Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read

If you've got time to read this interesting one-page article, click here. You might find it useful.

Woody Allen joke about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.”

We're in France, we spik French

I've always been surprised and amused whenever I discover, for the Nth time, that French people are generally quite incompetent in English. Click here to find a few good examples.

Tara Pacific 2016-2018 expedition

This appears to be a splendid project.

Powerful playgrounds in Ghana

This kind of roundabout, installed in various school playgrounds in Ghana, generates electricity to light lamps that can then be used by the children. What a bright idea!

Making myself feel antediluvian

Every individual has a way of making oneself feel as old as a dinosaur. My failproof method consists of watching old cycling videos. Click here for a typical aging device.

Not much to say

I watched and listened until late in the evening. But François Hollande didn't seem to have any exciting news for us. There's no doubt in my mind that the president is an intelligent man, who speaks well. But you can't squeeze wine or water, or even moisture, out of a stone. He had little to tell us... and that's more or less what we heard.

For the moment, we don't know whether or not Hollande intends to be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election, but he says we'll receive a firm answer to that question before the end of the year. His decision will only be affirmative, so it seems, if the French economic situation were to make a dramatic positive leap... which would be great news for everybody. But I fail to see how such an economic miracle could become a reality within the remaining months of 2016. That would be a bit like Agnès Saal informing us [click here] that she intends to get involved in a Parisian taxi-bike business.

But why not ?

Airport software accepts two French passengers who exchanged passports

This demonstration appears to be valid... but there's no firm proof of the absence of stage tricks.

Places that can be seen by my son in Brittany

Up until recently, I was constantly puzzled by the question of the not-so-distant places that could or could not be observed from the house of my son François Skyvington in Brittany. Click here to see a recent post that mentions a few of these places. I had the impression that my blog offered a good conclusion to most aspects of this interesting question. Well, I don't know whether my son actually studied that blog post carefully. Be that as it may, half-an-hour ago, he phoned me up to say that he was thrilled to have concluded, this afternoon, that distant lights that he could see in a north-easterly direction from his upper-floor study (using binoculars) were in fact located, not on French territory, but in the British island of Jersey.

I found that news weird, because I believed that my son had spent so many hours (days, months and years) staring out across the splendid English Channel, from his delightful house on the cliff-tops of Plouha, that the wonderful view no longer held any kind of secrets for him.

Certain websites are strictly brain-damaged

I saw this heading:

Conspiracy theorists believe Mongolian mummy

‘wearing Adidas’ is proof of time travel

And here's their image:

I'm not sure there's any way of treating such a terribly sick website. I have the impression that it would be more humane if the website were to be calmly euthanized, to put it out of its misery. If not, the miserable website is likely to suffer excruciating pain for years to come.

French arms supplier for terrorists arrested

In many ways, memories of the horrible Paris terrorist attacks of January 2015 (Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher) seem to be so far away in the past that they almost belong to ancient history.

I've just heard that a 27-year-old French fellow captured yesterday in the south of Spain was an arms merchant who provided weapons to the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly who attacked the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes on 9 January 2015.

If this accusation could be proven to be true, beyond any doubt whatsoever, I feel that there's little point in bringing this fellow back to face a trial in Paris. Couldn't the French Republic offer him a free boat trip down towards Somalia, accompanied by the other fellows I talked about yesterday? I have the impression that more in-depth imagination is necessary in the way we handle certain proven delinquents. There's no point, as they say in the classics, in beating around the bush.

Am I suggesting, in a way, that the death penalty might be reintroduced in France for certain exceptional crimes? Maybe. The question  has never really arisen up until now, for the simple reason that we've had relatively few convicted criminals with blood on their hands and infinite evil in their heads. Give me time to think about that...

Splendid painting found in a French attic

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The younger woman on the right, Judith, is using a sword to hack off the head of an Assyrian general, Holofernes. This splendid painting, possibly the work of Caravaggio, was found by chance in the attic of an ancient dwelling near Toulouse. Click here to access a short video on this fascinating subject.

Caravaggio had already painted an earlier version of this same theme.

Click here to access a Wiki article on this first version of the painting.

Abominable fellows

During my first voyage to Europe, in 1962, our Greek ship Bretagne dropped in at an exotic but desolate place named Aden.

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In those days, Aden (now known as Yemen) was still a British protectorate. As a naive young Australian, totally devoid of political intelligence (as is probably still the case for many of my fellow Australians), that short visit to Aden was akin to dropping in at DisneyLand on a day when there were general strikes and power cuts, and everything was topsy-turvy. I remember the archaic look of the dusty old town, and the presence of beggars and wounded people. Later, I talked about Aden with an imaginative Sydney friend, Richard O'Sullivan, who had developed the habit of referring to the township as "Limb Valley", meant to draw attention ironically to the striking presence of citizens who were missing an arm or a leg.

In those days, nobody imagined that scoundrels from that corner of the globe—from Somalia in particular, on the nearby shores of the isthmus—would soon decide to transform themselves, aboard flimsy vessels, into murderous pirates.

These days, in France, we're aware of this nasty form of terrorism, because French forces captured seven of these poor primitive bastards, who are now awaiting their sentencing in a Paris court of law.

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On 8 September 2011, in the Gulf of Aden, they attacked the pleasure craft of a French holiday-maker, Christian Colombo, skipper of the Tribal Kat, and murdered him savagely. I've always thought that it's hard to understand the presence of these seven stupid rogues, from far across the waters, in a great French law court in Paris. Later this afternoon, we shall inevitably learn that these seven fellows have been sentenced to many years in a French jail, where they'll stay until they rot. Now, that situation troubles me immensely. I have the impression that there's something wrong with the French legal system when it captures seven uncouth ruffians, out on the open seas, and brings them back here to the heart of France where they'll inevitably be thrown into chilly cells for the rest of their miserable lives. To my mind, there is little chance that these ruffians will truly grasp what has happened to them, and why. There's something perfectly normal in the idea of sentencing such criminals to harsh punishment, if only to prevent them from repeating their crimes. But I persist in believing that something has gone wrong, and that those idiots don't really deserve to be subjected to that kind of handling. They certainly needed to be captured, sentenced and punished. But maybe differently... whatever that might mean. (I'm deliberately vague, because I really don't know the answers to the questions I'm raising.)

In my previous blog post, I evoked a splendid human theme: the Sermon on the Mount. I'm curious to know how the author of that monumental message—human, too human—would have expected us to deal with Daesh terrorists and Somali pirates...

Sermon on the Mount

Designating a series of moralistic lessons said to have been preached by Jesus in the vicinity of Capernaum alongside the Sea of Galilee, the evangelist Matthew invented what came to be known as the Sermon on the Mount : no doubt the most novel and awesome presentation of moral philosophy and intense love in the history of human thought.

I had the chance to find myself at this unique spot on Friday 16 December 1988, after a coach trip to the Arab town of Nazareth, during my first trip to Israel. This was a chance for me to realize fully that everything I had ever imagined about Christianity was summed up exclusively in that extraordinary Sermon on the Mount, which seemed to have been conceived spontaneously in the middle of the countryside. Above all, these lessons went against the grain of everything that rich people, tyrants and evil men might have ever imagined.

These days, whenever inspired folk start trying to tell me how we might welcome Islamic believers into our societies, I wonder instantly: Have Muslims ever grasped what the Sermon on the Mount is all about? I have no reason to suppose that they've ever even heard of it, let alone been inspired by its fabulous messages.

Number of wild tigers in the world has risen by 22%

That's the sort of unexpected news that fills me with hope and pride.

The number of wild tigers has increased from 3,200 in 2010 to 3,890 at present: an increase of almost 22%. Tiger countries include Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russian Federation, Thailand and Vietnam.

We probably infected European Neanderthals with our African diseases

Neanderthal populations of Europe and Asia were probably weakened by pathogens that we homo sapiens emigrants brought with us when we moved away from our African birthplace. We probably didn't actually kill them in an outright manner, but the Neanderthals would have surely picked up our diseases such as tapeworms, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers and herpes. And these new afflictions would have no doubt sickened members of the old community to such an extent that they could no longer care for themselves by foraging and hunting.

Neanderthals seem to have been driven to extinction around 40,000 years ago. We didn't necessarily act deliberately in killing them. It has been suggested that we Humans and certain Neanderthal friends even got around to friendly sessions of rock-and-roll, resulting in genetic traces that remain in our present chromosomes. But the Neanderthals nevertheless disappeared from Europe and Asia soon after our arrival. You might say that it wasn't really our fault. But in a sense, it was.

Serial taxi rider

In April 2014, Agnès Saal was nominated as president of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (which was an emanation of the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF where I worked in the early 1970s).

A year later, the lady was obliged to abandon her high-level appointment after having been accused of an unusual misdemeanour. She appeared to have spent an exceptionally large amount of public money on taxi trips. When I first heard about this affair, I simply couldn't imagine how a professional person in Paris could possibly spend so much money on taxis.

I still can't understand how she did so... particularly when I learn that she had a professional chauffeur-driven automobile. Her children may have made taxi trips in Paris, but that wouldn't seem to account for all the expenses. In their attempts to shed light upon this mystery, many journalists asked questions.

Finally, her huge taxi bills remain a mystery. I'm convinced that, one of these days, we'll come upon a clear logical explanation...

Awesome French hoverboard

Click here to see an impressive demo from Franky Zapata.

France has ordered French drones

Last week, the French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian signed a contract of 350 million euros with the manufacturer Sagem for the purchase of 24 French Patroller drones, which have been tested satisfactorily for the last nine years in Afghanistan.

This drone can transmit high-quality images, and can carry a load of 250 kg of electronic surveillance equipment. Even in total darkness, this drone can detect whether a fellow on the ground is carrying either a simple bag of food or rather a kalachnikov weapon. This drone can even carry a human observer, to control operations programmed from the ground. In that way, the drone can legally operate in the same style as a conventional aircraft. (To my mind, that nevertheless sounds like an intrepid job for a passenger.)

Several Asian and Middle East nations have already expressed their interest in purchasing this French drone.

Extraordinary TV evening on the ancient Aborigines

I've just spent the evening watching two amazing documentaries on the ancient prehistory of the Australian Aborigines. Never before have I been treated to such a fabulous Aboriginal cultural description.

I'll be intrigued to learn whether my fellow citizens in Australia are aware of the existence of these documentaries.

Exotic Aussie road vehicle

Although I was born in Australia, and spent quite a few years there, I have to admit that I've never witnessed our most spectacular road vehicle: the Esky... which is actually used, at times, on public highways.

Its design is fairly straightforward. It's basically a matter of taking a traditional Esky container, as used to keep bottled beer cool, and fixing it on a set of wheels. All that then remains to be done is to motorize your new vehicle. And why would any Aussie guy want to build himself such a vehicle? The answer is obvious. Australia is a hot country, and Aussies need to take steps to avoid dying of thirst. There's no better solution than a low-cost light-weight vehicle that enables you to go out to a liquor shop, to purchase new supplies of thirst-quenching beer.

BREAKING NEWS: Wanneroo Police charged a 30-year-old man for allegedly driving a motorised esky while drunk.

Standing up in the night

The title of this blog post is an attempted translation of #nuitdebout which is a popular nocturnal movement in Paris.

The assemblies are spontaneous, peaceful and devoid of appointed chiefs. People "vote", as it were, by using hand signs. Personally, through TV reports, I find these nocturnal assemblies particularly spirited and moving, suggesting the birth of a new youth movement.

Dumpers of shit

Several associates of the French right-wing party Front national have found their names appearing in articles about the Panama Papers. The party chief Marine Le Pen has reacted to all this negative publicity.

She has referred to the big pile of offensive press articles as “tombereaux d’excréments” (dumpers of shit).

That's her way of taking out a shovel. Dig, Marine, dig!

Belgian terrorist with a hat

Click here to see the latest images of the infamous Brussels terrorist with a hat. Once upon a time, I was led to believe that we knew his identity, but I'm no longer certain. In any case, this guy troubles me. I have a weird impression that this mysterious intruder has been wandering around stealthily on my computer screen, non-stop, for several weeks, and resisting all police attempts to capture him...

BREAKING NEWS: No sooner had I finished this blog post than I received a further flash concerning the man with a hat. He has just been designated as a Belgian-Moroccan named Mohamed Abrini. We have a new photo of the fellow, whom I've renamed:

"Hatless Houdini"

And above all, we are told that he has just been arrested. Can I really believe that the ubiquitous terrorist with/without his famous hat has finally been captured? Or will he still be running around on my computer screen, once again, tomorrow?

It appears that our Hatless Houdini is 31 years old, and was arrested today in Anderlecht (Belgium).

If ever "Houdini" turned out to be registered as a theatrical performer (maybe with a bank account in Panama), he deserves to pick up a fortune in fees for his Internet performances. The poor bugger must be exhausted after all his non-stop walking around Belgium.

BREAKING NEWS: At the end of the day, Belgian authorities confirmed that they had indeed captured a terrorist named Mohamed Abrini, but they still don't know if he's the same fellow who was filmed with a hat. So, my choice of the name Hatless Houdini is fine.

Childhood culture

Years ago, when I was starting to collaborate regularly with French software engineers, I discovered that so-called "Anglo-Saxon" culture is not universal. As a typical young Australian, I wrongly assumed that my French colleagues would have a similar everyday culture to me. One day, in the IBM office in Paris, I said: "That reminds me of the story about George Washington and his father's cherry tree." My colleagues told me immediately that they'd never heard this tale, so they asked me to tell them the story. I explained: "Mindlessly, young George grabbed an axe and chopped down his father's cherry tree. That evening, the father was most unhappy, because he had loved the young tree, and he asked his children to tell him who had committed the silly act. Young George, ashamed of his stupidity, and aware that he deserved punishment, made a solemn declaration: Father, I cannot tell a lie; it was I who cut down your cherry tree."

Now, it's possible that American kids, hearing this tale, break down in tears. The reaction of my French IBM colleagues was different, totally down to earth: "So what the hell?" I realized instantly that my alleged story about little George Washington and his father's cherry tree was a total flop. For them, it wasn't really a genuine story.

Dawkins event in Oxford next Saturday

I'm happy to see that Richard Dawkins will be reappearing in Oxford next Saturday, at the Sheldonian Theatre, for the first public event since his stroke, in the company of his research assistant Yan Wong.

They will be presenting the new edition of their wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.

Aussie mining students shot in US drug deal

Two students from Curtin University (where I once spent a year as a lecturer) were visiting New Orleans to compete in an undefined inter-university contest referred to as “mining games”. At the end of the day, they asked to be driven to a sleazy neighborhood to meet up with a drug dealer, but their encounter ended in unhappy circumstances when they received nasty bullet wounds. They are still in hospital, but reported to be in a stable condition. Their families will probably travel to the USA to meet up with their sons, and take them home to Western Australia. Click here for a news item on the shooting. An Aussie newspaper article on this affair provides us with happy news:

"The Kalgoorlie-based WA School of Mines took out top titles at the Montana event, with the Wombat A team dubbed the champions for the second straight year, while the Wombat B team was the runner-up."

Good on you, Wombats! That reminds me of a journalist’s question to the widow of President Lincoln, assassinated while attending a Washington theatre evening.

“Up until that event, Mrs Lincoln, was your husband enjoying the play?”

French TV evening of Panama Papers

Notre Elise: an outstanding journalist

Click here to join in an evening of financial fun...

Can French youth still write French ?

I have my doubts... and it saddens me.

David Cameron is a man in the news

The British prime minister David Cameron seems to be playing with fire. Or maybe I might say that a lot of fire seems to be playing with the PM. I'm thinking, of course, of the Panama Papers, which have just brought the late Cameron father and his son into the limelight. I have the impression that the case of the PM and the forthcoming Brexit referendum (on 23 June) might well implode between now and then.

Although I have little evidence to back up such a belief, I've often felt that tax cheating is indeed a rather British preoccupation.

BREAKING NEWS Friday 8 April 2016 — Not only is Cameron a prick; he's also a liar, who only starts to approach the truth when he's cornered. He has just changed completely his explanations concerning links to his late father's offshore wealth. David Cameron's upper-class Pommy slickness gives me goose pimples, and makes me sick. It's rare for me to react so violently to a fellow's face and grin, not to mention his tone of voice and his complacency. That's not an argument, I know. Sorry. For the moment, I can't make myself clearer.

Where did Hannibal cross the Alps?

If only my smart dog Fitzroy had been around in 218 BC, I'm sure he would have figured out rapidly the exact itinerary chosen by Hannibal to cross the Alps and move into Italy. Fitzroy would have simply sniffed around for a while until he determined with accuracy the places where there were traces of horse dung and elephant piss, and he would have known immediately where Hannibal had traveled.

These days, scholars are still trying to solve this problem, and they are using scientific instruments to sniff at ancient specimens of animal dejections. Click here to access an article by Chris Allen, an environmental microbiologist at Queen's University Belfast, who reveals how microbial evidence has located dung left by Hannibal's horses when they were moving across the mountains.

[ I find it hard to believe that this kind of pseudo-scientific historical research is indeed serious. I'm not exactly proud to admit that I tend to be biased by the fact that the research in question has been conducted by would-be Alpine specialists from Northern Ireland. ]

The exact spot where Hannibal crossed the Alps is thought to be the treacherous Col de Traversette, seen here:

In the following map of the section of the Alps between France and Italy, the red blob indicates the location of the Col de Traversette:

Click to enlarge slightly

In the lower left-hand corner of this map, you can find a tiny village named Risoul. That's the Alpine birthplace of my dog Fitzroy, which lies just a whiff to the west of the spot where Hannibal and his animals scrambled over the Col de Traversette. It goes without saying that, if the Irish fellow Chris Allen wanted to call upon help from a local specialist to locate traces of archaic elephant piss and horse dung, I'm sure that my dog Fitzroy would be thrilled to participate in such an excursion... particularly if it's a chance to get involved in ancient history.