Weavers all gone

Fred Hellerman, 89, the last member of The Weavers folk group, has finally left the stage forever. In this old video, he's the seated chap.

Trivial sad story

Male penises are never totally tamed. No matter how we try to teach them refined behavior and nice manners, they have a habit of remaining wild and savage, hard-headed, ready to attack their owners. They can become as mad as a dog with rabies. If the worst gets to the worst, a rabid penis may have to be lobotomized or even euthanized. In most cases, fortunately, they can be tranquillized by pharmaceutical drugs.

François Bayrou (à gauche) et Robert Rochefort,

le 19 mai 2014 à Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). (GAIZKA IROZ / AFP)

A distinguished French political fellow was found masturbating publicly, last Wednesday, near children. Robert Rochefort, 60, is a political companion of the president of the MoDem party, of François Bayrou, mayor of Pau. The alleged wrongdoer—who apparently recognized his act, but then claimed that the words were untrue—has been asked to resign. It’s terrible to observe the career of Rochefort stagnating, if not culminating forever, in this sad fashion. But such is life. Such are mad penises.

Festival of drones on the Champs-Elysées

Tomorrow (Sunday), more than 100,000 spectators are expected to attend the inaugural Paris Drone Festival on the Champs-Elysées.

photo signed DR from Le Parisien

Dozens of tiny aircraft, piloted by their ground-based owners, will race up and down the famous Paris avenue beneath a gigantic canopy, 140 metres long and 17 metres wide. This big “tent” will be located near the top of the Champs-Elysées. At the same time, the entire avenue, 2 km from Concorde to Etoile, will be closed to road traffic, and no doubt protected by massive police forces.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that big brothers (or rather American cousins) of these elegant little Parisian drones will continue to work in faraway places, attempting to shoot to death Islamic criminals.

Ratification of the COP21 treaty

This morning, we've heard that both China and the USA have finally ratified the COP21 treaty. Laurent Fabius will be happy, of course. And so will everybody.

Identity of Banksy

A new theory has arisen. Maybe the street artist Banksy is in fact the leader of the Massive Attack group, Robert “3D” Del Naja.

France’s political establishment has always been constipated

Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte seem to be exerting a wonderful laxative effect upon many French groaning and farting observers. They do things that most serious French political figures never dream of doing. For example, they smile. Not a Sarkozy grin. Nor a Hollande giggle. Nor a Le Pen smirk. And certainly not a sinister Balkany baring of the teeth to bite you. No, believe it or not, the Macron couple actually smile, as if they’re happy. My God, there must be something wrong with them. Are they crazy? We must be careful!

French presidential face book

Everybody on the planet Earth (and maybe beyond) knows what a face book is. Did you know that this kind of document (a collection of face portraits of class students or business colleagues) is referred to in French as a trombinoscope ? That word comes from trombine, a modification of bobine, meaning a human face. Click here to access the trombinoscope of all the 82 current candidates for next year’s French presidential election.

It's a little too early to print out and frame this beautiful array of splendid heads. It's more than likely that I'll soon be publishing a revised version, both bigger and better.

Nice French political people

Patrick Balkany and his wife Isabelle. You can see from their smiles that they’re contented. They have a son, Alexandre Balkany, who also has a childish variant of his dad's smile. God only knows why...

Alexandre has just had his passport confiscated, for an affair about helping his parents hide a luxurious villa in Morocco from taxation authorities. Smart smiling family.

When will they drone the big bastard?

The removal by drone of Abou Mohammad al-Adnani is great news.

Abou Mohammad al-Adnani

Over a period of five months, he was the third Daesh boss to be zapped. I often wonder if people in either the US or Russia will be rewarded the cash that has been placed upon the heads of such guys. Amazingly, the biggest bastard, Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still at large.

Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi

I would imagine that drone pilots are surely looking around for him day and night, and that he has to be most careful about the life he now leads. But it's mathematical that he’ll be located and drone-zapped in the near future.

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.