Genetic tucker

The term "tucker" is Aussie slang, meaning food for humans.

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Several earlier posts in my blog have mentioned the CRISP-Cas9 system of gene editing. Click here to access a Wikipedia article on this subject. Well, for the first time ever, an edible green plant has been created by genetic editing using the CRISP-Cas9 system. It looks great. I hope it’s tasty. I’m sure it is. I’m a genetic optimist.

Accidents that should no longer happen

I wanted to cry in horrible sadness, a few minutes ago, when I heard that a young Rom girl of 14 was mortally electrocuted in Grenoble, in an insalubrious building, when a wire dropped into a basin of water in which she was bathing herself. [news from the 20 minutes website]

Certain weird Aussies won't admit that I exist

The behavior of the Australian book-sales business is unique. They don't seem to function in the same way as ordinary civilized bookshops elsewhere in the world. In a nutshell, they behave as if their country still lived in the days of bushrangers. For example, when a prospective customer attempts to purchase books that I've written and published, Amazon Australia simply tells the would-be customer that no such author or publisher exists.

It's amazing! When I discovered this state of affairs, a few days ago, I was utterly shocked. The primitive bastards don't seem to realize that, beyond the shorelines of their Antipodian island, a vast new world exists. To be honest, I don't know exactly why a few Australian Internet book shops behave in this weird manner.

I suspect, though, that it's because they discovered that I was an independent publisher, with my own successful business named Gamone Press, Choranche. What they dislike about me, I would imagine, is the fact that my book-printing platform is Lightning Source. Maybe there's some kind of gang warfare going on between Aussie bookshops and this platform. I'm merely guessing, because nobody seems to be able to tell me what's happening in the Antipodes. In any case, the situation Down Under truly sickens me... like many things, these days, that emerge from my land of birth.

Imagining the future in God’s Own Country

It’s perfectly possible that Trump could become the next US president. For the moment, polls put the two contenders in a dead heat. (What an ugly and somewhat terrifying expression!)

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I’m troubled by a not-impossible consequence of the not-impossible victory of Trump, particularly when I learn that Texas is against the candidate. In the USA, many brave folk would not accept his election as the president. And many of those citizens carry weapons. Put two and two together… I’m surely not the only observer who thinks that way. I hope my thinking is merely an empty nightmare. Not an empty charger.

To put it bluntly, this man has a screw loose

Click here to see Nicolas Sarkozy raving on about his "passion de la France". I'm convinced that French people—who aren't idiots—are going to wake up massively to the insane egocentric behavior of the ex-president. Let me remind readers that this man is currently faced with a possible trial for the illegal financing of his last electoral campaign. In my native Australia, we used to have nice expressions (rarely understandable) for such a fellow (rarely for a famous polly):

• "He's all over the road like a mad woman's shit."

• "He's as mad as a cut snake."

It's fascinating to study Sarko's facial movements. They offer such a pile of explicit psychiatric indications that a simple untrained observer like me can detect the presence of clues to the man's mind.

Pebble in Sarkozy’s shoe

That’s the metaphor invented by Le Monde to designate the suggestion that Sarkozy should be brought to trial.

The magistrates handling the Sarkozy case are not obliged to respect any kind of time delay before deciding whether to bring him to trial, or whether to establish what is termed an “ordonnance de non-lieu” : a ruling that simply states the absence of grounds for pursuing the affair. With respect to the presidential primaries to be held in November, this decision could be announced either before or after that time.

The journalist of Le Monde used the verb “pollute” to designate the possible effects of the Sarkozy affair upon those primaries.

Lawrence Durrell's Greece

Lawrence Durrell

Click the YouTube icon to see the video in a larger format

If Sarko is tried, how might it end?

The poor man (?) has just been told that he'll normally face a court trial. So, let's give him time to get himself organized for that ordeal. And above all, in the excellent time-honored French tradition, let us assume totally (I stress that adverb, seriously: totally) that Nicolas Sarkozy is indeed, for the moment, innocent. In other words, let us suppose that the man has been accused wrongly, unjustly... and that he will surely find ways of demonstrating, beyond any doubts whatsoever, that it was an error for people to drag him into a court of law. If events were to turn out in that way, then the case against Nicolas Sarkozy would be dropped, as it were. If I correctly understand French legal jargon (which is not necessarily the case), we would avoid saying that he was acquitted or shown to be innocent, because both those expressions might leave vague doubts suspended in the air above Sarkozy's head. The politically correct way of expressing such an outcome would consist of saying that it was decided by the parquet to abandon all pursuits against the man brought to trial.

If I make blunders in my understanding of French legal terminology, it would be nice if an educated reader were to put me on the right path.

Learning the facts of Sarkozy's future trial

I'm making an effort to master the facts of Nicolas Sarkozy's future trial... which could possibly take place next year. It seems to me that the very idea of trying a former president is enormous, which means that we should look gravely upon this future trial. It will be a most exceptional event. Besides, Sarkozy has been hoping to become the president of France for a second time. Instead of awaiting the results of a presidential election, he'll be awaiting the verdict of a court of law.

Sarkozy's lawyer is 60-year-old Thierry Herzog, who is a personal friend of the former president.

Already, this afternoon, Herzog has surprised observers by making erroneous statements. Up until now, Sarkozy has been subjected to a single legal operation, designated as an examination (mise en examen), which took place last February. The motive for his being examined was the illegal financing of an electoral campaign, and five facts were retained against Sarkozy. The examination was carried out by a body known as the parquet of Paris. The examination came to an end on August 30. The original motive and facts might have been totally replaced by new entities, but this was not entirely the case. In deciding that Sarkozy should be brought to trial, the parquet retained the same motive: namely the illegal financing of an electoral campaign. On the other hand, the parquet abandoned the first two facts, and only retained the last three :

1. Sarkozy had exceeded the ceiling of electoral expenses.
   
2. He had failed to respect the rules for establishing his campaign's accounting.
   
3. He had inserted, in the accounting, some elements that were deliberately understated.
   

Now, Herzog suggested today that the parquet, in moving from the examination to the present réquisitoire, had committed legal errors. Clearly, this is untrue, because no new elements whatsoever have been inserted. We have seen, above all, that the motive for sending Sarkozy to trial is strictly identical to the motive for examining him. So, it appears that Herzog was trying to pull the wool over our eyes when he suggested the existence of legal irregularities.

Copé reacts to an announced trial for Sarko

"This new element confirms my innocence in that affair,

wrongly designated as the Bygmalion Affair.

That affair concerns solely the campaign accounting of Nicolas Sarkozy."

What exactly did Jean-François Copé have in mind when he spoke of "this new element" ? I see no new elements thrown recently into what we designate, rightly or wrongly, as the Bygmalion affair. We simply learnt that the parquet has decided that Nicolas Sarkozy, deemed for the moment to be innocent, must face a court trial. And the motive for Sarkozy's being brought to face this future trial was the illegal financing of an electoral campaign. In other words, the trial is expected to determine whether or not Sarkozy did in fact finance illegally his electoral campaign. Now, that is not exactly what might be called a "new element" in this affair. It's merely the normal down-to-earth unfolding of ordinary French processes of law.

Once upon a time, they were friends

The smaller friend, on the right, is Nicolas Sarkozy, who used to be the French president. His friend on the left is Jean-François Copé, who used to be in charge of Sarko’s political party, the UMP. Then there’s an excellent news magazine, Le Point.

Last but not least, there's a mysterious French communications company named Bygmalion.

• In February 2014, Le Point said that Copé had favorized the Bygmalion agency, enabling it to pocket some 8 million euros during Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in 2012. Copé was obliged to resign, and the legal system of Paris opened an enquiry.

• Bygmalion revealed a ghost system of accounting.

• On April Fool’s Day 2015, Sarkozy was dragged into the affair.

• On September 4, 2015, Sarko blamed Copé for the mess.

• A member of Bygmalion, Jérôme Lavrilleux, counter-attacked Sarko, who was examined by legal authorities (along with 13 other individuals) for illegal financing of his political campaign.

And that’s about where we are today. You'll certainly be hearing more about this affair, in the French press, in the near future.

Remake of a famous French movie

Everybody in France loves Les Valseuses of Bertrand Blier, with Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere, Miou-Miou and Jeanne Moreau. John Turturro, who acted in Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, is working on an updated version of the great French cult film. That explains—so I hear—last night’s crazy new hairdo of Audrey Tautou.

Is it really true that Audrey will be taking over the Miou-Miou role ?

Rope net dropped around Sarko

The Bygmalion affair has just been dropped onto Sarko's head. If he can succeed in escaping from that mess between now and the presidential election, he's a Houdini. But the guy is as cunning as an educated ferret. So, he'll possibly succeed...

Cartooning for Peace

A nice tweet from an admirable organization: @CartooningPeace

 

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For  reasons I don't understand, it took me some messing around to include both the Twitter name of the organization and the cartoon. Everything on the Internet is becoming more and more difficult...

Ancient history of my paternal family

It's a long time since I've mentioned my ancient ancestors in the Leicestershire village of Skeffington. I devoted considerable energy to the publication of my books A Little Bit of Irish and They Sought the Last of Lands. Today, I'm tremendously proud of both books, but I believe that I should no longer remain attached to such subjects. Nevertheless, I remain intrigued by ancient paternal genealogy, particularly since I persist—for reasons of genealogical genetics—in seeing myself as a rare survivor of the earliest imaginable patriarch in Leicester. If I were particularly energetic (which I'm not, particularly since falling down the stairs a year ago), I would pursue an interesting line of my paternal genealogy: namely, research into the identity of the Norman fellow who settled in the English place that came to be known as Skeffington.

When I left this subject, prior to falling down the stairs a year ago, I was particularly intrigued by the case of an ancient Norman family called Verdun, who were closely attached to the village of Skeffington. There's even a chance that my earliest male ancestor in Leicestershire might have been a member of this Verdun family.

So, I am still interested in contacting living descendants of this ancient family, to see if they have any Y-chromosome data they could show me (so I could compare it with mine). But there's a major unexpected hitch. The most prominent living Verdun descendant happens to be the husband of... Christine Dupont de Ligonnès. And I don't intend to start asking those people if they might assist me with DNA research.

Two different young politicians with a similar viewpoint

Click here to see François Baroin talking about Manuel Valls on the subject of Islamic head attire for females. It’s reassuring to find youthful French politicians, on opposite sides of the fence, sharing similar views concerning the challenge of chasing obscurity from modern France.

Just a star away

A stone’s throw ? Not exactly. A little bit more. Aim your stellar pebble in this direction.

Jeanne Moreau sings “Le tourbillon” on March 2, 1969

I don’t know whether this movie clip loads easily. It probably takes time, but it's worth waiting. When Jeanne Moreau recorded this song, my son was still a six-months-old fœtus in his mother’s womb. The man alongside Jeanne was the former journalist Pierre Lazareff, who had become a press baron and producer of variety performers.

Weavers all gone

Fred Hellerman, 89, the last member of The Weavers folk group, has finally left the stage forever. In this old video, he's the seated chap.

Trivial sad story

Male penises are never totally tamed. No matter how we try to teach them refined behavior and nice manners, they have a habit of remaining wild and savage, hard-headed, ready to attack their owners. They can become as mad as a dog with rabies. If the worst gets to the worst, a rabid penis may have to be lobotomized or even euthanized. In most cases, fortunately, they can be tranquillized by pharmaceutical drugs.

François Bayrou (à gauche) et Robert Rochefort,

le 19 mai 2014 à Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). (GAIZKA IROZ / AFP)

A distinguished French political fellow was found masturbating publicly, last Wednesday, near children. Robert Rochefort, 60, is a political companion of the president of the MoDem party, of François Bayrou, mayor of Pau. The alleged wrongdoer—who apparently recognized his act, but then claimed that the words were untrue—has been asked to resign. It’s terrible to observe the career of Rochefort stagnating, if not culminating forever, in this sad fashion. But such is life. Such are mad penises.

Festival of drones on the Champs-Elysées

Tomorrow (Sunday), more than 100,000 spectators are expected to attend the inaugural Paris Drone Festival on the Champs-Elysées.

photo signed DR from Le Parisien

Dozens of tiny aircraft, piloted by their ground-based owners, will race up and down the famous Paris avenue beneath a gigantic canopy, 140 metres long and 17 metres wide. This big “tent” will be located near the top of the Champs-Elysées. At the same time, the entire avenue, 2 km from Concorde to Etoile, will be closed to road traffic, and no doubt protected by massive police forces.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that big brothers (or rather American cousins) of these elegant little Parisian drones will continue to work in faraway places, attempting to shoot to death Islamic criminals.

Ratification of the COP21 treaty

This morning, we've heard that both China and the USA have finally ratified the COP21 treaty. Laurent Fabius will be happy, of course. And so will everybody.

Identity of Banksy

A new theory has arisen. Maybe the street artist Banksy is in fact the leader of the Massive Attack group, Robert “3D” Del Naja.

France’s political establishment has always been constipated

Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte seem to be exerting a wonderful laxative effect upon many French groaning and farting observers. They do things that most serious French political figures never dream of doing. For example, they smile. Not a Sarkozy grin. Nor a Hollande giggle. Nor a Le Pen smirk. And certainly not a sinister Balkany baring of the teeth to bite you. No, believe it or not, the Macron couple actually smile, as if they’re happy. My God, there must be something wrong with them. Are they crazy? We must be careful!

French presidential face book

Everybody on the planet Earth (and maybe beyond) knows what a face book is. Did you know that this kind of document (a collection of face portraits of class students or business colleagues) is referred to in French as a trombinoscope ? That word comes from trombine, a modification of bobine, meaning a human face. Click here to access the trombinoscope of all the 82 current candidates for next year’s French presidential election.

It's a little too early to print out and frame this beautiful array of splendid heads. It's more than likely that I'll soon be publishing a revised version, both bigger and better.

Nice French political people

Patrick Balkany and his wife Isabelle. You can see from their smiles that they’re contented. They have a son, Alexandre Balkany, who also has a childish variant of his dad's smile. God only knows why...

Alexandre has just had his passport confiscated, for an affair about helping his parents hide a luxurious villa in Morocco from taxation authorities. Smart smiling family.

When will they drone the big bastard?

The removal by drone of Abou Mohammad al-Adnani is great news.

Abou Mohammad al-Adnani

Over a period of five months, he was the third Daesh boss to be zapped. I often wonder if people in either the US or Russia will be rewarded the cash that has been placed upon the heads of such guys. Amazingly, the biggest bastard, Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still at large.

Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi

I would imagine that drone pilots are surely looking around for him day and night, and that he has to be most careful about the life he now leads. But it's mathematical that he’ll be located and drone-zapped in the near future.

What a privilege to be a French citizen in France today!

It's a privilege to be a French citizen living in this splendid country. Those words came into my mind spontaneously as I watched, on my Macintosh, the news from France's new TV channel. It's not that event in particular that prompted my patriotic thoughts, but rather a whole series of reasons. I'm tremendously proud to have a French passport, to own a French house, and to be living in France. For the moment, the only negative affair is the current plague of disgusting moths! But I have faith in French science and technology to find a solution.

New French news channel

 

You might be interested in clicking here to see if you can pick up this new TV channel. It's rather buggy for the moment, but it should be a powerful broadcasting vector when it works smoothly and correctly. You might be wondering why I don't try to insert the channel directly into my blog. Don't be bloody stupid!

This anchor fellow, Louis Laforge, is a TV celebrity in France:

For the moment, he's reappearing regularly to explain that there's a slight technical hitch. (We could have worked that out all on our own.) In fact, the quality of this inaugural demonstration (it goes into operation tomorrow) is very good indeed.

Their brains might teach us a few tricks

An article by Nathaniel Herzberg in Le Monde says that dogs capt the sense of human words and tones of speech. I've just told my friend Fitzroy that he should take a glance at this article.

« Les travaux récents ont montré que les bases de l’empathie, de la coopération, de la cognition, du maniement des nombres existent bien au-delà de l’espèce humaine. Nous nous inscrivons dans un arbre évolutif qui nous dépasse très largement et qui impose des contraintes. Une sorte de naturalisation de la culture. » Le chien, assistant du philosophe ?

Lionel Naccache, neurologue à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière

Blind man loses his cane

The cane bore a name : Macron.

Moths across the world

The moth plague is bad at Choranche, but click here to get glimpses of a similar plague that took place a few years ago in Australia. Just as Australia is a much bigger land than France, their moths are bigger too. My sister told me that Aborigines have cooked and eaten them for ages. There's even a local chef who serves up moths to his customers.

 
Our moths at Choranche have such a nasty stench that a lot of ketchup would be necessary, to make them tasty.

Emmanuel Macron has resigned

Serious rumors have indicated throughout the day that Emmanuel Macron was in the process of resigning from his job as Minister of the Economy in the French government. An hour ago [I am writing at 19:20], his resignation was confirmed.

Not a particularly exciting subject

Few readers will be moved by this image, nor by the French-language article that it accompanies here:

But their subject means a lot to me. Jobs I carried out back in the days when I was earning my living now result in a monthly payment that provides me with my daily soup and puts a spoon of margarine in it.

That last statement might persuade my readers that I don't eat spinach and that I probably avoid butter. Neither belief is correct. Look at these two products in my refrigerator:

At the top, you have one of the finest Brittany butters. At the bottom, it's a soft butter from Normandy. As for my spinach, it's hidden away somewhere in the freezer.

The most interesting fact in the above-mentioned press article about retirement funds is that my automatic benefits will almost certainly go on for as long as me. It's nice to know that. My sole aim now is to survive comfortably for a while at Gamone... while consuming dabs of the world's finest butters from Brittany and Normandy, not to forget an occasional bit of spinach. The global picture is one of contentment.

American smart-ass

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, is so smart at an intellectual level, and so proud of his superior thinking, that he’s turning into an obnoxious smart-ass, capable of fooling countless ordinary people who can’t always read between his lines. He has been raving on constantly about Donald Trump, as if an understanding of the behavior of this foul idiot required intelligence and imagination of the Adams variety. The inflated cartoonist (who never stops trying to flog his latest book) is now starting to be a similar self-proclaimed specialist on Hillary Clinton. Why won’t Adams simply shut up for a while, to protect the world from evil, at least until the end of the US elections?

A more down-to-earth French correspondant, Frédéric Autran, has simply said that the US presidential campaign is “un duel puant” (duel that stinks). Click here to access Autran's article.

UPDATE [7 September 2016] : Scott Adams remains one of the smartest humans in the known universe. Click here to see yet another typical example of our hero talking down to us like a smart-ass, seeing himself as a fearless observer and analyst of Trump, a brilliant hypnotist and a superior thinker, and then flogging his book. His Dilbert stuff remains amusing, but repetitive. As for the rest of Adams, he bores me. I dislike pompous people who, as the French put it, pètent plus haut que leur cul (fart higher than their anuses).

Brussels bomb

In the middle of the night, a bomb exploded in front of the laboratories of the Criminology Institute to the north of Brussels. There was much damage but the police found no victims. For the moment, there are no theories concerning the origins of this act, which is clearly criminal.

France also builds great trains

If you've visited France recently, you may have had an opportunity of seeing the great trains called TGV: Trains à grande vitesse (high-speed trains), which have become world-famous.

The French company Alstom has just succeeded in signing a huge deal of 1.8 billion euros to provide such trains to the USA... of all customers.

Whichever way you look at it, this kind of business feels more pleasant than the sale of military equipment. The two activities are actually complementary in a subtle fashion. You might say that French industry has many different feathers in its cap. And they're all fine feathers that earn our poor nation enough cash to put a bit of butter in our humble spinach... façon de parler!

War against nocturnal moths

We've been invaded by this tiny nocturnal moth called the Pyrale, which comes from China, India and Asia.

Of an evening, if you leave a lamp near a closed window, the moths rapidly form a blanket over the glass panes of the window. It's a frightening insect, because we run up against unexpected problems when trying to eradicate it. Even when you try to use a garden hose to wash them off a window pane, the moths seem to enjoy themselves. Neighbors tell me that the best way to eradicate the moths is to leave a bucket of soapy water alongside the place where they gather when attracted by a lamp inside the house. Here's a photo of moths killed by that technique in Pont-en-Royans.

I've prepared six buckets of soapy water for this evening's planned attack. Meanwhile, some specialists recommend the use of plastic traps containing a phial of a pheromone that attracts male moths. That would be fine if you wanted to castrate them, say. To destroy the entire horde at one fell sweep, I prefer the soap suds solution.

Views from my bedroom window

I signed the purchase of my Gamone property on 26 January 1994 (Australia Day). In the quaint office of the notary public François Guiliani in Saint-Marcellin, my daughter Emmanuelle, present as a witness, explained that she was amused to see her father buying an antiquated house in the depths of France (la France profonde, normally designating the deep old heartlands of France). Guiliani, offended, politely reprimanded her: “Mademoiselle, Saint-Marcellin cannot really be considered as the primitive backwoods of France.”

The site of Gamone was spectacular (because of the magnificent view of the Cornouze mountain), but the house was a shambles. Here are photos of the façade:

Nobody had actually lived there for ages. Inside, there was neither electricity nor municipal water, let alone a WC. Looking back, I realize that I was slightly brain-damaged to have invested in such a ramshackle place. The truth is that I had so little knowledge of this kind of affair that I didn't have the least idea of how much time, money and imagination would be required before people could actually live there.

I won’t go through details of the time and vast efforts that were required in order to convert the Gamone mess into a home. For the moment, I simply wish to draw attention to my discovery, long after my purchase, of an ugly pylon (in fact a pair of wooden posts) right in front of the house. It's still there today, directly visible from my bedroom window.

Click to enlarge slightly

In my regular photos of the valley, you never see this pylon… for the simple reason that I make a point of hiding it. But it’s still there, even though it has ceased to annoy me greatly.

That was up until a few weeks ago. I had received a letter from the French electricity company, EDF, giving me an appointment for the arrival of an employee of the company that reads the electricity meters. Well, my meter is in fact attached to the bottom of that pylon. In a straight line, it’s less than 20 yards from my front door, but the land between my house and the pylon is steep and rugged, and the only way of reaching the counter consists of scrambling down a track that starts on the other side of my house. In other words, that pylon was obviously never placed there with the goal of supporting a domestic electricity counter. Now, this is where my story starts to become interesting but complicated, so I beg readers to bear with me.

If you look carefully at the above photo, you'll notice that the wooden pole carries two distinct sets of cables

• Near the ground, and halfway up the pole, a pair of cables is covered in black rubber protection. This is the supply of ordinary domestic electricity. One cable is for my house, and the other for my neighbors Jackie and Fafa. A little further up the pole, you can see the black cable that runs back up to my house. That cable passes through my electricity meter, located down near the ground (hidden behind the bushes).

• At the top of the pole, you can see three heavy steel cables for medium-voltage electricity. On the right-hand side of the photo, these lines bring in electricity from nearby Pont-en-Royans. On the left-hand side of the photo, after leaving the pole at my place, these lines travel up the hill, on the other side of Gamone Creek, transporting the medium-voltage electricity in the direction of Presles. It is important to understand that, at the level of my property, not one of these cables brings any kind of electricity into my house. In other words, it is totally ridiculous that these heavy cables, carrying medium-voltage electricity, happen to be located just a few yards in front of my bedroom window.

The presence of these high-voltage lines has brought about a dangerous situation. In front of my house, more and more slender saplings have branches that rise high enough to enter in contact with the cables, creating a life-threatening danger. I must attempt to find a solution to this dangerous situation, as soon as possible. In a nutshell, I intend to ask the electricity people to move the medium-voltage lines further down the hill. I now know exactly the people I have to contact, and how to do so:

Crumbling of a small section of French cliffs

Chalk cliffs of Normandy, just north of Fécamp, are known as the Alabaster Coast.

Yesterday afternoon, a section of a hundred yards fell down onto the beach, apparently without victims. From time to time, I see TV documentaries about seaside towns on the northern coasts of France that are regularly losing territory to the sea. It’s a frightening but quite normal predicament, affecting flat coastlines and cliffs alike. The presence or absence of the cliff problem depends upon their geological nature. In Brittany, for example, most cliffs are made of granite, which doesn't usually crumble. The overall situation in France is quite trivial when compared to the dangers of coastal sites in Florida, say.

Messy end to a theft

Inside a Parisian metro carriage, a fellow grabbed a lady's handbag, then left the train just as the doors were closing. The poor fellow couldn't have realized, but it was his last theft on Earth. The lady whose bag had been stolen managed to ring a bell that halted the train, then she left the carriage and started to run along the platform after the thief. He decided instantly to jump down onto the rails and run across to the opposite platform. He never reached the other side. Another train appeared, and ground him into a mortal mess. So sad. Too bad.

Maybe we have nearby cousins in the universe

When I was a student, the only star whose name I could remember was Proxima Centauri. That was because I had been told that it was our closest stellar neighbor. Today, we learn with excitement that this star has a planet, known as Proxima B, that sounds as if it could be relatively similar to our Earth. Inevitably, we ask the breathtaking question: Could there be, or have been, life on this exoplanet?

That sphere in the foreground is an artist's impression

of the Proxima B exoplanet, which gravitates around

the little orange star in the background.

It’s not exactly just down the road. The distance between Earth and Proxima B is over 4.2 light years. That’s to say, over 40 thousand billion kilometers. But that’s neither here nor there. In more down-to-earth terms, it will probably take our human scientists another ten or so years to use new scientific instruments to tell us whether or not there might be, or might have been, life of some kind on Proxima B.

Old individuals continue to disappear

 

Michel Butor chez lui en Haute-Savoie le 19 mars 2016. (ULF ANDERSEN / AFP)

Michel Butor, 89, was a member of the Nouveau roman movement, along with Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Sonia Rykiel à Paris le 26 novembre 2013.  (CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / AFP)

Sonia Rykiel, 86, was a celebrated Paris fashion designer and interior decorator.

Sensing nerve "repairs" in my body

After my fall down the Gamone stairs, just over a year ago, medical staff examined me to discover if there had been any brain damage, and they said no. Later, in Bretagne, I had several clear indications that my brain seemed to be working successfully. Above all, I found that my technical computing skills on the Macintosh were still perfectly intact (regardless of how family members looked upon this question).

I was still intrigued by the undeniable existence of certain traces of my accident in parts of my face and head, not to mention minor eyesight problems. For example, I have a document that presents an image of a part of my head (I won't provide details) containing a small "pool of muck" that flowed there after my accident. Obviously, I often asked myself how and when this "pool of muck" might disappear, if ever. That's to say, I couldn't imagine that it would simply dry up magically. Surely the liquid "muck" had to flow somewhere.

Well, believe it or not, there have been moments, quite recently, when I suddenly "picked up" an unexpected series of "movements" in my head, as if a process had started. It might continue for ten minutes, during which time I would remain totally incapable of deciding what was happening. There would be no unpleasant sensations, and certainly no pain. Only unexpected noises, like static in an old radio. Then the noises would suddenly stop, just as rapidly as they had started.

Today, I'm persuaded that I was in fact listening to various nerve-repair operations. Besides, these alleged activities have been accompanied, in more-or-less the same time frame, by clear demonstrations that my thinking and memory were returning to normal.

To be "tired of" can indicate brainlessness

When I decided to leave Paris and move to the Dauphiné province, I had the ridiculous impression that I was becoming bored with the French capital. To be honest, it was William Skyvington who was becoming boring, not Paris. Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] illustrated this kind of situation in the case of the British capital.

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual,
who is willing to leave London.

No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life;

for there is in London all that life can afford."

I recently published a few stupid blogs about blogging. I soon realized that it was akin to saying that I was tired of London. So, I deleted those silly posts.

Silence of death

Today, I am Italy.

Human lives can be snuffed out in an instant, and the traces of an ancient village can be reduced to rubble.

We humans have never understood sudden disappearance, and we never shall.

We cannot grasp the way in which the sounds of life might be suddenly reduced to silence.

Survival becomes the only meaningful goal, but we shall never understand why one friend survives whereas countless others are no longer there.

Do we really understand anything whatsoever about our human existence? No, our brains are not powerful enough for understanding. But our eyes are strong enough to weep, and our voices, to cry.