My fig trees are still too young to bear fruit, but the next best thing to having your own fig trees is living alongside a neighbor whose fig trees have a plentiful yield... especially when the neighbor in question is not, himself, keen on figs. That's the case with Bob.
I wander up to Bob's place every afternoon to bring back a plate of excellent figs. Sophia, too, has become very keen on over-ripe figs that fall from Bob's trees.
[Click the image to see the video.]
[Click the image to see the video.]
Once you've downloaded the file, it's preferable to read it on the screen of your computer, rather than printing out some or all of the 53 pages on a color printer, since you can use the enlarge feature of your PDF reader to zoom in on photos, etc.
[Click the photo to access the Dickenson website.]
[Click the photo to visit Yves Rossy's high-powered website.]
To my mind, Rousson looks more like a banana-bag Dickensonian inventor than FusionMan. Doesn't that photo remind you of the closing images from Speilberg's marvelous ET ?
The kind of device to be used by Stéphane Rousson was in fact imagined by a certain Frenchman named Goupil (colloquial term for a sly fox) back in 1885.
Goupil's dirigible airship was to be constructed of a silk sheathing around a wooden carcass. In the original article published in Chronique industrielle, the inventor points out that it will indeed be possible, shortly (?), for a cyclist to rise into the air and ride along a desired itinerary... but "only when the atmosphere is not perturbed by storms". So, you've been warned!
Seasoned fliers have learned that the greatest luxury, on long-distance flights, is to be able to stretch yourself out. This goal was attained in a design of 1889, which might be thought of as a kind of precursor John Dickenson's invention of 1963.
Somebody said in a comment to one of my recent posts about John Dickenson: "People have been successfully hang gliding since the 1800s." I don't know whether the devices illustrated in the above engravings were what you might call successful inventions. In this line of thinking, the thing that impressed me most in my recent face-to-face encounter with John Dickenson is the fact that, not only did he invent and test a free-flying wing, but he also survived his invention! In making that declaration, I feel a little like a joyful Saint Thomas crying out on the clifftops that he has actually poked his fingers through the holes in the blue plastic banana bags.
The ad says: A frank discussion at last on a subject that has long been taboo. The elegant fellow is asking his sophisticated but timid lady friend if she swallows it. Cigarette smoke, that is.
The idea of believing in yourself implied, of course, that you should pay no attention to annoying people who claim that smoking might be a terrible danger. For example: What's all the talk about plutonium?
Lance Armstrong exerts the same kind of New World fascination upon ordinary French people as the powerful US saviors of Normandy in 1944. When SuperMan moves in to your rural towns and villages, you simply sit down by the roadside, in awe, and watch the action.
Certain observers contend that a historical prototype only merits the designation "invention" if it was a direct precursor of a popular modern device. Such critics are wading through historical quicksand, since their alleged "inventions" are appearing and disappearing at the same speed as current progress in technology and marketing. This is particularly true in a domain that is considerably more familiar to me, personally, than hang gliders. I'm referring to computers. Maybe certain naive folk would be happy if today's history books were to claim, say, that Bill Gates invented the computer! It goes without saying that I wouldn't agree with them.
This engraving comes from an issue of the excellent magazine Scientific American (to which I subscribe today) dated 1865. A Baltimore inventor had sent in a letter to the editor suggesting the exploitation of a team of eagles as "a means of air transport that would be extremely simple and not costly". He calculated that, since a bird can carry up to 10 kg in its claws [legend of vicious eagles clutching lambs and children], only ten would be required to transport an adult passenger, enclosed (for safety?) in a metallic cage. The Baltimore fellow explained that a "system of ropes" could be manipulated like reins by the human passenger, obliging the eagles to orient their flight in any desired manner. American science in 1865!
Many aircraft [archival images] were decorated with weird colorful trappings, since one of the basic goals of the Coupe d'Icare, if I understand correctly, is to entertain the crowd.
Often, the parapentes carried, not only the pilot, but one or even two passengers. Dozens of slim airfoils, manned by daredevil experts, provided us with acrobatic displays: loops, spins and cliff crawling, terminating in high-speed descents and horizontal landings that always appeared to me as near crashes.
Five minutes later, I learned with amazement that I had witnessed the flight of the eagle Sherkan and his human friend and trainer, a Swiss master of falconry, Jacques-Olivier Travers, conveyed by a third team member, Laurent Cochard, an experienced parapente pilot.
This is a truly beautiful and unique story, which is rapidly becoming world-renowned. I haven't found any English-language video that presents this case of an amazing bird/man relationship, but you can click the photo to access a short presentation on French TV. To obtain more information, Google with the French expression "aigles du leman" (eagles of Lake Léman), and look for their English-language pages. Magnificent stuff!
And the ascension ends with a scary trip through a black tunnel: the steepest passenger tunnel of any kind in the world. I prefer not to think of what might happen if the steel cable connecting the two cars were to break. A couple of local girls with whom I started to chat while awaiting the departure assured me that it was unthinkable that the cable might ever break... because it had been in operation since 1924, and it hadn't broken yet. Good optimistic thinking!
I nearly got eaten up, with my camera and all, in the embrace of a couple of giant Oriental puppets, who would not have surprised me one iota if they had suddenly ascended into the blue Icarian sky above the delightful village of Saint Hilaire du Touvet.
Strange creatures on stilts created panic in the crowd. One imagined that they might slip and slide off the cliffs.
Elsewhere on the plateau, crazy but serious members of a local quintet in black costumes and top hats insisted that visitors arriving in the lovely little alpine village should wipe their feet on door mats.
Confused tourists, of course, were at a loss to know how to react... so we saw them wiping assiduously their feet. Delightful detail: From time to time, the absurd crew decided that such-and-such a visitor had to be measured with a wooden yardstick to see if he/she might not be too big to enter the village. Their actions were conducted so seriously that tourists obeyed... whereupon successful entrants of a plump kind were rewarded with a tap on the buttocks with the yardstick. Nice fun of a second-degree kind. Simple and innocent, but never vulgar nor tiring.
Ah, what a magnificent concept for those who, unlike me, are not the victims of vertigo. Jumping into nothingness! If only my father had behaved like that! I would have been spared both a religious adolescence and a lifetime of catching up on existentialists such as Albert Camus and Richard Dawkins. [Soon, maybe, I should think about the idea of awarding nice little Gamonian key rings to perspicacious readers of Antipodes who succeed in detecting blog posts in which William has failed to sneak in even a tiny mention of his Oxfordian hero Dawkins.]
A few days ago, in an article entitled Inventor of the hang glider [display], I spoke of my joyful encounter with my compatriot John Dickenson, who has been a guest of honor at the Coupe d'Icare. A replica of Dickenson's 1963 wing was hung up in one of the halls at Saint Hilaire du Touvet.
Unfortunately, its curved whitish form could hardly be distinguished from that of the enclosing marquee.
It certainly doesn't make me want to throw away my Mac and move to MicroShit. On the other hand, this sketch with Mr Bean is charming:
It's amusing to see that the Apple ads of the "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC" series have created what might be called a publicity paradigm, in the sense that they're being used as a yardstick of excellence. PC people realize that they can't create anything better than these ads, which viewers are not likely to forget overnight, so they merely try to jump on the bandwagon in one way or another, in a vain attempt to borrow the Apple momentum.
The three bottles in this photo have the same capacity, 50 centiliters, which is two-thirds that of an ordinary wine bottle. As you can see, I often use a fashionable tall and thin version of this bottle for my walnut wine, but the transparent glass has the disadvantage of revealing stains. This modern bottle, popular in France for prestigious samples of white and rosé wines, has an empty weight of about 450 grams.
[Click the image to visit the website that sells this beautiful object.]
The plastic casing is pure Ikéa, whereas the time-keeping mechanism is pure Chinese. A nice tandem. And that's the way the fortune cookie crumbles. I really must offer this object as a gift to Corina, the next time I see her. I haven't had time [How could I, with such a device?] to analyze the product carefully, but I have the impression that the Chinese engineers have incorporated into their mechanism—no doubt for pure fun, like fireworks—some kind of incredibly miniature high-tech device for generating random numbers, which are then used to determine the slowing factor applied to the displayed time. On the other hand, a lot of the energy supplied by the clock's battery has been channeled by the Chinese engineers into the audio production of a huge once-a-second thud that is guaranteed to prevent anybody from sleeping in the same room as this extraordinary gadget.
As I said in yesterday's article on this subject [display], in Dickenson's home country, Australia, certain revisionists have been trying absurdly to deny his role in history. In France, there is no such bickering. On the contrary, two Frenchmen—Stéphane Malbos and Jean-Paul Budillon—were the first aeronautical historians to discover the importance of John Dickenson's pioneering work. Well before nasty disputes on this question were ignited in Australia, no doubt through jealousy and vested interests, the website of the French Federation of Free Flight (with headquarters at Nice on the French Riviera) made it clear that John Dickenson was the inventor of the delta-wing hang glider. Towards the end of 2002, I relayed this information in my personal website concerning my childhood township of South Grafton.
My bedside table in steel and walnut is finished... except for the final treatment of the wood. It cost me exactly a hundred euros. And I purchased a nice Ikea halogen lamp, maximally pivotable, that's exactly what I need for reading Richard Dawkins in bed. As you can see from the photo, the table had to be narrow, to fit in between my West Australian jarrah-wood bed and bookshelves.
I've repeated the title of a short article I wrote nearly a year and a half ago [display]. I admire this woman. I persist in believing that Tzipi Livni might achieve marvels at the head of that rugged nation, still so close to its violent pioneering roots. Many people think back nostalgically to the era of Golda Meir. Born in Tel Aviv, the daughter of diehard Irgun activists, Tzipi Livni has been a lawyer and a fighter, who once worked for the Mossad. At the head of the Kadima party, her major opponent from now on is Bibi Netanyahu, who will surely do his best to make it difficult for Tzipi Livni to accede to the top post of Israel. It'll be a good fight. May the best (wo)man win!
This solution doesn't work well for reading in bed, because the lamp head can't be swiveled as much as one would like. So, I set out to find an ideal solution.
Cost = 55 euros. Next, I needed a couple of walnut slabs. That's the point at which the design of furniture became a splendid quest for authenticity. I soon located a timber mill alongside the mysterious tiny village of Albenc, known to Nostredamus, described in my article of 10 October 2007 entitled Intriguing tourist [display]. I purchased an aged slab of walnut. Cost = 30 euros. I now await the cabinet-maker's trivial invoice for two finished walnut shelves. What I'm trying to say is that designing one's custom-made furniture can be—in the case of a simple bedside steel-and-walnut structure—an exhilarating low-cost experience... with warm repercussions, after effects, every time you snuggle into bed with a good book.
[Click the photo to visit the Dickenson website, based upon the remarkable
[Click the poster to visit their website. If you don't read French,
I sensed immediately that there was a change in Pif's behavior, for he seemed to hesitate before coming down to meet up with us. But, after a few minutes, he finally dashed down.
I was amused to see that Pif now wears a nice little blue metal badge informing us that he has an electronic chip implanted in his body. For Alison to resort to such technology, I would guess that Pif has probably been doing a few disappearing tricks over the last couple of weeks.
As always, he splashed his broad snout around in the bowl of water in front of the house.
Then, he surprised me by calmly trotting off back home, like a wise little dog. This behavior was so unexpected that I wondered, for an instant, whether Pif might not be under the influence of a mysterious high-tech homing device. A more plausible explanation: Maybe Pif has simply attained the canine equivalent of the age of reason.
Now, let me drop the inverted commas around "letter": a metaphor for nucleotide. From one human being to another, throughout the planet, 99% of DNA sequences are identical. But every now and again, for such-and-such a fragment of DNA, one of the letters might be different, as illustrated here:
As you can see, in the normal fragment of DNA, the third letter is green, whereas in the case of the individual we've just encountered, the third letter is red. If this kind of variation occurs for at least one in every hundred new individuals they examine, geneticists refer to the changed letter as an SNP, pronounced "snip". In the case of humans, potential snips are commonplace. They probably number around 3 million. But, as I said, for any particular snip, only a small proportion of humans will possess the changed letter. Concerning the vast majority of snips, geneticists have no idea whatsoever of the consequences upon an individual, if any, of the changed letter. On the other hand, certain snips have been identified as sources of possible health problems, meaning that they can be used as medical indicators... which is why snips are of interest to pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline.
There has been so much rain in the region over the last week or so that I welcomed this late Sunday afternoon rainbow over the Bourne, with the sunlit Cournouze in the background. Talking of rainbows, the poetry-inspired book by Richard Dawkins entitled Unweaving the Rainbow [which I've mentioned already in Antipodes] is truly a masterpiece. I should say: yet another Dawkins masterpiece.
This charming US specimen of the female sex claims she's a virgin. Based upon that hypothesis, she's offering her body to the highest male bidder/screwer at a starting price of a million bucks. To me, that sounds like an absurdly expensive deal. And it also sounds a bit like what we old-timers used to call prostitution. But I'm sure there'll be takers. The bottom line [no pun intended] is that the young lady, whose code name is Natalie Dylan [Google with this name to obtain the whole "truth" concerning this affair], intends to use her ill-gotten gains to pay her way through university, where she would like to major in family and conjugal psychology.
