Air-borne witch

These photos come from the 43rd annual Icarus Cup event near Grenoble. Here we see a witch running down the slopes:

Click to enlarge slightly

And here she's floating through the air, with a skeleton hitching a ride behind her:

Australia’s preferable mate: USA or China?

The French newspaper Le Monde informs us that this crucial question has arisen Down Under. May the better mate win.

Vehicle-free zone in Paris

In Paris, air pollution is 60 times more deadly than road accidents. Every year, 2,500 Parisians die through having been exposed to atmospheric pollution, caused mainly by automobile exhausts. And that explains why the municipality of Paris is immensely proud to have announced today a new law that will transform permanently the roadway alongside the Seine into a vehicle-free zone.

This will rejuvenate the magnificent City of Light... and make it more like what it used to be when I arrived here in 1962.

Meanwhile, a fellow named Georges Pompidou arrived on the scene, and decided to transform the banks of the Seine at Paris into a highway for motor vehicles. Talking about Pompidou, I remember finding myself just behind him in the queue in a tobacco shop in Houdan around 1968. He appeared in front of me so quickly that I didn't even think of taking a selfie. But how could I? Back in those ancient times, selfies hadn't even been invented. We lived in a peaceful old rural world.

French police records

In colloquial French, a simpleton is said to be "neuneu".
The expression "Je suis neuneu" evokes "Je suis Charlie".

But the police don't necessarily see things in that light.

In French, a card created by the police to identity an individual is called a fiche. Recently, a much-talked-about new kind of police record has come into existence. It’s referred to as a fiche S (S-record), where the letter S stands for « sûreté » (security) as in the expression « atteinte à la sûreté de l’Etat » (state security threat). To call a spade a spade, while simplifying the situation abominably, anybody with an S-record is “largely” on the way to being looked upon as a terrorist threat… where the sense of my last remark depends greatly on the meaning associated with the “largely” adverb. Theoretically, an S-record should be created by French authorities for anybody who might have behaved as if he were a potential terrorist. But the inverse is not true. The fact that a certain individual is associated with an S-record does not indicate that she/he is a potential terrorist. It merely means that this person interests the police, for any of many possible reasons.

Consequently, the subject of S-records must be handled in an extremely subtle manner… which is not easy for the Australian-born author of the Antipodes blog, who knows next to nothing about French police methods. Meanwhile, the general public in France hears a lot about this new variety of police record, and it’s easy to imagine that one knows what it’s all about. But we don’t really understand anything at all, because the basic idea of sound security methods consists of making sure that they remain as enigmatic as possible. And that’s my final word on what I intended to say.... which I wish I'd never started.

Selfie imbecility

These people are turning their backs in order to take selfies with Hillary Clinton in the background. If you want my opinion (which you probably don’t), I look upon such folk as harmless idiots. I often wonder what they do with their shitty photos. I suppose they would show this selfie to equally-idiotic friends and say: “Look, that’s the closest I ever came to the wife of Bill Clinton”. I hope they’re happy to be able to survive with such shitty thoughts. If ever I were to learn that Trump started his presidential career by taking selfies of this kind, that information would provide me with a deeper understanding, both of the candidate and of American politics.

Maybe I should coin a new term: self-idiocy.

BREAKING NEWS : The more I look at this silly spectacle, the more I realize that it was no doubt Hillary herself who either organized, or agreed upon, this ridiculous demonstration of self-idiocy. In other words, Hillary is as stupid as the kids. Probably more stupid still. Media professionals in France were shocked by this silly show of backsides, and believe that it might have negative effects upon the candidate.

Gamone Press books delivered to my doorstep

The mail-woman has just delivered to my doorstep the three copies of A Little Bit of Irish that I ordered recently. Really, the self-publishing solution offered by Ingram is perfect. Bravo!