Poor-quality fuzzy drawing of a boat

This low-quality drawing is so amateurish that it looks like the fuzzy work of a child. So, I would understand you for thinking it's worthless.

Well, it is indeed an uninteresting work of art... but I was prepared to pardon its weaknesses when I learnt that this was an authentic sketch of the barque Caroline which had reached Rottnest Island near Perth (Australia) in 1829, conveying the Henty brothers James, Stephen and John, accompanied by a few Spanish merino sheep. Four years later, on 6 August 1833, my great-great-grandfather Charles Walker had been employed as a steward aboard that same ship when he arrived in Sydney.

As for Rottnest Island, that was a lovely playground for my son François and me when we used to go sailing on the Zigeuner in 1986. So, at a personal level, this fuzzy drawing is a precious document.

A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that an Australian lady whose maiden name was Sheridan Henty had purchased a house in the neighboring village of Pont-en-Royans. She was a descendant of the Henty pioneers who had reached Western Australia aboard the Caroline. Sheridan showed me a book on her Henty ancestors by Marney Bassett, and that's where I found the fuzzy drawing.

Learning how to splash around in the sea

Who are these people, splashing around like water babies? Are they holiday makers? Is this their initial contact with the gear they're wearing? Well, they're medical staff, attached to the French organization Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World).

They've jumped into the cold water at Concarneau (Brittany) with the aim of learning, in a hands-on fashion, how to intervene in saving refugees who've been thrown into the sea. Within a week or so, at Marseille, they'll be getting aboard a German patrol boat called Aquarius and sailing to the Italian island of Lampedusa, to await the arrival of refugees fleeing from Libya.

Click here to visit the English-language website of this exemplary French body.

Phone spam

In France, we often receive phone messages from crooks who leave a fake phone number (which generally starts with 0899 or 0892) and ask us to phone back. This has been the case, for example, since a new law about compulsory smoke detectors came into existence.

Citizens in France can complain about this costly rubbish by calling

0 811 02 02 17

or by contacting the French government website at

internet-signalement.gouv.fr

Click here for a short article on this subject.

Darwin Day

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809.

It's wonderful that this birthday of one of the greatest scientists falls just one day after one of humanity's greatest scientific discoveries.

What counts above all is belief

The day before yesterday, this nice-looking American cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy was arrested in Portland (Oregon). The Federal criminal charges against him were contained in a 32-page summary. It’s all a very American story, so I’ll let my readers use the Internet to look up the facts for themselves. In any case, I would imagine that Bundy will be protected and brought to salvation by a guardian angel of one kind or another, for he's a Mormon and he surely has God on one side… along with arms on the other.

Busy intellectual might calm down a little

I often have the feeling that our hero Richard Dawkins works too much. Why doesn't he set aside some of his multifarious preoccupations (for example, atheism) and simply calm down a little? Of course he surely knows personally what he's doing, and why.

This morning's news indicates that Dawkins suffered a mild stroke, last Saturday, leading to the cancelation of his planned trip to Australia and New Zealand. Readers might have noticed that Dawkins is already back on the Internet, suggesting that his stroke was fortunately quite minor.

Biggest declaration ever of big science

This afternoon (in France), we were told that the gravitational waves imagined long ago by Albert Einstein were indeed a reality.

I watched the press conference of representatives from the European team.

Birth of a black hole...

All the data concerning this gigantic discovery is amazingly complex and largely incomprehensible for ordinary people. We do however realize that our universe, an incredibly astounding entity, can be grasped by the minds of scientists. By the brains of godless human beings. And that alone is a thought that makes me proud to be an atheistic specimen of Homo sapiens.

French military liquor

That document was made available through the Gallica website (owned and operated by the national library in France). The alcohol-inflamed declaration dates surely from the end of World War I. Here's my attempt at translation:

Strong liquor, victory liquor

Anti-alcoholic weepers, with fake philanthropy and make-believe pity, have nothing to do with the opinions of our new France, victorious and ready to allow her armies to suffer inevitable revenge from the defeated.

Pinard and Gnôle are military liquors, ideal for French armies facing conflicts that will emerge inevitably from the rigorous application of peace treaties.

If the money owed to us by our former enemy is not in fact paid, then we shall never be moving towards peace. Liquor flasks from the military mess must not be filled with water.

Something got screwed up at the end of the jewellery holdup

Something went seriously wrong with a jewellery holdup in Paris. Click here to watch the video. Instead of taking French leave with the sack of treasures they had just unearthed, the two bandits got locked up in the cylindrical glass doorway. And this little problem drove them as mad as a couple of cut snakes. (Aussie slang, hard to explain.)

Let's hope they took advantage of the comedy, for they're unlikely to have an opportunity of participating in this kind of fun for the next 20 years or so, from inside their prison.

Year of the Monkey

I feel reassured (God knows why) by the fact that Chinese astrologers consider that we're moving into the year of the Monkey. Better still (although I'm not sure what it means), the year of the Fire Monkey.

Hydrangeas in Brittany

I've already written briefly [here] about the glorious hydrangea-covered seaside slopes in Brittany.  Here's a photo of the German horticulturalist Bernhard Meyer about to set off from Brittany in his truck loaded with freshly-cut hydrangeas:

My sister Anne Skyvington, who admired these colorful fields when she visited us last year, has pointed out that the differing colors (blue, pink, mauve, etc) depend upon specific chemical elements that each hydrangea plant finds in the surrounding soil.

Click here to visit the website (available in English) of a colorful nursery in another corner of Brittany.

The degree of acidity of the soil influences the colors of many hydrangea varieties.

• In a strictly neutral soil (pH 7), varieties of plants that are naturally reddish will produce either pink or crimson flowers, whereas bluish varieties will turn mauve.

• Varieties of plants that are naturally bluish will express themselves most vividly in a slightly acidic soil (pH between 4.5 and 6.5).

Apparently changing the colors is easier said than done, and gardeners might need to experiment, and maybe use a dose of chemicals containing aluminium.

To be honest, I must admit that I failed dismally in my early attempts to introduce hydrangeas in the alkaline limestone soils of Gamone (pH often greater than 8.5). As everybody knows, if Brittany is indeed Brittany, it's for sound scientific reasons.

Google self-driving car

What a fabulous idea: Google's plans to develop and test a small driverless car.

Click to enlarge

For the moment, Google has been testing its prototype at Mountain View (California) where the company's headquarters are located, and also at Austin (Texas). Further testing will be carried out soon in the rainy weather of Kirkland (Washington). Apparently there are "active discussions" between British authorities and Google in a the hope of starting trials of driverless cars in the UK.

As far as the current results of Google's testing are concerned, I would imagine that most of the data remains a protected secret, because the company is tackling a fabulous money-making challenge, and they're not going to let the cat out of the bag.

One of the most friendly aspects of these future cars is the obvious fact that they run purely on electricity. So, the sooner they dominate our highways, the sooner they'll enable us to abandon the gluttony of fossil fuels.

Another fabulous possibility will be the probable reduction of road deaths through the elimination of human errors and stupidity. In this domain, it's inevitable that many people will inevitably be anguished, at the beginning, by the idea of placing their personal safety in the hands of robotic devices. Funnily enough, many of these fearful passengers would not hesitate before stepping into a conventional vehicle whose driver has just downed a few glasses of alcohol.

Cartooning for Peace

Nicolas Vadot, 44, is British, French and Australian. This fine specimen is a contribution to Cartooning for Peace.

American Gothic

To the same extent as The Scream [click here], this painting by Grant Wood [1891-1940] has become a famous icon. Its simple title is perfect: American Gothic.

Among the countless parodies that this painting has motivated, here's an excellent specimen:

Concerning the original painting, critics used to say that the female was too young to be the wife of the grim Iowa farmer, so they decided that she was the old fellow's daughter. In the parody, the youthful Iowa star Hillary Clinton is standing alongside her silver-haired parent Bill.

Don't shoot the messenger

Forcing Julian Assange to stay cloistered in an embassy

is a barbarian act, perpetrated by God's Own Barbarians.

Personally, as a naturalized Australian in France, I am shocked to realize that the French president François Hollande refused my compatriot's request to be welcomed as a "refugee" (approximate term) in France. That refusal broadened my awareness of the genuine nature and character of our head of state.

Slave labor Down Under

In Australian speech, the word "backpacker" designates a foreign tourist, generally young, whose only luggage is a sack with shoulder straps carried on the back.

Backpackers come from countries all over the globe. An article on this subject in the French journal Le Monde speaks of more than 23,000 French backpackers.

Well, starting in July, backpackers will be taxed: a gigantic 32.5 % of their earnings! Faced with this blatant case of highway robbery, the volume of backpackers Down Under is likely to dwindle. Indeed, fewer young tourists will wish to spend time in a harsh land in the Antipodes that seems to consider them as potential slaves, particularly in various agricultural sectors, which employ 40,000 backpackers every year.

New rules for spelling in French

As a foreigner who has been speaking and writing French for many years, I've encountered two quite different kinds of problems. On the one hand, my accent hasn't evolved very much. Consequently, French people are immediately aware that I didn't grow up as a French speaker, but they're generally incapable of identifying my native language or my land of birth. On the other hand, although I'm still capable of making grammatical mistakes, my behavior in that domain is often much better than that of native French people.

At present, there's a lot of buzz about major changes to French spelling, particularly at the level of circumflex accents, as shown here

Nîmes

Up until now, the dot over the letter i has been replaced by a circumflex. But maybe this accent should be removed from now on. I wouldn't be surprised if many foreign observers, seeing this buzz, were to imagine that the task of writing correct French is about to change considerably... for the better, or for the worse.

Now, without going into details (which would be sure to bore those of my Antipodes readers who are not necessarily familiar with French), let me simply point out that this whole affair is little more than buzz. So, carry on with your familiar handling of French spelling, as if nothing whatsoever is about to change!

Prison islands for Australia

Protesters have been gathering in Australian cities to oppose cruel government plans to deport 267 refugees, including 72 children, to offshore detention in a prison island.

Australia has installed such detention centres in two foreign lands. One is located in the republic of Nauru: a remote and desolate phosphate island in the Pacific Ocean.

In this hot climate, people and their children have to live in tents, in a place where there is so little to do that many inmates tend to develop psychiatric problems.

Everybody knows that white Australia started as a penal colony for Britain, towards the end of the 18th century. Unfortunately, as a modern society, we seem to have retained certain aspects of what might be termed our "penal mentality".

Absence of birdsong: Silent Spring

The American writer Rachel Carson [1907-1964] published her masterpiece Silent Spring in 1962, describing the nasty effects of pesticides on the environment. The sense of the book's title is that birds, poisoned by pesticides in spring, had ceased to sing.

Soon after starting to work for Pierre Schaeffer at the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF in Paris, I had the privilege and thrill of attending the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (Sweden), from June 5–16 in 1972, which was the first major international event devoted to environmental challenges. I discovered that Rachel Carson's book had become a bible in this domain.

Last night, on French TV, I watched a fascinating and highly disturbing show concerning the present-day dangers brought about by pesticides in France. I realized with horror that the situation was indeed far worse today than when Rachel Carson first evoked the "absence of birdsong", over half a century ago. The following map (created by the TV people themselves) provides us with a good idea of the intake of pesticides in the various French départements :

It's sad to realize that the worst-hit zones are the celebrated wine regions, such as the Bordeaux area in the south-west. As for my Isère department, it's marked as light orange, which is not too atrocious. Here's a table (in French) indicating the toxic shit that hits our dear Isère:

Click to enlarge

Click here to watch a lengthy replay of the French TV show.

BREAKING NEWS: Today (Thursday, 4 Feb 2016), the French minister Ségolène Royal has reacted briefly but clearly and courageously to the alarming news evening on pesticides in France.

She started by revealing that she had often been in arguments with agrochemistry multinationals. "I ran into problems when combating the aerial spreading of pesticides. It was quite difficult." After mentioning her ban upon the Monsanto product Round-Up, described as a "very violent" pesticide, she concluded: "The lobby of the production of pesticides is very powerful in France." She then invited people on the land to reduce their use of pesticides "in their own interests, when we see the number of cancers among farmers who use pesticides." Then she concluded on a positive note: "We are now aware of the existence of substitution products in the case of dangerous pesticides. France could become the first nation for the production and consumption of substitution products that do no harm to public health."

Are Dutch policemen as smart as they think they are?

I've watched with amusement a small video that shows a few smart Dutch policemen using a trained eagle to attack and destroy a drone. If I understand correctly, no eagle has yet had its head chopped off by a drone propellor.

The policemen surely know what they're doing. But I think they're encouraging a deadly arms race. The next thing we know, smart drone engineers will invent some kind of eagle-killer device. Truly, this is not what I think of as the march of science and technology.