Sting has reopened the Bataclan

We shall always remember the
victims of 13 November 2015.

#Bataclan

La culture sera la plus forte !

Click to enlarge slightly

For whom is this blog written?

That’s a good question, and I thank you very much for asking it. On Saturday, 9 December 2006, my very first blog post asked a similar question.

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.

Alas, I didn't have the courage at that time to provide my forthcoming readers with the proverbial truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It's not easy for me to reply, but let's see if I can be a little more honest today. First, I'll give you a hint. A few nights ago, I was intrigued by an unexpected early-morning dream. I found myself informing my readers that the name of my Antipodes blog would be replaced by a new title : The Notebook of William de Gamone. Readers who know me well will recognize instantly what's behind this choice.

• It's pure Rilke, associated with The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge.

• The author's name has been mildly Frenchified in a noble fashion by the addition of "de Gamone".

Let's no longer beat around the bush. Right from the start, ten years ago, my Antipodes blog has always been written primarily for myself. It's simply my on-screen notebook, for saving various ideas, and testing my ability to say various things in certain ways. Readers may have noticed that I've rarely gone out of my way to attract readers and their comments. Often they annoyed me, especially when I found them quarrelsome.

So, let me be perfectly clear. For whom is this blog written? Primarily, for a French-speaking fellow named William who lives at Gamone. Who has always been enchanted by the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke.

You merely wanted to catch a plane

In fact, you ended up catching a nasty bacterial infection at the level of your tail end. According to a study conducted by researchers of the University Hospital of Münster, that kind of affliction is a likely possibility in the toilets of 136 airports in 59 countries. Traces of Staphylococcus aureus were found on 5.5 % of samples from 400 door handles of toilets. To put it bluntly, disgusting data like that is enough to give you the shits.

Cohen song that's hard to understand

Leonard Cohen, 1976, in France

                                                           [photo Istvan Bajzat/Alliances]

The Cohen song Hallelujah was started in 1980, but wasn’t finally written until 1984. Naive listeners might fail to understand that it’s a highly erotic song.

An explicitly sensual version was brought out by Jeff Buckley.
Switch to YouTube to access the original Buckley's performance.

It's a song inspired by the singer's sexual relationship with a lady.

Democracy is leaving the USA

It's weird that Leonard Cohen should leave us at a moment when US democracy seems to be heading in the wrong direction. It's weird, too, that I'm celebrating memories of this great man on a public holiday in France: the 11th day of the 11th month, Armistice Day.

Towards the end of my Israel-inspired novel All the Earth is Mine [lookup in Amazon], I included an excerpt from Cohen's song. In my tale, the entire land of Israel is transformed by modern technology into a gigantic floating island, which spends its new existence sailing around the planet Earth.

Sail on, sail on, oh mighty ship of state

To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed


Though the squalls of hate


Sail on, sail on, sail on...

     

— Leonard Cohen, Democracy

Two angels and a holy man

The holy man has just left us in painful solitude.

Many years ago, in a Paris concert hall, I had the privilege of seeing
blonde Julie Christensen and dark Pearla Batella

accompanying Leonard Cohen.

They appeared to me as a pair of female angels surrounding a holy man.

Leonard Cohen on Chelsea Hotel

Like a bird in the sky

Leonard Cohen [1934-2016]

We were waiting to say farewell, dear Leonard.

We knew you were ready to leave.

You left us so elegantly, in your usual style, with no more

than a few words... for those who had already gone.

Presidential duration

I don’t like to behave like an old fortune-teller who reads magic stuff from all around him.

Over the last day or so, my mind has been invaded constantly by a conviction that President Trump will not last for very long. My imagination comes to a halt well before the New Year, probably even before Christmas… but my mind balks on what might happen to him.

Meanwhile, let me turn to an old friend, Noam Chomsky. A journalist asked him: What effect would electing Donald Trump have?

CHOMSKY: It’s hard to say because we don’t really know what he thinks. And I’m not sure he knows what he thinks. He’s perfectly capable of saying contradictory things at the same time. But there are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: “Climate change is not taking place.” As he puts it: “Forget it.” And that’s almost a death knell for the species. Not tomorrow... but the decisions we take now are going to affect things in a couple of decades. In a couple of generations, it could be catastrophic.

How is Trump going to deal with US technological giants?

The new president dreams of a friendly relationship with the smart guys in charge of Google, Apple, Facebook... who would tell him how to catch Islamic terrorists. It’s a nice idea, but those fellows might not necessarily rush out rapidly to assist Trump. Why would they? Up until now, they’ve never manifested any enthusiasm for Trump's “ideas”. In any case, computing and the Internet are such intricate phenomena that the reptilean brain of Trump would encounter huge problems in trying to understand them. Obama was smart enough to oversee correctly the elimination of Osama bin Laden. We’ll see if Trump is smart enough to catch devils that remain at large. I hope he is (with a little help from his friends), but I have my doubts.

Intelligence will inevitably prevail over idiocy

We shouldn't be too worried about Trump's victory. He might be able to earn dollars in real estate; but human beings need more than their personal wealth to change the world. They need intelligence. And Trump doesn't seem to have much of that. He will go down rapidly in world history as an American mistake. #Trump

Certain countries might take advantage of Trump's victory

Countries such as Canada and Australia might take advantage of Trump's win to attract high-level US scientists. In France, too, we might make an effort to attract various bright specialists in domains such as the development of military drones and artificial intelligence. Maybe Trump could do more for France, indirectly, than its current chief.

Decline in France of a great British firm

This morning, Marks & Spencer announced their intention to close more than a hundred of their shops throughout the world, including seven in France.

Their losses here for the financial year 2015-16 amounted to more than 26 million euros. That’s a lot of lot of butter biscuits in the tin box. The famous shortbread name is not appropriate. It's rather a case of being “short of bread”. They were delightful shops. So, what went wrong?

USA probably ends today

                                                           [photo Daniel Leal-Olivas AFP]

The marathon between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was worse than anything that most observers would have expected. Its only merit was that it didn’t end in death. If one of the two candidates had been genuinely and globally meritorious, the other could never have survived for more than a few days. So, the fact that the two candidates have carried on right up until today suggests that both of them had huge faults. Dark Ages are about to begin in the USA.

No new airport for Nantes

The construction of a new airport for Nantes at Notre-Dame-des-Landes seems to have crashed.

Archaic French beast

Next Wednesday in Paris, presidential candidate NKM (Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet) will be holding a major meeting, announced by means of a nostalgic old poster.

Certain candidates think that life in the old days was better.

Why don't we rather get together to design France Tomorrow ?

Are there really any presidential candidates who believe that life in France was better back in the good old days when our most powerful communications device was the Minitel? That would surprise me. It’s a fact that this gadget was once looked upon as a good invention, of which France could be proud. I remember a TV interview in which a journalist asked Laurent Fabius what he thought of personal computers. His reply included a curious phrase : “Yes, I use a Minitel.”

I was shocked by the words of Fabius, which fell like a stray hair in the soup. Most serious computer specialists always knew that this French invention (based in fact upon British research) was overrated, and did not deserve to be looked upon as any kind of genuine computer.

Be that as it may, people who continue to be a bit nostalgic about their Minitel days are offered a good solution today. Click here to see how you can use a product named AliStel to simulate the old Minitel gadget on a modern Apple iMac computer.

I haven't tried to test this application personally,
because I've never been a Minitel fan.

As for NKM’s suggestion of constructing together the new France, it would indeed be a good idea if in-depth projects in advanced computer science were to arise in France. But I don't think they have anything to do with the archaic Minitel. So, let it rest in peace.

Humble but extraordinary fish

In a living-room aquarium, in spite of its five horizontal blue stripes from head to tail, the zebrafish [Danio rerio], about 5 cm long, is not an exotic creature. Males have faint gold stripes between the blue, and females, silver. But these colors do not make the fish any more exciting.

Although it can neither change its stripes nor work in a circus or a zoo, the zebrafish can nevertheless perform one of the most extraordinary tricks in the entire animal kingdom. If ever its spinal chord were to be broken, the zebrafish is capable of repairing the damage, almost by magic. Click here to access a Wikipedia article on this animal.

The US Science magazine has just published an article [here] that indicates a fabulous research project that might be derived from this humble fish: namely, the possibility of finding out how to repair broken spines in humans.

Mac-based psychotherapy experience

Over a year ago, in July 2015, inside my house at Gamone, I suffered a severe accident. After consuming a little too much tasty white wine in the warm weather, I fell down the stairs and bumped my head. As a doctor told me later, I could have easily killed myself. My son François assumed the harsh task of taking a train from Brittany down to my region, and then driving me and my dog back up to Brittany. There, I was housed and cared for, not only by my son, but also by his mother Christine and her companion Michel. It was rough work for them, for several months, since I wasn’t an easy patient. To cut a long story short, I finally survived, thanks to my family and several skilled medical specialists, who patched me up remarkably well.

Since I was accompanied to Brittany by my Macintosh computer, I tried as best I could to manipulate it… but some of my previous Internet skills had been bumped into the backwoods by my accident. Personally, I was totally convinced that my basic technical intelligence—that’s to say, my computer skills—was intact…. which corresponded to official medical evaluations of the patient. Little by little, through playing around with my faithful Macintosh, I was able to confirm, slowly but surely, that most of my former Internet functionality was indeed operational, although there were several technical zones in which I continued to behave a little shakily.

Over the months that followed, right up to and including today, I have been able to use my hardware (including a new iMac and several external disks) to confirm that I know what I’m doing in the Internet domain. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my friendly Mac world has been playing a significant role as a psychotherapy guide and yardstick. For example, since the accident, I found it impossible to link a powerful external disk to either of my two iMac computers. It was only yesterday that I played around with this external disk long enough to discover that it must have been screwed up a little by contacts with somebody’s PC environment, and that I would have to reformat and reinitialize it. I lost no time in doing so, and everything returned to normal… as it had been before my accident.

The most amazing thing of all is that I am now tackling various aspects of my familiar Macintosh world in a more rigorous manner than before my fall down the stairs. The therapy challenges have made me an even better Mac user than I used to be.

Tough times for Samsung

After the problems of their Galaxy device with exploding batteries, the South Korean Samsung company is now faced with complaints about 34 models of washing machines, some of which were manufactured in China and Thailand. If they succeed in surviving, they're stronger than what I imagined.

Super Moon

Super Moon photographed in September 2015

(VLADIMIR ASTAPKOVICH / RIA NOVOSTI)

The most voluminous Super Moon of the 21st century will be visible on Monday 14 November 2016. Seen from France, the Moon will be biggest at 14h52. That’s not of course an ideal time to get involved in Moon watching, but it will remain spectacularly big throughout the evening. Our celestial neighbor hasn’t been closer to the Earth since 1948. And it won’t be getting any nearer to us for a very long time. So, this is your sole chance to see the Moon at such a small distance that you could truly lean out and touch its surface with a stick no more than 350,000 km in length... if only you could wield such a long stick.