Thou art Petraeus

Upon this rock, George W Bush has decided to pursue his war in Iraq. But the gates of hell could well prevail against this bright and confident soldier, who has just been offered Bush's war on a silver plate, like the head of John the Baptist.

The great French statesman Georges Clemenceau [1841-1929] once said cynically that "war is too serious an affair to be placed in the hands of generals". Clearly, the US president has no such qualms about handing over the Iraq fiasco to David Petraeus. Meanwhile, some of Bush's supporters take pleasure in pointing out that the four-star general is a bright guy, with a doctorate in international relations from Princeton, who surely knows what must be done in Iraq. Ah, if only Bush had obtained a doctorate or two from a distinguished US university, everything would be going so much more smoothly today!

There's an amusing expression in French slang: filer le bébé, literally "to hand over the baby", particularly in contexts where the metaphorical baby has just dirtied its diapers, and needs to be cleaned up. In transferring the Iraq baby to Petraeus, Bush is no doubt warming up for the inevitable forthcoming moment when he'll be secretly delighted to hand over the whole shitty mess to the next US president.

Slow food

As a sane reaction against the abominable American phenomenon of fast food, the "slow food" concept was invented in 1986 by an Italian sociologist, Carlo Petrini, dismayed to find a McDonald's outlet erected near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Three years later, the international Slow Food movement was founded in Paris [click here to visit their website], with Petrini as president [a position he still holds], and it now counts 80,000 members throughout the world. The movement's mission is clear and precise: Slow Food works to defend biodiversity in our food supply, spread taste education and connect producers of excellent foods with co-producers through events and initiatives.

While reading the news this evening, I learned that the movement had chosen September 15 to organize its first national Slow Food Day in France. Unintentionally, I happened to respect the spirit of this event. For lunch, I prepared myself one of my favorite simple cold dishes: king prawns, mayonnaise [home-made, of course], Provençal olives, Gamone lettuce, tomatoes and pickled walnuts.

Local chapters of Slow Food are designated by a lovely old Latin word: convivium. Apparently, the theme of French conviviums today was one of the planet's most ancient and noble foodstuffs: the potato.

Camping site at Châtelus

From Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne, there's a magnificent view of the limestone cliffs above the village of Choranche.

My friends Michèle and Daniel Berger run a camping park in Châtelus named Chez la Mère Michon, located just below their house. I've just reinstalled an updated version of the simple website I built for them. Click on the above photo to access this website. You can then click on a Union Jack flag to display the English version.

Another iPhoney display of Antipodes

I'm impatient to discover whether or not Antipodes will be readable, in reality, on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Readers may have noticed that, in yesterday's article concerning the restoration of the façade at Gamone, I employed the same display technique that I used in my son's photo website [display]. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my earlier iPhoney article [display], it will not be possible to exploit this Flash-based display technique on the iPhone or the iPod Touch.

Gamone façade almost finished

After a week of dust and noise, the façade at Gamone is almost finished. [You can click the above photo to display a series of images of the work.] The scaffolding remains in place because a final phase of the operations must still be performed. When the mortar is completely dry, next week, the entire façade will be sandblasted, to remove dust and to enhance the brickwork around the windows on the left.

Meanwhile, Eric Tanchon, the skilled tradesman who's doing the restoration, has taught me how to apply lime and sand mortar to the wall that my son and I erected a few years ago, using heavy limestone boulders that I gathered up on the banks of the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans. I had imagined naively that the gaps between the boulders would be filled in carefully with mortar using a narrow trowel. Well, that's not at all the way that professionals deal with such a situation. Eric showed me how to use a large trowel to hurl mortar at the wet wall from a distance of half a meter. Later, when it's dry, I'll simply use a wire brush to scrape away the excess mortar from the surface of the boulders. For the moment, I'm about halfway through the job, as can be seen from this photo I took this morning:

My wall still needs to be "loaded" with a lot more mortar (as they say in tradesmen's jargon) before I can start to scrape it smooth. We imagine stupidly that, in carrying out this kind of work, we should remain nice and clean like the people in ads for do-it-yourself hardware stores. I'll let you guess what I looked like, with my eyes protected by goggles, after half an hour or so of hurling semi-liquid mortar at a stone wall half a meter away. No problem. Today, we have such niceties as hot showers and washing machines. And I was able to watch the rugby on satellite TV while my clothes were getting cleaned. Back in the centuries when Gamone was a wine-making installation, I would imagine that fellows who built stone walls using sand and lime mortar simply dived fully-clothed, afterwards, into the Bourne.

iPhoney gadget

For people like me who don't yet have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, a software gadget called iPhoney makes it possible to see what such-and-such a website would look like on the real device. I now know, for example, that this is what my Antipodes blog would look like when displayed on an iPhone or an iPod Touch:

I'm disappointed, of course, to discover that Flash stuff simply doesn't get displayed at all on these devices. In any case, it's rather senseless to display graphic websites on such a small screen.

Dear Janet Albrechtsen

This is the content of a letter I sent, dated 4 September 2007, to a well-known journalist, Janet Albrechtsen, at The Australian.

You wrote recently:

Who can forget how European intellectuals danced on the graves at ground zero? French philosopher Jean Baudrillard declared his "immense joy" when planes flew into the twin towers.

Your evocation of the great intellectual Baudrillard dancing on the graves at Ground Zero, and expressing his pleasure in the wake of the terrorist acts of September 11 is misleadng, indeed absurd, and stems surely from a misreading of what he actually said in his article entitled L'esprit du terrorisme, published in Le Monde, November 3, 2001. Here is a key passage in that article:

Tous les discours et les commentaires trahissent une gigantesque abréaction à l'événement même et à la fascination qu'il exerce. La condamnation morale, l'union sacrée contre le terrorisme sont à la mesure de la jubilation prodigieuse de voir détruire cette superpuissance mondiale, mieux, de la voir en quelque sorte se détruire elle-même, se suicider en beauté. Car c'est elle qui, de par son insupportable puissance, a fomenté toute cette violence infuse de par le monde, et donc cette imagination terroriste (sans le savoir) qui nous habite tous. Que nous ayons rêvé de cet événement, que tout le monde sans exception en ait rêvé, parce que nul ne peut ne pas rêver de la destruction de n'importe quelle puissance devenue à ce point hégémonique, cela est inacceptable pour la conscience morale occidentale, mais c'est pourtant un fait, et qui se mesure justement à la violence pathétique de tous les discours qui veulent l'effacer. À la limite, c'est eux qui l'ont fait, mais c'est nous qui l'avons voulu.

He is describing in subtle language a gigantic abreaction (psychological term designating the expression and consequent release of a repressed emotion) that could be detected in many comments surrounding the tragic events of September 11. I would paraphrase Baudrillard's wordy analysis by the following trite statements:

— For many observers throughout the world, the USA had become too big (hegemonic).

— Many people said to themselves: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

— These same people hoped (unknowingly) that the big fellow might one day bite the dust.

To express the latter sentiment, Baudrillard evoked « cette imagination terroriste (sans le savoir) qui nous habite tous ».

Throughout that article [which did in fact raise many eyebrows in France because, as in all psychological demonstrations, the reasoning was subtle], Baudrillard was attempting to analyze a recent planetary event in an objective clinical fashion. He was never standing on a political pedestal and voicing vulgarly his own personal opinions. And to suggest that this humanist was immensely happy to witness the Twin Towers terrorism is not only wrong; it's ignoble.

The mindless intervention of Bush in Iraq — condemned globally, since the start, by French intellectuals, politicians and ordinary people — has introduced us to the daily phenomenon of murder and torture. If you're seeking examples of individuals capable of dancing on the graves of innocent victims, you'll find lots of them in the universe created by Bush. But Jean Baudrillard was not that kind of a person.

Trains that run on time

Civilized humanity is thinking today, of course, about the earth-shaking events of a certain September 11, seen by most of us on TV, that nobody is likely to forget.

Jumping from one subject to another. In France, there's a profound old saying: Nobody's interested in trains that run on time. It means that people are concerned—indeed excited—by things that go wrong [look, for example, at the mind-boggling drama of the McCann vacation in Portugal], whereas we tend to forget about things that go right.

French trains have the habit of running on time, and this means that they're rarely front-page news... except when they break speed records. See my blog of 3 April 2007 entitled Fast track [display].

The publicity people working for the French railway system, called SNCF, have produced a nice website based upon the theme that nobody's interested in trains that run on time. It starts out by suggesting that maybe you might be interested in an exotic animal known as the Crowned Propithecus of Madagascar.

Chances are that you're even less interested in this beast than in French trains that run on time. So, we're back to scratch... unless you click the above banner, to see a delightful mini-show of the beast talking and acting like a robotic SNCF lady. Brilliant publicity work.

Buzzword

I'm amused to see the extent to which the buzzword "singularity" has gained ground in recent years. When I was a student, singularity was a rather ordinary mathematical concept. Roughly speaking, if a mathematical function behaved normally except for certain particular values of its arguments, these special cases were designated as singularities. Then the word was applied to theoretical situations in which the normal laws of physics break down. The most famous case of a so-called space-time singularity occurs within black holes.

More recently, the word "singularity" has been used to designate an advanced case of AI [artificial intelligence], namely an ultraintelligent machine. If AI researchers were indeed capable of designing a machine that happened to be more intelligent, in general, than the brightest humans [which is a situation that has never yet arisen in practice], then we might expect this smart machine to be smarter than humans in various engineering tasks. Among other challenges, that machine could turn out to be extremely talented in the art of designing even smarter machines... which might give rise to a snowball effect. And the end result could well be a vastly intelligent machine of the kind referred to as a singularity.

A colloquium on this theme, called the Singularity Summit, has just been organized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Palo Alto, California [location of Stanford University].

Many singularist believers predict that technological progress is accelerating at such a rate that ultraintelligent machines are just around the corner. Detractors, on the other hand, claim that the AI singularity concept is no more than harmless garden-variety science fiction. As for me, although I have the retrospective impression that AI research [which once interested me greatly] ran into a brick wall a couple of decades ago, I must say that the power of computing amazes me today in ways that I would never have imagined not so long ago. Consequently, I'm ready for anything.

Soft Apple touch

When Apple's cutting-edge iPhone appeared, a few months ago, I had the impression that its least interesting aspect was the fact that you could use it to make phone calls. To put it bluntly: Who wants to make phone calls these days? It's so much more fulfilling to communicate through the Internet. Besides, I already possess a perfectly satisfactory portable phone, which I don't really need to replace. Consequently, I was thrilled to discover that Apple has just put out an extraordinary iPhone that doesn't make phone calls. They call it the iPod Touch.

To be truthful, I believe I'll probably be able to survive for a month or two without this lovely gadget, because I'm not really the sort of old guy who jogs around the countryside like Sarkozy wearing earplugs. In fact, my forthcoming purchase will be a new iMac, but only after the release of the Leopard system, next month.

I've believed for ages that smart personal computing is a strictly Apple affair. Today, I have the impression that it's almost a societal misdemeanor that uninformed people should be allowed, let alone encouraged, to purchase computerized products of other origins. I'm happy to announce today that, beyond Apple, there's nothing more than a prickly desert full of serpents and scorpions. Believe me! Or rather: Believe Steve Jobs. Better still: Just believe!

Does it really matter?

I've been browsing through stories in The Australian about police behavior during the APEC events in Sydney. And I've been asking myself questions of a rhetorical kind. That's to say, it's important to pose such questions, without necessarily hoping to obtain answers.

• Does it really matter if a pair of air-force fighter jets scarred shit out of an innocent private pilot in a tiny Cessna who strayed into the air-exclusion zone?

• Does it really matter if dozens of police removed their identity tags before manhandling innocent demonstrators in an excessive manner?

• Does it really matter if a freelance photographer was arrested and charged after refusing to stop filming police during the protest?

• Does it really matter if an innocent 52-year-old onlooker, crossing the road ahead of an APEC motorcade, was arrested violently in front of his son, and spent 22 hours in jail before being released on bail?

Personally, I don't think it matters a lot, because every society generally ends up with the police it deserves. And many Australians are so hoodwinked into believing naively that they live in a laid-back environment that they apparently accepted the recent police closure of Sydney as a necessary evil, without seeing Howard's dictatorial constraint as a state-imposed incursion upon their civil liberties.

Hearing complaints, Andrew Scipione, the new chief commissioner of police, explained: "That's the way we do business in NSW now." What a frightening conclusion.

Too bad to be true

The gray-bearded man on the left is a still shot of Osama bin Laden taken from a video that was aired in October 2004. The black-bearded man on the right is alleged to be this same Osama bin Laden in a recent video, released yesterday. If you wish to see a presentation of this latest video, click the above image.

My personal reactions? I'm convinced that the second video is an expert hoax. You only have to compare the two representations of Osama bin Laden to see at a glance that the alleged recent video is simply a finely-executed remake of the older one.

QUESTION: Who would have produced this remake?
ANSWER: Video specialists working for Bush.
QUESTION: Why would they have produced it?
ANSWER: To demonstrate that the devil is still rampant.
QED.

Blind corner

I've often said that this corner in the main street of the village of Pont-en-Royans, near the Picard bridge, is one of the worst I've ever seen in an urban context in France.

At the bend, there's only room for a single vehicle. But, up until you reach the corner, you have no idea whether another vehicle is approaching in the opposite direction.

All sorts of trucks and buses use this street constantly. And, if you find yourself face-to-face with a big fellow like this, the only way out is to reverse, often over a distance of twenty or thirty meters... provided that you're not being followed by a line of vehicles.

Fortunately, a solution is in sight. This old building is about to be sacrificed. Work started yesterday on the demolition. Drivers will then be able to see approaching vehicles.

Tenorissimo

In memory of Maestro Pavarotti, this image of the evening sky in the direction of Italy, seen from my house at Gamone:

French Communist irony

One of France's oldest newspapers is the Communist daily L'Humanité, founded in 1904 by the great Socialist Jean Jaurès, who was celebrated because of his defense of Alfred Dreyfus. His pacifist views provoked his assassination by a nationalist student from Alsace-Lorraine, Raoul Villain, three days before the outbreak of World War I. At the end of this war, in which France emerged as a winner, pacifism was considered retrospectively as a misdeed. Villain was therefore liberated. The widow of Jaurès was even obliged to pay the court costs! In modern France, Jean Jaurès became a national hero, and streets and avenues bear his name from one end of France to the other.

L'Humanité, read by countless folk who don't belong to the French Communist party, has printed one of the few articles I've discovered in France concerning the start of the APEC conference in Sydney. I've translated the following tongue-in-cheek extract:

On this occasion, John Howard made an odd appeal on the Internet video platform YouTube. He asked protest groups to support the fundamental efforts made by the USA and Australia since their nonsigning, in common, of the Kyoto protocol. Protestors will surely respect Howard's electronic gesture and refrain from transforming the prime minister's environmental celebrations into a demonstration against a global economic order.

The banner of L'Humanité is beautifully cynical, in the time-honored spirit of the Parti communiste français. The US bomber is dropping teddy bears. No need for explanations. The journal's slogan is a splendid play on its name: In an ideal world, Humanity would not exist. For those who might not understand: If everything were fine in the world [meaning, among other things, that bombers would not be dropping explosive devices disguised as teddy bears], then there would be no need for a newspaper, defending the powerless innocents, such as L'Humanité. I'm in no way a Communist, but I agree.

Click the banner to see the English-language version of this great French daily newspaper.

Stadiums

A few days ago, in my article entitled Fences and walls, I evoked the use of barriers as protection, as in Sydney this week. In the modern world, there's a new kind of fortress: sporting stadiums. At the outset, it was a matter of defining an enclosed space for sporting events, making it possible to "protect" matches from those who would wish to watch them for free.

Modern stadiums, particularly for soccer matches, are faced with the additional responsibility of protecting players from certain spectators, and separating adverse spectator groups. Here's an aerial photo of the new stadium at Montpellier, to be used for Rugby World Cup matches:

During these events, France will be employing some 27,000 police officers and gendarmes. They'll be aided by 1,500 members of the armed forces, 5,000 firemen and 4,000 first-aid specialists. That sounds like a pretty solid protective barrier... even by John Howard's standards.

Paris to London by train in two hours

In London a few weeks ago, I was greatly impressed by the splendid transformation of the old St Pancras station, which will soon replace Waterloo [after 14 November] as the terminus of the Eurostar link with the Continent.

The modern rail section between the English Channel and London is referred to as High Speed 1, because it is Britain's first line capable of supporting high-speed trains of the kind that have been crisscrossing France regularly for years. This morning, a train pulverized the speed record between Paris and London. Two hours and three minutes! These two great cities are so totally different in ambience and style that it will be an amazing thrill to be able to leave one and set foot in the other a couple of hours later.

PS When I reread that last sentence I've written, I find it so trite and obvious that it almost deserves to be classed as what the French call a lapalissade. Monsieur de la Palice used to make declarations of the following kind: "No more than an hour before she died, the poor lady was perfectly alive!" A good modern example, from John Howard's Texan mate: "I think we agree: the past is over."

Gamone facelift

Since this morning, the main eastern façade of the old house is covered in steel scaffolding, and two tradesmen have started to remove the dusty mortar between the stones, using an electric percussion tool and a steel pick. They've protected all the windows and doors by covering them with heavy plastic. So, Sophia and I are cooped up inside as if were were in an air-raid shelter. And the constant din of the tools prevents me from thinking. The façade has certainly been patched up on many occasions over the last two centuries, but this is no doubt its first overall facelift.

Years ago, after purchasing the property, I watched my son and his friends removing rotten timber by tossing it out through the windows. The architects in charge of the restoration had planned that about half the inside timber would need to be replaced. As things turned out, we had to discard the totality of the old wood... except for the roof beams, which had been restored a little earlier on.

Today, we've encountered a similar situation. The fellow in charge of the facelift had imagined that about two-thirds of the old mortar would have to be removed. He has just revised his estimate. All of it will have to be replaced!

Closer than ever to a deer

Clearly, my dog Sophia smells the presence of a roe deer on the slopes opposite Gamone, and starts barking, before she actually sees the animal. An hour ago, I dashed across the creek and managed to get this photo before the deer spotted us, and disappeared into the woods.

In French, there's a lovely simple word, orée [from the Latin ora, extremity], to designate the edge of the woods, where wild animals come out to feed on the grass. There, they know that, if a danger appears, they can spring back into the safe obscurity of the woods. It's strange that this common rural term doesn't appear to have passed into English. The nasty-sounding word edge, of Germanic origins, is associated with blades of weapons.

Fences and walls

When people are terrorized (in both senses, figuratively and literally) and their imagination runs out, causing them to lose control of themselves, they build fences, hoping that the demons will remain on the other side. That's what the French did, between the two world wars, when they decided to erect the ridiculous wall of blockhouses, to the north of Metz, known as the Maginot Line:

The Nazi demons simply flowed around one end of this silly barrier.

The most notorious fence of modern times was the Berlin Wall:

Thankfully, most walls are fragile. They have weak spots. And, when a breach was finally found in the ignominious barrier between the two German peoples, the wall disappeared overnight, heralding the start of a new European era.

In Belfast, the Protestants thought of the Catholics as demons, while the Catholics applied this term to the Protestants. And people found a pretty name for the ugly barrier that cuts the city into two camps: the Peace Wall.

In the Holy Land, where a legendary wall around ancient Jericho was once shattered by a trumpet blast from Joshua, today's leaders have thought it necessary to erect a wall to keep the demons out.

In Sydney, John Howard has been so terrified by potential demons on Australian soil that he too decided to build his own little fence:

The greatest surprise with protective fences and walls is that, when they're broken down, the elements out of which they were composed can be transformed rapidly into weapons.