Leap year

Click here to see today's Google doodle, presenting a bunny leaping into the final day of February 2016.

Come on ladies, let's knock him out!

There’s a delightful story in yesterday’s newspapers about a criminal who couldn’t prevent his holdup in a boutique in Rennes (Brittany) from getting totally screwed up… by a few courageous female shoppers.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a heavily-built bandit dropped in to the shop Ombre des Marques in the Boulevard de la Liberté, and yelled out that he wanted to take their drawer full of cash, otherwise he would shoot everybody. Since the staff refused to obey this threat, the fellow stepped behind the counter and grabbed a heavy drawer containing the day's earnings. Meanwhile, a dozen female customers observed the surprising events unfolding in front of their eyes. One of them decided spontaneously to intervene. She cried out to the others: "Come on ladies, let's knock him out!" So, they jumped upon the big fellow, knocking him to the floor, and simply sat on him. The silly fellow was so busy holding on to the drawer of money that he couldn't even reach for the alleged weapon hidden (?) in his pocket.

Police arrived rapidly on the scene, where they admired the weighty work performed by the ladies.

A detective explained: "When we entered the shop, we saw that the bandit was stretched out on the floor, held down by the weight of the women. They're exceptionally brave ladies, because they didn't know whether or not the fellow was really armed."

The detectives congratulated the women, and set off to the police station with the captured bandit.

Best beaches in the world

Click here to access a lengthy and well-illustrated article in Britain"s Guardian newspaper on the top 50 beaches in the world. The list includes four French sites.

French site — Pyla dune, an hour's drive from Bordeaux

This huge sand dune is 2,7 km long, over a hundred metres in height, and a few hundred metres in width. The dune is located on the shores of the Atlantic, while its landward side looks out over a vast forest. This ancient dune is in perpetual but gentle movement, of an imperceptible kind.

French site — Morgat, Crozon peninsula, Brittany

French site — Bora Bora, French Polynesia

In my native land, Australia, the list includes a single beach: neither Bondi, Yamba nor Byron Bay. That absence doesn't surprise me, as I've never been impressed by Aussie beaches. I've found them hugely overrated, often boring and ugly, never poetic... but possibly dangerous.

French president visits the agricultural show

Click here to see a one-minute video of the rowdy visit of president François Hollande to France's annual agricultural show in Paris.

A few fellows actually vandalized the government's agricultural stand.

The idiots durely didn't realize that acts of that senseless nature are unlikely to win them supporters. On the contrary...

Buying a beach in New Zealand

This splendid beach named Awaroa is located in the Abel Tasman national park at the upper tip of the south island of New Zealand. This remote paradise of 7 hectares, 10 km from the closest village and only accessible by boat or helicopter, was up for sale for a few million dollars.

Last Xmas day, a New Zealand pastor named Duane Major decided to tackle the challenge by a crowd-sourcing approach. He rapidly received 40,000 pledges, amounting to 2.3 million dollars. Even the New Zealand government participated in the project, with a gift of 350,000 dollars. The pledges were even accompanied by poems from children, praising the beauty of the site.

That's the same nation whose citizens were most upset when France was testing nuclear weapons in that part of the world... before blowing up a Green Peace vessel in Auckland. Retrospectively, I have the impression that French authorities didn't really understand the kind of citizens with whom they were dealing.

David Cameron is truly a pommy a-hole

The more I see and hear David Cameron, the more I'm inclined to designate him by means of the nasty old-fashioned Aussie slang term "pommy". There's no doubt about it, Cameron is indeed a perfect pommy specimen.

He has just produced a pure specimen of prickish pommy behavior in an allusion to Jeremy Corbyn.

“I know what my mother would say. I think she’d look across the dispatch box and she’d say: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’.”

New agriculture in France

The French organization Agence Bio has just published data that indicates an impressive rise in organic farming (referred to in French as agriculture bio).

The figures show that the acreage devoted to organic farming has risen by 17 % in a year, reaching 220,000 hectares,. That still amounts to merely 4.9 % of agricultural territory in France.

The number of French farmers who've abolished pesticides and chemical fertilizers has risen by 8.5 %. They now amount to 28,725. There again, that's merely 10 % of farmers in France. The Agence Bio organization evaluates this agricultural group at around 69,000 full-time employees.

Exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to ocean acidification

An alarming article has just been published in Nature on the subject of threats of a new kind to the coral of the Great Barrier Reef.

Coral calcification has been declining for several decades. There are several possible causes, such as increasing temperatures, pollution, excessive fishing, development of destructive infrastructures, multiplication of invasive creatures, etc. But ocean acidification is now looked upon as a likely explanation. In the case of the Great Barrier Reef, it is clear that the damage is more rapid and worse than what scientific observers had originally envisaged.

Turning the ugly pages of French testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific

The president François Hollande has just been on a trip to French Polynesia, where he thanked local people for tolerating 30 years of nuclear testing. He spoke frankly and solemnly, in particular, of the impact of these activities on the environment and public health.

Click here for an extract of the president's speech. "Without French Polynesia, France would have no nuclear arms." Over a period of 30 years, France carried out 193 nuclear tests on the atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa. These tests have given rise to many cancers in the archipelago. Ever since the end of the testing in 1996, the  citizens of Polynesia have been asking constantly for indemnities, without success. The president hopes that this situation will now evolve positively.

Click here for an excellent in-depth explanation of the infamous Rainbow Warrior attack in 1985 (one-hour interview in French of Jean-Luc Kister).

Celebrating the centenary of the horrors of Verdun

Today, in France, the nation is celebrating the centenary of the most horrible butchery in European history: Verdun.

On the morning of 21 February 1916, a vast German offensive was set in action at a quarter past seven. For the next ten hours, the 1,291 German field guns fired more than a million shells, along a front of 20 kilometers. Within ten months of warfare, some 700,000 soldiers were slain: 379,000 French and 335,000 Germans.

Since early this morning, a sad movie clip has been reappearing whenever I click upon the main Verdun website. We see naked soldiers strutting robotically around the courtyard of an asylum. Clearly, they're brain-damaged. It's a terrible illustration of the ghastly psychiatric consequences of war.

Simon and Garfunkel “Sounds of silence”

Click here to listen to a 1966 presentation by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the French city of Provins. Christine and I were living in Brussels at that moment, and our daughter Emmanuelle was born towards the end of that year.

Three ways of looking at living entities

A Faccebook user, David Hillis, made this interesting three-part chart:

• The EGO section, inspired by the egoism of Homo sapiens, places a male human being at the summit, while more modest creatures (such as a human female) are located further down.

• The ECO section, inspired by an ecological outlook on various kinds of living creatures, includes the above-mentioned pair of human beings, together with various specimens of living creatures and plants that exist in the vicinity of humans.

• The EVO section, inspired by an evolutionary approach, is a slice of a tree trunk whose circular rings designate groups of living entities whose members are equally distant, timewise, from the start of life.

Umberto Eco has left us

Umberto Eco, born on 5 January 1932, was a distinguished Italian linguist, specializing in semiotics. and a successful novelist, author of The Name of the Rose (1980).  This first novel sold several million copies, was translated into over 40 languages, and gave rise to a movie in 1986 by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, with Sean Connery in the role of Brother Guillaume de Baskerville, an ex-inquisitor investigating the suspicious death of a monk in a monastery in Northern Italy. Click here to view the opening of this powerful movie. Personally, I look upon this work as a total success, compared with the total failure of the infamous book and movie by Dan Brown.

All's well that ends well

David Cameron's marathon in Brussels seems to have culminated in a happy ending, enabling him to return to London with sufficient benefits to convince his fellow citizens that the United Kingdom should remain a member of Europe.

But I hope that this is not merely another Antarctic penguins story...

Antipodean penguin-counters probably screwed up

You might have found my title a little hard to understand. Well, an Antipodean penguin-counter is simply an Australian or New Zealand technician whose job consists (among other activities) of counting penguins. Now, this job has intrigued me since I came upon news of the disappearance in Antarctica of no less than 150,000 Adélie penguins, which were probably annihilated by the arrival of a gigantic iceberg.

The thing that puzzled me most was that this sad news — which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 February 2016 — did not say whether observers in Antarctica had in fact found traces of countless dead penguins. I imagined therefore that their crushed bodies were hidden beneath piles of ice and snow.

Information on the alleged catastrophe had been supplied by researchers on climate change from the University of New South Wales and New Zealand’s West Coast Penguin Trust, who had published an article on 2 February in the review Antarctic Science, edited by Cambridge Journals Online. In fact, I don't subscribe to those publications. So, I failed to double-check the story.

I now learn that a New Zealand academic named Kerry-Jayne Wilson has stated: "I don't know who started to spread that information, but we never said that 150,000 penguins had died. The birds probably migrated to some other place, to await better weather." As you can see, the plot does not thicken. It actually thins... like melting blocks of ice.

Now, while we're looking forward to more precise information concerning the alleged catastrophe in Antarctica, let me tell you a great penguin story, which took place in Sydney back at the time I used to live there. My mate Jimmy (who told me this true story) was contacted by his friend Bob, who did delivery jobs for Taronga Park Zoo.

Bob: "Tomorrow afternoon, Jimmy, I'm supposed to drive down to the wharves to meet a ship from Antarctica, pick up a rare species of penguin and take it to the zoo. But I've got to get my van repaired, so I can't carry out this task. It's a well-paid job. Here, I'll give you all this money if you're prepared to replace me. All you've got to do is pick up the penguin at the wharves, and then take it to the zoo."

Everything worked out well. Jimmy picked up the rare penguin, as requested by his mate Bob. But, towards the end of the afternoon, they all met up unexpectedly in the middle of the city. And Bob was surprised to see the penguin walking down the street alongside Jimmy. Bob was furious.

Bob: "Jimmy, what the hell are you doing here with that penguin? I gave you cash, and told you to take the penguin to the zoo."

Jimmy: "Calm down, Bob. I took the penguin to the zoo, exactly as you asked me. We had a great time there, all afternoon. The penguin loves the zoo. He was thrilled above all by the monkeys and elephants. But we've still got a lot of money left over. So we decided to come back here to the city to see a movie."

BREAKING NEWS: Click here to access yet another article, published today in French, concerning the alleged plight of the Adélie penguins.

To be in Europe, or not to be in Europe?

That is the question, concerning Britain's future relationship with Europe, to be handled in Brussels today and tomorrow.

Donald Cameron and the European president Jean-Claude Juncker

The United Kingdom is indeed a member of Europe today, and most Europeans hope sincerely that this will remain the case.

For the moment, Britain is not exactly a typical member of Europe. The UK doesn't use the euro currency, and it is not a signatory to the Schengen Agreement of 1985. Meanwhile, Britain is seeking further special concessions from the European members. And, within the next day or so, we'll probably know whether Britain's demands have been accepted or rejected at Brussels.

Prize-winning photo from an Australian

Warren Richardson is a freelance photojournalist currently working in Eastern Europe. Born in Australia in 1968, he is a self-taught photographer who undertakes long-term projects dealing with human and environmental issues, as well as assignments for newspapers, magazines and companies. He has lived in Asia, the USA and Europe, and during a period in the UK and US he worked in celebrity photography. While working on the Serbian-Hungarian border in 2015, he was one of a group of journalists covering the refugee crisis who were beaten by police. His next project will see him walk to the Arctic Circle, to continue his refugee stories, and then explore the effects of human-induced climate change on the world. He lives by the proverb: "We have not inherited the land from our fathers, we have borrowed it from our children."

Australian photographer Warren Richardson

Richardson's award-winning photo

Hope for a New Life

A man passes a baby through the fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border in Röszke, Hungary, 28 August 2015. Warren Richardson had been camping here for five days when a group of 200 refugees arrived. They started to attempt to cross the frontier, while making sure to avoid the police. The entire operation took several hours, and Richardson's prize-winning photo was taken at 3 o'clock in the night, without a flash, so as not to attract the police.

Odd words: those that most people don't know

I've often felt that certain ordinary words (either in English or in French) have a curious tendency to remain unknown by people who are not native speakers of the language in question. I shall refer to them simply as odd words. For example, the trivial English adjective "sole" (meaning "only", as in "the sole candidate") appears to be an odd word for many French people who've learnt English at school. I don't necessarily understand why such odd words come into existence.

In everyday French it's easy for me to discover odd words. In most cases, they're French words that I myself have taken ages to know and use. As in English, it's often hard to understand why such and such a word might fall into this category. Here (in my opinion, which might be misguided) is an example:

In the title, I would suspect that "mouise" is an odd word for most English-speaking readers who've learnt French at school. We see that Sarko is in such stuff. But what in fact is it? Well, basically, the journalist is using polite language (?) to say that Sarko, for the moment, is waddling in shit.

This "mouise" term means "gruel" or "porridge", and it probably comes from a Dutch noun akin to "muesli". In our English culture, we all recall that Oliver Twist dared to ask for a second serving of such muck.

I suddenly recall one of my favorite jokes. A slave driver informs his hungry men that he has some good news and some bad news: "The good news is that the chief allows you to survive by eating shit. The bad news is that there won't be enough shit for everybody."

Hydrogen-powered drone

Click here to access an article on a fabulous hydrogen-powered drone.

Problems of Richard Dawkins (and me)

Click here to discover a letter from Richard Dawkins.

Having fallen down the stairs at Gamone last year, I can better understand the present health problems of Richard Dawkins (who did not fall down stairs), and I even have the physical possibility of sympathizing with him to a certain extent. I must nevertheless point out that, unlike Dawkins, I did not in fact suffer any kind of cerebral attack. But my fall damaged various elements (nerves) in the vicinity of my right eye and cheek, and I consider that I still haven't reached the end of a lengthy period (over seven months) of convalescence.

During my stay in Brittany, I realized (with great joy) that everything in my brain appeared to be perfectly intact when I discovered that I could build and update the following website on my Macintosh:

http://chatelus.free.fr/english.html

Funnily enough, since this was a state-of-the-art website of the HTML5 kind, it was quite impossible for me to inform anybody that I had indeed discovered proof that my software aptitudes were totally unharmed. Certain people, hearing me talk enthusiastically of my successful development of this Châtelus camping website, may have thought that I might in fact, on the contrary, be demonstrating nasty brain damage...