Glamour and fresh water

The Swedish group H&M has called upon Kylie Minogue to launch a new collection, and 10% of profits will go to a charitable British organization named WaterAid that aims to supply water and hygiene to the planet's needy.

Stylist Margareta van den Bosch says: "When we think of glamour and Australia, we think of Kylie!"

Let's toast those encouraging words and plans with a glass of fresh water!

Blog post # 100 — Aussie political cartoonist

I hesitated a little about an appropriate theme for the hundredth post of my Antipodes blog, but I finally decided to dedicate it to a brilliant compatriot named Peter Nicholson. For ages, I've been a fan of his work. I've always felt—rightly or wrongly, since I don't know him personally—that I'm on the same wavelength as Peter, and that the only thing that separates us is his immense talent (which I envy greatly) as a graphic artist and political commentator. Peter Nicholson has authorized me to include the following image in my blog:

Click on the image to visit Peter Nicholson's website at

http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/

Isn't that a fabulous encounter between Bush and Howard? The only thing that troubles me is that Nicholson's depiction of John Howard is such a nice little garden gnome that I almost feel like picking him up and cuddling him. Or maybe hitting his helmeted head with a brick...

Seriously, there are talented cartoonists, like Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, whose static work is poorly transformed into animation. In the case of Peter Nichsolson, his wavery lines translate marvelously into the brilliant animations of the Rubbery team. Each sequence is a nicely-designed little story, and the voices of Howard and Bush are fantastic. This is truly international-class animation.

In any case, Peter, if ever you happened to get into a fight, count upon me to stand alongside you, Mate. The only thing that frustrates me is that you don't evolve your perspective to the world at large, which would enable you to be celebrated as a planetary cartoonist.

The hosed hoser

It's likely that the title of this post doesn't ring a bell with anybody. In its original French, L'arroseur arrosé is the title of the world's first movie, less than a minute long, created by Louis Lumière in 1895. My mentor Pierre Schaeffer used to refer to it frequently. A gardener is using a bulky hose to water his plants. A prankster creeps up behind the gardener and clamps his foot on the hose, causing the water jet to dribble and halt. The gardener, wondering what has happened, peers down into the hose nozzle. The prankster takes his foot off the hose, whereupon the gardener receives the full force of the jet in his face...

More than a simple cinematographic reference, Lumière's hosed hoser sequence has become a social metaphor in France for things that backfire. For me, personally, I often take pleasure in using the hosed hoser concept as a principle of action... or rather reaction.

For example, a young woman phoned me half an hour ago with the intention of signing me up for some kind of a satellite TV deal. Speaking in naive terms (with the help of my accent), I had no trouble in steering gently the phone conversation around to the level of the important role of TV in rural communities. (I wasn't giving her any private data, of course, because she already had my phone number and address from the directory.) Rapidly, I told the anonymous lady—still in a naive tone of voice—that I was constantly alarmed by the idea of robbers, and that my house was henceforth a terrifying arsenal of mysterious weapons, linked to multimedia satellites and communications devices, designed to explode during the night if ever the presence of an intruder were detected. Exploiting my most seductive tone of an Anglo-Saxon charmer, I asked the lady to give me her name and her age [which the silly girl did: Amélie, 29], and told her that I would be delighted to invite her along to my place to learn all about my system. I added that I also sold insurance policies. The young lady bid me farewell in a friendly fashion that was both rapid and definitive. I had the impression that I had hosed her. What a nice naughty notion!

Sad affair

The Bush administration has just filed terrorism charges against David Hicks, who has already been detained without trial for more than five years in the notorious detention center of Guantanamo Bay. What a disgusting anticlimax to a mediocre affair. As an Australian, I'm ashamed of the way in which groveling Howard has allowed Bush to lead us up the the garden path concerning the treatment of this pathetic fellow who would have no doubt done better to stick to kangaroo skinning instead of signing up (so we're told) as an illuminated mercenary. Be that as it may, David Hicks holds an Australian passport. So, one might ask: What does it mean today, if anything, to be Australian? This affair is not only disgusting; it's frightening.

Google News

I'm becoming so enthusiastic about Google services and offers that, sooner or later, people are likely to accuse me of being either a fool or a financially-interested admirer, or maybe both. I think I'm neither, and I'm prepared to climb up onto the rooftop and scream if ever I were to discover that Google is less than what I thought it to be.

If you've been hiding in the jungle for the last few years, and you don't already know Google News, click this image to see what it's all about:

To be perfectly honest, I myself only emerged from the jungle quite recently, because I used to be tuned in regularly to CNN International before discovering Google News, and I was continually blowing out my bodily safety valves whenever I felt offended by CNN reporting: that's to say, at least once a day.

What I like first and foremost about Google News is their delightfully ingenuous warning at the bottom of their main page:

The selection and placement of stories on this page
were determined automatically by a computer program.

This seems to say: "If you don't like what you see, please don't blame us. It's the computer's fault."

In fact, I like what I see, because Google News enables us to see almost everything, from excellent professional journalism down to the worst shitty comments from narrow-minded scribblers.

I really don't know if the Google approach to real-time universal news is ethically perfect, because I ignore the legal environment in which they succeed in borrowing stuff—as it were—from all the media organizations of the planet. I can imagine that such-and-such a scruffy news-sheet from a remote village in the media backwoods would be thrilled to find its stuff announced on Google News. But I don't know whether the big newsgroups react similarly. Maybe, one of these news, Google will let us know what's happening at that level. The news, the whole news, and nothing but the news.

The art and the manner

In French, people who know how to handle personal events in an elegant fashion are said to have l'art et la manière. In other words, not only have they acquired the art of doing things correctly, but they also have a manner of adding a flourish of style. Good examples: the way in which cousins of my children have informed me of January 2007 births in the family:

When the art and the manner are accompanied by a tiny but supreme detail, this is often referred to in French as "the cherry on the cake". In the case of the pink envelope, it's the postage stamp, which I've enlarged so that you can see the details:

The text at the bottom says: It's a girl. And the image shows a plump pink baby girl emerging from a rose.

Exceptional events

Yesterday, people throughout the world were startled to hear about the Hollywood-style treatment of mysterious stone boxes that might have contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth, his friend Mary of Magdala and maybe their child named Judah. On that same day, the San Diego Catholic diocese filed for bankruptcy protection in the hope of avoiding lawsuits from 150 individuals who alleged they had been sexually abused by priests. Obviously, the two happenings are totally unconnected, but it's intriguing to realize that these two high-profile events took place simultaneously on the seventh day of Lent 2007. God only knows what's in store for Christians by the time Easter arrives. Maybe even a miracle...

Maybe we'll learn that it was Pandora herself who brought these charming boxes to the quiet garden suburb of Talpiot (Hebrew term meaning armory), to the south of Jerusalem.

Romantic love in Valence

While awaiting reactions to the amazing story of the possible bones of Jesus, I've been engaged—by chance—in an unexpected but delightful Internet dialogue with a lady named Anne Peynet. Her father drew a picture that now belongs to the history and culture, not only of the neighboring city of Valence, but to France and the entire planet. This kind lady has authorized me to reproduce this drawing in my blog:

According to a legendary tale (which is surely authentic), the graphic artist Raymond Peynet [1908-1999] happened to be passing alongside the Valence music kiosk at the end of a public concert. Everybody was leaving—musicians and audience—except for a violinist, carefully placing his instrument in its case, and a young female front-row member of the audience. A minute later, the violinist came down from the stage, kissed the front-row girl, and they wandered off—thanks to Peynet's pencil—into the eternal role of romantic love.

The Peynet kiosk still exists, more lovely than ever, against an urban background, in the ongoing restoration work being carried out by the municipality of Valence:

Does Peynet-style romantic love still exist in our harsh modern world? I certainly hope so, and I think so... but it's not really the kind of question that could be settled in a scientific manner. If you were to ask young people today what they think of the round-hatted violinist of Valence and his tender pigtailed girlfriend, everybody would agree, I imagine, that they're a pair of lovely lovers.

He might, in fact, be IN...

There's a story about a priest leading pilgrims through the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Following his presentation of the ugly 19th-century stone structure covering the alleged tomb, a lady asked cautiously: "If I understand correctly, the tomb itself is in fact empty?" The priest replied with a grin: "Lady, if he's in, then we're out!"

This is gigantic stuff. The term "mind-boggling" is far too weak. The adjective "awesome" would be great, except that idiots now use it to describe golfers. This is all about shaking the roots of Christianity. About what?

For the moment, I believe that we should all wait for more ample explanations...

What's in a name?

Thirty years ago, in 1976, the Internet and the Google search engine did not yet exist. But my French-language book on artificial intelligence was already a reality:

At that time, I was pleased with my use (invention?) of the expression Machina sapiens as a title. Today, if you want to observe an interesting case of culture transfer, Google with "machina sapiens". To put it bluntly, my title has been ripped off—with no recognition—by sundry users.







There have been less explicit cases of culture transfer. In 1995, the great French writer Jean d'Ormesson wrote a best-seller: a popular science presentation of the history of nearly everything.










Eight years later, in 2003, an American brought out another best-seller with a similar title, of a similar kind: a popular science presentation of the history of nearly everything.

Coincidence, like magic, is a fabulous concept... but it's often difficult to believe in such things.

Culture transfer

We can speak of culture transfer when people of one society borrow cultural fragments from another. Maybe "sharing" would be a better word than "transfer", because the borrowed fragments are not, of course, lost to the first society.

Throughout my blog, I've often spoken of culture transfer between two antipodean societies: my birthplace, Australia, and my homeplace, France. Meanwhile, in off-blog conversations, I've often discovered that some of these culture transfer situations are not well understood. The worst situation of all is when both societies seem to be capable of transferring culture fragments in the same domain, but of a totally conflictual nature. In such extreme cases, communications can be totally screwed up, since the messages end up destroying one another. That's what seems to be happening in the environmental domain...

Out in Australia, we had—until recently—an environmentalist hero named Steve Irwin, who promoted the idea that our relationship with the planet Earth might be linked in weird ways to the pastime of stirring up combats with crocodiles.



Here in France, we have an environmentalist hero named Nicolas Hulot who accomplishes extraordinary missions of a crocodile-combat intensity. The great difference is that Hulot never gets into fights with the wonderful animals of the world. He doesn't even whisper in their ears. He simply talks to us humans about the planet Earth. About all things bright and beautiful... and the ugly stuff, too.

In France, nobody has ever heard of Steve Irwin. In Australia, the same thing might be said of Nicolas Hulot. Transposing the language of a crocodile combat into the domain of culture transfer, this would be called a draw. In our planetary combat, it's a more dramatic situation.

Women in white

Looking at recent posts, Freudian readers of my blog might conclude that I've got some kind of a fixation for women in white. Now, that might or might not be the case. It's a fact that, like many males, I've often been fascinated by female dentists, nurses, etc. But I've never known whether the whiteness played a role in this fascination, or whether it wasn't simply the protective soothing presence of these ladies. On the other hand, I was recently enchanted by the vision of a splendid female gendarme, dressed in blue, with a pistol in her belt, talking nonchalantly with friends outside the local supermarket. Maybe I'm simply attracted by uniforms, no matter what color. In any case, there's probably no point in my pursuing this daring exercise in sexual fantasies, since it's likely to send my blog readers to sleep...

Just one final remark. Or rather a question. Do you know, off hand, the etymology of the word "candidate", as in a phrase such as "the French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal"? It comes from the Latin candidatus, designating an individual dressed in white. In the Roman empire, individuals who came to the forum with the intention of proposing their services for a public office were traditionally clothed in white robes.

Restaurants

Why were these people peering through the windows of a Greenwich Village restaurant last Friday? Were they admiring the drumsticks and thighs advertised in the red sign? No, they were watching a pack of a dozen or so rats running around on the floor of the restaurant.


It's enough to make tourists feel like staying back in their hotel room and surviving on healthy peanut-butter sandwiches...

An amusing sequel of this horror tale (well, it's amusing for lucky folk like me who don't have the habit of consuming finger-licking fastfood) is that New York pest-control experts talk as if it's perfectly normal for rats to be found in such an unexpected environment. One of these specialists stated: "Even the most famous restaurants can get rats." Another Manhattan rat exterminator declared that wiping out vermin is impossible. But I'm not sure whether or not this man should be believed, because wiping out rats would mean the end of his business.

One of my uncles once supplied us with a nice little restaurant horror story of a mild homely kind. He lived in an attractive beach setting where the principal restaurant was run by an Asian family. The establishment had a fine reputation, but my uncle refused to ever go there for a meal. When pressed to explain why, my uncle told us he'd heard a rumor about somebody opening the door of the dunny behind the restaurant and finding the Asian cook seated there calmly chopping up beans. Unlike the rat incident in Manhattan, no video crew was on hand to provide us with images of the Asian cook, so we have to rely upon the sincerity of the anonymous rumor-monger who gave the story to my uncle. As for me, I would bet my beans that this rumor was invented, say, by the guy who ran the fish-and-chips shop further down the road.

The following restaurant photo has nothing to do with horror tales:

This 37-year-old female chef named Anne-Sophie Pic—whose body is arched like a ballet dancer as she leans over her stove—runs a time-honored family restaurant in the nearby city of Valence. She has just been awarded three stars by the Michelin red guide: the first time ever that a lady has received such a culinary honor. So, the local press has been treating Anne-Sophie as a heroine over the last week or so.

Now, having said earlier on that I don't normally go into fastfood restaurants (except in Sydney, where it was the only way of finding a so-called broadband hotspot for accessing the Internet), I should point out, in all fairness, that I'm not wealthy enough to eat at the renowned Pic restaurant. In fact, I do all my own cooking... and I think I'm quite good at it.

Five years as a political hostage

People in France are familiar with the photo of Ingrid Betancourt, who has dual French-Colombian nationality. While campaigning politically in Colombia on 23 February 2002, Ingrid was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Today, there are no firm projects for rescuing her. Worse, nobody even knows if she's still alive.






In France, Ingrid's daughter Mélanie Delloye has been fighting relentlessly to make sure that her mother's plight is not forgotten. It's a small consolation to be able to take advantage of the forthcoming French presidential elections to remind everybody that more needs to be done to find her mother.

The Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal has just signed a manifesto submitted by the French committee concerned with the Betancourt case. Among other things, Madame Royal has promised that, if she were to be elected president of France, she would call upon both the European Union and the USA in a long-overdue attempt to rescue Ingrid Betancourt.

Shit!

I try to maintain this blog at a certain level of correct gentlemanly communication, which means that I wouldn't normally think of submitting a post named Shit! But I've just broken down in the face of fucking Cheney, who dares to suggest that the spirit of Aussie mateship—and John Williamson's embarrassingly-fundamentalist True Blue lyrics (which I don't necessarily admire)—might support Australia's continued military support in Iraq and Afghanistan. This Yankee mother-fucker (who deserves, like Bush, to be brought to justice for war crimes) obviously takes us simplistic Australians for morons.

I ask humbly: Are we?

All I can reply—as a proud seventh-generation son of pioneering founding fathers and mothers of Australia named Walker, Hickey, O'Keeffe, Dixon, Kennedy, Cranston, Pickering and Skyvington—is that we are definitely not idiots.


I've always loved intensely Dorothea Mackellar's fabulous country, whose beauty is reflected neither in Dick Cheney's alien verbiage, the silly words of Williamson nor mindless money-making Qantas adds.

Political gestures

A private citizen can't do a lot in the political domain. We might talk of gestures rather than actions. I made such a gesture recently in sending an email to the environmental authorities of the Australian opposition party stating that I would be happy to act as a liaison with the grand environmentalist pact of the French celebrity Nicolas Hulot. No reply (elementary rudeness). At the same time, although I'm not a French citizen (voter), I contacted the dynamic people in charge of the political campaign of Ségolène Royal, who stands a great chance of becoming the future president of France. I told them they might use the interesting idea of top-right-corner mini-banners... and they responded positively.

This morning, I went along to the municipal office in Choranche to lodge my bulky application for French citizenship.

Apart from that, my lady, everything's fine

One of France's best-known satirical songs starts with a noblewoman talking on the phone with her butler James, at the end of a two-week holiday, making sure that everything's fine at the country castle.

James: Everything's fine, my lady...except for a minor incident: the death of your gray mare. Apart from that, my lady, everything's fine.

Lady: My gray mare is dead? How did that happen, James?

James: She was burnt to death in the fire that destroyed your stables. But, apart from that, my lady, everything's fine.

Lady: A fire in my stables? How did that happen, James?

James: Well, your castle was burnt to the ground, and the fire spread to your stables. But, apart from that, my lady, everything's fine.

Lady: The castle burnt down? How did that happen, James?

James: Well, you see, when his lordship learned that he was financially ruined, he committed suicide. And, in so doing, he knocked over a candle that set the castle on fire. And the fire spread to your stables. And that's how your gray mare got burnt to death. But, apart from that, my lady, everything's fine.


I couldn't help thinking of this song when I read the amazing words of vice-president Dick Cheney, when asked to comment upon Blair's decision to withdraw many British troops from Iraq: "I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well."

Sure, there have been over three thousand American deaths, countless thousands of Iraqi deaths, the destruction of a nation, and the creation of a state of civil war and a breeding ground for terrorists. But, apart from that, everything's fine.

History in the making?

Monday evening, while watching a live TV broadcast of the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal answering questions from a citizens' audience, I had the vague impression that I might be observing history in the making. Initially, I was wary of expressing the intense emotional impact upon me of the TV presence of Madame Royal, because I felt that I might have been a duped minority spectator. At a certain moment, a man in a wheelchair broke down emotionally while putting his questions to the Great White Lady, and she left her podium and moved physically across to her interrogator, to comfort him. This was a moment of verity that will surely go down in French political media history.

Meanwhile, Ségolène Royal was her real fabulous self. And I was merely one of the huge audience of spectators who observed the televisual behavior of our candidate. Ségolène is already a virginal myth: Mary, Joan of Arc. But she's also, and above all, a lovely and intelligent lady, perfectly capable of managing the great and ancient household named France. Like countless French citizens, I hope that Ségolène Royal will be the future president of the French Republic.

Time for a G change

A year ago, when the French telecom people wired up Pont-en-Royans and Choranche in such a way that I could finally have broadband access to the Internet, I was annoyed to find myself sucked into signing up for a year with the ISP [Internet service provider] called Wanadoo/Orange, which is in fact an emanation of the state-owned France Télécom organization. As soon as this contract terminates, in a month or so, I intend to switch to a more friendly French ISP: Free, which already accommodates most of my Internet creations [as can be seen in the list of my websites]. From that point on, my current e-mail address sky.william@wanadoo.fr will be obsolete. This old address can already be replaced by any of the following valid personal e-mail addresses, all of which I consult daily:

— william.skyvington@free.fr

— gamone@free.fr

— choranche@free.fr

— grafton.nsw@free.fr

— nutopia@free.fr

I've just learned that an extraordinary e-mail possibility, called Gmail, is now being offered free to everybody by Google. [Click the image to visit Gmail.] My new e-mail address within this system is william.skyvington@gmail.com. Please use it!

After having examined closely the advantages of the Gmail system, I would advise everybody to join up. For example, in Australia, as weird as it might sound, I have certain relatives and friends to whom I cannot send e-mail [with certainty that it will be delivered], because of the idiotic behavior of a few Aussie ISPs [including, above all, Big Pond]. If everybody had a sound Gmail address, this ridiculous problem would cease to exist. So, it's time for a G change!

Great inventions

Americans often praise a new invention by saying it's "the best thing since sliced bread". This has always intrigued me, since I've never really thought of sliced bread as a great invention. In France, nobody would dream of buying a sliced baguette. How would you carry such a limp object on the back of your bike?

The computer scientist John McCarthy (inventor of the Lisp language) surprised me back in the early '70s by affirming that the invention that had made the greatest impact upon society was, not the computer (which had been around for a couple of decades), but the photocopier. McCarthy argued that, if computers were to be suddenly eliminated by a magic wand, many people would hardly notice that these big boxes full of electronics (I repeat: he said this during the early '70s) were no longer there. On the other hand, if secretaries could no longer make photocopies, that would be the end of business, industry and research. Today, the wheel has turned in the sense that, most often, I use my computer's scanner and printer to copy documents.

We learned of the death, a few days ago, of the 93-year-old man behind one of the greatest inventions of the second half of the 20th century: the remote control device. In 1956, Robert Adler created such a gadget based upon ultrasonics. Today, as in countless homes across the planet, I have half-a-dozen different kinds of remote control devices lying around the house, and it's becoming more and more difficult to use them intuitively, since there's no such thing as standardization in this domain. Meanwhile, every family has its private jokes about an old-fashioned relative trying to change TV channels with a portable telephone, or make a phone call with a zapper. Here at Gamone, my dog Sophia doesn't even need to wait around for visits from my relatives to observe comparable cases of such confusion.

My favorite remote control gadget is the elegant and simple device included with all new Macintosh computers. I got a first one with my iMac, and another with my MacBook. I get a kick out of playing with the device for a few minutes from time to time, because its effects are really nice to watch. If I were perfectly truthful, though, I would have to admit that I don't make any serious use of this device on the Macintosh. I'm not keen to operate my computer in a remote style. On the contrary, I try to develop a closer and closer contact with my computer, so that the virtual distance between us (a new concept I just invented) is minimal.

When I think about, as an invention, the Macintosh remote control device is a little like sliced bread. It's nice to know that such a thing exists, and I admire the imagination of the inventor. But it's not exactly an invention that excites me personally.