Road on top of the Great Wall of China

I've never had an opportunity of visiting the Great Wall of China. If I did, I might be surprised to find that a modern concrete roadway runs along the top.

In many modern cities, concrete has been Man's best friend, giving rise to architectural splendors. In other places, an abominable enemy.

You Want It Darker

Last Wednesday, on Leonard Cohen's 82nd birthday, he announced the forthcoming arrival of a new album, You Want It Darker, produced by his son Adam Cohen, 44. The title song is superb.

Click here for the words (with French translation)

Church Night

Pleasant US satire. It’s so well done that it could be real. The title, Church Night, is ingenious.

Belgian street art

Brussels is world-famous for its ancient Manneken-Pis.

A bigger sample of prick art has appeared recently on a Belgian wall.

Funnily enough, people apparently walk past this masterpiece without noticing it. My personal explanation is that a prick is so boring that our human visual system simply fails to acknowledge its presence.

Publisher receives copies of his book

This morning, the Choranche postman (who's replacing Martine for a while) brought me a big bag.

Inside, I found three immaculate copies of my book They Sought the Last of Lands. I had ordered them recently through the Internet from the Ingram Spark printing platform in England.

Their technical qualities are perfect: beautiful hard cover, fine illustrations (photos and ancestral charts on nearly every page), heavy paper, excellent printing. They cost me 43 euros per copy, delivered to my doorstep. That price takes into account the fact that I'm the publisher, Gamone Press. Most people would pay a little more. Regardless of the price, for people seeking solid information on the Skyvington family, my book is a convenient economic solution.

Crazy Christian

Christine Boutin is a right-wing French politician. Yesterday, she published a ridiculous tweet:

She had surely received the news of Chirac's death from some kind of divine messenger. As we say in Australia, the woman is clearly as mad as a cut snake. Up until the present moment, she doesn't seem to have provided any kind of explanation for her madness. It might be a good idea for this lady to retire from politics, or from the Holy Spirit, or maybe strong alcoholic spirits...

Dates

• Wednesday 21 September 2016 was the first day of spring in Australia.

• Tomorrow, Thursday 22 September 2016, will be the first day of autumn in France.

• And Saturday 24 September 2016 will be my 76th birthday... in both Australia and France, of course!

India buys French Rafale fighter planes

India has confirmed the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter planes, totally made-in-France by Dassault. Details of the deal have not been made public, but it's probably in the vicinity of 8 billion dollars.

Vatican's latest saint

Click the comic strip to enlarge

Nice tweet

I like this tweet from

@boldatheism

Morandini in police custody

The well-known 51-year-old journalist and TV producer Jean-Marc Morandini has been in police custody since 9 o’clock this morning, in the context of an inquiry into the corruption of youth.

Flash is about to disappear

Once upon a time, Flash was the coolest kid on the block. I worked hard to master it. Most of my old websites of which I'm most proud today were created in Flash. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined for an instant that all these websites would disappear in the near future, simply because no navigator was prepared to display them.

I've just heard that, soon, neither Safari, Chrome nor Firefox will be prepared to display Flash websites.

Theoretically, I might be able to retrieve images from my Flash websites, before they disappear forever, and then rebuild them in HTML 5. I plan to examine this idea, but I'm not sure that it's both easy and worthwhile. Here, for example, are several typical French/English websites that are due to disappear: Master Bruno.

A similar calamity occurred with the Apple Pages tool, which subsided into a brain-damaged state a few years ago, losing many of its major capacities, because its owner wanted to propose a common denominator of talents that could be demonstrated, not only on an iMac, but also on an iPad or iPhone. Personally, I find that goal ridiculous. It's akin to taking a schoolboy and an Olympic athlete, and asking them to be trained together to run the hundred metres in much the same time. One gets pepped up with pills; the other gets castrated.

Making babies without female eggs

A gigantic biological breakthrough overthrows a 200-year-old golden rule for making babies. According to the old rule, the only way to make a baby consists of encouraging a male sperm to penetrate a female egg.

Well, we learn today that there might be another way of starting the baby-building process, with no need for a female egg. Now, don't get me wrong. A male/female person who wants to become the father/mother of a baby still needs to get a little help from a friend. More precisely, from the girl who's going to carry the fœtus in her womb for nine months. But this lady doesn't collaborate initially by donating an egg, and she will therefore not be a parent of the future child.

Let's examine this gestation that doesn't start with a female egg. We might use a skin cell, from either a male or a female.

To simplify the graphical presentation, we show merely eight chromosomes. To start the process, half of the cell's chromosomes are removed: four. In the next step, the halved cell receives a male sperm.

At this point in my description of the process of babies whose gestation doesn't start with an egg, I'm reminded of a joke about an inspired inventor who's creating a miraculous aircraft. "It looks fabulous, with its swept-back wings and narrow tubular fuselage. And its jet engines are designed to take it rapidly up beyond the speed of sound. There's just a single problem that I still have to solve. How do I get the bastard to fly?"

That's where we are with our bundle of four chromosomes and a sperm cell in the above illustration. Without going into details, let's say that the group of biologists who've announced this new process claim that a simple cell formed by a sperm injected into half the chromosomes of a skin cell can indeed be made to evolve into an embryo. But how? Well, the biologists who are promoting this idea have published an article revealing how they were able to bring about the birth of healthy mice. A little imagination and faith is then required in order to see how a human male or female might get together with a male sperm-donor to build a baby. In fact, my dear Watson, it's rather elementary...

Google respects the private lives of cows

Google's famous Street View gadget has been reprimanded, from time to time, for displaying roadside individuals who are easily identifiable. A jealous husband might discover, say, that his wife was photographed in a conversation with a male neighbor further down the road. And that might create problems. So, people's faces are blurred, to make them as unrecognizable as possible. In most cases, this technique works well.

Google seems to have decided that the same process should be applied to dairy cows, so that no jealous bull would ever see red.

Fitzroy, who often roams around the neighborhood to visit his lady friends, told me that he would feel more at ease if Google were to extend their privacy blurs to cover, not only cows, dogs and cats, but the entire range of four-legged creatures. I suspect that, from time to time, my dog might be boring into attractive young wild boars, and he doesn't want this news to spread around Choranche and Pont-en-Royans.

Question that no longer concerns me

Prostate gland. Do you see where it is, just between the bladder and the penis? Where it was, as far as I'm concerned. I lost mine a few years ago. An excellent surgeon removed it. He even left me with a perfectly operational nerve that enables me, for what it's worth, to sport an erection like a donkey. (Well, not quite. I was never—not even at the summit of my sporting career—in the donkey category.)

Click here to access an article, in a distinguished medical publication, suggesting that my above-mentioned brilliant surgeon should not necessarily be praised for having saved my life. Be that as it may, I'm still alive. That's all that really matters.

Abbott tells Europeans how to run the world

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us that former PM Tony Abbott addressed an Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists in Prague on Saturday night. If you want to see everything he said, don’t hesitate to click here. Otherwise, I can give you the gist of his words, which didn’t impress me greatly… to say the least. He expressed his opinions concerning Europe's treatment of unwanted immigration… as if all European nations were looking upon this phenomenon in the same way. He said that it looked like “a peaceful invasion”. I wonder what Abbott really suggests by his juxtaposition of those two unrelated terms. It's murky Down Under English, along the lines of his rough-and-ready "Look, I'm going to shirtfront Mr Putin ... you bet I am."

France is happy to have earned a lot of cash by selling submarines to Australia. We’re grateful for that business, of course. And we don’t expect Australia to be more generous towards France by telling us (or any other European nation) how to handle the delicate and difficult problem of out-of-hand immigration. If France wanted to put a brutal end to such immigrants, Tony Abbott surely knows that the French navy could use one of our submarines. So, why doesn't he simply shut up?

Names and photos of 238 victims of terrorism in France since “Charlie”

Click here to access a block of 238 photos, in alphabetical surname order, with links to brief descriptions of victims of terrorism in France since the massacre at the Charlie offices in Paris on January 7, 2015.

Beautiful song by Francis Cabrel

Click YouTube for a full-screen version

Francis Cabrel was the object this evening of a wonderful documentary on French TV. It's amusing to discover the extent to which this intelligent and sympathetic fellow exists far away from the usual throng of media and music-hall people. He seems to be totally devoid of "skills" enabling him to become a selfish arsehole imbued by his talents and popularity. He remains as pure (and shy) as on the first day he ever sang in front of an audience. So, those beautiful kids who are accompanying Cabrel in the song "Il faudra leur dire" (They Must be Told) are on a perfect par with the great songwriter and singer. He is truly one of them, and the children seem to "know" that this is the case.

Click here for a streamed version of this song

Since early this morning at Gamone, this music—which mesmerizes me—has been playing non-stop on my Macintosh. Light rain is falling, and my dog Fitzroy is sleeping alongside my desk. Meanwhile, I spent much time this morning by trying to tell one of my Australian sisters that I look upon her Wordpress blogging activities as puzzling, to say the least. Click here to judge for yourselves. I keep saying to her: Why don't you write an Australia-based blog along the same lines and in the same kind of spirit and style as my France-based Antipodes ?

PAROLES DE CABREL

Si c'est vrai qu'il y a des gens qui s'aiment 

Si les enfants sont tous les mêmes 

Alors il faudra leur dire

C'est comme des parfums qu'on respire


Juste un regard 

Facile à  faire
Un peu plus d'amour que d'ordinaire

Puisqu'on vit dans la même lumière
Même s'il y a des couleurs qu'ils préfèrent

Nous on voudrait leur dire
C'est comme des parfums qu'on respire
Juste un regard
Facile à  faire
Un peu plus d'amour que d'ordinaire

Juste un peu plus d'amour encore
Pour moins de larmes

 

Pour moins de vide
Pour moins d'hiver
Puisqu'on vit dans les creux d'un rêve
Avant que l’amour ne touche nos lèvres
Nous on voudrait leur dire
Les mots qu'on reçoit
C'est comme des parfums qu'on respire
Il faudra leur dire
Facile à  faire
Un peu plus d'amour que d'ordinaire

Si c'est vrai qu'il y a des gens qui s'aiment
Si les enfants sont tous les mêmes
Alors... il faudra leur dire
Les mots qu'on reçoit
C'est comme des parfums qu'on respire
Il faudra leur dire
Facile à  faire 

Europe ready to discuss Britain's departure

At the Bratislava meeting, European nations revealed that they would like to start discussions with the UK as soon as possible on the subject of Britain's departure from Europe. Click here to listen to Donald Tusk, president of European Council.

Interesting tweets

I like these tweets from

@boldatheism

 

 Click to enlarge slightly

Silly ideas form in my imagination

Two days ago, I was working calmly on my iMac when the electricity suddenly disappeared, just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon. There were no vehicles on the road down alongside the River Bourne. An hour later, the electricity had not reappeared in my house. Crazy ideas started to form in my imagination. I wondered if terrorists might have blown up a nuclear power station. Frankly, I was quite worried. I strolled down the road with my dog, but this didn't ease my mind at all, since the neighborhood was in total silence. Finally, I heard the church bells of Châtelus ringing at 6 o'clock. I dashed back into the house, where I was relieved to find the electricity restored.

Yesterday, my neighbor Jackie told me that a road-works machine, further up along the valley, had accidentally destroyed an electricity pylon, causing an extensive blackout.

All the news I hear about terrorists has twisted my mind...

Proud to be British

Diane James—a businesswomen and healthcare professional—has just replaced Nigel Farage as the new leader of the UK Independence Party. They look liberated. Don’t they just?

Australian magpies

I've always been surprised by the fact that French people seem to know nothing at all about our Australian magpies.

Our birds Down Under look a litle like the French bird referred to as a pie, pronounced pee.

So, French people imagine that they're basically the same creature. Few people know that our Australian magpies, in their nesting season, attack children on bicycles by diving down at their heads. This kind of attack used to terrify me when I was a boy in South Grafton.

An Australian child on a bicycle, when attacked by a wild magpie, is capable of bending his head, looking down at the road, and maybe running into an approaching vehicle. If the bird uses its heavy beak to hit a child on the skull, this can cause a nasty wound

For French readers : The name in French of our possibly-vicious Australian magpie is the Cassican flûteur (Gymnorhina tibicen).

Dinosaur for sale in France

An American owner has decided to put his excellent dinosaur up for sale in France. Before the auction takes place, the skeleton is on display in a French railway station. The future auctioneer believes there'll be a big crowd of prospective buyers, because it's rare to find a top-quality dinosaur up for sale in this corner of the world.

I would like to put in a bid. I'm sure that my dog Fitzroy would love to have such a friend at Gamone. But the dinosaur is surely above my budget. I'll make a point of providing readers with details when the sale takes place. And, if ever I raked up enough cash to clinch the deal, Fitzroy and I will throw a dinosaur party at Gamone.

Going, going… gone

David Cameron, 49, ex-PM of the United Kingdom, has announced his intention to abandon his current job as a Tory parliamentarian. He explains that it’s not possible for a former PM to become an efficient political representative (of the everyday variety). Cameron resigned on June 24 following the Brexit vote.

Google's latest voice is not bad at all

Click here to access a short French-language article about Google's latest achievements in synthetic voices. Samples start with well-chosen words: "aspects of the sublime".

Do dolphins use an advanced language?

The Russian scientist Vyacheslav Ryabov, of the Crimean marine station in Karadag, affirms that the language of dolphins is just as complex as human language. Click here to access his article on this subject in the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University Journal: Physics and Mathematics. This specialist in marine biology and animal communication draws attention to the fact that dolphins have existed on the planet Earth for a much greater period of time than humans. So, they've had sufficient time to become as smart as us. I don't know whether that reasoning is valid, but it sounds good to me. I would be thrilled to discover that dolphins—even though they don't appear to publish books, set up scientific laboratories or carry out political elections—are as bright (?) as the brightest humans.

My readers might not know that the French region in which Gamone is located is known as the Dauphiné. That term is related to the French word for "dolphin", and it's closely linked to the word dauphin, designating the eldest son of a French king.

Arms of the Dauphin of France

But why would dolphins be evoked in the name of a region so far from the sea, and in the nickname of a prince? If you're interested, I'll make a point of telling you—one of these days—my "theory" on this question...

World butchery championship in Australia

A short news article in the French press reveals that the world butchery championship was held in Australia, but it indicates neither the date of the event nor the name of the city in which it took place. Guess who won. France, of course. Here’s a photo of the French entry for the preparation of beef, the preparation of lamb, and minced beef rolls. The French team was composed of three butchers from the Loire region.

Plantu cartoon

Click to enlarge slightly

French police-woman

Dramatic interview of a brave young French police-woman, Magali, who was obliged to fire back at a terrorist at the wheel of a big truck in Nice on July 14, 2016. Clearly, Magali is still suffering deeply, and it's not certain that she'll be able to carry on her career.

Today, as the world looks back at September 11, and relates that terrible day to more recent happenings in Europe and elsewhere, I realize more than ever that the lives and thoughts of countless human beings throughout the world have been changed forever by our awareness of the horrors of terrorism. We must never forget.