Simple direct talk

Since last Sunday's results of the first round of the French legislative elections, which were unfavorable for everybody except the supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Socialist Party has been in a state of disharmony. Somebody said it seems to have two chiefs, with different strategies: on the one hand, the former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal; on the other, François Hollande, the party's chief secretary.

This double-headed state of affairs is all the more intriguing in that Ségolène Royal and François Hollande, in everyday life, form a couple, with a family of four. [Their union was officialized by a recently-created French contract known as a PACS: literally, a civil pact of solidarity. This is the same legal device that enables same-sex couples to officialize their union.]

Yesterday, Ségolène Royal proudly told everybody that she had left a phone message with the chief of the centrists, François Bayrou. The election results for Bayrou's supporters were even worse than those of the socialists. Since all the centrist candidates except Bayrou were knocked out in the first round, the party leader could now encourage centrist voters to support the socialists... which was, of course, the raison d'être of Ségolène's phone message.

Today, Bayrou said he isn't going to reply to Ségolène's message, because he doesn't wish to side with anybody, neither the socialists nor the Sarkozists. Meanwhile, several leading socialists—including François Hollande—have publicly reprimanded Ségolène because of yesterday's phone message to an "outsider".

The grand lady's reaction: "It would be nice, from time to time, if politics could be as simple a thing as making a phone call." Ségolène should know by now that politics has never been as easy as that. When she gets home this evening, I wouldn't be surprised if her companion were to yell at her for having made a remark that sounds as if it might have come out of the mouth of George W Bush.

In fact, the spirit of Ségolène's sense of simplicity and direct talk reminds me of Ronald Reagan's famous words to Gorbachev on 12 June 1987, exactly twenty years ago: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Only in Leopard

Coinciding with their annual developers' conference, Apple's website has been redesigned with a sophisticated black cosmic look. Above all, the site includes a lengthy description of the future operating system, named Leopard, which will be available in October. [Click here to display it.] It looks like a fabulous system, with several powerful new devices, such as Stacks [for partitioning projects on the desktop] and Time Machine [to find ancient stuff in personal archives, created automatically].

I have the impression that, next year, smart folk everywhere will be working and playing with a pair of machines from Cupertino: a Leopard-equipped Macintosh and an iPhone.

Safety shoes

In 1973, an audiovisual firm in Paris hired me to make a publicity product for a manufacturer of industrial safety shoes, Jallatte. The founder, Pierre Jallate, had set up his shoe factory in a splendid 17th-century military fort built by Vauban in the isolated village of Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the Cévennes, north of Montpellier.

I was given a selection of Jallatte products [which I would later wear, personally, for years], and my aim was to take photos of these shoes being worn in various working environments, particularly on construction sites.

Besides their functional role of protecting the feet of workers, Jallatte shoes have always been elegant and fashionable. So I tried to get this message across in my photos.

The French cartoonist Denis Dugas collaborated with me on the Jallatte project. He created montages in which photos of shoes were placed in humorous decors.

As you can see, we went to great lengths to illustrate the merits of Jallatte safety shoes. And I believe that the chief, charismatic 54-year-old Pierre Jallatte, was pleased with our audiovisual creation.

Recently, the new owners of the company [which has always remained a world leader in the manufacture of safety shoes] started to talk about delocalizing the Jallatte factory in Tunisia. Last Friday, 88-year-old Pierre Jallatte refused to accept the idea that local workers would lose their jobs, and that his famous factory in the ancient fort might cease to exist. In his home in Nîmes, he pointed a rifle at his head and pulled the trigger.

El Nino and global warming

In an email yesterday, my sister Anne informed me with joy that the drought had broken in NSW [New South Wales]. Today, I learn that a gigantic tempest has been blowing in on the NSW coast, accompanied by torrential rain on the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, and that five thousand people have been evacuated from their homes around Maitland because of imminent flooding. Eight individuals have already drowned in this sudden bad weather: the worst for thirty years.

A question springs to mind immediately:

— Could this exceptional weather be associated with El Nino?

Two complementary questions:

— Are Australians, in general, conscious of the El Nino phenomenon?

— Have Australian scientists envisaged the possibility of correlations between global warming and El Nino? More precisely: Could the former phenomenon have any effect upon the latter?

Big questions. Big risks.

Delay in obtaining the Talpiot book

On 3 March 2007, I wrote my article entitled Thomas time concerning the affair of the tomb in Talpiot. [Click here to display this article.] On the same day, I ordered from Amazon the book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb. Today, over three months later, I still haven't received this book, and Amazon has just informed me that they won't be able to deliver it for another two months. So, what's happening? I have no idea. I've never heard of having to wait five months for a new book from Amazon.

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.

Neighbors who dwell in castles

Here in France, authentic ancient castles abound. And all kinds of manor houses and stately homes have the look and feel of castles. So, in countless villages, it's not unusual to have neighbors who dwell in structures that we might refer to as châteaux. During my recent excursion to Provence, I was particularly impressed (among many other surprises) by the mysterious white castle in Lacoste that once belonged to the famous Marquis de Sade.

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.

Not far away from Choranche, in a village named La Sône, on the banks of the Isère, I recently visited a fairytale castle that belongs to a friendly ex-pharmacist from Avignon.

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.

Talking of castles, believe it or not, back in my native Clarence River region in Australia, in the vicinity of Grafton, there's a kind of castle, called Yulgilbar, constructed by German craftsmen for wealthy cattle men named Ogilvie between 1860 and 1866. Historians of architecture would refer to it as a mock-Gothic folly, because it has crenellations of the kind that once played a role in defense.

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.

If I understand correctly, the original name of the rich land on the banks of the Clarence, belonging to the Bunjalung Aboriginal tribe, was Baryulgil, and the Ogilvie pioneers decided to invert the syllables to obtain a name for their huge property. Much later, in about 1940, descendants of this Aboriginal community were employed as laborers in local asbestos mines. And today, there is distress in this community because of asbestos pollution and poisoning.

Yes, sometimes we have rich neighbors who dwell in castles, while neighbors on the other side of the castle walls lead very different lives. It has always been that way with castles.

Things I don't wish to talk about

Towards the end of my recent post entitled Childhood myths [click here to display it], I said that I didn't wish to use my blog to publicize the moronic thinking of an Aussie expatriate named Ham in the USA who believes that Noah's Ark was a relatively recent reality, and that it carried dinosaurs. Likewise, after weeks of Internet boredom and fatigue due to constant descriptions of an empty-headed bird whose daddy owns big hotels everywhere (according to the latest news, she's now a jailbird), I've reached a state of extreme irritation in which I refuse to even mention the name of the fat-faced wig-wearing Aussie gangster whose story is nevertheless in today's headlines of The Australian. By the same token, I don't intend to comment upon his girlfriend who outsmarted French police, who were supposed to be tracking her, by leading them on a wild goose chase to Disneyland. [It's possible that the French police chief might not have assigned his most brilliant detectives to this international surveillance task.] I'm aware of the fact that no less a man than the prime minister of Australia, John Howard, has thought it fit and necessary to speak about the capture of this gangster, who in turn has thought it fit and necessary to speak about John Howard. As for me, I refuse to use my blog to speak about any of these individuals, not even the prime minister of Australia. In this whole mediocre arena of non-news, the only exception I'm prepared to make consists of guiding you to the latest Nicholson animation, excellent as usual, on the dumb jailbird. Just position your mouse on her stupid face and click as if you were giving her a slap.

High-technic's sign

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.

To complicate matters, it's a fact that, if the owner of the French firm consulted an American dictionary (as he surely did), he would indeed find the nouns "technic" and "technics". But writers of good English would not normally apply these highbrow terms to the field of scrubbing floors in offices and factories.

Incidentally, there's an error in the French. Can you find it?

No trespassing

While surfing on the web, looking for information about recent Australian movies, I ran into the following site:

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.

Unplugged

You know how a stage magician, having levitated a woman who's stretched out horizontally, proves that she's floating in the air, with no strings attached, by passing a metal hoop around her body, from head to toes. Well, the following researchers at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] are in fact positioned in such a way as to prove that their demonstration of magic is genuine.

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.

Admittedly, the present demonstration is rather primitive, and a lot of research and technology will be required before we can power computers and communication devices, or maybe automobiles, in a remote fashion.

One day in the future, one of my descendants might come upon the blog article I'm now writing, and exclaim to his/her partner: "Isn't it weird to think that, at Gamone, poor old William didn't even have witricity!" [That new term is short or wireless electricity.] I nevertheless insist upon pointing out to those smart young buggers, here and now, that I do have a couple of sophisticated gadgets that provide me with an uninterruptible power supply when the electricity fails during a storm. I described this hardware in an article, Show me your machines, on 15 January 2007. [Click here to display that article.]

Forty years ago: a man named Moshé

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.

Insofar as the Suez Canal was theoretically accessible, even if the nation of Egypt was henceforth in a terrible mess, why did the captain of the Marconi make that last-minute decision on June 8, 1967 to change our route to Australia, resulting in a voyage that would be about a week longer than planned? It was only quite recently that I obtained, by chance, an answer to that question. And Christine and Emmanuelle will no doubt encounter the following explanation for the first time.

Here's a photo of a small US navy intelligence vessel named the Liberty, which happened to be operating in the eastern Mediterranean in June 1967:

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.

Besides this incident, the captain of our liner had probably learned, too, that a fleet of Soviet bombers had just landed in Alexandria, and that the conflict could flare into a global war if Israel carried on its rampage. Stunned observers would soon learn that, on the final two days of that famous Six Day War, Israel would capture the Golan Heights from Syria. By then, Egypt had lost the Sinai, and Jordan had lost its West Bank territories.

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.

The actors of that epoch—Nasser, Dayan and Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol—died long ago, but the Holy City and much of the Palestinian West Bank territories are still occupied. And this state of affairs is likely to endure.

Tennistic Amazons

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.

Traces of D-day

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.

Traces still remain of the enormous determination of the Nazis to stand firm in Normandy. They placed astronomical quantities of sophisticated explosive devices along the shoreline. French minesweepers and mechanized beach crews are still working non-stop to eliminate this nasty stuff. As of today, it is estimated that a mere 15 percent of mines and unexploded bombs have been detected and destroyed. On French TV this evening, an officer in charge of this work said that explosives experts and naval frogmen will remain engaged in D-day cleaning-up operations in Normandy for another century.

No future

In a post of 17 January 2007 entitled Therapy, I mentioned my enthusiasm for the blog of Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip. [Click here to see this post.] Lately he has set aside his usual facetious and offbeat topics, as well as his curious naive crusade against the concept of free will, and he has got around to some serious soul-searching about the role of the US in today's world. He has been trying to invent serious and less serious schemes for the US to get out of Iraq, to win back respect and friendship from other nations, and to cease being regarded as a prime target for terrorists. He has even taken a sudden interest in the threat of global warming.

In the piles of comments that Scott's blog attracts, I've often found allusions to the much-celebrated role of the US in putting an end to the Hitlerian catastrophe in the Old World. A bewildered American asked rhetorically the other day (I'm paraphrasing his comment): "If the US could do such a good job in eliminating Nazism, why have we got everything screwed up in Iraq?" I would hope that the fellow who made this comment recalls that Iraq is not the first US military fiasco. There was Vietnam...

This evening, on the Franco-German TV channel called Arte, a series of excellent documentaries tackled the subject of the current image of the US as seen through European eyes. A theme that reoccurs constantly is the notion that the USA felt comfortable on the world scene as long as it had a precise enemy to combat, such as the Soviet Union. But Bush's alleged "war against terror" was a nonsense thing, because there was no longer any explicit enemy to wage war against. And the US is lost in this new world, like Don Quixote setting out on his steed to fight windmills. Another reoccurring theme is that we Europeans might happen to have ringside seats for the imminent fall of a latter-day empire akin to that of Ancient Rome. It's astounding to observe the way in which many serious European observers tend to talk calmly but solemnly about the USA as if its power, global glory and influence were things of the past. In two words: no future.

Why do we talk so much?

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."

It's a bit the same with blogs. This will be my 257th post. Now, six months ago, if somebody had asked me whether I would be capable of publishing an article a day, to ramble on about anything and everything, I would have replied: "No way. I'm simply not that talkative." It's true that I prefer to write about a precise theme, in a well-specified context. Here, that's not at all the case. From one day to the next, I have no idea whatsoever of what I'm going to write about. And above all, apart from a handful of personal contacts, I don't even know who's reading my stuff. So, I guess I have to admit that I might even be a naturally talkative fellow. Add that to the fact that I speak in such a loud voice (I've always been slightly hard of hearing) that I'm capable of waking up the neighbors of my aunt and uncle in Sydney, and you'll gather that I'm definitely not the kind of guy to invite home... which is probably why nobody phones me on my portable.

I've observed the frenetic way in which today's adolescents use and abuse the portable telephone. In Sydney's suburban trains and buses, the situation was even worse still. "Hi. It's me. I'm on the way home. See you soon. Bye."

Why do people do so much talking on phones, on blogs, etc? It's time for another plug concerning the fabulous book by Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine. [Click here to see my article of 4 March 2007 on this subject, entitled Imitation.] Let me just repeat the gist of the subject. Darwinian evolution transformed us into big-brained naked apes, of whom one of the earliest and dearest specimens was our Mitochondrial Eve, celebrated in yesterday's article. But this style of progress is henceforth—as they say in French—a little has-been. We need something bigger, better, faster and more modern in a human sense than old-fashioned genetic evolution. The new stuff is called memetics. And, if you read Susan Blackmore's book, you'll see that we humans talk a lot (well, at least those of the talkative kind do) for the simple reason that we're constantly transmitting and receiving memes.

I hope I've talked you into reading this great ground-breaking book.

Mothers

In genealogy, there's a relatively unusual approach that consists of only taking into account your female ancestors. So, you disregard your father entirely and look only at your mother. Likewise, you disregard your maternal grandfather, and look only at your mother's mother. And so on. The set of ancestors that you obtain in this way describes your so-called uterine ancestry. In many ways, it's a sound approach to genealogy. In concerning yourself constantly and exclusively with the unique womb in which each female ancestor developed, you remain on relatively firm ground. After all, an error at a maternal level is less likely, for obvious reasons, than ambiguities or downright lies concerning the identity of somebody's father. Besides, the concept of matrilineality (as it is called in genealogical terminology) corresponds to our intuitive impression of having once emerged from the body of our mother. To put it in silly terms, most humans surely feel more like a well-hatched egg than a grown-up sperm, even though we've learned that we're a little bit of both.

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.

Now, the uterine approach to genealogy has some strange but positive consequences when we look at things from a genetic viewpoint... which is, after all, a perfectly normal way in which to deal with family history. Every human baby inherits from its mother a stock of weird stuff, stored in every one of our cells, called mitochondria (in fact, a form of DNA), which can be thought of as tiny energy suppliers. Were it not for our mother's gift of mitochondria, our cells would be like factories without fuel, or cities without electricity. We would instantly collapse and die. Human males, like females, need mitochondria to survive. But a father, unlike a mother, does not transmit any of his stuff to his children. And, because mitochondrial DNA is only transmitted down uterine lines, this means that it can be used as a "marker" (that's not quite the right term) in the genealogical domain. By analyzing the mitochondria of two individuals, it's possible to ascertain whether they have a common uterine ancestor.

In the context of the famous tomb at Talpiot, this was the kind of analysis that enabled geneticists to declare that the individuals designated as Jesus and Mariamne (allegedly Mary of Magdala) were not related in a matrilineal sense. And this conclusion made it feasible to imagine this couple as man and wife.

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.

Memorable façade

I return to the fascinating subject of the work of Simcha Jacobovici concerning a tomb at Talpiot, to the south of Jerusalem, that contained a bone box labeled "Jesus son of Joseph". [Click here to visit the official website of this affair.] Uncovered accidentally by an earth-moving machine on Friday, 28 March 1980, the tomb and its ossuaries did not attract much attention during the brief period of time that the façade remained visible. But photos were taken, and a detailed diagram of the tomb was drawn by a young archaeologist named Shimon Gibson, who was intrigued by the carvings on the façade.

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.

There is, however, a subtle way in which the forms on the façade of the Talpiot tomb might have a bearing on the question of the identity of the incumbents. Imagine, for the sake of the explanations that are to follow, that the Talpiot tomb was indeed the place where the body of Jesus of Nazareth was laid to rest. In that case, we can assume that a certain number of early Christians were aware of this site, and had visited it. For such people, it seems reasonable to assume that the façade was memorable, because of its chevron and circle... regardless of whether or not these forms actually meant much to those who saw them. We might imagine that the façade served as a visual indicator for pilgrims, who probably spread the information, by word of mouth, that Jesus was buried in tomb to the south of Jerusalem adorned with a sculptured triangular form above a circle. In this way, the forms on the façade of the Talpiot tomb would have been transformed into a symbol of the tomb of Jesus, even if this had never been their initial raison d'être. Now, if this kind of reasoning is valid, there should be cases of the presence of this symbol, later on, in Christian contexts. Here is the most explicit case of such a symbol:

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.

More recently, this image of an "all-seeing eye" (as it is often termed) has been adopted as a masonic symbol, and it is construed today as a coded sign that might have come from Ancient Egypt. As I said earlier on, this discussion about possible signs and symbols cannot be used to prove anything, but it provides us with interesting guidelines.

Different lands

The chilly damp weather has continued at Gamone, and I've spent most of the afternoon and evening reading in front of a log fire. Meanwhile, Natacha phoned to let me know that she and Alain had visited a fabulous botanic park, the Domaine du Rayol, on the edge of the sea in the Var département. Then she emailed me this photo of a eucalyptus tree at Rayol:

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.

Spirit of place

For Nancy and Natacha

Many people persist in believing that any two places on the planet could be made to resemble each other, provided that enough transformation work were to be carried out at both ends. A couple of months ago, I joked about this style of thinking in my post entitled Mediterranean Bondi. [Click here to see this post.]

In fact, many spots on the planet Earth would appear to be unique and inimitably specific. Surely one of the most celebrated places of this kind is the sacred mountain at the heart of the Holy City, adorned by the Moslem Dome of the Rock.

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.

But that's not at all the way the cookie crumbles. Places are unique. They are not swappable. We cannot rebuild Paris, as somebody once suggested, out in the country.

Why is this so? What does it mean to say that places are unique? It means that certain places have a spirit. A spirit of place. As the Romans put it: a genius loci.

Probably the most extraordinary machine on Earth is the human brain. And, if any known machine is capable of detecting the ubiquitous spirit of place, it's surely our extraordinary human wetware, about which we still know so little. Our brains react to the specificity of a place.

I was thrilled this morning, when phoning Nancy to wish her a happy birthday, to learn that she had recently ventured by accident into the place of our ancestors in New South Wales: the tiny country town of Braidwood. And that my aunt had been engulfed in a curious spiritual cloud that Nancy described naively as happiness. Why not?

I know that such things happen, that such mysterious feelings arise unexpectedly from time to time. But I don't know why. No more than Nancy does. Nor even Natacha, who's attached profoundly to the spirit of certain places in her beloved Provence. It's obviously a matter of the ways in which our respective cerebral mechanisms interact with tellurian memories stored away in specific places, in ways we don't yet understand. In a nutshell, we're sensitive to the spirit of place. For the moment, that's all we can say. But let's say it with joy!

Required reading

Many people like to believe antiquated nonsense such as the notion that the crucified Jesus once ascended bodily into the sky. In a different domain, other misinformed folk persist in believing today that donkeys are stupid beasts. Once upon a time, in French schools, teachers punished the dunce of the class by forcing him/her to wear a so-called bonnet d'âne [donkey bonnet] adorned with a pair of big cloth ears.

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.

Simcha Jacobovici's film was finally aired on French TV late last Wednesday evening, and it was followed by a well-mannered debate in French between Simcha himself and 65-year-old Monsignor Jean-Michel di Falco, bishop of Gap, who has long been looked upon as an elegant and well-informed spokesman of the hierarchy of the Catholic church in France.

I hardly need to say that Jacobovici's astounding film is clear and convincing. Quite the opposite of commercial donkey shit. On the other hand, di Falco's observations were neither pertinent nor particularly relevant, and certainly not persuasive. He even wasted everybody's time by evoking two extraneous subjects: Dan Brown's popular novel [The Da Vinci Code] and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Curiously, Monsignor di Falco did not utter a single word concerning the relatively recent discovery (1945) of the most fabulous Christian documents since the Bible: the Nag Hammadi library. [I've already written two articles on this theme. Click here to see the first post, entitled Sharing life together. Click here to see the second post, entitled Gnostic discoveries.]

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...

Building fences

Over the last thirteen years, since settling down at Gamone, I've planted hundreds of chestnut posts in the rocky soil to build wire-mesh sheep fences. If the donkey leans against such a fence, or a sheep runs into it at full speed, it won't survive for long. [I'm talking of the fence, not the donkey or sheep.] So, I often recycle old posts and even previously-used wire mesh to build new sections of fencing. At a Gamone level, that's the sustainability concept.

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.

This photo also shows how I'm using a pulley device (a steel block and tackle), attached to a linden tree, to stretch the wire mesh so that it lies flat up against the chestnut posts. At that stage of the fence building, all I have to do is to hammer in U-shaped nails (I don't know what they're called in English) to fix the mesh to the posts.

Back in South Grafton, when I was a child, my father often talked about fencing. I seem to recall that local farmers and graziers used eucalyptus posts and barbed wire, but I don't know how they dug holes. Probably with a spade and shovel...

Fencing is a primordial rural preoccupation. My neighbor Madeleine once told me that, after their marriage, Dédé said that, either they would go on a honeymoon, or they would use this time and money to build a fence around their future property at Choranche. Their splendid fence is still there, as solid as their marital union.

Childhood myths

I'm using the word "childhood" to designate, not only my own early years in Australia, but the wider concept of the infancy of Humanity. The great myth of Noah's ark belongs to these two domains.

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.

I've always looked upon the biblical tale of Noah's Ark as an archaic precursor of themes I'd witnessed as a ten-year-old child in South Grafton. As soon as weather reports made it clear that there would soon be a flood, farmers started to move their animals to higher grounds. As the waters slowly rose, families in isolated places were offered a choice between moving by boat to safer places, or staying stoically in their inundated houses. In my juvenile vision of a Clarence River flood, the waters seemed to cover the entire flat world. I had no reason to imagine that there might be places on Earth that remained high and dry.

The ancient people who left us legends of the Deluge probably saw things in a similar way to me, at the age of ten, on a farm in South Grafton. If the rain were exceptionally heavy, the resulting flood would be universal (or global, as we would say today, knowing that the Earth is round), and the only way of surviving would be to scramble aboard a gigantic biblical boat. If there were room on the vessel, a farmer might ask the captain to save some of his dearest animals.

Normally, there's a time for infantile tales: childhood. As we grow up, most of us set aside such legends, replacing them by adult explanations. Sadly, some folk remain immature kids throughout their entire lives. In the USA, a recent poll revealed that half the population believes that a supernatural being named God created the universe, in much the same form as we see it today, at some time during the last ten millennia. In other words, for these folk, who have the superficial appearance of adults, it's as if scientific research in general, and Darwin's theory of evolution in particular, simply never existed. The extremists, who call themselves creationists, believe that Genesis is a literal description of the way in which the cosmos came into being. A milder form of this anti-scientific affliction consists in believing in the concept of intelligent design, which alleges that "all things bright and beautiful" were conceived and produced by a superior being intent upon creating a satisfactory abode for humans.

[NOTE: In my personal profile attached to the Antipodes blog, I speak of spending my time at Gamone "admiring the beauties of Creation". I have hoped that readers would understand that my use of the term "Creation", with a capital C, is a trivial case of poetic license, which is not meant to suggest that I see the cosmos as the outcome of a biblical Genesis-type creator. In fact, I often use the term "Creator", with a capital C, to designate Big Bang principles, evolutionary events, and their on-going consequences.]

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.

Powerful TV commercial

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.

School for chefs

On Saturday afternoon, by chance, I came upon one of the most fascinating TV programs I've ever seen in the domain of high-class cooking. It was the fifth and final episode of a cooking competition, L'Ecole des Chefs (the school for chefs), that has been going on at a weekly rhythm for the last month. There's a good French-language website about the competition [click here to display this website], which includes typical video extracts.

The general idea is that seven promising young apprentices were selected from several French écoles hôtelières [culinary colleges] and invited to participate in an extraordinary month-long training experience, guided by four distinguished chefs:

— Alain Dutournier of the Carré des Feuillants (Paris)
— Yannick Alleno of the Hôtel Meurice (Paris)
— Alain Llorca of the Moulin de Mougins (Alpes-Maritimes)
— Régis Marcon of the Clos des Cîmes (Haute Loire)

In yesterday's episode, there were four finalists, two males and two females. At the start of the final trial, each contestant received an assortment of splendid foodstuffs, to be used in the preparation of two dishes. The first dish was to be based upon Mediterranean rock lobsters (the equivalent of Australian crayfish), and the second on roast lamb cutlets. Each of the four finalists worked in association with one of the four above-mentioned chefs, who acted as a coach, but without actually participating in the manual operations of the food preparation and cooking. All phases of the activities were precisely timed, and we TV spectators were treated to a lengthy presentation of the work of each of the four finalists, followed by the comments of the jury members, another group of four distinguished chefs:

— Joël Robuchon
— Thierry Marx
— Marc Veyrat
— Marc Haeberlin

The resulting TV program was highly informative and didactic, since we were invited into the hectic kitchen environment of the dynamic young culinary creators and their experienced coaches. Apart from the immense imagination and practical competence of the apprentice chefs, I was impressed by their ability to work calmly and efficiently under the huge pressure of the competition. Not only did they have to think and act rapidly, but they had to deal with the constant advice and criticism of their respective coaches, while knowing all the time that they were being filmed and, above all, that they would be serving the outcome of their cooking to four of the world's most famous chefs.

In the world of high-class cooking, it is not by chance that the French word for a master of cooking is chef, which simply means "chief". He/she rules over the kitchen in a style that appears to be almost tyrannical at times, crying out orders to his/her subordinates that must be obeyed instantly, exactly as the chef has commanded. The atmosphere is almost military. There is no time for discussion, and no place for disobedience. The only acceptable reply to an order is "Oui, chef!" Meanwhile, the chef has his/her eye on everything that is happening in the kitchen, including the possibility that one of the electric ovens might suddenly break down.

There were all kinds of tiny but fascinating details, such as the way in which these culinary artists use their bare fingers, all the time, to pick up hot pieces of food in pans, to turn them over while they are being cooked. When performed by a great chef, even the way of tipping a saucepan with one hand and using a spoon in the other hand to splash buttery juice rapidly and regularly over the roasting lamb becomes an artistic gesture. The terminology used in rapid discussions between professionals is precise and apparently universal. Plausible names for newly-invented dishes were generally invented spontaneously during a ten-second conversation between the apprentice and the coach, often while they were walking from the kitchen to the jury's dining table. Once there, the apprentice had to describe in a few brief remarks the specificity of his creation, just as if he were conversing with diners in a top-class restaurant, and he had to remember to wish them "Bon appetit!" Several times, the members of the jury complimented the apprentices on the simple fact that they had mastered the technique of serving up their dishes hot, straight out of the oven. This did not prevent the apprentice chefs from devoting a lot of last-minute attention to the purely aesthetic fashion in which the food and sauce were laid out the plates. Funnily, while watching this interesting program, I often had the impression that it was some kind of a sporting event, involving highly-trained young athletes.

The self-assurance of the fourth contestant, whose first name was Hugo, worried me as soon as I saw his initial discussion with his coach, Régis Marcon. The two of them appear to be smiling but determined individuals, used to making up their own minds, and I was afraid that a conflict might erupt in front of the TV cameras. Hugo had decided spontaneously that he would use vanilla to flavor the sauce for the green vegetables accompanying his roast lobster. Well, Marcon disagreed firmly but politely, warning his apprentice that this would give rise to an excessively "heavy-flavored" sauce. Hugo's immediate reaction: "Chef, I'll prepare my vanilla sauce, and then you'll taste it. If you like it, I'll use it. If not, I won't." Later, in real time, we saw Régis Marcon sticking his finger in Hugo's vanilla sauce, tasting it and flashing an expression of amazed delight. Hugo had just invented a new concept of serving up lobster!

Hugo was the winner. The prize: he will spend the next six months touring the planet, working in each of Joël Robuchon's restaurants. There is little doubt that, on Saturday's TV, we witnessed the birth of a future great chef.

Doggish behavior

We dog-lovers tend to get carried away by the exceptional intellect of our favorite animal. Not necessarily dogs in general, nor even other dogs, but our dog... who happens to be a unique genius. As the saying goes: The only thing that's missing is the ability to speak. But dogs bark, and that's exactly what Sophia has been doing, non-stop, for the last twenty minutes.

Why? You see the stone slab in the form of a mysterious jungle beast (maybe a petrified bunyip that swum here from Australia back in the age of dinosaurs). Well, Sophia knows that there's a terrified lizard curled up behind it, hiding. I don't know why Sophia's annoyed by the presence of the tiny reptile. It's not as if she wants to eat the lizard, although it's likely that she would smack it with her paw, just for fun, and traumatize the poor lizard. No, Sophia is barking out of sheer silly doggish behavior. However it's reassuring at times to discover such trivial manifestations of canine stupidity. I realize, on such occasions, that I should cease to have a guilt complex about never having sent Sophia to a superior school for exceptionally intelligent dogs.

Now, having taken the liberty of speaking in these derogatory terms about my dear Sophia, I must admit two things:

— I'm impressed by Sophia's ability to smell the presence of a tiny lizard hiding behind a rock. I wouldn't be capable of doing so, even if the lizard farted.

— Back in the days when dangerous reptiles used to hide behind rocks at the entrance to caverns where my ancestors resided, the barking of Sophia's ancestors no doubt saved human lives. Otherwise, one of my potential ancestors would have got gobbled up by a boa, and I wouldn't even be here today to talk to you about Sophia. We must be grateful to barking dogs. Thanks, Sophia. In a moment, I'll go downstairs and move the slab, so that you can have some fun attacking and destroying that lizard.

Busy Sunday

Every year, I watch the TV coverage of the Grand Prix de Monaco. I'm not exactly a fan of automobile racing, which can be quite boring on TV, but the legendary Monaco event is inevitably exciting.

For me, there's also an element of nostalgia. Shortly after my arrival in France in 1962, an Australian friend drove me down to watch the race. At that time, tourists could wander around the circuit at ease to find a vantage point. I recall that we spent most of the race at the famous Mirabeau hairpin. These days, of course, the famous race is a gigantic event that paralyzes road circulation on the French Riviera.

As if car racing wasn't enough to draw a crowd on the shores of the Mediterranean, the red carpet of the 60th Cannes Film Festival will be rolled up this evening after the announcement of winners.

Finally, for those who love to spend hours in front of their TV [on a par, I suppose, with spending hours in front of a computer screen], there's the French Open in Paris, which starts this afternoon.

At a personal level, to put the events of this busy Sunday in their proper perspective, I should point out that the Monaco supershow on my wide flat TV will be relegated to the status of a background blur and noise. I don't intend to spend time at Cannes, and the ball is out at Roland Garros. In fact, if it's sunny this afternoon, I plan to build a fence around the patch of Batavia lettuces I planted yesterday.

The future enclosure [of the sheep fence style] will protect my lettuces from Gavroche the billy-goat. But what about snails, which are presently thriving just a meter away from my lettuce patch?

My ex-neighbor Bob, who dropped in yesterday to pick up his mail, is an experienced vegetable gardener. He made an interesting suggestion: "Grow your lettuces to feed your snails. Then collect these lettuce-fed Burgundy snails from time to time. They're far more tasty than lettuce." Bob's right. A few years ago, I used to prepare regularly a stock of Gamone's excellent Burgundy snails, but the dry summer of 2004 seemed to eliminate them. I see now, at exactly the same time I'm planting lettuces, that the snails appear to be back in force. Gastronomical days ahead...

Chirac has some explaining to do

We've heard a strange financial allegation concerning Jacques Chirac, former president of France. Apparently he has an account at the Tokyo Sowa bank, and the balance of the ex-president's account would appear to be 45 million euros. Now, that's a hell of a lot of spare cash, and people are obviously wondering where it came from.

The global context in which this bank account has come to light is referred to, in France, as the Clearstream Affair, since it concerns a Luxembourg clearing house of that name.

Everything started in 2001, with a judicial inquiry into alleged commissions associated with the sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991. This inquiry was assigned to a celebrated French magistrate, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who had already handled several high-profile affairs. He was appreciated for his competent style in terminating the case of the 1996 murder in a French youth hostel of an English schoolgirl, Caroline Dickinson. This case was finally solved, after nine years of futile investigations [click here to see the BBC timeline], thanks to the diligence of an alert US immigration officer.

In January 2004, the French prime minister Dominique de Villepin called upon a mysterious general, Philippe Rondot, well-versed in intelligence affairs, to do some detective work in the domain of the frigates affair. Then, a few months later, an anonymous individual sent the judge Van Ruymbeke several documents that claimed to name prominent people whose illegal commissions concerning the Taiwan frigates had been paid into secret accounts at the Clearstream bank. And one of these named people was Nicolas Sarkozy.

Finally, after numerous investigations and incidents, it emerged that these alleged Clearstream documents were forgeries, and the identity of the forger was revealed. And it was during these investigations, in May 2006, that the Canard enchaîné weekly newspaper revealed the anecdote concerning Philippe Rondot's discovery of the president's mysterious bank account in Japan.

In France, the most famous magistrate in the financial corruption sphere is Norwegian-born Eva Joly. A few days ago, she made life more uncomfortable for the ex-president by declaring publicly that she hopes that French justice opens an inquiry into Chirac's alleged Japanese bank account. So, many observers predict that sparks will start to fly after June 17, when the ex-president's penal immunity terminates.

This question of a mysterious bank account has nothing to do, a priori, with the other affair [click here to see my previous article on this subject] for which Chirac might have some explaining to do: salaries paid to fictitious employees at the city hall of Paris, in fact money directed towards Chirac's political party.

Romantic table

Romantic table. My daughter used this expression, a few days ago, when she saw this photo. The top is a heavy plaque of white marble with traces of gray. The support is black forged iron and steel.

In a previous post, I mentioned a friend who's trying to sell his former restaurant in Pont-en-Royans. [Click here to see this post.] His name is Eric. After diluvian rainfall, Eric's former restaurant is a wreck, but there are still enough resources left to serve me up a green Chartreuse liquor (on the rocks) whenever I drop in. I love to sit on the upper balcony of Eric's dilapidated place, of a late afternoon, and contemplate the hanging houses. Periodically, a tiny flock of ducks flies down from the Vercors to their habitat on the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans. They swoop past Eric's place in a gracious curve, like jet fighters at an air show. They give me the impression that they know I admire their aeronautics. They're surely doing their act for me and my dog Sophia.

My romantic table is in fact a gift from Eric, who's getting rid of his former restaurant equipment. The lawn in front of Gamone is henceforth adorned with two such lovely white marble romantic tables.