 August 1999—once told me that this danger is indeed very real at Choranche.

Meaning in images

You're familiar, of course, with these two famous images:

Bart Simpson and his sister Lisa.

Now, close your eyes and form the following image in your mind. Bart has unzipped his blue shorts and pulled out his pecker. His adorable wide-eyed sister has leaned down in front of him and started to give her brother a tender Olympian blowey... as they say in the sporting classics. Specialists (elsewhere on the Internet) have suggested that this incongruous composite image might look something like this:

You've recognized, of course, the logo of the forthcoming Olympics in London.

One might wonder what the athletes in the Olympic Village are going to be doing in their spare time, when they're not actually competing. Training, of course...

Howling

Fitzroy doesn't usually make a lot of noise. When he's playing with Moshé and Fanette, he barks a lot in the hope of impressing the donkeys. Then he's no doubt dismayed to discover that his barking doesn't impress them at all. So, whenever he wants to startle the donkeys, Fitzroy adopts the surprise-arrival technique, which consists of creeping up on the drowsy animals, suddenly appearing from nowhere and leaping in front of them... which usually creates the desired effects. In general, whenever Fitzroy is confronted with any kind of unfamiliar phenomenon, he tends to sink onto his belly so that he can study the situation calmly at ground level. During this kind of observation phase (which Fitzroy even applies to me when I return to Gamone after a shopping excursion), the dog remains perfectly motionless. Then, when he has successfully analyzed the situation, he promptly wags his tail, while still laying flat on the ground, indicating that the meditation operations are terminated.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, besides his normal barking, Fitzroy is capable of producing a quite fabulous sound. He can howl like a wolf! But he only does this in special circumstances, when he has encountered an exceptional situation... such as the presence of roe deer, for example, on the slopes opposite the house. When he starts to howl, Fitzroy throws his head back, stretches his neck and seems to be gazing at the heavens. As for sound itself, it's blood-curdling (as they say in the classics), but particularly fascinating when you have the privilege of being just alongside the howling beast. Well, yesterday, finding that Fitzroy was emitting a halfhearted howl (I forget why), I decided to see if I could encourage him. So, I did my best to imitate Fitzroy imitating a wolf. Miracle, it worked. Fitzroy was thrilled to find his master howling like an aging wolf with laryngitis, and he promptly howled back at me. Every time I croaked out a feeble howl, Fitzroy responded like an opera star. But he soon lost interest in the game.

Today, I succeeded twice in getting him started again. Tomorrow I'll get together some kind of reward system, such as chunks of cheese. Maybe there's a future for us on the stage of a Riviera cabaret, or on TV. But the situation can be embarrassing whenever Fitzroy has decided that enough is enough. If a visitor were to drop in at Gamone at such a moment, and find me howling ridiculously in front of a silent dog, I might have some psychiatric questions to answer.

British trick

There are rumors that Her Majesty's Guards are recruiting certain exceptional sportsmen with the aim of putting together a top-level basketball team, in the hope of challenging the USA.

Meanwhile, the Coldstream Guards hit upon the diabolical scheme of using one of their top basketball-players (whose identity cannot be determined, since his eyes are hidden behind the rim of his busby) in order to humiliate an unpopular foreign visitor—the perfectly normal president François Hollande—by making him look like a dwarf.

Back in the good old days when Nicolas Sarkozy was president, his buddy David Cameron didn't need to use this kind of nasty trick.

Bugged bells

Yesterday morning, at around 11 o'clock, I was surprised to hear the chimes of the Angelus ringing out across the Bourne Valley from the church in Châtelus.

I imagined that a marriage was probably taking place in the village. At midday, my neighbor Madeleine and her sister Paulette had invited me down for lunch. The first thing that Madeleine said to me was: "The bells of Châtelus are broken." What she meant was that the electronic timing device that was normally programmed to produce the chimes twice daily, at midday and at 7 o'clock in the evening, had gone haywire, and the Angelus was now being rung in a random fashion, at any hour of the day or night. I was reminded of the Parisian teashop that displayed a sign in the window announcing proudly that they were able to serve English-style "four o'clock tea" to clients "at all hours of the day". Clearly, for a pious and practicing Catholic such as Madeleine, the messages delivered by the electronic chimes had a more profound sense than the mere musicality that charmed my atheistic ears. Consequently, the fact that the bells were bugged disturbed her in the same way that my day is messed up whenever the Internet goes down.

The first second

Yesterday was a giant day for human knowledge. Scientists working at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva announced that the Higgs boson appears to be a reality. We are surely on the right path towards grasping (albeit fuzzily) what took place during the crucial early instants of the first second after the Big Bang. During those infinitesimal fractions of the primeval second, there must have been a tiny disturbance in ubiquitous symmetry that enabled Existence (with a capital E) to come into existence. And that moment of creation was associated with the advent of the Higgs boson.

The spirit of the hunt for this particle is well presented in the following 60-minute BBC program, produced about six months ago:

We can expect that great results will emerge soon from the LHC in the fundamental domain of supersymmetry.

Truly, I have had the privilege of living during an exciting period of human history. In 1953, when I was a 12-year-old kid starting science studies at Grafton High School, the structure of DNA was discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson. That was a fabulous moment in biology. Yesterday's announcement concerning the existence of the Higgs boson was an equally great moment in cosmology.

Not the answer

Last October, in a blog post titled Walnut harvest [display], I spoke with enthusiasm of a promising solution for storing my annual walnut harvest, using light-weight plastic containers that can be folded flat when empty.

[Click to enlarge]

I filled the containers with walnuts, sealed the carrying slots with tape, and placed them in my stone-walled cellar. Well, it turned out to be a totally unsatisfactory solution. The other day, when I thought about preparing a walnut cake, I was shocked to find that last year's stock of walnuts had been reduced to a few empty shells. I have the impression that Fitzroy, too, was disgusted by the mess.

At first sight, I couldn't understand how unidentified rodents had succeeded in entering the containers, and apparently carrying away most of the walnuts. The tape blocking the carrying slots was intact, and the top of the upper container had been covered. When I looked more closely, I soon discovered what had gone wrong. The mysterious rodent(s) had simply gnawed through a few thin plastic bars... in the classical style of a jail inmate escaping from his cell.

Once this hole existed, it was an easy matter for the rodent family to feast upon the walnuts, and to carry them away to their secret lair.

Maybe a high-tech solution might consist of inventing rodent-proof plastic. But the right stuff exists already: it's called steel. So, goodbye flimsy plastic! That's to say, between now and my next walnut harvest, I intend to design and build the perfect walnut container: a kind of steel mesh cage with sturdy drawers made of slats of wood (for the aeration). I assure you, it will be a masterpiece!

When the Mormons go down

For ages, we family-history researchers have all believed that the Mormons are our friends, and that we can take advantage indefinitely of their fabulous databases in Utah, present on the Internet through the time-honored FamilySearch website.

Personally, I've always been a little dubious of this idyllic scenario. While giving thanks constantly to the Mormons for their free services, I couldn't help wondering: What would happen in the genealogical domain if these crazy idolaters of the god Mormon suddenly decided to turn the tap off? Well, I fear greatly that this is what happened a week or so ago...

For some time, they've been touting the merits of their so-called new interface to the database as a friendly godsend, devoid of errors. What they really mean is that the new interface is designed to render user contacts antiseptic, as it were, with nothing more than the display of pure Mormon-authorized data... as distinct from all the stuff that heathen contributors (such as me, for example) might have dared to submit to Utah.

The outcome, for the moment, is catastrophic. It's as if the Mormon database—the summit of irony—has lost its soul.

Personally, I have complained bitterly on their blog. The latter, incidentally, can only be accessed if you're sufficiently well-informed to think of Googling "IGI": the Mormons' International Genealogical Index. Then you have to click around to find out what might be evolving in this domain.

Meanwhile, the new interface greets family-history researchers in pleasant green tones, with the charming silhouette of a young couple and a pair of kids in the mountains, alongside a lonely but auspicious family tree, as if nothing had ever changed in the universe of the prophet Mormon:

The only problem is that... everything has changed in the interface! You simply can't use it any longer as before, to look around for data of all kinds (true and maybe false) about your ancestors.

I posted a complaint on their blog at
https://familysearch.org/blog/familysearchupdates-igi

William Skyvington says:
June 21, 2012 at 12:11 am

The impossibility of accessing the old interface is, for me, catastrophic. I’m right in the middle of a one-name study on the Skeffingtons, Skevingtons, etc… and nearly all the essential basic data has suddenly become unavailable.

Then I tried to be constructive:

William Skyvington says:
June 23, 2012 at 5:07 am

The IGI database came into existence because of the religious beliefs of its Mormon creators. And countless genealogical researchers bless them for this immense creation, without which modern family-history investigations would not have become a daily reality. It is time, though, to start evoking the perennial dimensions of this affair. Today, we are all alarmed because the LDS church seems to have suddenly decided (for reasons that are not totally clear) to block access to the celebrated old interface. Would it not be imaginable to ask the Mormons if they might be willing to to donate a copy of their database to a world-heritage fund under the auspices of UNESCO ?

 Finally, I succumbed to despair:

William Skyvington says:
June 25, 2012 at 6:48 am

We lamenters of the demise of the good old Mormon website are all crying in the genealogical wildnerness in the sense that most people, finding that the behavior of FamilySearch has become strangely unfriendly, won’t even know how to find help, seek explanations or complain. The privileged few who are submitting comments to the present blog are sufficiently well-informed to know that they should Google “IGI”. Unless you do that, you’ll never be guided gently by the Mormons to the present blog and its litany of complaints. In other words, the old database is dying, it would appear, not with a bang but a whimper.

Happily, at a purely personal level, all is not quite as bleak as I might have suggested (in my enthusiasm for saving the old Mormon website). A year or so ago, I started to sense the fragility and the awkward presentation of data in the Mormon database. So I decided to start saving everything that was offered. Already, my preoccupation was a comprehensive one-name study of Skeffington (Skevington, Skivington, etc). It was clear to me that the major weakness of the Mormon database was that a researcher could not simply make a common-sense request such as: Please give me a listing, in chronological order, of all your Skeffington records.

Well, to cut a long story short, as soon as I sensed that the Mormons were unlikely to react positively to a request such as mine, I decided to adopt a do-it-yourself approach aimed at the production of such chronological list of records for three groups of folks: the Skeffingtons, the Skevingtons and the Skivingtons. This goal necessitated countless hours of manual processing. Today, those three precious Mormon files exist in my personal archives... and it goes without saying that I am prepared to send them freely to researchers who might be interested in such data.

Amazingly (Does God protect genealogists such as me?), I had just terminated my in-depth analysis of Bedfordshire Skevington data at the same moment, last week, when the old Mormon database went down. So, I'm no longer really concerned about whether or not the Mormons might bring their old interface back into existence, since I know exactly what it contained.

The gist of my conclusions is that normally, if my reasoning is right, and if all our respective female ancestors were righteous Christian women who only slept with their lawful husbands (that's a big "if", I agree), then individuals such as Judd Skevington (in Western Australia) and I should share exactly the same Y-chromosomes as the Tudor lord Sir William Skeffington. In that perspective, we Australians (along wth certain Skevingtons in England) might be thought of as the unique "blood descendants" (to use an old-fashioned expression that I detest, because genetic inheritance has nothing to do with blood) of the Leicestershire Skeffingtons. So, exit the Mormons, and enter DNA.

Behind the masks

Over the last few years, this grinning mask has attained planetary notoriety as a symbol of political protest:

Anonymous at Scientology, Los Angeles (2008) — Vincent Diamante

This iconic disguise has been adopted by members of the Anonymous group of hacktivists, but they were not the inventors of the mask, which had been a key visual element in the 2005 movie V for Vendetta by James McTeigue.

Today, it has become one of the most famous masks of all time, on a par with theater masks of Ancient Greece:

Or the carnival masks of Venice:

The historical personage depicted in the mask is supposed to be the English Catholic would-be terrorist Guy Fawkes [1570-1606].

In the early hours of 5 November 1605, Guy Fawkes and a small group of conspirators, opposed to the Protestant monarch James I, made a foiled attempt to blow up the English Parliament with barrels of gunpowder. We might say that the veritable creator of the iconic mask was the anonymous 17th-century Dutch artist who dashed off this famous drawing of the group of conspirators.

Did the Dutchman actually see any members of the group before drawing their portrait? Probably not, but that's neither here nor there, for the artist had a knack for drawing convincing conspirators: the proof being that his iconic "conspiracy look" is still making front-page news some four-and-a-half centuries later.

The eight conspirators who were captured alive were subjected to some very nasty treatment, to say the least. It started with sessions of torture in the Tower of London. Then they were rapidly tried and condemned. The following drawing shows the so-called hurdles of wattle branches on which the condemned men were finally strapped and drawn by horses to the gallows at Westminster.

One of the executed conspirators (not shown, curiously, in the group portrait) was a Leicestershire knight, Sir Everard Digby [1578-1606]. He was in fact the only one of the conspirators who pleaded guilty. He also had the dubious honor of being hanged for a short period of time. Consequently, when they cut him down, he was still perfectly conscious... and therefore capable of observing in agony the ensuing operations of castration and disembowelment.

Digby (issued from a long line of distinguished males, most of whom were named Everard) came from the village of Tilton, just a few kilometers to the north of our ancestral village of Skeffington. Here's a recent photo of the parish church of Tilton-on-the-Hill (as it is now known) and the old school-house (made from the same stone):

Our ancestor Sir William Skeffington [1460-1535] was married in that church in 1492. And his 20-year-old bride was a village girl, Margaret Digby, daughter of an Everard Digby... who was a predecessor of the Everard Digby involved (over a century later) in the Gunpowder Plot. William, a Catholic—known familiarly as "the Gunner" because of his military predilection for heavy artillery—had seven offspring with Margaret. Then, when she died, William seems to have concluded that Digby women were a good affair, for he married Margaret's cousin Anne Digby, and had another five offspring.

Getting back to the famous mask, I have the impression that no authentic images of Guy Fawkes have survived. On the other hand, we do have an authentic portrait of at least one of the condemned conspirators: Everard Digby.

It's quite possible that this Digby portrait was the only visual document that could be accessed by the anonymous Dutch artist who created the group drawing of the conspirators. I have the impression that Digby's facial features and his vaguely cynical expression are not unlike those of Guy Fawkes in the group drawing. If it were the case that the Digby portrait inspired the Dutch artist, then that would mean that all those modern V for Vendetta masks might be thought of as joyful mementos of a curious Catholic from the tiny Leicestshire village of Tilton who was knighted by King James I on 24 April 1603, and then tried to blow up that same monarch just two and a half years later.

What would Sir William Skeffington "the Gunner" have thought of the behavior of this Digby descendant? We shall never know, of course, because these two Leicestershire knights were separated in time by a century. But I have my own idea on that question.

Remember, remember the 5th of November:
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason that gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Elusive Turing

Today is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing [1912-1954]. He is represented in Manchester by this park-bench sculpture, which includes the cyanide-laced apple that killed the genius.

Google has celebrated the centenary by creating an ingenious doodle representing a Turing machine, but it takes some time and effort to figure out what it's supposed to do.

In my earlier blog post entitled Turing that unknown [display], I suggested that it's not easy to grasp what exactly Turing achieved. Fortunately, the US computer-science author Charles Petzold has offered us an excellent book, The Annotated Turing, which explains precisely the achievements of Turing.

While it's true that Turing's contribution to the British war effort at Bletchley Park was invaluable, his achievements in code-breaking were not the reason why we consider Turing today as the patriarch of computing. Likewise, while we appreciate Turing's suggestion about considering convincing man/machine conversations as a criterion for so-called artificial intelligence, this too was not really an all-important factor in Turing's claim to fame. So, why is Turing so greatly admired by computer scientists?

Well, his invention of the abstract concept of a so-called Turing machine (like the one in the Google doodle) threw light upon the limitations of algorithmic devices such as computers. More precisely, to use a horrible German term, Turing demonstrated that the Entscheidungsproblem cannot be solved. And what is this exotic beast? You might call it the "mission accomplished" problem. Like George W Bush with his war games, computers will remain forever incapable of determining beforehand whether or not a certain computing challenge can indeed be handled successfully. Turing taught us that the only way of knowing whether or not a computer can handle such-and-such a complex challenge is to set the machine into action and see whether or not it soon halts with a solution.

You might say that Turing proved that the proof of the computer pudding is in the computing.

Save Julian

As a fifth-generation Australian, whose ancestors were English or Irish, I'm disgusted to realize that our compatriot Julian Assange has been obliged, following an "Australian declaration of abandonment", to seek political asylum at the embassy of Ecuador in London.

Meanwhile, Australian authorities dare to evoke retrospectively the question of "the possibility of cancelling Mr Assange's passport'', as if a modern nation might have the option of deciding to blacklist one of her citizens and chase him into exile. Shame upon Australia!

The inspirational origins of our international English-speaking community—indeed a former empire and civilization—were largely Judeo-Christian. And one of our symbolic personages was the Wandering Jew, cursed and outcast forever.

                                   — Samuel Hirszenberg (1865-1908)

Alone, torn from his roots, Julian Assange awaits his destiny in a dull ambassadorial building in London, where the otherwise kind people don't speak the same language that kids like Julian and me used to speak Down Under. His isolation is a shame upon Australia.

In France, not so long ago, there was a great man, like Julian, named Emile Zola [1840-1902].

If you shut up truth and bury it underground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that, the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.