Autumn views from my window

The morning temperature hasn't dropped to zero yet, so the Cournouze still looks basically greenish, even under a leaden sky full of low clouds and mist.

The slopes just in front of my house are still quite green, with a few trees turning rusty.

It's what I think of as no-man's-land weather. Outside, it's too chilly to go walking with the dog, while inside, it's hardly cool enough to light up a log fire. Maybe I would be tempted to do so by the promise of a nice long TV evening. Well, it just so happens that the subject of this evening's weekly Thalassa program is Marseille and the surrounding region. To my mind, that sounds like a good pretext for a fire in my living room.

Messages from Mac men in black

Many years ago, my marvelous friend Marie [whom I encountered at a Paris computer fair, where we were both employed] told me about a trade show of female lingerie where she had been working as a hostess: "William, I can't be expected, of course, to know what goes on in a man's mind when he sees sexy females. But there were times during that trade show when I imagined that, if I were a male, gazing at some of those girls parading in front of us would have been a kind of sweet torture." I told Marie that her imagination was no doubt spot on.

Faced with entities of a quite different kind, the latest sexy Macs, I've often felt that Apple's men in black are capable of enhancing their products with an aura of lust. Click on the following image to see a video that describes the latest MacBook:

At one point in the video, I felt frustrated that I couldn't lay my hands upon the naked aluminum unibody, as it's called, run my finger tips over the glass trackpad, or simply gaze wide-eyed and breathlessly upon the LED-backlit display.

Body language

I've always disliked this expression, "body language", because I simply hate the very idea that my physical carcass might be capable of "saying things", spontaneously and uncontrollably, which don't necessarily coincide with the purer expressions of my mind. But I'm obliged to accept the veracity of this concept, which implies that successful lying is a rare art, which can only be mastered by a handful of great actors. For years, my two children have told me with amusement that, as soon as I'm about to talk rubbish, my facial features start flashing and beeping like a red lamp on a police vehicle. So, I'm a lousy liar.

There's something even worse than body language. I'm referring to an individual's distinctive gait. I was made aware of this characteristic, personally, back in the early '60s, in Sydney. I had made arrangements by phone to meet up with my friend John Weiley in William Street, which swoops down in a long line from Kings Cross. At a distance of several hundred meters, I was surprised to see a creature waving his arms as if to send a message. It was John, whom I hadn't seen for about a year, informing me that he had recognized me. When we met up, John surprised me by informing me that my gait made me recognizable from a great distance. Up until then, I didn't even know that I had a personal gait.

Irish joke. The other day, strolling along High Street, I thought I saw Patrick Hickey approaching me. The closer I got to Patrick, the more I was sure that he too realized it was me. When we met up, though, we both realized it was neither of us.

The ugly gait of George W Bush, with rigid shoulders and arms, resembles that of a disgruntled but self-confident wrestler who has just been thrown out of the ring. As for John McCain, no matter whether he remains immobile or moves, agitating his robotic arms, he still looks like an exhibit at Madame Tussaud's waxworks.


It goes without saying that we should not mock certain celebrities simply because their gait reminds us of a certain comical character. That would be too easy. While it was true that George W Bush looked like a numbskull wrestler, it was normal that we should have to wait for a few years, and a few thousand deaths of soldiers in Iraq, before we knew with certainty that he was indeed a numbskull political wrestler. Naturally, it would be nice if the gait of a political candidate could warn us beforehand of his/her mentality.

Let me just add a word or two about the most famous Yogi Bear on US media at the present moment: Joe the Plumber.

Is he real or invented? Apparently, he exists. His name (which might sound un-Alaskan, if not un-American, to Mrs Moose) is Joseph Wurzelbacher, but reports remain fuzzy about his authentic credentials. Is he really a typical tradesman trying to make a buck for his wife and kids, or might he be a comedy figure? Today, in God's Own Country, anything is possible. In any case, I hope that Joe, through his notoriety and the sexy shape of his head, has a chance of sneaking up on procreative Palin, coming to tradesman's terms with her, and—who knows, in an ideal scenario—maybe even snaking her plumbing.

Mission: Not necessarily impossible

The latest news is that Lance Armstrong, after his comeback in the Down Under Tour in January, will be riding in next year's Giro d'Italia, giving him a crucial test before his attempt to win an eighth Tour de France title.

"I'm so excited to be coming to the 2009 Giro. I raced a long time professionally and never did the Giro. It was one of my biggest regrets. I'm going to be able to erase that regret. Who knows, maybe with a good result."

Armstrong's comeback will focus attention upon his global campaign to fight cancer: a disease he survived before his seven straight victories in the Tour de France. That dimension of his mission, at least, will be surely accomplished. As for the rest: Does it matter? Yes, it does... but in ways that transcend everyday sport. Lance Armstrong has become a symbol, and the world is looking henceforth at the human being, in all his profundity, not merely at the way he pedals on the slopes. This change of outlook indicates—if it weren't already obvious—that we're in the presence of an extraordinary individual.

Guns or butter, maybe both?

As an adolescent at high school in Grafton, I studied economics for no more than a year. It turned out to be a disturbing but mind-opening educational experience in my existence. The context and facts are fuzzy. I remember writing an economics essay that I considered—with my usual egotism and pretentiousness—as brilliant. When the teacher, a certain Les O'Neill, didn't agree with my personal judgment, or didn't award me the credit I deserved (in my imagination), I behaved preposterously by complaining to the headmaster, John Orme, that my economics instructor was obviously incapable of recognizing my excellence. And the affair fizzled out when the teacher in question more or less admitted that he might not have understood correctly what I had tried to write, or accepted that it was non-plagiarized original thinking. I had won, in a way, but I was hardly inclined to think of myself as a winner, since I had appealed to non-scientific criteria. In fact, I had just offered myself the luxury of provoking an ideal lesson in the "science" of economics, whose principal actors are, not atoms and molecules, but human beings. I had become an economic entity.

Today, a 55-year-old guy named Paul Krugman from Princeton University has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.

A specialist in trade theory, Professor Krugman has two extra qualities that demand my respect and endear me to him. First, he's a columnist for my favorite newspaper, the New York Times. Second, he seems to hate the guts of an intellectual moron named George W Bush.

"Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law," wrote Krugman wrote in May 2007. "He has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor."

Truly, my global faith in humanity is restored when I realize that Alfred Nobel, having made a fortune by inventing dynamite, went on to celebrate geniuses in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics and even peace! Wow, what blind but awesome vision!

Food to be picked up

This afternoon, while strolling up the road with Sophia, I encountered the fellow whose dog recently found truffles on my lawn. He was out driving with his wife, their child and dogs. They had found huge quantities of mushrooms in a nearby valley, and gave me a big bag full.

The beige ones are hedgehog mushrooms [Hydnum repandum, French hydne sinué, pieds de mouton]. The others are black trumpets, also called horns of plenty [Craterellus cornucopioides, French trompettes de la mort]. These two mushroom species have become popular in France for the simple reason that they're often available in supermarkets. The hedgehog mushrooms (so-called because of their spiky underside) will be fine for an omelette tomorrow. As for the black trumpets, they can be dried and eaten later on.

Meanwhile, I've carried on gathering walnuts and apples.

I wash the walnuts rapidly in chlorinated water, then leave them to dry. As usual, I'll peel, slice and prepare the apples so that can be kept in the deep freezer, enabling me to cook apple pies right throughout the year. Sophia, too, consumes walnuts and apples several times a day.

Whenever she brings an apple back to the lawn in front of the house, she starts a kind of ritual, moving around while playing with the fruit and sniffing it, waiting for the ideal time and place to devour it. My dear dog has a truly Epicurean respect for fine fresh food.

Manuals

When I worked at Ilog in Gentilly (just outside Paris) and I annoyed my brilliant colleagues with nasty technical questions (mainly about Unix stuff), I would periodically receive a kind but firm RTFM reaction: "William, read the fuckin' manual! " But this kind of blunt advice was relatively rare, for the simple reason that my job consisted precisely of writing most of the company's manuals. In any case, I often felt that it was extremely efficient, in the case of complex computer queries, to question a wizard in an adjoining office—there were many such creatures at Ilog—rather than plowing through tons of documentation. (Incidentally, Ilog shares are being purchased by IBM at this very moment, in the context of an official month-long takeover bid that went into action a few days ago.) Needless to say, as a former professional in this domain, I've always respected and admired good documentation... of which many of the planet's finest specimens have been signed by a Californian company named Apple.

Every now and again, I say to myself that we modern humans should strive constantly to free ourselves from excessive documentation concerning various devices. I'm thinking, not of my Macintosh nor even of my Nikon, but of simple hardware such as my splendid Riviera&Bar bread machine. A month or so ago, I decided audaciously that I was determined henceforth to use my appliance intuitively, without browsing through the instruction booklet. Normally, that should have been easy, because there are only three parameters for which values have to be chosen: the program for the desired kind of bread, the weight and the kind of crust. Well, I noticed that there were up/down arrows on the control panel, and I immediately imagined that these might be used to jump back and forth between the parameters. When the ingredients were ready, and everything seemed to be set up correctly, I pushed the start button... but nothing happened. So, I repeated the set of operations, but to no avail. I concluded that the machine was broken, so I emptied out the ingredients and ended up cooking the bread in my ordinary oven. The next day, I took the bread machine along to the repairs section of the shop where I had purchased it. Three weeks later, they phoned to say that the machine had been fully tested, and that they had not detected the slightest fault. This time, I decided to browse through the instruction booklet while setting up the machine. On the first page, I discovered that the up/down arrows on the control panel made it possible to delay the start of the baking process for any number of hours, which explained why the machine had given me the impression that it wasn't working. This time, of course, I didn't touch these arrows. The machine went into action immediately, and finally gave me one of the best loaves I've ever baked. The moral of this anecdote is that it always pays to read—and maybe even reread—the fuckin' manual.

In a quite different domain, I've decided to finally make an effort to master the nice little Sony camcorder that I purchased last year.

So, I invested two hundred euros in the following Apple product:

It's unthinkable to attempt to manipulate a sophisticated software tool such as Final Cut Express in an intuitive manner. In other words, I'm obliged to study the documentation. The only problem is that the manual is a PDF file 1152 pages long! So, I've spent hours today printing it out on paper. I'm not complaining, though, because Final Cut Express is a truly amazing software tool. The Sony HDR-SR7E camcorder, too, is an awesome piece of technology... and its manual is a "mere" 117 pages long. That's even shorter than the 157-page manual for the LiveType software tool for inserting titles and graphics into a movie, supplied at no extra cost with Final Cut Express.

There's no doubt about the fact that electronic machines in general, and computers in particular, have made our existence vastly more sophisticated and complex. And we're obliged to spend a huge amount of time reading fuckin' manuals.

Marvelous mazes

This is a shameless plug for two old websites of which I'm proud.


I created these Flash websites several years ago. Today, I'm happy to see that they haven't aged much.

New approach to Australian tourism

Everybody remembers fondly the video commercial promoting Australian tourism that ended with a question that shocked the British: "So where the bloody hell are you? "



Today, a new approach is about to be adopted, created by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. Here's the curious video message designed to coax hordes of fatigued US tourists to sunny Down Under:



Will it work? Like bloody hell, it will. As they say in the classics: "Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves. Sometimes we gotta go walkabout." Me, gotta go walkabout...

I'm still standing

In general, I make no attempts to determine who might be reading this blog. It would be an exaggeration, though, to say that I'm writing essentially for myself, because I welcome reactions... for example those of Jannie Funster, this morning, who said she found me through the Leonard Cohen tag in my Blogger profile. I'm sad to realize that those for whom I conceived this Antipodes blog two years ago—my relatives in Australia—have never responded by a single iota of comments. That's their problem, not mine. I'm amused and thrilled to discover that certain readers (my dearest, in fact) have got around to thinking that Antipodes is surely a regular outpouring from William, and that any delays or interruptions in the production of this blog are a sign of alarm. William must be drunk, sick or maybe dead! I like to bear this weight of journalistic responsibility, associated with the concept of a blog. Besides, it's a fact that I feel uncomfortable whenever I realize that I haven't written anything, for a few days, in the Antipodes context.

Often, when I haven't written anything for a few days (generally for legitimate reasons), I've received alarmed reactions from friends. On the other hand, I've never received healthy feedback of the kind that reprimands me for having written bullshit! Now, nice naive folk (like me) might conclude that this means that William has rarely written bullshit. Naturally, I would like to believe this... but I don't.

Broken symmetry

The 87-year-old American physicist Yoichiro Nambu, born in Japan, has been awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics". Today, he's a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Nambu's mind-boggling work deals with a mysterious concept, spontaneous symmetry breaking, which can nevertheless be described in a simple context. Symmetry breaking? Let me talk rather about egg breaking...

Real-world eggs are more or less symmetric with respect to an axis that goes through the middle of the egg from the blunt end to the pointed end (where the adjectives "blunt" and "pointed" are purely relative). Here's an interesting experiment that you can perform in front of a friend... not necessarily a good friend. Tell him/her that you're going to hold an egg in front of you, fixed between the palms of your two outstretched hands: your left palm pushing in on the blunt end, and your right palm on the pointed end. Next, you are going to squeeze the egg between your palms, harder and harder, until something happens... Roughly speaking, the egg will explode in one of four general directions. If you friend is unlucky, he/she will get sprayed with fallout. Otherwise, you might get hit in the face with your scrambled egg, or the fragments might fly either upwards or downwards. The interesting question is: Why would an essentially symmetrical egg "choose" to explode in one of these four general directions rather than in another?

In a real-world experimental situation, it's easy to imagine obvious reasons why an egg-squasher might succeed in obtaining one outcome rather than another. To put egg on your friend's face, for example, you would only need to wriggle your palms around in such a way that they channeled the eggy projectile away from you. But let's be theoretical, and imagine a perfectly symmetrical egg held between ideally innocent hands in a weightless environment. It would still explode, and the fragments would still fly out in one of the four general directions. In other words, within a perfectly symmetrical context, a disparity has suddenly appeared. How? Why? What caused the unbiased egg, brought up—like a member of British royalty—to be impartial under all circumstances, to "choose" one of these four directions?

An explanation of Yoichiro Nambu's answer to these questions would lie far beyond the scope of this humble blog and the talents of this ever-curious but unpretentious blogger. Let me simply say that, in the weird world of quantum physics and string theory, inhabited by a mysterious creature known as the Higgs boson, all sorts of unthinkable things can indeed arise spontaneously. Even nothingness can suddenly be transformed into somethingness. Astonishing, no?

Spoof trailer for a font movie

The Extensis company produces a Macintosh font tool named Suitcase Fusion, which is a must for people who like to play around with a variety of exotic fonts. Since they're about to release a new version of this product, they've created a splendid spoof trailer for an alleged movie named Bravefont, described as a "historical, romantic, action-adventure, science fiction drama". Produced by Orlando Caps and directed by Bauer Bodoni, the movie stars Stone Serif, Lucida Blackletter, Sean Symbol, Corvina Skyline, Gill Sans and Dom Casual.

[Click the banner to see the spoof trailer.]

It's adolescent humor of the kind that might be imagined by American college students, but nicely produced.

Australian backyard view

My friend Bruce Hudson sent me this delightful view of cockatoos on his back lawn near the New South Wales town of Young. It's a splendid image of everyday Australia.

I was struck by the fact that almost all the beautiful gold-crested birds, engaged in eating capeweed seeds, are aligned in parallel. Scientists have found (the references escape me for the moment) that animals tend to orient themselves, while at rest, with respect to geomagnetic fields. Maybe Bruce might undertake rigorous experimentation in the context of his backyard cockies (as they're called Down Under).

Meanwhile, I've installed a kangaroo banner in the right-hand column of my blog pointing to the wilderness tours organized by John Thompson. Ever since our recent Internet encounter [display], I've liked the intelligent style of this man (whom I've never met) and the nature of his touristic services. He sounds like authentic Australia.

French expecting

Everybody in France is familiar with the egg-head image and highly-strung behavior of Bernard Laporte, who was the telegenic trainer of France's rugby team before Nicolas Sarkozy appointed him state secretary for sport.

Last July, at a garden party at the president's Élysée Palace in Paris, onlookers were delighted by explicit manifestations of affinity (for want of a more pertinent word) between Laporte and another political celebrity in the Sarkozy universe: Rachida Dati, minister of justice.

Recently, glamorous Rachida—a splendid emblem of achievement in modern France, liberated from sexism and racism—has started to get rounder and rounder, like a rugby ball.

No doubt about it. Officially, the unmarried lady is expecting. It's none of our business, of course, but everybody has been wondering: Who's the father? Rachida doesn't want to reveal his identity to the avid French public. Not surprisingly, a rumor has arisen: Maybe it's Bernard Laporte! Today, in a surrealist anti-coming-out at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, Laporte declared publicly that he's not the future Dati dad.

This news disappointed me... like missing out on the World Cup.

Religulous

Ever since his sketch on France, I've admired greatly the US stand-up comedian Bill Maher. It's reassuring that an American could be so frank and lucid.



I'm looking forward to his anti-religious movie, Religulous (like ridiculous), which will be coming out in the near future.

[Click the banner to see the trailer.]

Antipodean adventures

People imagine that the great island continent of Australia is far away from everywhere. In fact, as the following map indicates, the northern tip of Queensland is only a few hundred kilometers from two foreign lands: Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of Papua.

A few weeks ago, five Australians decided that it would be fun to take off from Australia—more precisely, from Queensland's Horn Island in the Torres Strait—in a light plane and drop in at Mopah airport. They thought naively that, once they touched down on Indonesian soil, it would be easy for them to obtain tourist visas enabling them to do a bit of sightseeing before flying back home. Well, the latest news is that they've been fined several thousand dollars, and they're still in jail. In this context, my sister Susan Skyvington has been interviewed in The Australian:

Susan Skyvington, whose son Saul Dalton was detained in Papua for six months in 1999, said the similarities with her son's case were chilling.

"In the first few days he was under house arrest in a hotel and (we were told) we were going to be able to get him out in a few days ... when the documents were sorted out.

"Then they were saying he was not going to be released, they were going to put him through a trial and he was moved to a military police outstation in the jungle."

Mr Dalton, then 25, had gone to East Timor to hand out how-to-vote cards during the referendum on independence from Jakarta. Indonesian-backed militias were intimidating independence supporters at the time and took a dim view of foreigners participating in the political process.

Ms Skyvington said that when violence erupted her son boarded a ferry to Papua to escape, and was told he could sort out his documentation when he arrived. In Papua, he was put to trial and given 10 months' jail, which was reduced for good behaviour. He ended up spending six months in detention.

Ms Skyvington said that her son had never fully recovered from the experience, and now suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another affair. In the above map, I've highlighted a magnificent place in northern Queensland called Cooktown, at the mouth of the Endeavour River, where the navigator James Cook berthed his vessel for a few weeks in 1770, to carry out repairs and replenish their stocks of water and food.

Today, tourists are warned that it's crocodile country, and that they must be constantly "crocwise".

[Click the banner to visit the Cooktown website, which lets you download a
page of survival instructions that should help you to avoid getting eaten alive.]

A few days ago, a 62-year-old Brisbane man who had been camping there with his wife strolled down to the edge of the water to retrieve his crab pots before driving off home. His wife never saw him again, but police discovered the man's camera on the river bank, along with his wristwatch and a sandal. There were track marks of a crocodile, and the line to the crab pots was cut.

Another local animal, the kangaroo, is in the front-page news. An Australian specialist on climate change, Ross Garnaut, has just suggested that people should give up eating beef and lamb and change to kangaroo meat, since our marsupials have the advantage of farting in a less noxious fashion than conventional livestock.

When I observe the quantity and variety of Oriental herbs, spices and Thai fish sauce that are recommended by chefs, to make kangaroo dishes tender and tasty, I'm wary about the possibility of a new source of urban flatulence pollution. Before implementing a change to local mammal meat, Aussie authorities might carry out comparative methane-rejection tests on humans who eat spicy kangaroo dishes as opposed to the ordinary farting of old-fashioned beef eaters.

Fruit season

Sophia's religious convictions surely pass through her belly. At this time of the year, she's certain that God exists, and that He has placed her in a land of plenty, at Gamone, where tasty delicacies such as apples and walnuts fall from the heavens.

My fig trees are still too young to bear fruit, but the next best thing to having your own fig trees is living alongside a neighbor whose fig trees have a plentiful yield... especially when the neighbor in question is not, himself, keen on figs. That's the case with Bob.

I wander up to Bob's place every afternoon to bring back a plate of excellent figs. Sophia, too, has become very keen on over-ripe figs that fall from Bob's trees.

Mrs Moose super star

Once again, on SNL [Saturday Night Live], lovely Tina Fey did a great job impersonating Sarah Palin, while Amy Poehler played the news anchor Katie Couric. Recent words from the real Mrs Moose—for example, on the sense of her wishy-washy explanations about the proximity of Alaska and Russia—provided SNL writers with lots of good material.

[Click the image to see the video.]

If you want to witness a complicated surrealist aspect of the real Sarah Palin, in the religious domain, look at the following video:

[Click the image to see the video.]

To call a spade a spade, it's becoming clear that Sarah Palin is a weirdo. More precisely, a dangerous fuckwit. But it's nice to know that she's there, standing alongside John McCain, and shouting out her bullshit from the rooftops, for all to hear, because she's no doubt doing wonders for the presidential hopes of Barack Obama.

Family history writing

Maybe certain friends who read my Antipodes blog are interested in Grafton, which was my birthplace. In my monograph on my maternal genealogy entitled A Little Bit of Irish, I've just completed and uploaded chapter 4, concerning my maternal ancestors in Grafton named Kearney, O'Keefe and Dixon. After clicking the cover image, click MENU then request the downloading of the PDF file for chapter 4. It's quite bulky (10 megabytes), so don't try to download anything unless you've got a broadband Internet connection.

Once you've downloaded the file, it's preferable to read it on the screen of your computer, rather than printing out some or all of the 53 pages on a color printer, since you can use the enlarge feature of your PDF reader to zoom in on photos, etc.

Chapters 2 and 3 of my monograph deal with an earlier and more exciting dimension of my maternal genealogy: the Walker and Hickey branches in Braidwood, at the time of the gold rush and bushrangers.

The title of my monograph is slightly ironic in that I no longer believe that our pioneering ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860] was really a Catholic Irishman from Cork, as he made himself out to be, but rather a Protestant Scotsman, maybe even [according to a family legend that is old enough to be taken seriously] a brother of the fellow who invented Scotch whisky. I find it hard to imagine that the owners of the Caroline—a Newcastle banker, William Chapman, and a man from Calcutta, Eliot MacNaughten—would have hired an Irishman from Cork, in 1833, as the steward aboard a vessel carrying the families of convicts to New South Wales. Besides, nobody has ever found the least trace of our ancestor's alleged birth and life in Ireland. I have the impression that, once settled as the owner of a sheep grazing property in a largely Irish area of the Braidwood region, called Irish Corner, my ancestor simply lied about his nationality and religion in order to wed a 16-year-old Irish Catholic girl, daughter of a transported convict.

Today, many of the Australian descendants of Charles Walker are devout Catholics. I've invented a joke on this theme. I can imagine making the above allegations in front of one of these Catholic descendants, and concluding as follows: "So, you see, your supposedly Irish Catholic ancestor may well have been a Scottish Protestant." Reaction of the Catholic Walker descendant: "I've always known that Scottish Protestants are lying bastards."

Proving the past

There has been a bit of contestation, in recent times, about the question of whether or not John Dickenson's wing, demonstrated at the Grafton Jacaranda Festival in 1963, was an authentic precursor of modern hang gliders. An obvious but risky way of handling these doubts consists of rebuilding a Dickenson wing, to strict specifications (observed by the master himself), and seeing how it behaves. It would have been appropriate if this experimentation could have been carried out, say, in Grafton, New South Wales, on the banks of the Clarence. But that kind of imagination is missing, these days, in my birthplace. So, it's an English hang-gliding specialist, Mark Woodhams, who's determined to perform the simple but much-awaited research.

[Click the photo to access the Dickenson website.]

The current world trip of John Dickenson and Tricia is a little like a revival of a beloved and respected pop-music group. In a way that is not yet possible with current gliders (not even FusionMan), Dickenson is stepping around the planet from one friendly free-flight zone to another. Meanwhile, John and his historic wing are being followed through the air by a tracking device called the Internet.