What a privilege to be a French citizen in France today!

It's a privilege to be a French citizen living in this splendid country. Those words came into my mind spontaneously as I watched, on my Macintosh, the news from France's new TV channel. It's not that event in particular that prompted my patriotic thoughts, but rather a whole series of reasons. I'm tremendously proud to have a French passport, to own a French house, and to be living in France. For the moment, the only negative affair is the current plague of disgusting moths! But I have faith in French science and technology to find a solution.

New French news channel

 

You might be interested in clicking here to see if you can pick up this new TV channel. It's rather buggy for the moment, but it should be a powerful broadcasting vector when it works smoothly and correctly. You might be wondering why I don't try to insert the channel directly into my blog. Don't be bloody stupid!

This anchor fellow, Louis Laforge, is a TV celebrity in France:

For the moment, he's reappearing regularly to explain that there's a slight technical hitch. (We could have worked that out all on our own.) In fact, the quality of this inaugural demonstration (it goes into operation tomorrow) is very good indeed.

Their brains might teach us a few tricks

An article by Nathaniel Herzberg in Le Monde says that dogs capt the sense of human words and tones of speech. I've just told my friend Fitzroy that he should take a glance at this article.

« Les travaux récents ont montré que les bases de l’empathie, de la coopération, de la cognition, du maniement des nombres existent bien au-delà de l’espèce humaine. Nous nous inscrivons dans un arbre évolutif qui nous dépasse très largement et qui impose des contraintes. Une sorte de naturalisation de la culture. » Le chien, assistant du philosophe ?

Lionel Naccache, neurologue à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière

Blind man loses his cane

The cane bore a name : Macron.

Moths across the world

The moth plague is bad at Choranche, but click here to get glimpses of a similar plague that took place a few years ago in Australia. Just as Australia is a much bigger land than France, their moths are bigger too. My sister told me that Aborigines have cooked and eaten them for ages. There's even a local chef who serves up moths to his customers.

 
Our moths at Choranche have such a nasty stench that a lot of ketchup would be necessary, to make them tasty.

Emmanuel Macron has resigned

Serious rumors have indicated throughout the day that Emmanuel Macron was in the process of resigning from his job as Minister of the Economy in the French government. An hour ago [I am writing at 19:20], his resignation was confirmed.

Not a particularly exciting subject

Few readers will be moved by this image, nor by the French-language article that it accompanies here:

But their subject means a lot to me. Jobs I carried out back in the days when I was earning my living now result in a monthly payment that provides me with my daily soup and puts a spoon of margarine in it.

That last statement might persuade my readers that I don't eat spinach and that I probably avoid butter. Neither belief is correct. Look at these two products in my refrigerator:

At the top, you have one of the finest Brittany butters. At the bottom, it's a soft butter from Normandy. As for my spinach, it's hidden away somewhere in the freezer.

The most interesting fact in the above-mentioned press article about retirement funds is that my automatic benefits will almost certainly go on for as long as me. It's nice to know that. My sole aim now is to survive comfortably for a while at Gamone... while consuming dabs of the world's finest butters from Brittany and Normandy, not to forget an occasional bit of spinach. The global picture is one of contentment.

American smart-ass

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, is so smart at an intellectual level, and so proud of his superior thinking, that he’s turning into an obnoxious smart-ass, capable of fooling countless ordinary people who can’t always read between his lines. He has been raving on constantly about Donald Trump, as if an understanding of the behavior of this foul idiot required intelligence and imagination of the Adams variety. The inflated cartoonist (who never stops trying to flog his latest book) is now starting to be a similar self-proclaimed specialist on Hillary Clinton. Why won’t Adams simply shut up for a while, to protect the world from evil, at least until the end of the US elections?

A more down-to-earth French correspondant, Frédéric Autran, has simply said that the US presidential campaign is “un duel puant” (duel that stinks). Click here to access Autran's article.

UPDATE [7 September 2016] : Scott Adams remains one of the smartest humans in the known universe. Click here to see yet another typical example of our hero talking down to us like a smart-ass, seeing himself as a fearless observer and analyst of Trump, a brilliant hypnotist and a superior thinker, and then flogging his book. His Dilbert stuff remains amusing, but repetitive. As for the rest of Adams, he bores me. I dislike pompous people who, as the French put it, pètent plus haut que leur cul (fart higher than their anuses).

Brussels bomb

In the middle of the night, a bomb exploded in front of the laboratories of the Criminology Institute to the north of Brussels. There was much damage but the police found no victims. For the moment, there are no theories concerning the origins of this act, which is clearly criminal.

France also builds great trains

If you've visited France recently, you may have had an opportunity of seeing the great trains called TGV: Trains à grande vitesse (high-speed trains), which have become world-famous.

The French company Alstom has just succeeded in signing a huge deal of 1.8 billion euros to provide such trains to the USA... of all customers.

Whichever way you look at it, this kind of business feels more pleasant than the sale of military equipment. The two activities are actually complementary in a subtle fashion. You might say that French industry has many different feathers in its cap. And they're all fine feathers that earn our poor nation enough cash to put a bit of butter in our humble spinach... façon de parler!

War against nocturnal moths

We've been invaded by this tiny nocturnal moth called the Pyrale, which comes from China, India and Asia.

Of an evening, if you leave a lamp near a closed window, the moths rapidly form a blanket over the glass panes of the window. It's a frightening insect, because we run up against unexpected problems when trying to eradicate it. Even when you try to use a garden hose to wash them off a window pane, the moths seem to enjoy themselves. Neighbors tell me that the best way to eradicate the moths is to leave a bucket of soapy water alongside the place where they gather when attracted by a lamp inside the house. Here's a photo of moths killed by that technique in Pont-en-Royans.

I've prepared six buckets of soapy water for this evening's planned attack. Meanwhile, some specialists recommend the use of plastic traps containing a phial of a pheromone that attracts male moths. That would be fine if you wanted to castrate them, say. To destroy the entire horde at one fell sweep, I prefer the soap suds solution.

Views from my bedroom window

I signed the purchase of my Gamone property on 26 January 1994 (Australia Day). In the quaint office of the notary public François Guiliani in Saint-Marcellin, my daughter Emmanuelle, present as a witness, explained that she was amused to see her father buying an antiquated house in the depths of France (la France profonde, normally designating the deep old heartlands of France). Guiliani, offended, politely reprimanded her: “Mademoiselle, Saint-Marcellin cannot really be considered as the primitive backwoods of France.”

The site of Gamone was spectacular (because of the magnificent view of the Cornouze mountain), but the house was a shambles. Here are photos of the façade:

Nobody had actually lived there for ages. Inside, there was neither electricity nor municipal water, let alone a WC. Looking back, I realize that I was slightly brain-damaged to have invested in such a ramshackle place. The truth is that I had so little knowledge of this kind of affair that I didn't have the least idea of how much time, money and imagination would be required before people could actually live there.

I won’t go through details of the time and vast efforts that were required in order to convert the Gamone mess into a home. For the moment, I simply wish to draw attention to my discovery, long after my purchase, of an ugly pylon (in fact a pair of wooden posts) right in front of the house. It's still there today, directly visible from my bedroom window.

Click to enlarge slightly

In my regular photos of the valley, you never see this pylon… for the simple reason that I make a point of hiding it. But it’s still there, even though it has ceased to annoy me greatly.

That was up until a few weeks ago. I had received a letter from the French electricity company, EDF, giving me an appointment for the arrival of an employee of the company that reads the electricity meters. Well, my meter is in fact attached to the bottom of that pylon. In a straight line, it’s less than 20 yards from my front door, but the land between my house and the pylon is steep and rugged, and the only way of reaching the counter consists of scrambling down a track that starts on the other side of my house. In other words, that pylon was obviously never placed there with the goal of supporting a domestic electricity counter. Now, this is where my story starts to become interesting but complicated, so I beg readers to bear with me.

If you look carefully at the above photo, you'll notice that the wooden pole carries two distinct sets of cables

• Near the ground, and halfway up the pole, a pair of cables is covered in black rubber protection. This is the supply of ordinary domestic electricity. One cable is for my house, and the other for my neighbors Jackie and Fafa. A little further up the pole, you can see the black cable that runs back up to my house. That cable passes through my electricity meter, located down near the ground (hidden behind the bushes).

• At the top of the pole, you can see three heavy steel cables for medium-voltage electricity. On the right-hand side of the photo, these lines bring in electricity from nearby Pont-en-Royans. On the left-hand side of the photo, after leaving the pole at my place, these lines travel up the hill, on the other side of Gamone Creek, transporting the medium-voltage electricity in the direction of Presles. It is important to understand that, at the level of my property, not one of these cables brings any kind of electricity into my house. In other words, it is totally ridiculous that these heavy cables, carrying medium-voltage electricity, happen to be located just a few yards in front of my bedroom window.

The presence of these high-voltage lines has brought about a dangerous situation. In front of my house, more and more slender saplings have branches that rise high enough to enter in contact with the cables, creating a life-threatening danger. I must attempt to find a solution to this dangerous situation, as soon as possible. In a nutshell, I intend to ask the electricity people to move the medium-voltage lines further down the hill. I now know exactly the people I have to contact, and how to do so:

Crumbling of a small section of French cliffs

Chalk cliffs of Normandy, just north of Fécamp, are known as the Alabaster Coast.

Yesterday afternoon, a section of a hundred yards fell down onto the beach, apparently without victims. From time to time, I see TV documentaries about seaside towns on the northern coasts of France that are regularly losing territory to the sea. It’s a frightening but quite normal predicament, affecting flat coastlines and cliffs alike. The presence or absence of the cliff problem depends upon their geological nature. In Brittany, for example, most cliffs are made of granite, which doesn't usually crumble. The overall situation in France is quite trivial when compared to the dangers of coastal sites in Florida, say.

Messy end to a theft

Inside a Parisian metro carriage, a fellow grabbed a lady's handbag, then left the train just as the doors were closing. The poor fellow couldn't have realized, but it was his last theft on Earth. The lady whose bag had been stolen managed to ring a bell that halted the train, then she left the carriage and started to run along the platform after the thief. He decided instantly to jump down onto the rails and run across to the opposite platform. He never reached the other side. Another train appeared, and ground him into a mortal mess. So sad. Too bad.

Maybe we have nearby cousins in the universe

When I was a student, the only star whose name I could remember was Proxima Centauri. That was because I had been told that it was our closest stellar neighbor. Today, we learn with excitement that this star has a planet, known as Proxima B, that sounds as if it could be relatively similar to our Earth. Inevitably, we ask the breathtaking question: Could there be, or have been, life on this exoplanet?

That sphere in the foreground is an artist's impression

of the Proxima B exoplanet, which gravitates around

the little orange star in the background.

It’s not exactly just down the road. The distance between Earth and Proxima B is over 4.2 light years. That’s to say, over 40 thousand billion kilometers. But that’s neither here nor there. In more down-to-earth terms, it will probably take our human scientists another ten or so years to use new scientific instruments to tell us whether or not there might be, or might have been, life of some kind on Proxima B.

Old individuals continue to disappear

 

Michel Butor chez lui en Haute-Savoie le 19 mars 2016. (ULF ANDERSEN / AFP)

Michel Butor, 89, was a member of the Nouveau roman movement, along with Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Sonia Rykiel à Paris le 26 novembre 2013.  (CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / AFP)

Sonia Rykiel, 86, was a celebrated Paris fashion designer and interior decorator.

Sensing nerve "repairs" in my body

After my fall down the Gamone stairs, just over a year ago, medical staff examined me to discover if there had been any brain damage, and they said no. Later, in Bretagne, I had several clear indications that my brain seemed to be working successfully. Above all, I found that my technical computing skills on the Macintosh were still perfectly intact (regardless of how family members looked upon this question).

I was still intrigued by the undeniable existence of certain traces of my accident in parts of my face and head, not to mention minor eyesight problems. For example, I have a document that presents an image of a part of my head (I won't provide details) containing a small "pool of muck" that flowed there after my accident. Obviously, I often asked myself how and when this "pool of muck" might disappear, if ever. That's to say, I couldn't imagine that it would simply dry up magically. Surely the liquid "muck" had to flow somewhere.

Well, believe it or not, there have been moments, quite recently, when I suddenly "picked up" an unexpected series of "movements" in my head, as if a process had started. It might continue for ten minutes, during which time I would remain totally incapable of deciding what was happening. There would be no unpleasant sensations, and certainly no pain. Only unexpected noises, like static in an old radio. Then the noises would suddenly stop, just as rapidly as they had started.

Today, I'm persuaded that I was in fact listening to various nerve-repair operations. Besides, these alleged activities have been accompanied, in more-or-less the same time frame, by clear demonstrations that my thinking and memory were returning to normal.

To be "tired of" can indicate brainlessness

When I decided to leave Paris and move to the Dauphiné province, I had the ridiculous impression that I was becoming bored with the French capital. To be honest, it was William Skyvington who was becoming boring, not Paris. Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] illustrated this kind of situation in the case of the British capital.

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual,
who is willing to leave London.

No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life;

for there is in London all that life can afford."

I recently published a few stupid blogs about blogging. I soon realized that it was akin to saying that I was tired of London. So, I deleted those silly posts.

Silence of death

Today, I am Italy.

Human lives can be snuffed out in an instant, and the traces of an ancient village can be reduced to rubble.

We humans have never understood sudden disappearance, and we never shall.

We cannot grasp the way in which the sounds of life might be suddenly reduced to silence.

Survival becomes the only meaningful goal, but we shall never understand why one friend survives whereas countless others are no longer there.

Do we really understand anything whatsoever about our human existence? No, our brains are not powerful enough for understanding. But our eyes are strong enough to weep, and our voices, to cry.

Young Aussies killed in France in March 1966

When I moved to the Alpine village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse in the summer of 1993, I came upon an Australian tomb in the church cemetery, just opposite the building in which I had found a tiny flat.

Click to enlarge slightly.

It was the grave of two young Australian students who were killed in March 1966 when they were leaving the village in their car, bound for Grenoble. Blinded by the early-morning winter sun, they skidded off the road and rolled violently into the valley, a hundred yards lower down.

The driver Nicholas Jager, 17, died instantly.

His sister Christina Jager, 18, died three days later,
in the Voiron hospital.

Their 16-year-old brother Michael Jager survived.

Two younger children — Jeremy, 11, and Claire, 10 — were attending a local school on the day of the accident. Here are two photos of the fatal corner that I took in 1993.

On that day of 7 March 1966, when the Alpine sun in the ancient monastic village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse blinded Christina and Nicolas, forever, one of the world's most popular songs was The Sun ain't gonna Shine Anymore by the Walker brothers.

On the web, today, you can find a short article about the accident from Melbourne's The Age of 9 March 1966. [Curiously, the article confuses the given names of the two brothers, Nicholas and Michael Jager.]

The children's father, Charles Henry Jager [1919-2008], was a well-known Melbourne cattle breeder and bookmaker.