New crazes in taking pictures

A few years ago, when I needed a special self-portrait for a blog post (a photo that would show me wearing a newly-purchased Russian black-fur chapka), I tried desperately to use my Nikon to take a picture of me reflected in the bathroom mirror, but I never succeeded in obtaining exactly what I wanted. Above all, if I remember correctly, it didn’t look right to be attired in Siberian headwear with a plastic shower curtain in the background. So I gave up.

That was before the planet Earth encountered the phenomenon of selfies. Funnily enough, although I’ve owned several iPhones, I’ve never once been tempted to take a selfie… which goes to prove how atrociously old-fashioned I’ve become. Even today, I don’t recall ever having used my iPhone to send a text message to anybody, but that’s simply because I lead a quite solitary existence, beyond any circle of friends with whom I might wish to communicate in that fashion. To put it bluntly, mobile phones, text messages and selfies are simply not my kettle of fish… and surely never will be.

I was nevertheless intrigued to hear that, following an unfortunate incident at the Louvre, selfie sticks have now been banned in most French museums.

Click to obtain an enlarged view of the black eye

In any case, selfies are starting to become old hat. Among smart people, phonies are being replaced by dronies, in which you replace your has-been selfie stick by a drone equipped with a tiny GoPro video camera.

Groups of foreign tourists visiting France only have to bring along a drone with them to be sure of obtaining all kinds of fabulous aerial photos of themselves, to upload to their FaceBook pages. (Facebook is yet another thing I’ve never used. Truly, I’m antedeluvian.) But visitors still won’t be allowed to bring such hardware into the Louvre.

Talking about drones, I’ve just seen a fabulous video presentation of the most amazing drone that has ever been imagined. It’s alone in its category, and it makes all the other drones look like spluttering aircraft of the era of the Wright brothers.

Click the YouTube button, then watch this amazing video on your full screen.

If your mind is not blown by that video, then we're clearly not on the same span of eagle's wings.

To do justice to past inventors, I should point out that an imaginative engineer in Baltimore (USA) provided the world, in 1865, with an impressive graphic depiction of bird-powered aviation.

As far as I can ascertain, no prototype of this amazing aircraft was ever actually built and tested... which simply proves that it's often hard to get a good idea off the ground.

Meanwhile, in our modern world, which never wants to stand still, yet another spectacular innovation in picture-taking is starting to emerge. I’m talking of vertical video, the subject of this most informative video:

Click the YouTube button, then watch this funny video on your full screen.

Personally, I welcome this kind of new thinking. If the vertical video phenomenon were to become popular and widespread, it would be a fantastic economic boost for the entire media business, not to mention the electronics industry (faced with the challenge of supplying households with vertical TV and computer screens). I nevertheless fear the negative impact that vertical video would have upon certain TV sports. Popular spectator sports of a predominantly horizontal nature—such as football, rugby, sailing, rowing, swimming, F1 racing, ice hockey and even curling—would lose much of their attractiveness when presented in a strictly vertical-video context. The Tour de France would be reduced to the ascension of the famous 22 hair-pin bends of the Alpe d’Huez. Admittedly, acrobatic flying and base jumping would become the sporting events to watch on vertical-video TV… but a little bit of that stuff can't be pushed too far without boring your viewers.

Rather than comparing new vertical video with the old-fashioned horizontal variety, I’m awaiting patiently the introduction of total-3D-immersion TV, which would totally invade all the space of my living room. The antiquated phenomenon of screens would cease to exist. We viewers would simply be part of the show, day and night. Every time I was watching a football match, for example, and wanted to get up for a glass of wine or a pee, I would have to be careful to avoid getting hit in the face by a ball. That would certainly add spice to my passive existence as an avid TV-viewer of sporting events (which, incidentally, to be perfectly honest, I’m not).

Killed by helicopters... not by reality TV

Like millions of my fellow-citizens, I was shocked to learn (through an early-morning tweet) that the collision of a pair of helicopters in Argentina had killed eight French individuals who were participating in the filming of a TV show for the TF1 channel, called Dropped. Two Argentine helicopter pilots also died in this accident, seen here:

I consider that it's important to insist upon the fact that none of the commonly-criticized features of reality TV seem to have played any part in this terrible accident. It was neither more nor less than yet another dramatic aviation accident [presently inexplicable].

French people were stunned to learn of the brutal deaths of three celebrated sporting heroes, seen here:

Camille Muffat (swimmer), Alexis Vastine (boxer)
and Florence Arthaud (veteran yachtswoman).

The list of victims included five accomplished members of the TV production team, seen here:

• Brice Guibert was the camera operator.

• Volodia Guinard [professional role undefined for the moment].

• Lucie Mei-Dalby was the journalist in charge of interviews.

• Laurent Sbasnik was a well-known director of TV documentaries (including several programs in the series Détour(s) de mob featuring my son François Skyvington).

• Edouard Gilles was handling the audio recording.

The names of the two deceased pilots [to be verified] were Juan Carlos Castillo and Roberto Carlos Abate.

To borrow the title of the TV series in which they were participating, these individuals were literally dropped out of the sky, to their deaths.

May these splendid and talented adventure-seekers—struck down while at work in the noble avant-garde domain of entertainment media—rest in peace.

You can’t win

The blog post you’ve started to read is extraordinarily trivial. Besides, there’s no way in the world that you might be able to deduce anything from that stupid title: You can’t win. What the hell could that mean? I believe that this blog post will go down in Antipodes history as the dullest thing I’ve ever written here. So, you might think of it as a historic piece of shit… particularly if you happen to have masochistic tendencies. At times, in Antipodes, I’ve dealt with earth-shaking themes, such as war, terrorism and the Theory of Everything. Today’s blog post, on the other hand, wouldn’t even shake a dog’s turd, let alone the earth. But I find it funny, and mildly philosophical, evoking human drama and destiny. And I happen to be the sole boss around here. So, if you’re not happy to carry on reading this extraordinarily trivial blog post, please leave immediately.

OK, that’s got rid of all those boring folk. Now, what was I saying? Ah, yes, it’s a particularly dull blog post, and unimaginably trivial. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. The story starts with my precious pair of boots.

Now, they might (or might not) appear to be quite ordinary garden-variety boots, nothing to get excited about. But, as I tried to point out, if you’re looking for excitement, you’ve come to the wrong place. Well, the greatest merit of this pair of boots is that I can slip them on effortlessly, as soon as I get out of bed, without even bothering about putting on socks. Maybe you don’t realize that this is truly a gigantic advantage for somebody like me, who’s awakened every morning at dawn by a crazy but loveable dog who has only one idea in mind: to get out of the house as rapidly as possible, and to race around on the slopes of Gamone looking for wild boars, roe deers, pheasants, donkeys, foxes, etc… Thanks to these boots, I can safely accompany my dog—through puddles, mud, sleet, ice or snow—for the first dozen or so metres of his matinal romp… before leaving him in the hands of God, who generally gives my dog back to me, unharmed, half an hour later. And, once I’m back inside my warm house, I can discard my dirty boots and put on more sensible winter footwear such as Aussie thongs.

My dull story starts here. Insofar as my boots are wide open (even when my big feet are wedged inside), there’s ample room for tiny pebbles, which seem to enter the boots magically, through mysterious channels known only to the Holy Spirit. And I’m sure you’re all aware that there’s nothing worse than suddenly realizing that there’s some kind of a tiny pebble lodged inside one of your boots. To be precise, it was my left foot. So I made an effort to perch in the mud like a one-legged stork (maybe that’s not the right bird) and to carefully take off my left boot. With my hand, I soon located the offending pebble, and I promptly shook it out. No less promptly, the pebble fell, not to the ground, but rather into my other boot, where it was immediately lodged firmly beneath my big right foot.

As I said, you can’t win. Maybe this blog post might have been slightly improved (let's say, less boring) if I had decided upon a more eloquent title such as Out of the frying pan and into the fire, or Not knowing what foot to dance on. Meanwhile, for any kind readers who might still be hanging around out there, I promise to make an effort to write more interesting stuff…

Old school photos

On chilly winter evenings, my dog Fitzroy loves to sit down in front of the computer (not surprisingly, he’s a Macintosh addict) and browse through old school photos of his master.

Click to enlarge

In case you didn’t recognize us, that’s Fitzroy’s head in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, and me in the upper right-hand corner of the school photo.

An eye on Fashion Week in Paris

I’m always amused and impressed by the surprising artistic creations of talented individuals, even when they’re relatively trivial.

First steps towards culture

The Lebanese-Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte has authorized me to translate his French into English and to include here this pathetically delightful drawing published by the Swiss daily Le Temps :

Click to enlarge

My family-history books

I've written and recently published a pair of books on my family history: one about my father's side, and the other about my mother's side.

Paper copies of these two genealogical books, They Sought the Last of Lands and A Litttle Bit of Irish, published in 2014 by Gamone Press, can be obtained easily (through Amazon, for example).

Otherwise, they can be read comfortably on the Internet (so I believe, maybe wrongly) thanks to the user-friendly issu service.

Click HERE to access the above-mentioned book.

Click HERE to access the above-mentioned book.

PS For me, these issu files appear to work beautifully on the screen of my Macintosh. For the moment, their existence would seem to remove the necessity of any other solution for reading my family-history stuff through the Internet. Admittedly, this hasn't solved the e-book challenge. But, is the existence of e-books a genuine challenge as far as my family-history books are concerned? I don't think so.

Islamic achievements

The heavenly creature in this 17th-century Indian miniature is known as a Buraq (Arabic term for lightning):

This is the kind of winged steed that was capable of transporting prophets through the sky. The most celebrated air trip of this kind took place in the 7th century when Al-Buraq enabled the prophet Muhammad to travel in a single night from Mecca to Jerusalem and back. Besides, we know that, during the short time he spent in Jerusalem, Muhammad actually tied up his steed to a section of the famous Western Wall (remnants of Herod’s Temple, known as Kotel in Hebrew), which has often been designated in Arabic as the Buraq Wall.

It might be said (why not?) that modern aviation owes a great deal to the extraordinary creative thinking of Islamic scientists and engineers. So, we have every reason to listen to this brilliant lesson from the Saudi scholar Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari. His fundamental premise cannot be denied: the possibility of getting aboard a plane and flying to China. From this unquestionable starting point, the sheikh demonstrates brilliantly that the planet Earth is perfectly stationary, and does not revolve around the Sun. In fact, our planet does not move in space in any way whatsoever. Amazing, no?

Click on YouTube to obtain an enlarged view of the sheikh's wisdom

The demonstration is clear. The part I like best is the vision of the poor old Boeing beating its guts out in trying to reach China. According to us idiots who believe that the Earth moves, China would be constantly winning the race. I believe that nothing more needs to be said. Except for one thing: I would like to promote the idea that the sheikh might be appointed immediately as the world director in charge of civil aviation. Otherwise, we'll surely run into nasty situations, sooner or later, where misguided planes full of innocent travelers simply run out of fuel and fall to earth in vain attempts to reach China.

PS Certain subtle things can only be said seriously in French:

Le regard clair et fier de cet idiot illuminé (sans parler de sa voix) donne l’impression d’avoir transpercé puissamment d’énormes couches épaisses de nuages vides, de barbe à papa islamique.
Mais ce mec reste totalement fou à lier, c'est-à-dire dangereux.

Driving in Paris

For English and Australian visitors to Paris, driving has always been been a somewhat disturbing experience, because the French drive on the wrong side of the road. Nevertheless, motoring calmly through Paris in spring or summer—maybe in an elegant open-top automobile—can be a charming way of discovering sites such as the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Elysées and the Moulin Rouge… not to mention the site of Diana’s car crash.

But there’s always the risk of meeting up with a reckless and ill-mannered driver, such as this young fellow in his red Mini... who appears to be some kind of a tourist.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a fellow who drives like that in the lovely old streets of Paris is frankly—to my mind—a public nuisance. Who does he think he is? And I can’t understand why the French police wouldn’t simply confiscate his license, and force him to move around Paris on a bicycle, or on foot, for that matter. Allowing such an individual to remain at the wheel of an automobile is—to my mind—simply outrageous, and proof of laxity. The people in charge of Paris ought to do something about it.

Back to the apes

The domination of the power of fire was a huge step in the history of humanity. Today, alas, certain barbarian brutes are setting out backwards along the evolutionary path.

Biographical notes from the website of Cartoon Movement: The Egyptian Doaa Eladl worked as a cartoonist in Al Dostor newspaper, Rose Al Youssef Magazine and Sabah El Kheir Magazine. She currently works at the prominent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm. In the field of illustrations for children, she contributed in Qatr El Nada, Alaa-ElDin and Bassem Magazines. In 2009 she received the award of journalism excellence in Caricature.

Yes please, a bit more of that

Let’s face the facts. If we humans intend to survive on the lovely little planet Earth, then we’ll need to be imaginative.

JOKE: In a besieged village in ancient Gaul at the time of the Roman invasion, the chief addresses his citizens: “I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news. The good news is that, since the beginning of the siege, we’ve accumulated a huge pile of shit at the back of the village, which you’re invited to eat. The bad news is that, according to our calculations, there won’t be enough shit for everybody.”

To find edible proteins, we might call upon the delightful tiny creatures that thrive in flour.

Once the bread’s baked, who would dare question its origins?

What was that old saying about the proof of the pudding? To be truthful, I’ve never yet tasted a loaf of bread made from flour weevils.

Blog post for the donkeys

When my computer beeped, a minute ago, I found that my surveillance camera had sent me a nice photo of my neighbor Jackie bringing back a trailer full of hay.

My immediate reaction, as an Internet user, was to say to myself that I must forward this photo to the donkeys, who’ll be so happy to discover that Jackie has a delicious big gastronomical surprise in store for them: a stock of fresh hay! Then I realized that this was a silly idea. I’m not even sure that the donkeys are picking up the Internet at present, because the phone lines are sagging under the weight of lots of snow. Like Jackie and me, the donkeys don’t yet have fiber-optics links.

Pathetic end of a pioneering era

I don’t know whether many of my compatriots have ever heard of a NSW rural township named Breeza. Here’s a wonderful photo of the Breeza landscape from Ian Stehbens:

Breeza is surely one of the loveliest names you could possibly imagine for a hot flat place out on the Liverpool Plains. One imagines sea breezes floating in magically from the distant Pacific! I heard this name constantly during my childhood, because my grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] was born in nearby Quirindi and brought up in Breeza, on a sheep station named Currabubula. What fabulous place names! If you’ve got a map—or, better still, Google—you’ll find that the municipalities named Breeza and Currabubula lie in the middle of a triangle whose corners are Gunnedah, Tamworth and Quirindi.

I’ve just published (through Gamone Press) a family-history book, They Sought the Last of Lands, presenting pioneering stories of my Australian ancestors.

If you’re interested, I invite you to click here to download the chapter in which I speak of my grandmother from Breeza.

Now, some of the few remaining flimsy threads that tie me to my native land are about to be destroyed forever. A Chinese company named Shenhua has apparently received approval from the NSW state government to build a gigantic coal mine on the agricultural lands of the Liverpool Plains near my ancestral township of Breeza. Astounded and shocked by such a scenario, I hardly know what to say.

Australia is selling off to China

 the lands and spirits of her pioneers.

The souls of my ancestors.

Click here and here for press stuff on this unfolding tragedy.

Meanwhile, as usual Down Under, where life is casual, nobody seems to give a coal-mine fuck. Is our Australian people really as apathetic and indeed pathetic as that? Yes, no doubt. I would love to be contradicted...

Love letters to Richard Dawkins

This is the second video instalment of Richard Dawkins reading some of his hate mail. It’s hilarious.

Patriotic sheep

On Australia Day, these sheep got their act together:

But this dumb ram didn’t:

Australia Day thoughts

I’m so stunned and embarrassed by the comical stupidity of that Abbott fellow that I don’t feel like saying anything much at all today. So, out of respect for a land I once loved, I shall remain silent.

PS A sad thought crossed my mind: Things could get worse, alas, if Charles were to become king. And another sad thought: How many of those Australians who joke about Abbott today were actually responsible for voting him in, often with the sole misogynistic aim of getting rid of Julia Gillard? Aussies are a fickle people.

Συγχαρητήρια Ελλάδα !

It would be wonderful if the stunning victory of the extreme left in Greece could be an incentive for vast changes in Europe.

On this Australia Day, it would be wonderful too if my native land, inspired by the Greek example, were to set out at last on the road towards the creation of a republic, capable of recuperating the vast mineral wealth that is being stolen by international capitalists, and using it to build a splendid infrastructure and a decent defense system for the people of Australia.

US journalists can be as dumb as they come

Fox News has a “specialist” named Nolan Peterson (a former GI) who informed the world, last week, that there are so-called No-Go Zones in certain parts of Paris which non-Muslims cannot enter. This dumb arsehole said that youths strutted around in these neighborhoods wearing T-shirts celebrating Bin Laden. Fox News went on to say that police could not enter such neighborhoods, and that the Muslims applied Sharia law in these zones.

Needless to say, everything that the liar Peterson related on Fox News was pure rubbish... but I have not yet understood his motivations in airing all this make-believe nonsense. Now, there are 2 million Americans who watch this shit, to learn about what’s supposed to be going on in France. Fortunately, there has been a massive TV campaign in France aimed at telling Fox News just how poorly informed they are. And they seem to have gotten around to understanding that they were transmitting pure bullshit.

I feel sorry for naive and well-intentioned Americans who have such rubbish rammed down their throats by stupid and unscrupulous would-be US "journalists".

Since 2003, an abominable lie about France and the French has become widespread in the US, designated by an expression that's popular with dumb US jerks: cheese-eating surrender monkeys. The idiots imagine that, in 1940, the French took one look at the approaching Nazi forces and promptly surrendered. There's little point in getting upset about such a total ignorance of the military events of that terrible epoch. As we say in French: Never try to explain things to arseholes; there's a danger that you might inform them!

BREAKING NEWS: Anne Hidalgo, Socialist mayor of Paris, has just announced (January 20) that the city will be taking Fox News to court over their outrageous "news", which prejudiced gravely and stupidly the French capital. In the following shoddy CNN interview, their interpreter sounds as if she has trouble understanding French, and the audio is not handled correctly:

I'm happy to see that the great city is standing up for itself against a band of dumb US arseholes.

Shawl

The Cournouze is like an old lady (or a young lady, for that matter) who has wrapped her shoulders in a white woolen shawl.

Click to enlarge

This is the first time this winter that a little snow has settled onto the slopes of our Bourne valley.

Anecdote. I was amused to discover, this morning, that my external surveillance camera looks upon every falling snowdrop as a potentially undesirable intruder. That’s to say, during the early hours of the morning, the camera emailed me a pile of uninteresting warning snapshots composed of big white blobs.

Religions are rubbish

There are several fine articles in the English-speaking press that criticize the ridiculous notion that Islamophobia would be a greater problem than Islam. Unfortunately, here in France, in the land of Charlie, citizens are not really free to tackle this primordial question, because any publicly-expressed negative remarks concerning the tenets of the religion of Mahomet can be construed immediately as an incitation to hate the “race” (?) of French citizens who adhere to this religion. And that’s a crime here in France.

This confusion has something to do with the French mindset. French people don’t seem to be able to distinguish clearly between ideas and individuals who claim to be adepts of those ideas. This goes back at least as far as Philippe Pétain. Many people of that epoch might be pardoned for looking upon the Maréchal as a lovable old fool, who had been a World War I myth, but his ideas—that’s to say, his acceptance of the Armistice—were totally abject. French people seem to have trouble realizing that many good people can adopt bad ideas, and that certain good ideas can even be held by people who are essentially bad. A typical example of the latter situation is the pedophile priest taking care of children in need.

At a superficial level, the suggestion by Pope Francis that you might have the right to punch somebody who insults your mother doesn’t sound very Christian to me. In fact, as Jerry Coyne demonstrates here, the pope was frighteningly close to condoning—indirectly, of course—the kalashnikov actions in Paris. See the frank reaction of a celebrated US humorist, Brian Keith Dalton, who pulls no punches:

Click here for a brilliant exposé of the “religion of peace” myth.

Clearly, our leaders who talk casually about blasphemy as if it were a crime, just like those who decry Islamophobia while insisting that Islam is a "religion of peace", are simply trying to appease their Muslim fellow citizens. Why? That’s a big and complex question, which I would not try to answer…