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

Click to enlarge slightly

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.

Click to enlarge slightly

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.

Click to enlarge slightly

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...