A question springs to mind immediately:
Happily, I've been able to read the excellent French translation of this book. So, I haven't lost any time in becoming familiar with all the fascinating details of the Talpiot affair. But I'm most curious to know why there's such a long delay in acquiring the original English edition. It's surely not a simple matter of running out of stock, for the publishing house would have had ample time to reprint it. So, I imagine that there must be more serious reasons for the delay. If anybody could supply me with information on this question, I would greatly appreciate it.
Today, it is inhabited by the equally famous Pierre Cardin, genius of haute couture, who is both a familiar neighbor for the village people of Lacoste (including many US students) and the organizer of a summer music and theater festival.
The adolescent novelist Françoise Sagan was a friend of the daughter of the former owner, and the present owner informed me that the novelist used the La Sône castle in 1960 as the setting of her play entitled Château in Sweden.
Here's an old photographic glimpse into the courtyard of Yulgilbar:
During my adolescence, I often heard my father and his beef-cattle friends referring to the huge and prosperous Yulgilbar affair, owned by a great rural pioneer: Samuel Hordern [1909-1960], member of a wealthy Sydney merchandising family. Today, the immense Yulgilbar estate belongs to Hordern's daughter and her husband Baillieu Myer.
In the category of pseudo-English words and punctuation used in France, this is one of my favorites. It's a sign for an industrial cleaning firm in the nearby village of St-Jean-en-Royans. The French word propreté means "cleanliness". I know nothing about the firm, but I would guess that the owner has purchased one of those huge cube-shaped floor-scrubbing machines on wheels, with revolving brushes, that you often see in supermarkets. This top-notch cleaning equipment was probably made in the USA (because I'm not familiar with any French manufacturers in this field), and the fellow surely paid a lot of money for it. So, he wanted to find a name for his firm that evokes the idea of high-tech cleaning. Knowing that a French word such as clinique becomes "clinic" in English, he imagined that technique becomes "technic". And, in case any ignorant French customers didn't know that "technic" is supposed to be English, the owner has thrown in a meaningless apostrophe-s for good measure.
This is the first time I've ever seen a case of explicit geographical discrimination on the Internet. In fact, I didn't even know it was technically feasible.
On the right, a light bulb is receiving energy from a metal coil. But the coil itself is not plugged in, by a cord, to any source of electricity. The coil on the right is in fact receiving electricity from the other coil, on the left. And, not only are the two coils physically unconnected, but the researchers are placed in such a way that some of them block the linear path between the two coils. It would be easy, after all, to use a laser to beam energy across to the light bulb, but that technique wouldn't work if individuals stood in the way. And the individuals in question would probably be zapped. In the case of the MIT demonstration, the electrical energy gets from the first to the second coil in a roundabout fashion, through so-called resonance.
On June 7, 1967, Christine and I, with our daughter Emmanuelle in a pram, boarded the Lloyd Triestino vessel Marconi at Genoa, on the northwestern coast of Italy. The following day, the ship called in at Naples, our last European port before sailing out to Australia. Here's the stamp in my passport, dated June 8, 1967:
We were heading towards the entry into the Suez Canal when an unexpected message over the ship's public-address system announced that we were about to turn around and head towards the Strait of Gibraltar, with the aim of sailing to Australia by the sea route around the tip of South Africa. In our hectic preparations for this trip to my homeland, Christine and I had not been following the news, and we were unaware that, over the last four days, the defense forces of Israel had annihilated the Egyptian air force and that, at that very instant, they were encircling the Egyptian army in the Sinai.
At the same time that our Marconi was sailing calmly from Naples to the Suez Canal, a terrible naval drama was being enacted just a few nautical miles ahead of us. Tsahal fighter planes imagined mistakenly that the Liberty was an enemy vessel. They fired upon it, and Israeli torpedo boats got into the act, too. The combined air/sea attack killed 34 Americans, wounded 171 and destroyed the Liberty.
Meanwhile, a man named Moshé Dayan (shown here with generals Uzi Narkiss and Yitzhak Rabin) would lead his brethren proudly to a newly-bulldozed piazza at the base of the western wall of Herod's Temple in Jerusalem.
I'll bet you didn't even know, up until reading the title of this post, that a lovely adjective such as "tennistic" could exist. Well, it does. At least in French. And why not in English? No need to answer that question. I've just waved my magic racket, and I henceforth own the copyright of "tennistic" as an English word. If you disagree, I ask you to take me to your leader, particularly if she's a Serbian wonder woman such as Jelena Jankovic or Ana Ivanovic. My god, these ladies are fabulous Amazons, who seem to step right out of a Modigliani painting. They're both so beautiful, so physically female, so powerful.
June 6, 1944 was surely one of the most illustrious dates in 20th-century world history. Today, 63 years after the allied landings in Normandy, the five beaches retain the glorious code names they received from the combined US and British armies, under the command of Dwight Eisenhower: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.
I've just heard that it's coming soon in the USA, on 29 June 2007: Apple's revolutionary iPhone! [Click here or on the image to visit their excellent website.] Up until now, I've been a total phone philistine, maybe because I don't live in an urban environment where lots of friends are calling me continually to invite me around for a drink or dinner, or to talk about going out somewhere. Gamone has never been that kind of world. Even my dog Sophia rarely gets phone calls. Like me, I assume she prefers the Internet. Well, on the iPhone, we'll have both. So, I have a feeling that my phone world might change radically for me—and lots of other folk—when this little Apple gadget is released. Between now and then, I'll have to look into the idea of maybe extending my list of people who might be prepared to talk to me. [Poor lonely soul!]
I've always been amused by the words of an unnamed critic, back in the days of the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who took out a patent on the telephone in 1876. "That gadget won't last for long. People will soon run out of things to say to one another."
The only problem about family-history research of a strictly uterine orientation is that, in societies where a married woman takes the surname of her husband, the researcher is likely to run out of data rather rapidly, at least much earlier than in investigations in which both male and female ancestors are being researched. In the case of my personal research, the disparity between a purely patrilineal and a purely matrilineal approach is flagrant. Concerning possible ancestors called Skyvington—or a variant of this patronymic such as Skivington, Skevington, Skiffington, Skeffington, etc—I've already filled a small book with research results. [Click here to visit this website.] But, when I concentrate solely on my uterine line, I find my maternal grandmother Mary Jane Kennedy [1888-1966], my Irish-born maternal great-grandmother Mary Eliza Cranston [1858-1926], my maternal great-great-grandmother Eliza Dancey [1821-1904], and then I run into an ancestor named Mary Adams about whom I know nothing whatsoever. And there's little chance of my ever learning the name of this Mary's mother. So, I've run up against a genealogical brick wall after four or five matrilineal generations.
In fact, the existence of mitochondria makes it possible to hypothesize the existence of common female ancestors—vastly more ancient than Biblical women—for all human beings living today. Genetic genealogists use a rather unromantic name to refer to the most recent female in this role: Mitochondrial Eve. She wasn't exactly a plump white-skinned European beauty. Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa some 150 thousand years ago. Whatever she looked like, she's the lady to whom we can say thanks for passing on to us the primordial cell energy enabling humans to crawl out of their beds every morning, to make hay while the sun shines... before getting back into their beds of an evening, maybe to make more mitochondria.
The bulky stone chevron (inverted V), whose triangular form resembles the gable of a roof, houses—as it were—an embossed stone circle. An observer is tempted to ask whether these forms might be symbols enabling us to determine the likelihood that this was indeed the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. In fact, this approach is not particularly rewarding, for several reasons. First, for all we know, the chevron and the circle could be purely decorative. Maybe the carving work was interrupted before its completion. Besides, we cannot know whether these forms were created prior to the burial of the individuals associated with the ossuaries, or after their inhumation. (Only in the latter case might the forms help us in identifying the deceased.) Even if we were convinced that these forms play a symbolic role of some kind, this would not enable us to prove or disprove possible links between the Talpiot tomb and Jesus of Nazareth. For example, somebody recently affirmed that "the pointed gable over the rosette is a pre-Christian Jewish symbol that referred to the Temple", and that this pattern can even be found on Hasmonean coins. Well, that doesn't affect the issue of whether or not this particular tomb did in fact house the remains of Jesus and his family.
This celebrated Supper at Emmaus (depicting the resurrected Jesus) was painted in 1525 by Jacopo Carruci, known as Pontormo, whose work was greatly influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Above the head of Jesus, a curious visual image is composed of an eye at the center of a triangle. Is it thinkable that this round object on a triangular background might be intended to evoke the façade of the tomb at Talpiot? If so, this would mean that the 16th-century Florentine painter was aware—in ways that are hard to fathom, but plausible—that Jesus had been buried in a tomb that bore an image of this kind.
Although the Mediterranean coast is less than an hour away by train, I often have the impression that, climate-wise and weather-wise, Natacha and I live in two totally different lands. Her land is called Provence. Mine is the Dauphiné. I'm always amazed by the fact that the geography of France is so varied, often over quite short distances.
If only this majestic site could be duplicated magically at other spots on the globe, this might end many ancient quarrels. American Jews could then have their own holy mountain, say, in an isolated corner of Colorado. Certain Christians might admire a copy in Salt Lake City. And Moslems would be free to recreate the spirit of Jerusalem's splendid es-Sakhra, the Rock, in every Arab corner of the globe.
The French term ânerie [donkey stuff] is still used as a synonym for ignorance and stupidity, as in the English metaphor that consists of designating a silly fellow as an ass. Well, in a recent issue of a serious French TV weekly, two otherwise respectable French intellectuals dared to apply this derogatory term to the famous film by Simcha Jacobovici about a tomb to the south of Jerusalem that contained several ossuaries [human bone boxes], one of which was marked "Jesus son of Joseph". [Click here to see my earlier article, entitled Thomas time, on this fascinating subject.] These Parisian intellectuals, who should know better, referred rudely to Jacobovici's work as an ânerie mercantile [roughly, commercial donkey shit]. I would like to offer a symbolic donkey hat to each of these gentlemen, while hoping—as we say in English—that they'll end up being obliged to eat it.
This juxtaposition shows the covers of two books. The current situation can be summarized simply. If you're concerned by Christianity today, either as an interested observer (like me) or as a believer (like Monsignor di Falco), you need both these books. The one on the left provides a complex but partial introduction to the subject. The one on the right [hot off the press] offers an even more complex but necessary and complementary view of Christian things. Henceforth, for aficionados of Jesus, both books are required reading. The second book reveals all that was stupidly banned, in year 367, in the days of Athanasius. Today, we're adult enough to read such stuff. In any case, to my mind, Simcha Jacobovici's research and film go hand in hand with the Nag Hammadi scriptures. And together, they'll end up turning Christianity upside-down...
I've repainted the pointed ends of these posts with bitumen (sold in cans in hardware stores), to minimize rotting in damp soil.
In the above photo, I'm holding the heavy steel spike used to create post holes. The general idea is that you stand with your feet apart at the spot where you intend to make a post hole, and you raise and then hurl this spike into the ground. To produce a hole that's deep enough for a post (about thirty to forty centimeters), you might have to raise and drop the spike a dozen or more times.
As a boy in Grafton, I had witnessed two major floods, in 1950 and 1954. In our dull existence in a small country town, floods were exciting happenings, tinged with anguish, because nobody knew to what height the waters might rise. On the other hand, people rarely feared for their lives, because few of us were in the vicinity of swirling currents and treacherous depths. Besides, there were boats and dinghies everywhere, even amphibian military vehicles nicknamed "ducks". During the tense countdown to an impending flood, many local men saw themselves faced with long hours of harsh effort, in the chilly dampness, to protect their families and belongings from the rising waters. Some of these flood fighters were convinced that an ideal way of sustaining their bodies during these combats consisted of a regular intake of warming alcohol, often rum or whisky. An outcome of this belief was that a few rare accidents during a flood involved drunken men who slipped in the water and drowned.
Some Australians might be pleased to know that America's star creationist is a Queensland expatriate named Ken Ham, who has set up a so-called Creation Museum in Kentucky featuring a reconstruction of Noah's Ark carrying robotic dinosaurs. First, Crocodile Dundee, then Steve Irwin, and now Ken Ham. There would seem to be big openings in America for Aussie clowns. I don't wish to waste any more time describing the US operations of this nitwit whose success story appalls but does not surprise me. Whether we like it or not, America is America. Use Google to learn more about the Ham scam.
The Italian truck manufacturer Iveco (which also happens to be the world's leading manufacturer of diesel motors of all kinds) has scored a hit with a brilliant TV commercial exploiting the powerful image of the All Blacks. [Click here or on the image to see this commercial. To make it play, you have to choose a language.] There's no doubt that the visual image of the All Blacks and their famous haka has always been a striking symbol. [Click here to see the official website of the All Blacks, which explains the origins of their war dance.] And there's also no doubt that Iveco must have paid a huge amount of money to create this exceptional advertising.
