Hurricane Matthew about to hammer Florida

Since its initial publication,

this blog post has been updated several times,

making it a little incoherent.

In Haïti, Hurricane Matthew has caused at least 400 deaths [latest news : Friday, 20 h 45 in France].

On Thursday 6 October, 1.5 million inhabitants were asked by the State Governor of Florida to abandon the coastal region.





Click a chart to enlarge it

Click a chart to enlarge it





Click a chart to enlarge it



Click here to access the bulletin from which
the above charts were extracted.

French factories and businesses often have to move from one place to another

People in France have been following the case of the Alstom organization in Belfort, which was about to be either closed down or relocated in another place. The French government finally intervened, and made it possible for the manufacturer to remain in Belfort. To do so, the SNCF (state-owned French railroad system) agreed to order a huge volume of rolling stock from Alstom. But do they really need all this new equipment? The cartoonist Xavier Gorce imagines that French bakeries might take the hint.

Unpleasant aspect of a top job

An observer might imagine that a prime minister spends most of his time prancing around in nice places. Manuel Vals has been obliged to face up to the poor state of French prisons. The situation has become all the more urgent in that France is starting to imprison, not only authentic terrorists, but also (as little as possible, of course) mere suspects of terrorism. The PM announced today that, during the next decade, over 30 new penitentiary establishments are to be built.

Le Premier ministre Manuel Valls et

le ministre de la Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas
visitent une prison à Caen (Calvados), le 13 juin 2016.
(CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP)

South-western USA threatened with megadroughts throughout this century

 

                                                                      [photo David McNew AFP]

Click here to see the US magazine Science Advances. Click here to access the full article that warns Americans of the risk of prolonged droughts throughout this century.

No happy marriage in Melbourne

Kylie Minogue and her British fiancé Joshua Sasse have decided not to get married in Melbourne. They are protesting against Australia’s refusal to marry homosexual couples.

Come on, Australia, take Kylie's advice.

Get your country up to date with the world!

Paris Agreement on climate change

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in December 1997, only went into force 7 years later. Things have been far more rapid for the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015. It will go into action in a month.

For the ratification of the Paris Agreement, December 2015 :
Jean-Claude Junker, Ségolène Royal, Ban Ki-Moon and Martin Schulz
[left to right, photo Jean-Francois Badias/AP/SIPA]

Winter vaccination in France

The annual flu vaccination campaign will be starting in France next Friday, and will concern 10 million patients. The health system spotted me well in advance. For the last month or so, I’ve been carrying around the pharmacy paper that I received.

Blasphemy is good for you

Abolish Blasphemy Laws

Aussie speech going uphill

Most often, I believe that Australian news is going downhill, in the sense that nothing much is ever happening in that remote country, and the outside world rarely receives news from Australia about anything at all. On the other hand, whenever I succeed in hearing Australian voices, generally about totally uninteresting subjects, I’m amazed to see that they’ve totally adopted an unpleasant new vocal accent. The end of every sentence soars upwards into the sky, as if they were asking lots of big questions. Even a run-of-the-mill policeman seems to be asking you questions all the time. Click here to listen to a good demonstration of this ascending intonation in a short and boring news video from South Grafton, my home town.

Trump stands a chance of winning a Nobel

Click here to see some of the 376 candidacies for the Nobel Prize for Peace. I would be thrilled if Donald Trump were to win. This victory would have no effect whatsoever on peace and war in the world, but it might blow up Trump’s head to such a point that it would burst. That explosion would keep him out of the forthcoming presidential election. I hope the members of the Swedish Academy read my blog.

Three Europeans win the chemistry Nobel

In the domain of molecular machines, the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France), J Fraser Stoddart (an Englishman working at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA) and Bernard Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands).

Time to leave

Diane James has nothing to say, and she knows it. She has no authority, and she can’t count upon the esteem of her colleagues. So, after merely 18 days in charge of Britain’s xenophobic Ukip party, Diane James has bowed out. The English call such a departure “taking French leave”. The French say “filer à l’anglaise”.

Amazing documentary on Australia

This evening, France 2 showed an amazing documentary, shot in Australia, on the subject of animal intelligence. We saw baby kangaroos being reared in a clinic, a female crocodile examined by echography, clouds of fruit bats in the sky (a familiar scene in Grafton, my place of birth), horses that communicate with humans through emotions, a huge snake being captured in a suburban house, the glorious movements of dolphins, giant turtles and rays, a presentation of the extraordinary cuttlefish...

This was one of the most intelligent and exhilarating documentaries from Australia that I've ever seen, totally different to the general touristic rubbish that emerges regularly from Down Under. There wasn't a single shot of koalas, Aborigines,  opal mines or Uluru. We didn't even get a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House. Not even Taronga Park. And no surfers or lifesavers. Viewers were simply presented with a land whose animal diversity surpasses that of all other places on the planet. Australia has 378 species of mammals, 828 bird species, 4,000 fish species, 300 lizard species, 140 snake species and 2 species of crocodiles. 80 % of these creatures are endemic, which means that they don't exist anywhere else in the world.

This documentary, created by a team of friendly and intelligent French people, was the 13th in a series designated as The Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body, directed by Michel Cymès and Adriana Karembeu.

 

Michel Cymès et Adriana Karembeu (Crédit photo : Philippe Doignon / FTV)

Don't get screwed!

This message is powerful.
It's from an American talking
to young Americans about America.
He tells them to vote, and to vote for Clinton.
But the message can be understood by
young people throughout the world.

I hope that young Brits listen.

The young generation of the UK know now

that the Brexit was a gigantic mistake.

A blunder made by oldies for oldies.

The mistake cannot be corrected,

but it might be attenuated.

No such mistake should

ever be made again.

Pope Francis seems to think the French are idiots

Somebody apparently told Pope Francis that the French have crazy ideas about the differences between boys and girls. One of his mates (?) told him a funny story, along the following lines:

          QUESTION : What do you want to be when you grow up?

          LITTLE BOY : I want to be a little girl.

Pope Francis seems to think that we really teach young French kids to behave like that.

Personally, I think that Pope Francis needs to get his papal head read.

Nobel Prize for Physics

Three British scientists: David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz. They "revealed the secrets of exotic matter". The biggest surprise of the announcement was that it didn't go to the team behind the discovery of gravitational waves.

Augmenting intelligence

To augment your intelligence, you need to be stimulated, indeed shocked. Your brain needs to receive a burst of energy that makes it cogitate. A bolt of cerebral lightning. If that doesn’t happen, then you’ll finish the day no more intelligent than when you woke up. In certain places, at certain times, there might be so few flashes of cerebral lightning that your brain might even go into hibernation. This happens, I believe, in binary situations where crowds are watching win/lose happenings such as sporting competitions. The brain is not really being stimulated in a cognitive manner. It is simply being turned on to applaud in joy, or turned off to weep in despair. People in such situations are being manipulated like pigeons in a Skinner box, designated technically as an operant conditioning chamber.

The ancient Romans believed in a protective spirit of a place, known as a genius loci. In certain wonderlands, the spirit of place can operate in a way that makes passers-by more intelligent. It all depends on what’s available in the way of cerebral surprises. The other evening, I watched a TV documentary about the huge sewage canals beneath Paris. Crowds of onlookers in the street were behaving feverishly because workers digging up the street had asked them to step back a little… to make way for an emerging boat. When people are told that a boat is about to appear from beneath the street pavement, their brains are indeed capable of going into overdrive. First, you imagine that somebody is cracking a joke, and making fun of you. When you do indeed grasp the image of a big flat-bottomed vessel being hauled up from the bowels of the City of Light, your neurons go wild, and start to chatter like a Geiger counter in a nuclear fallout zone. I should explain that the above vessel is simply used in Paris sewage canals to pick up solid rubbish. It needs to be taken out of the water from time to time and brought up onto dry land, to be cleaned and repaired.

For understandable local reasons, often historical or purely incidental, there are more chances of a spirit of place becoming excited in the streets of Paris than in a dull Antipodean neighborhood, regardless of the sunny weather. The sewage canals are more ancient and complex.

It's all a fraud

Don't waste time comparing one fraud with another. One book of lies is no better than another book of lies. They're all shit. Lies are lies are lies. Only truth counts.

Incidentally, the organization that created the following pleasant poster is Catholic.

So, don't fall into the trap of imagining that they know what they're talking about. Catholics simply cannot ever really understand all that they're talking about. Those folk talk with God and angels, and they believe in magic. They got themselves brain-damaged long ago, and they've never really succeeded in escaping from that accident, which they like to call Original Sin. They might appear to be nice folk, but they're merely a mob of nutty fruit-cakes. Shit, they "pray"... Do you see what I'm saying? Catholics actually believe that they can chat away with a guy who lives up in the sky, who once built the universe. As I said, they're totally crazy. Raving lunatics. Mad as cut snakes.

Probably our next president

The candidate is Alain Juppé, currently mayor of Bordeaux : our likely future president.

Click here for a short announcement of a TV documentary by FOG (Franz-Olivier Giesbert), which France will we watching this evening. If I wanted to be "sarkastic", I would say that Juppé’s major merit is that he’ll save us from Sarkozy.

Eternal silence

Frequently on French TV, several times a week, exceptional movies describe the universe, just above the horizon. Without such splendid reminders, I would surely shrink up and die.

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.
— Blaise Pascal

Children speak the language of Pascal, but differently.

And a tweet from Bold Atheism transmits that language.
Through the Cosmos ? Yes, forever.

Getting their act together

The slogan alongside Theresa May is curious. Who exactly is included in the "everyone" for whom Brexit Britain is working? Why is Britain working for her citizens? Wouldn't it be more logical, inversely, if her citizens worked for Britain? Is the country really working for the huge proportion of citizens who didn't want the Brexit at all? How exactly is this "work" being conducted? The formula is fuzzy.

This morning, on the BBC and in the Sunday Times, Theresa May reassured the world that the UK plans to activate article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, to obtain a divorce settlement with the European Union, before March 2017. In that case, the UK would normally be able to leave Europe around the start of 2019. Not too soon...

This afternoon, she'll open the congress of the Conservative Party in Birmingham.

Blog gem : If it be Your will

Browsing through old blog posts, I often come upon an unexpected gem. It’s a post entitled Freedom of speech, published on May 10, 2011. It contains a link to an article by a great man, Christopher Hitchens, still alive at that time. (He died seven months later.)

Then Hitchens pointed us to another great man: Leonard Cohen. Click here for the post.

Nobody owns me

Since yesterday, the administration of web names, carried out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is no longer under the control of the US Department of Commerce. Icaan is henceforth in the hands of a private non-profit organization (NPO). In spite of its name, an NPO is not obliged to avoid making profits. It’s simply an organization with no owners. Wikipedia informs us: A nonprofit organization uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing such money to shareholders as profit or dividends.

Have you understood? Will this change affect ordinary web-users like me, for example? Decide for yourselves. For me, this change might be superficial, but I find it fine. I never like to be owned. Particularly by the US Department of Commerce.

Sale of French submarines to Australia

The French press has just spoken briefly about the contract with Australia for the sale of submarines. Click here to access an article (in French) published by the Mer et Marine news organization.

Why did I want to become a Blogger ?

I decided to become a Blogger almost ten years ago. [I prefer to use the term that designates people who work on the blogging platform made available by Google.] Here is my very first post, which attempted to answer the same question that concerns me today:

Saturday, December 9, 2006

Why have I created this blog?

I often find myself saying more or less the same everyday things in e-mails to several friends. Consequently, this blog could be a good way of avoiding such repetition. This doesn't mean that I intend to abandon the idea of sending e-mails to friends. It merely means that certain stuff can be outlined here publicly in my blog, and I can then talk about specific behind-the-scenes things in my personal e-mails. Another down-to-earth reason for this blog is that some of my friends have faulty e-mail systems, which often block my messages because they're judged to be spam. [This is notably the case for Australian customers of Big Pond.] Finally, another good reason for this blog is the possibility of my being able to express freely my feelings in domains that some of my friends judge to be taboo: for example, Aussie politics. So, I'm hoping that this new vector of expression (new for me, that is) will prove to be effective and pleasant to use.

Do I have any better answers today than in 2006? Yes, I do. At Grafton High School, a wonderful teacher named Edith Crane (whose later married name was Bennett) taught us how to understand and appreciate an Australian novel about rural folk who lived in a cyclical fashion. That’s to say, their existence went around constantly in a loop. Instead of moving into new challenges, they would simply return to their point of departure, and start a similar cycle, without ever being aware that they were always moving in circles. Today, I'm convinced that Edith Crane's teaching about that novel was largely responsible for instilling in me an eagerness to become a published writer. And later, a Blogger. I've never thought of trying to make money through my writing. Nor have I ever been interested in having numerous readers. I merely wish to talk about my existence. And a bit about the universe that surrounds me. Above all, I like the idea of moving around in circles. You might say that I resemble the mythical giant bird that flew constantly in circles of an ever-decreasing radius... until it finally flew up its arsehole and disappeared.

End of Rosetta

Click here for a rapid summary of the role of Rosetta

Maybe this blog post should disappear into oblivion along with Rosetta.

Flight MH17 destroyed by a Russian missile

On 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The Ukrainian army claimed that Russia was responsible for this crime, but Russia blamed Ukraine. Undeniable data confirms that the Boeing was indeed destroyed by a Russian missile. Click here [Pardon the publicity].

Birds of death are disappearing

Human idiots in Africa are destroying these wonderful birds, which are a vital link in the chain of Nature that cleans up my fragile planet.

Rafale jet fighters leave the Charles-de-Gaulle

Here in my bedroom at Gamone, about two hours ago, I received this photo of Rafale jet fighters leaving the Charles-de-Gaulle in the eastern Mediterranean, bound for Mosul. Real-time news of the departure of the planes came from a France 2 reporter aboard the aircraft-carrier. Click here for the article. Amazed by the speed at which we can follow this first French strike against Daesh, I shall now await news of the return of the fighters. I sense that all is well...

TIMING : Here's the time at which the article reached my computer, transmitted by the franceinfo service :

A tweet on the subject wasn't published until an hour later.

Clearly, the news reached me well before Twitter picked it up.

Big tweets

from Bold Atheism
and Atheist Quote Bot

Bound to strike the buggers

The French aircraft-carrrier Charles-de-Gaulle is about to sail towards a major target: Daesh. Alongside its 1,900 marines, the giant vessel will house 24 Rafale jet fighters. And it will be accompanied by a German frigate and a US destroyer. Its task is to chase the Daesh enemy out of Mosul.

Sailors, we’re all convinced that you’re sailing towards success. Towards a big battle… followed by peace in Syria and Irak. Happy sailing.

My brain hides unpleasant memories

This morning, unexpectedly, I suddenly found one of my favorite French songs floating through my brain, but I couldn't pin it down. Little by little, the melody started to shimmer in my memory, along with a few words, and accents of the singer's voice. But the singer's identity and the title of the song still failed to clarify themselves.

I immediately said to myself that some kind of a psychological obstacle was preventing me from obtaining a complete picture of this data stored in my brain. But there are ways to bring it back into view. Readers may have noticed that my brain has been working in overdrive for several months, simply because it has been “remastering” links that got messed up when I fell down the stairs last year. I promptly decided to start digging... as systematically as possible. I was convinced that, if I handled the situation calmly, but with determination, I would soon discover all the missing elements. So I simply lingered in the warm autumn sunshine and waited patiently, leaving my brain to search, like an obedient computer.

Within a few minutes, the singer's surname flashed onto my cerebral display screen: Moustaki. Fair enough, i remember being fond of this Greek-born singer, who made a name for himself in France.

But why would memories of this sympathetic singer lead to any kind of psychological obstacle in my brain? I recalled that, in 1993 (well before the singer's death in 2013), I had in fact attended a concert in which he performed, at St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, as part of the village's annual festival in honor of the great Belgian singer Jacques Brel, who had lived there for a short while. In my memory, I tried to turn on an image-retrieval system that might provide me with a photo of Moustaki as I had seen him that evening. No feedback...

All of a sudden, red lights started to flash in my brain, and buzzers made nasty noises. I realized immediately that I had made a hit... but it had nothing to do with wonderful artists such as Moustaki and Brel. Instead of their images, I picked up a cerebral snapshot of a unpleasant fellow named Merri. Here's a recent real picture of this comic artist:

I understood rapidly how this Merri demon had entered my mind, and why he was blocking the works. Let's see if I can explain to you what was happening. Better still, let me point you to a blog post I wrote, ten years ago, which includes a short account of the way in which Merri appeared for an unpleasant instant in my life. It's amusing to see that, in this blog post, I didn't even mention the fact that, on that same evening, I had been listening to Moustaki. I was so disturbed by Merri that I completely forgot about Moustaki. It was only this morning that the two fellows made an unexpected appearance, side by side, in my brain. Here is the 10-year-old blog post, which I urge you to read.

The name of Merri brought together both the name of my son's primary school, Saint Merri, in the heart of Paris, and my fond memories of the blue jacket that François had inherited in Fremantle, which he gave me later on. I remember being happy to wear this elegant jacket in St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, alongside nice local friends. Then Merri stepped into the picture, and screwed up everything... right up until this morning in the autumn sun at Gamone. I must make a conscious effort to zap him. I wonder if psychological devices such as cerebral drones exist.

Inherited aptitude in logical thinking

Over the last few days, I've been insisting upon a new belief: Most of my major interests and skills were surely picked up by reading. But I believe there's one exception: my alleged aptitude (call it an obsession, if you like) in logical reasoning. I'm convinced that it helped me, in an IQ test, to be considered as a perfect candidate for a job as an IBM computer programmer. Well, I happen to observe a capability in mathematical logic in a line of recent Skyvington ancestors.

• My charming ancestor named Frank Skyvington [1845-1916] was no doubt reacting to a taste for unusually rigorous logic when he decided that his two deceased wives should be buried in the same tomb.

• His crazy son William "Courtenay" Skyvington [1868-1959] used his aptitude for logical thinking to confirm that it was rather easy to behave as a scoundrel. His operations as a con-man were based upon the application of rigorous logic.

• My grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] used smart logical subterfuges to abandon his unpleasant childhood universe of London and start a new existence in the Antipodes. He even used his skills in logical reasoning to escape from the threat of being killed as a soldier.

• My father "Bill" Skyvington [1917-1978] used smart logical thinking to acquire his first agronomic property and to join the war effort in an acceptable manner. His most ingenious statement of poetic logic was when he tricked me in a mild way (I was about 15) by suggesting that his bush paddock was in fact his personal "cathedral".

That last incident had a profound lasting effect upon me. More than anything else, Dad's statement led me here to Gamone... where I look constantly upon the giant Cournouze mountain as my spiritual "bride", my Joan of Arc.

If anybody were to imagine a similarity between "Cournouze" and "Courtenay", I would be obliged to say that it's a pure coincidence.

Permanent imprint

On 9 January 2015, this printing-house at Dammartin-en-Goële in the French countryside (Seine-et-Marne) made an unforgettable impression upon TV-viewers throughout the world. It was the arena of a spectacular standoff between police sharpshooters and two defiant brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, perpetrators of the murders at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015.

The battered building has been totally renovated. The sparkling premises were inaugurated this morning by François Hollande.

Trying to find ancestors who made me smart

A few days ago, I was trying to solve the enigma of a charming ancestor named Frank Skyvington [1845-1916] whose son named William Skyvington [1868-1959] turned out to be a scoundrel. I kept saying to myself that it was strange to find a father and his son who were clearly so different. Why did this madness appear suddenly, before disappearing just as suddenly. I searched around intensely on the web to find an explanation of the ways in which chromosomes of madness might suddenly come into existence, maybe introduced by a baby’s mother. But every article I found on this genetic question was prefaced, as it were, by a huge warning: Be careful. Don’t assume that genes play any role whatsoever in the situation that concerns you. Maybe the factors that interest you were acquired, not from nature, but through nurture.

For ages, that sort of advice always infuriated me. It was unthinkable that environmental causes might have made me interested in science, then computers, then France, etc. To put it bluntly, nobody in my surroundings could have possibly persuaded me to get interested in out-of-the-way passions such as science, computers, France, etc. The only plausible explanation was that one of my ancestors must have supplied me with the necessary “good genes”.

Well, that last statement is utter nonsense. The only causes that make somebody smart come from the people who talk to him, the books he reads, the stuff he learns, etc. There are no magic genes in our bodies that turn on brightness as if we were an electric lamp.

It has taken me a long time to reach this simple conclusion.

Not as bright as I thought I was

I’ve always considered myself as relatively intelligent. That’s what people told me when I was a kid at school. Later, I thought I was bright when I became a computer programmer with IBM Australia. I simply failed to understand that I was merely the proverbial right man in the right place at the right time. Then I thought I was bright when I moved to France, married, raised a small family, and finally became a French citizen. Once again, as in Sydney, I was simply the right Australian in France at the right time. More recently, I started to think of myself as bright when I used my Macintosh computer at Gamone to publish a couple of family-history books. The truth of the matter is that I would have been silly to not take advantage of that excellent environment to produce those books. In any case, their existence doesn’t suggest for an instant that the author/publisher might have been in any way bright, merely fortunate.

A few days ago, for the first time in my life, at the august age of 76, the truth hit me with a bang. I’m not particularly intelligent. Purely lucky. The good old game consists of being in a convenient situation at exactly the right moment. Right place and right time. There’s a tiny bundle of convenient talents in my brain, but nothing whatsoever of an extraordinary nature.

It's high time that I made this clear! To myself, above all.

Still learning to master my dog

Some people ramble on for years about the novel they intend to publish, as soon as they find a publisher. I behave in the same way as far as mastering my dog is concerned. I talk about it constantly, and believe that my leap into mastery is just around the corner. But a bright observer (such as my son François) surely realizes that I’m unlikely to ever gain my diploma in dog mastery. It’s simply not in my genes.

For the last week or so, I had finally decided that the cold season is fast approaching us, and that it was time for me to accept the presence of Fitzroy inside the house. There’s no intrinsic dog-mastery problem in such a down-to-earth decision. All I have to do is to tie up Fitzroy outside, during the day, for at least an hour or so, to give him an opportunity of doing his business and having a pee. I repeat: no problem. If the worst came to the worst, and my dog decided to pee somewhere inside the house, in the middle of the night, it still wouldn’t be catastrophic. Besides, that situation would only arise if I went out of my way to give Fitzroy, late in the evening, a big bowl of milk… which would be a silly act for me.

Yesterday evening, Fitzroy was edging around the kitchen door as if he wanted to move out into the balmy night air. I must be careful about opening the door at such times, because my Gamone property is still a victim of disgusting Pyrale moths which dart towards any light that appears in the darkness. Be that as it may, last night, in the darkness, I did in fact make a single foolish mistake. I failed to attach my dog to a lead before letting him race out into the night air. Consequently, in the darkness, I failed to see where he had disappeared… but I soon learned (after a bit of silly shouting) that the Master’s animal was seated snugly in his kennel. (In daring to use the term “Master”, I was trying to crack a joke.) So, I dashed towards him and attached his collar to the chain alongside the kennel. Then I went back quickly inside the house, hoping that I wasn’t being pursued by too many moths. Once inside the lonely house, I watched some fine television, while listening periodically to check that my dog wasn’t barking.

This morning, at 8 o’clock, I was awoken by my clockwork brain. I saw from a window that Fitzroy, during the early hours of the morning, had performed an impressive wood-moving operation, over a distance of some ten metres. I grabbed my Nikon and took this photo of the result:

I have decided for the Nth time that, this evening, I will surely become, at last, an experienced dog-master. We'll see...

Peace at last for a man of peace

Shimon Peres [1923-2016]

 

French Moslems

Let us take a glance at the results of a recent IFOP poll of 1,029 individuals in France who consider themselves as Moslems. They can be broken into three categories:

 • 46 % are totally secular, or undergoing integration into the system of values of modern France.

• 25 % have a strong religious identity, but accept the existence in France of secularism.

• 28 % are Moslems who've adopted a system of values that are clearly opposed to those of the French Republic.

French specialists should examine the poll, to see if it was indeed conducted correctly. If so, then I'm troubled by the surprisingly large size of that third category.

Clearly I'm an ecumenical tweeter

Click to enlarge

I wonder what the letters FDN mean,
after the name of a Melbourne priest.

Is it possible that Father James Grant
belongs to the French Data Network ?

Smelly

An old publicity slogan remains well-known in France: « Il se passe toujours quelque chose aux Galeries Lafayette. » There's always something happening at the Galeries Lafayette department store.

For a long time, I've imagined naively that a few modern men's deodorants would keep me as fragrant as white lilies up until the cows come home. I've always liked a joke that doesn't seem to appeal to young generations: "I'm not basically a dirty or smelly person, so I don't need to wash myself regularly." Here's the sort of shit I smear upon my body to keep it fragrant:

Well, I've just come upon a disturbing news article about a typical happening at the Galeries Lafayette. It brings up the question of aluminium salts in deodorants. Apparently they're everywhere... like air pollution. It's almost impossible to understand a label that might warn you of dangers. And the basic danger in question is some kind of cancer, particularly for women.

Ghoulish Catholics

I've never understood why Catholics are so obsessed by blood and guts, as if the Creator had been particularly concerned by human anatomy. Well, yes, I do understand. We humans are obviously interested in such matters, because we often have to spend time getting bodily repairs carried out. So it's normal that we imagine the Creator being interested in the same messy meat as us. And other believers in magic can be more obsessed still.

Saint Padre Pio was a Capuchin friar (an offshoot of the Franciscans) who suffered constantly from an exotic bodily affliction that believers call stigmata. His hands displayed spontaneous flesh eruptions that reminded observers of the wounds inflicted upon their alleged hero of ancient times known as Jesus, about whom modern historians know next to nothing.

Well, preserved parts of the dead monk's internal organs have been placed in a plastic box, and they're currently being transported to places in America. Ghoulish pilgrims are coming out in droves. It's not often that they're offered a fleeting view (?) of a few pieces of relatively well-conserved meat.

I was better off sleeping

I don't suspect that many people in France stayed up late into the night to watch this debate. We've got far more interesting local stuff to see on TV, in prime hours. The New Yorker suggested recently that Hillary Clinton might have been seriously studying self-control.

In the case of such debates, there has to be a winner, otherwise it's not good entertainment. It appears that Hillary won by a big margin.

Click here to view a short talk between a French-speaking journalist and Oliver Stone, who sees the Clinton/Trump affair as a choice between the plague and cholera, between a warmonger and a madman.

Behavioral differences between members of the same family

In my post yesterday entitled Mongrel genes, I spoke of a curious change of behavior between a recent Skyvington father and his son. Well, no matter how hard I try to follow up this question on the web, I simply cannot understand how enormous behavioral differences might affect members of a single family. Explanations evoke inevitably the question of nature versus nurture. But I still fail to grasp the reasons why members of my own family group appear to be so different.

I grew up essentially in the same environment—indeed, in the same houses—as my brother and sisters, in simple rural settings, in similar educational contexts and social circles. But I have the impression that I evolved in totally different directions to my siblings. I often feel that I was "hit by a dose of mongrel genes", which have made me a very different individual to my siblings. For the moment, I simply fail to understand how these differences could have come about. I continue to believe, rightly or wrongly, that they were differences of nature rather than of nurture. But this opinion could well be erroneous.

In any case, I have no recollections of ever getting involved in "philosophical" discussions with specific adults, be they teachers or religious folk. The only individual whose remarks often sent shivers up my spine was my maternal grandmother, whom we called Grandma. She often analyzed critically the personality of my father, suggesting that he was what we might call "bipolar", constantly alternating between one kind of behavior and its opposite. Grandma used a mixed-up metaphor, saying that "the worm would turn". I think he meant that Dad was capable of abruptly reversing his personality. It's a metaphor that even Shakespeare used, but nobody knows its exact origins. Somebody suggests that the worm was a dragon, and that his "turning" simply meant that the beast was no longer about to attack us.

Grandma had lost her beloved husband Charles Walker [1882-1937] when he was still a relatively young man.

I often felt that this premature departure of her husband had destabilized the poor lady, and caused her to adopt a constantly harsh outlook on human existence. Grandma would go out of her way to make me realize that my own dear mother Kath could rapidly find herself placed "in the clay up on the hill at South Grafton" (that is, the local cemetery).

In another situation, Grandma plunged me into a state of despair when I saw her reacting most negatively to the fact that Bill, Kath and our family had failed to make a point of communicating with her when we traveled on vacation up around the Northern Tablelands. Because of our failure to communicate, Grandma said that she no longer wished to hear any words about our supposedly happy holiday. This austere character existed also in her elder sister Henrietta. Besides, let us not forget that these ladies were essentially descendants of Irish Protestants.

Is it imaginable that Grandma was transforming me when I was still a child, as it were, into the objective thinker that I would soon become ? It's certainly a highly recognizable case of nurture that cannot be denied.

Air-borne witch

These photos come from the 43rd annual Icarus Cup event near Grenoble. Here we see a witch running down the slopes:

Click to enlarge slightly

And here she's floating through the air, with a skeleton hitching a ride behind her:

Australia’s preferable mate: USA or China?

The French newspaper Le Monde informs us that this crucial question has arisen Down Under. May the better mate win.