François Skyvington's moped road movie #7

Episode #7 of the road movie was presented on Tuesday afternoon.

In this episode #7, François has moved down to the coastal region of northern Germany known as East Frisia, which lies alongside the northern part of the Netherlands.

On a country road, he was surprised to come upon two teams of men who were playing a curious game that consisted of tossing a big ball as far as possible along the macadam.

The rules of game were not immediately obvious. Players and onlookers were scattered all along the road, and they would start to shout wildly as soon as a ball ran off the macadam and into the grass.

In fact, there's a red team and a blue team, from neighboring villages. Each team (if I understand correctly) has its own ball, and the game—known as bossein—can extend over a length of roadway of 5 to 10 kilometers.

Besides, the players don't seem to be troubled by the presence of vehicles on the road.

The winners are the team that uses the lesser number of tosses to cover the distance. So, in a way, it's a bit like golf. François had a toss or two, towards the end of the wet afternoon, but he wasn't particularly impressive.

After the match, he was invited along to a tasty meal that included large servings of sausages and potatoes, accompanied by beer.

By the time François was ready to leave the bossein context, night had fallen.

Next on the agenda, the following morning, was a visit to an ancient windmill.

It had been restored by Theo, who was now the chief miller.

Inside the windmill, François stepped into a fabulous machine world whose centuries-old wheels and cogs were made out of wood.

Afterwards, the miller and his wife initiated François into one of the old traditions of East Frisia: tea.

The next day, in the port of Emden, François found his way to a distinguished establishment that blends high-quality teas.

The East Frisians seem to be connoisseurs in the tea domain.

The specialist at Emden blends his teas with the same quest for excellence as a Scotsman blending whisky, or a Frenchman producing brandy.

The various alternatives are compared and judged as if the teashop were a laboratory... which it is, in a way.

And the specimens are served and compared in an experimental context.

The next day, François met up with a giant named Tamme who works as a chiropractor with horses.

Tamme uses a high-tech device that enables a lame horse to walk on a treadmill immersed in water.

Viewers were impressed by a sequence in which the giant chiropractor manipulated rapidly the leg of a giant horse in such a way that the bones made a distinct crack.

François was apparently capable of performing a similar manipulation on a lame horse.

Then he was brought in contact with a huge white horse that had some kind of a problem.

I held my breath when I saw François climbing up onto the back of  this beast... but everything went over well.

Even the incongruous presence of Tamme as a pillion passenger on the orange moped seemed to be problem-free.

Finally, François terminated his interesting experiences in East Frisia by an excursion in a marvelous old wooden sailing boat.

The combination of old wood and ropes had the same magic charm as the interior of Theo's ancient windwill.

The orange moped, too, went on this boat trip.

At one point, François (who, I believe, might be described as a relatively experienced sailor) took the helm.

The same North Sea winds that drove the old sailing boat (not to mention Theo's windmill) was generating electricity on the shores of East Frisia.

Back on land, François left East Frisia under a damp steel-gray sky.

As a TV spectator, I had greatly enjoyed the tone of this episode.

Australia's future fighter planes

Two-and-a-half years ago, on 1 March 2010, my blog post entitled Australia's choice of fighter planes [display] suggested that my native country would do well to compare the French Rafale with the aircraft on order, the US Joint Strike Fighter.

Towards the end of last year, doubts concerning the evolution of the US project provoked a statement by the Australian Minister of Defence.

His words were reproduced in The Sydney Morning Herald dated 7 December 2011 [display].

Australia has set aside up to $16 billion to buy 100 of the planes, but the Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, has already warned that any cuts to the program could force Australia to reconsider its orders for the fighter beyond the first 14, which are to be delivered by 2014 at a cost of $3.2 billion.

Today, in the French press, there's an interesting article [display] entitled Et si Dassault convainquait les Américains d'acheter le Rafale? That tongue-in-cheekish title asks a rhetorical question: And what if Dassault convinced the US to purchase the Rafale?

In the Breton city of Brest this morning, at a colloquium on European defense, the director of Dassault, Charles Edelstenne, took to the floor for a totally unexpected little speech, which included the following statement concerning the US project, whose total costs have skyrocketed by 50 percent in the space of a few years:

The present difficulties are just a beginning. As soon as the systems attain their age of maturity, things will become far more complex. The unit cost has already overtaken that of the Rafale, in spite of the fact that the volume of orders for the F-35 is ten times superior [to that of the Rafale].

He added jokingly:

The Americans call the program TINA, meaning "There is no alternative". On the contrary, an alternative exists: the Rafale, an aircraft that has been proven both technically and financially.

These remarks should be interpreted within the context of the so-called "Smart Defense" approach that might be adopted in Europe, involving the large-scale mutualization of defense resources, and a "Buy European" attitude. But Edelstenne's remarks might be little more than wishful thinking.

Biggest threats to Christianity

As you might imagine, I'm not particularly worried personally by emerging signs of the decline of the Christian religion. On the other hand, this inevitable shift in significance is a subject that interests me from a social and historical viewpoint. What have been its main causes up until now, and what are the biggest threats to Christianity from now on? Those are interesting questions, which I would be incapable of tackling seriously, in depth, in this humble blog.

Over the last few years, many observers have suggested that the church might decay from within, as a consequence of the countless affairs of pedophilia throughout the world. I don't think that's likely, because the clergy have had centuries to get their defensive act together in that domain, and they can be pretty cunning. Look at the case of that silly old priest in New York, Benedict Groeschel.

He dared to evoke the possibility of teenagers transforming themselves into evil "seducers" then "coming after" poor defenseless priests, and leading them into iniquity. What a despicable arsehole!

Other people imagine that the widespread acceptance of the atheistic theses of scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins will inevitably turn vast numbers of people away from religion. There again, I don't really see things in that light. A godless movement such as that of Dawkins will inevitably remain elitist—like my recently-proposed awestruckism [access]—for the simple reason that it takes a lot of intellectual preparation to understand and appreciate the various branches of scientific thinking upon which it is based. It's most unlikely that devout Christians might read, say, A Universe from Nothing (Krauss) or The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), only to be swept immediately off their feet by a sudden urge to become atheists.

Things don't work like that. Even a formerly religious reader who has been deeply influenced, say, by God is not Great (Hitchens) or The God Delusion (Dawkins) was most likely a favorable candidate for conversion to atheism. Besides, we must never forget that, all the way down from the pope to schoolteachers in faith-based establishments, their are hordes of Christians who claim that they have no trouble in accepting science while pursuing their belief in God.

No, let me tell you the nature of the greatest threat to Christianity. The danger, in a word, is bones : that's to say, the possibility (however remote it might or might not appear to be today) that the fragments of bones unearthed by archeologists will end up "speaking" through an analysis of their DNA. Up until now, the alleged Greatest Tomb on Earth—in the Crusader church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem—has remained resolutely empty. This is hardly surprising, because there was surely never anything interesting to be seen in that ornate structure. But certain researchers have been starting to look in the right places in the hope of finding and examining the bodily remains of Biblical individuals, including members of the family of Jesus. And these investigations could well upset the apple cart in the near future.

When I speak of researchers, I'm thinking primarily of James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici, mentioned in my recent post entitled Jesus [display].

Ideally, one might imagine that the idea that Jesus was a splendid but perfectly normal male should shock nobody. But, because of the teachings of the apostle Paul, that simple idea is literally anathema within the established church. And if ever the examination of bones led us to conclude that Jesus had been married, that he had been the father of children, and that the so-called Virgin Mary had been the mother of five boys (of whom Jesus was the eldest) and two girls, then this would surely be disastrous news for most Christians, who prefer to envisage the Holy Family as unearthly supernatural creatures.

Sadly, we see already the initial signs of the hatred expressed publicly by certain eminent academics towards Simcha, who has the misfortune of being a humble Jewish-educated filmmaker, rather than a university professor. Click here to see, for example, Simcha's six-part response to nasty criticism of his interpretation of the presence of a pair of nails found inside a Jerusalem tomb.

You might say that the forensic analysis of stuff such a bones and nails strikes certain academics—not only Christians, but certain Jews, too—where it hurts most: that's to say, at the level where Jesus is no longer looked upon as a magical being.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #6

Episode #6 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

François and his moped left the sunny south of France for another exotic corner of Europe: the German Bight, on the edge of the North Sea.

His excursions started at the North Frisian port of Husum, where François boarded a vessel for a bit of prawn fishing.

Funnily enough, the crew members were intrigued to find that their French visitor was accustomed to crunching into small cooked prawns without removing their shells.

Next, François abandoned temporarily his moped and took a plane out to the remote archipelago of Heligoland, some 50 km off the German coastline, where he had a rendezvous with Rolf Hagel, in charge of the local seal population.

They started out immediately, on foot, to inspect seals on the nearby beaches.

They soon came upon a pair of baby seals that had been abandoned by their mother.

They would have to be captured rapidly and transported to the local seal nursery for feeding and care.

Next, François boarded a ferry for the bleak windswept island of Pellworm, which seemed to lie in the middle of nowhere.

Here, men were constantly building and repairing sea walls made of wooden stakes and bundles of branches.

Taking advantage of the least strip of earth emerging from the waters in this steel-gray setting, these warriors of the sea strive ceaselessly to prevent the island from disappearing into the North Sea.

François was guided by a local resident, Knud, who, besides his work as a seawall supervisor, has a job as a barefooted postman, walking across the beaches to deliver mail brought across on the ferry. On this particular day, the island's postman got a helping hand from François and his moped.

François' final encounter in this lonely but lovely universe was with a lady named Ruth.

After meeting up with François in a mainland food-supplies store and piling his moped into her van for the trip towards her island home, Ruth parked her vehicle and took control of her personal train for the journey along a narrow causeway with the sea on both sides.

She explained that she only owns the train, whereas the railway line belongs to the German Republic.

As for her home, it's built on a mound of earth that rises magically out of the flat sandbanks and the sea.

Whenever the sea surrounds the house, they simply close the doors and windows.

François saw amazing photos of what the house looked like whenever there was a tempest, several times a year.

Apparently, at the top of the house, an emergency attic has been built on four hefty concrete pillars. So, even if the rest of the house were to be swept into the sea, Ruth and her children could wait in safety for the waters to subside.

For the second time in his road movie, François was surrounded by a big flock of sturdy sheep, which enable Ruth to earn her living in this exotic setting.

When François asked Ruth naively if it might not be better to reside on the mainland and only step across to the island to take care of the sheep, she replied with a smile that her ancestors had been settled in this remote paradise for the last two and a half centuries, and that she felt fine there.

Finally, François trudged back along the causeway beside his trusty steed.

A big fat ewe watched him leaving.

The animal seemed to be saying to itself: "Why would anyone decide to leave this marvelous island?" In one of Ruth's amazing photos, we saw that, in times of tempest, the sheep gather on the lawns of her house as if it were Noah's Ark.

It's easy to understand that—for Ruth, her children and her sheep—abandoning this kind of existence for a mainland house at the other terminus of her railway line would be unthinkable.

Half a century ago

In September 1962, I was spending my final fortnight with IBM in Paris. After seven months working as a computer programmer in the IBM Europe headquarters in the Cité du Retiro—a few hundred meters away from the Elysées Palace of the Général de Gaulle—I had the frustrating impression (which later turned out to be false) that I hadn't learned much French.

For the next three months, I would hitchhike around France and Spain before moving across to London for another IBM job, in the UK company's Wigmore Street headquarters. For the moment, in Paris, I must admit retrospectively that I had not yet heard the new sound that was emerging on the other side of the English Channel.

However I had vaguely sensed that lots of things were happening in London at that time. It seemed to be the place where the action was.