Australian expatriates in London

When I was a science student at Sydney University in the '50s, the future celebrated author Robert Hughes [1938-2012] was studying architecture. The following photo shows Hughes more or less as I remember him, physically, in those days.

Admired as an outspoken dashing dandy on the campus, he was known above all for his comic strip in the university weekly Honi Soit. The main character was a student, like Hughes, attired in a duffel coat and shoes with thick crepe soles (the winter fashion at that time). I forget the theme of Hughes's comic strips, but it was no doubt related to the major enemy of university activists at that time: the much-maligned apathy of their fellow students. The greatest insult an intellectual could hurl at other people was to describe them as zombies overcome by apathy, unconcerned by politics, society, art, sex, etc. I've often wondered if these comic strips have survived in the university archives.

It was hard to imagine that Bob might have evolved into the excruciated spectacle of Bill Leak's astounding portrait:

Robert Hughes — Nothing if not critical 2001
by Bill Leak [1956- ], National Portrait Gallery

In the wake of Hughes's death on 6 August 2012, the media have often evoked the theme of celebrated Australian expatriates in London. Besides Hughes, four inevitable names appear:

Left to right: Rolf Harris (82), Barry Humphries (78), Germaine Greer (73) and Clive James (72).

Today, I believe that Australia has a champion expatriate in London:

The audacious style in which Julian Assange addressed Britain, Sweden and the US from a pulpit above the heads of the bored bobbies—waiting like vultures on the off-chance that he might fall down into their claws—was most spectacular.

I'm trying to imagine an escape scenario that would involve Julian's getting picked up from the London rooftops by a helicopter, before being let down in a nearby London park where a waiting automobile would take him down to the East London docks, where he would board secretly a ship leaving for Ecuador....

Recent comments are back

I finally found a widget that works for recent comments (in the right-hand sidebar). I should have found it ages ago, but I'm lazy.

Besides, as you see, I'm fed up with the grassy background. For the moment, I prefer this "wide brown land" look. Maybe it's the scorching heat in France that has altered my outlook.

Since writing that last paragraph, I've changed the brown background to a subtle greenish hue... which probably corresponds to what the French designate poetically as "goose shit".

My dog is an esthete

There's no doubt that Fitzroy is a superior dog... quite apart from the trivial observation that he seems to have accepted me as his master.

Click to enlarge, then hit ESCAPE to return to the blog

His tail may be a bundle of prickly burrs, but Fitzroy's heart is soft and sweet, and his mind is as pure as icy water in the torrents of Risoul in the Hautes-Alpes département, up where he was born on 10 July 2010. He is lovable and constantly (urgently) in need of caresses. And furthermore, he has taste. Artistic taste. In a nutshell, Fitzroy is an esthete. Indeed, a connoisseur.

Fitzroy's specialty is driftwood. Now, this might sound funny in the case of a dog (and his master) who are settled in the mountains, hundreds of kilometers away from the seashore. But bits of wood don't need an ocean to drift. Just ask Fitzroy. He would tell you that beautiful bits of wood can drift on mountain streams, on ice and snow, maybe even (who knows?) in the air. In any case, telling us mountain-dwellers that we don't have driftwood would be like telling our new president François Hollande that he doesn't have Nicolas Sarkozy. Like, it's everywhere, ubiquitous. But Fitzroy selects only the finest specimens.

My dog would surely refer to such items as nocturnal objects, reflecting the fact that he collects them in the early hours of the morning, just before the sun rises. Like fairies gathering dewdrops. Every object collected by Fitzroy has a story, which only my dog could tell. Each story elucidates the context in which that object acquired its form, its colors, its character, or—as Fitzroy might say (I try to avoid putting words into his mouth)—its soul.

In the case of my dear departed Sophia, I always apprehended the day when she would suddenly shun food, for I knew that this repulsion would announce her end... as it did. Concerning Fitzroy, I would certainly be gravely worried about his state of health (both bodily and mental) if ever he dragged home an ugly item, devoid of magic charm, such as a hunk of plywood or plastic.

Seriously, the idea that my canine companion Fitzroy seems to express esthetic judgment is, to my mind, quite fabulous. It would be interesting to see how distinguished evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and P Z Myers might evaluate and possibly explain my claim. In a nutshell (forgive me my constant usage of this metaphor, due to my preoccupations as a walnut farmer):

What might have been the evolutionary advantage
of being a driftwood esthete?

French Catholic steps into the political arena

One would have imagined that the Church in France has had time enough to realize that politics should be left to the elected representatives of the citizens of the French Republic. Gone are the dark days when old-fashioned priests in black cassocks imagined that the nation might be guided, if not governed, by dogmatic voices from the pulpits of "the Oldest Daughter of the Roman Church". Apparently the message has not yet got through to a dull cardinal in Paris, André 23.

He has proposed a prayer, intended to be professed by priests throughout France, stating that "children and young people must cease to be objects of the desires and conflicts of adults, so that they can take full advantage of the love of a father and a mother". Behind the euphemistic language, which beats around the bush, the cardinal is revealing his homophobic nature, opposed to granting same-sex couples the right to marry and bring up children.

Ecclesiastic behavior of this backward kind is outrageous in the French Republic of 2012. But I wouldn't imagine that André 23 has many followers who might listen to his words, take him seriously, and pray along with him.

You may recall that I quoted already this dumb cardinal back on 4 January 2009 [display]:

André XXIII  seems to have the habit of wasting precious opportunities (as they say in French) of keeping his silly mouth shut.

What, no rock 'n' roll in the caves?

Svante Pääbo, 57, is a Swedish geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

In my blog post of 26 December 2010 entitled Prehistoric encounters [display], I mentioned the existence in Siberia, 30 millennia ago, of humanoid creatures—on an evolutionary par with Neanderthals—known as Denisovans. It was Pääbo's team that revealed the existence of these people, in March 2010, using mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] that was lurking in a single Denisovan finger bone.

Two months later, Pääbo's team published a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Noticing that a certain quantity of DNA is common to both Neanderthals and modern humans whose ancestors had moved beyond Africa, Pääbo's team announced that it was likely that a certain degree of sexual promiscuity had characterized relationships between Neanderthals and humans in the course of their many millennia together, side by side, on the planet Earth.

                          — photo Jochen Tack/Alamy

That idea doesn't surprise me at all. On the contrary. I can well imagine a randy Cro-Magnon gentleman running into a horny Neanderthal lady, on his way home from the hunt at the end of a wintry afternoon, and paraphrasing in his imagination the well-known Canada Dry words: "It looks like whisky, smells like whisky, and tastes like whisky."

I imagine myself in the Cro-Magnon's place, on the horns of a dilemma. Regardless of the respective species (or races, or whatever) of the Neanderthal wench and me, I would have surely decided, there and then, that a little bit of Guinness would be good for me... and for her, too, no doubt.

Now, I learn today from The Guardian [access] that certain sourpuss scientists are abandoning this delightful idea of intertribal rock 'n' roll. They suggest that the DNA stuff shared by Neanderthals and us humans was surely a remnant of code that existed already in our most recent common ancestor, half a million years ago, before we had differentiated into Neanderthals and humans. Their reasoning is perfectly plausible, but it strikes me as somewhat puritanical. I far prefer the friendly idea of a whole lotta prehistoric shakin' goin' on.

Home-made furniture is fun

Maybe I disregarded a wise saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In a corner of my kitchen, there wasn't really anything wrong with the little cupboard holding my bread machine and a press grill for making toasted sandwiches.

However, since the above photo was taken, I had painted the cupboard gray, and the painted wood wasn't reacting well to the heat of the machines and occasional drops of hot cooking oil. So, I thought it would be a good idea to glue ceramic tiles to the upper surface. Above all, my daughter was spending the weekend at Gamone, and she has a reputation for being quite an expert in the installation of glazed tiles on floors and walls. First, she glued the tiles in place perfectly.

Then she filled in the gaps between the tiles with white mortar and smoothed it all down to obtain a perfect finish.

We both agreed that it was a job well done. All that remained was to let the mortar dry and put the cupboard back in the kitchen, along with its drawers. Alas, the following morning, I discovered with surprise that the mortar, in drying, had developed big cracks.

When I inspected the situation more closely, I found that the wooden plateau was hugely warped.

The warping—no doubt caused by the moisture of the mortar—was so pronounced that the central row of wooden pegs attaching the plateau to the left and right sides of the cupboard had been completely drawn out of their holes.

The warping had started to detach many of the tiles from the plateau. What's more, at the front of the plateau, the warping prevented the drawers from being inserted.

In other words, the wooden plateau had played a trick on us, and all the nice work carried out by my daughter was henceforth a total mess, which could not be rectified. This time, my cupboard was well and truly "broke", and I would have to fix it, one way or another. So I decided to use a clawbar to remove the plateau.

I told my daughter on the phone that her tiled plateau was so nicely curved that it would make an ideal base for a home-made rocking chair.

Unfortunately, I never had an opportunity of actually trying out my rocking chair. When I tried to move it, all the ceramic tiles fell off.

Clearly, the tiled plateau was a doomed object. So, I scratched my head a bit and decided that it was time for an excursion to Grenoble, to purchase a table top at Ikea. And here's the final result:

An observer would never guess that I had to saw off a couple of centimeters of the base so that the cupboard with its thick new plateau would fit in beneath the windows (which I don't usually open).

Gangsters in the grand city of Grenoble

I happened to drive to Grenoble yesterday, to purchase a few odds and ends at Ikea. Only when I was home at Gamone did I learn that the Alpine capital had been the scene, earlier in the day, of a gun battle between police and gangsters who were robbing a jewelry shop (using automatic high-caliber military weapons). Here's an amateur video that gives you an idea of the ambience of the shoot-out (in which the unfortunate jeweler got mildly wounded):

The robbers (apparently two, three or maybe four masked individuals) grabbed a female pedestrian as hostage, laid her down on the tram lines to tie up her hands, then drove off with her in their 4-wheel drive vehicle in the direction of Chambéry. In the course of the police chase, the hostage was abandoned, unharmed, near the village of Saint-Ismier (15 km north-east of Grenoble), but the robbers escaped with their haul of jewelry at the level of the Chambéry highway toll station.

In the following photo, police personnel are gathering elements at the scene of the robbery:

The jewelry shop, with a wide bronze panel above its street-level windows, is located behind the navy-blue vehicle. In the video, you may have noticed the presence of a monumental stone fountain, just across the road from the jewelry shop (which I've enclosed in a red rectangle).

This is the Three Orders fountain, erected in 1897 to celebrate local events (such as the Day of the Tiles in 1788) that had preceded the French Revolution.

The three orders (as every student of the French Revolution knows) were the clergy, the nobility and commoners. The city of Grenoble played a very prominent role in the Revolution.

The three orders are represented in this medieval depiction of the Cleric-Knight-Workman trilogy:

In the following old postcard, we see the Notre-Dame cathedral of Grenoble in the background:

Beyond the north-eastern edge of the city, delimited by the River Isère, we get a glimpse of the mountains of the Chartreuse. This, after all, was the place in Grenoble from which Bruno of Cologne set out in 1084 to set up a hermitage that would later become a great monastery.

Here's a street-level view in the same direction from in front of the jewelry shop (located on the right-hand edge of the photo, behind a white automobile):

Looking at the fountain in the opposite direction, back towards the city, we see here the splendid restored façade of the cathedral.

There's no doubt about it: Grenoble gangsters have the privilege of operating in a glorious historical setting. Once they're captured and locked up, out of harm's way, I must remember to send them a book or two (they'll have time for reading) on the history of the wonderful place where they perpetrated their criminal deed.

As a bookmark, I'll include an image of the guillotine, to remind these uncouth fellows what they would have risked, in former times, by acting as they did.

French wallaby living dangerously

For the last few days, a wallaby that escaped from a property in south-west France has been gallivanting around the countryside, often alongside busy highways.

When the animal happened to stop for a rest in a roadside parking zone, French gendarmes tried to capture it, but they were dismayed to discover that the wallaby simply hopped away.

Experienced Australian readers might be able to suggest reliable methods for capturing the animal before it gets annihilated by a vehicle. Maybe the gendarmes should simply try to put salt on its tail...

You can lead a dog to water...

... but you can't necessarily make him dive in and swim. The presence of Emmanuelle at Gamone made it feasible to coax Fitzroy into the car and take him down to the Bourne in the village of Choranche. During the excursion, my daughter's role consisted of making sure that our dog wouldn't jump up onto me when I was at the wheel.

If Fitzroy's head appears to be a little wet, that simply means that I had cupped up water in my hands and annointed him. For the moment, in spite of French successes at the Olympic Games, Fitzroy seems to be quite uninterested in swimming. We must not forget that he's a mountain dog, born in the Alpine village of Risoul 1850, at an altitude (as its name indicates) of 1850 meters. Fitzroy is capable of scaling an almost vertical embankment in a few bounds, but he's apparently uninterested in the idea of jumping into a stream in the valley.

Dawkins on Mormon madness

We can count on Richard Dawkins to find the right words to fire at Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile, two other prominent atheists, Sam Harris and P Z Myers, have started firing stupidly at one another in the context of Harris's troubling comparison [here] of two evils: collateral damage in warfare and the torture of terrorists. You can follow this sad mutual flaming on the respective blogs of Harris and Myers.

Without wishing to take sides, I do have the impression that the brilliant biology professor Myers, over the last year, has been losing his grip on everyday reality and becoming cantankerous.

BREAKING NEWS: Dawkins has just stepped quietly and briefly into the Harris/Myers quarrel [here], no doubt in the hope of calming down the situation.

Magic water

In the domain of magic, maybe the most celebrated liquid of all time was mercury.

Medieval alchemists looked upon this weird substance as primeval matter—in the spirit of Aristotle—out of which all metals evolved. As a schoolboy at Grafton High School, I remember well my first encounter with this amazing but dangerous metal, under the guidance of our aging chemistry teacher Jerry Spring. Once upon a time, it was used by dentists: a bit like installing a toxic battery in the patient's mouth.

Questing after miracles, modern believers in the supernatural seem to be placing their trust in a far more humble liquid: ordinary water.

Jacques Benveniste was a distinguished French specialist in immunology. In 1971, he discovered an organic chemical substance known as PAF [platelet-activating factor], which plays a basic role in the process of hemostasis (the stopping of bleeding) and other vital physiological functions. Benveniste—maybe with a Nobel Prize in the pocket of his lab gown—might have gone down in medical history as a result of this discovery. Alas, the curiosity of Jacques Benveniste led him into an esoteric field of research, inspired by the beliefs of homeopathy. Working under contract for the French pharmaceutical company Boiron [click here to see my article entitled Herbal and homeopathic products], Beneveniste published a controversial article in a 1988 issue of Nature in which he put forward the hallucinating idea that molecules of plain water might possess a mysterious "memory".

If so, then it would be quite normal (!) that the functions of an active ingredient within an enormously-diluted homeopathic preparation might in fact be "remembered". Quod erat demonstrandum. When shit of this superior nature hit the science media fan, it provoked a huge scandal that I won't attempt to summarize here. [See the Wikipedia article on Jacques Beneviste.] The discoverer of "water memory" retired from the French INSERM medical research organization, and the scientific community wondered whether their prestigious colleague might not have been led astray... into ridicule. Today, few serious scientists believe that Beneveniste's speculations incorporate the slightest grain of objective truth.

Whereas Jacques Benveniste obtained nothing more than an ignominious pair of Ig Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1991 and 1998, the French biologist Luc Montagnier was awarded a genuine (shared) Nobel in 2008 for his discovery of the Aids virus, HIV. Since then, at the height of his scientific glory, Montagnier has made astonishing claims that homeopathy works, and that Benveniste might have hit the nail on the head. Once again, I leave my blog readers to follow up this affair through Google and Wikipedia.

Let us move from "water memory" to the equally-exciting theme of "water fuel".

Agha Waqar Ahmad is a 40-year-old Pakistani engineer who operates normally in fields that are far removed from the Nobel domain. This employee of the police department claims to have invented an automobile that runs on ordinary water. Ahmad's scientific credentials: a degree in mechanical engineering from a technical college in Khairpur, in the southern province of Sindh. Water is water, universal and ubiquitous, and it knows no geographical, intellectual or cultural barriers. So, it is tempting to to draw parallels between the magic homeopathic memory of Benveniste's water and the magic power of water as the unique fuel in Ahmad's experimental cars. In both cases, we are faced with phenomena that modern science refuses to accept.

In Pakistan, there was intense excitement after the release of demonstrations of Ahmad's water-fueled automobile. TV journalists presented him as a savior of Pakistan, stricken gravely by the energy crisis. Once again, I invite my readers to use Google to learn more about Ahmad's miraculous invention.

Meanwhile, I remain an old-fashioned adept of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which I once learned in 1957, as a student at Sydney University, in the celebrated textbook of Mark Zemansky, which has accompanied several generations of science enthusiasts. I therefore refuse to believe that you can obtain an energy advantage by attempting simply to extract the oxygen and the hydrogen that compose water. The challenge is real, but Ahmad's alleged solution is surely chimeric.

An amusing detail of the Pakistani affair was the high-level support given by the Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs, Khurshid Shah, who drove the engineer’s car during his demonstration and said he was amazed by the performance of the water kit.

It's unlikely that that the inventor Ahmad might have been aware of, let alone inspired by, our Judeo-Christian beliefs, but there's a strong case for alleging a possible infringement of Roman Catholic patent rights concerning the power of water. After all, we've been using this powerful stuff for ages in baptisms, and we continue to sprinkle so-called Holy Water upon the coffins of our deceased.

In a nutshell, if ever Vatican lawyers were smart enough to demonstrate convincingly that the sacred Popemobile runs purely (as we all believe) on Holy Water, then this Pakistani heathen will be well and truly screwed. Here at home, in Pont-en-Royans, we are proud (?) of our Water Museum, imagined by the mayor Yves Pillet.

Don't ask me, though, what on earth this local museum is supposed to exhibit. Homeopathic health-impregnated water? Pakistani energy-impregnated water? Exotic shark-infested waters from afar? Maybe simply the water of the Bourne? Or the wind upon the waters...

Roast pork "Bangkok-en-Royans"

In France, in a butcher's shop or in the meat section of a supermarket, when you buy a piece of pork to be roasted, you generally get a rolled cylinder of lean pork sheathed in a thin layer of fat, tied up with string. That standard solution is not the only kind of pork to be roasted. Every Friday afternoon, a local pig farmer, Emmanuel Micolod, opens up his modern butcher's shop in a wing of his old stone farmhouse.

See his French-language website at http://www.fermemicolod.com. Emmanuel's shop enables us to purchase cuts of top-quality pork and pork-based delicatessen foodstuffs. And you can phone up beforehand to make an appointment with Emmanuel's wife Maria Micolod to get your hair cut, in an adjoining wing of the farmhouse. (That's a frequent rendez-vous for my daughter Emmanuelle when she visits Gamone.)

For my roast pork, I simply ask for a big chunk of échine (shoulder). Back at home, I cut it into two or three strips, a few centimeters wide, then I call upon my magic Thai powder, purchased in the shop of a friendly Asian lady in Romans.

Apparently this is the product that Thais use to obtain their red roast pork. The pork is macerated in a solution made with this powder. The red color comes from the inoffensive E129 food dye, while the flavor is obtained from two strong spices: cinnamon and anise. Inevitably, like everything of this kind that comes out of Asia, there's some monosodium glutamate in the powder, but I don't see anything of a questionable nature in their list of ingredients. Once the pork has been macerated for a day or so, I simply slip the pieces into plastic bags and place them in my deep-freezer.

Before roasting, I let the piece of pork thaw out slowly in the sun. Then I placed it in a Pyrex dish and covered the meat in fresh bay leaves (from my vegetable garden). I roasted it slowly, for almost an hour, in an oven at 200°. And here's the final roast pork dish, which I've named "Bangkok-en-Royans":

The hot pork (straight out of the oven) is seasoned with green pepper grains and capers, and sprinkled lavishly with fleurs de sel and freshly-ground dried pepper grains of the Ducros 5 berries kind. The meat is accompanied by a few slices of my pickled walnuts macerated in honey and cherry brandy, and the greenery is simply tender parsley, straight out of my garden.

Exciting foot and leg wear

Recently, somewhere out in the wide wild world of fashion design, a genius came up with the following prototype:

Let's say that you could wear these shoes, for example, when you're out on a surfboard in the waters off the West Australian coast, waiting for a wave. There's no way in the world that a big hungry fish might try to snap off your snappy shoes, chained safely to your shins.

I imagine an elegant high-end steel-gray version of this footwear: the jailbird model.

Curiously, after their brilliant prototype, the designers of the Adidas model seem to have run out of imagination. They could have easily added extra chains, in colorful hues, extending up to the wearer's wrists and—why not?—his stupid neck.

Suddenly I'm reminded of a trivial but true anecdote, many years ago, in the family flat of our concierge (guardian) in the rue Rambuteau. One of the youths was trying to lower a heavy bed from a first-floor window to the pavement in the courtyard, several meters below the window. To support the weight of the bed, he had coiled the ropes around his shoulders and neck. All of a sudden, he lost his grip on the ropes, and the big bed jolted downwards until it was suspended in the air about two meters above the surface of the courtyard. Meanwhile, the ropes had tightened around the fellow's neck, and he was choking for breath. We terrified onlookers lost precious seconds while we climbed onto chairs and boxes to take the weight of the bed, enabling the silly bugger to unwind the noose that was strangling him and get loose. In fact, he had a few screws loose, as they say. Fascinated by firemen, he always got around in the rue Rambuteau wearing bits and pieces of a fireman's uniform... in spite of the fact that no self-respecting unit of firemen would ever accept such fellow in their ranks.

Kangatarianism

I learn with interest that kangatarianism is a new nutritional approach, popular in my native land, which consists of avoiding all meat... with a single exception: kangaroo meat.

Critics have claimed that kangatarianism tends to make its adepts somewhat jumpy, but I reckon that negative remarks of that kind come from jealous folk in remote lands such as Europe, Asia and the Americas where you can't simply step outside and get yourself a roo steak. (In retarded Australia, ordinary citizens don't have the right to carry guns, so the only legal do-it-yourself approach to catching a roo is to use your automobile.)

But the automobile approach can be more messy and costly than using an old-fashioned gun.

Talking about guns, it was only this morning that I learned about the existence of this fabulous weapon, made in the USA.

It's called the Bug-a-Salt (pronounced "bug assault"), it's not expensive, and I immediately ordered one. The following video demonstrates the power of this new kind of arm.

Personally, I can't work at my computer when there's a fly or a wasp buzzing overhead, nor can I go to sleep of an evening in such circumstances. I've always got a can of toxic spray alongside my desk, my dinner table and my bed. But I've never liked the idea of breathing in such shit. So, I'm all excited about soon becoming the proud owner of a high-tech Bug-a-Salt weapon. Already, I can sense that it's going to change my daily existence...

Maybe they have a superior model that would work on snakes, spiders, cane toads, etc. Maybe they might even look into the possibility of designing an effective hunting weapon for kangatarians.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell us kids that the best way to catch a wild bird was to sprinkle some salt on its tail. It's amazing to discover that an old-fashioned piece of "bush knowledge" such as that, handed down orally from one generation to the next, was in fact scientifically sound, and has finally been translated into an advanced technological device such as the Bug-a-Salt.