Antipodes

Most observers of this morning's 14 July parade on the Champs-Elysées will award top marks, I'm sure, to the new producer and direc...

I don't know whether there's an expression in colloquial English for the French notion of a so-called poisoned gift . In a nutshell,...

In the popular image, on 14 July 1789 , the people of Paris stormed the huge fortress jail of the wicked Ancien Régime , called the Bastille...

I ignore the circumstances in which the Australian cyclist Robbie McEwan might or might not have said to football folk: " You chase a ...

Besides its purely sporting dimensions in the domain of competitive cycling, an aspect of the Tour de France that thrills TV viewers is the...

This is post #333 in my Antipodes blog, it's Friday 13 [a lucky number for the French cineaste Claude Lelouch... so why not for me too?]...

Exactly half a century ago [when I had just started science and philosophy studies at Sydney University, and was about to meet up with compu...

You can click on my name to visit my new MySpace site: William . But there's nothing there yet. However, since everybody seems to have ...

In the part of south-east France where I'm settled, people are still aware of, and indeed sensitive to, bloody conflicts that took place...

A year ago, I went along to a major store in Valence [the Fnac] to obtain information on a digital camera, and then I actually bought it thr...

A great Franco-Israeli intellectual has just died in the Holy City: 89-year-old André Chouraqui , counselor of David Ben-Gurion, friend of M...

Cindy Sheehan 's 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq over three years ago. Since then, this lady has become known as an anti-war activist...

I can't make up my mind about which of the two big events was the more idiotic: the Live Earth concerts around the world that are supp...

I don't know whether or not the world in general has been behaving similarly, but many people here in France are somewhat bewitched by t...

In a country such as France, where the political cleavage between the Left and the Right is ancient and profound, Nicolas Sarkozy's ouve...

That's the nickname in French of the Tour de France : la grande boucle . It's weird but wonderful to think that it'll be startin...

An hour ago, Sophia started to bark furiously in the direction of the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek. Once outside, I could hear t...

Clearly, the only efficient tool for trashing computer files is a hammer. The destruction process should of course encompass, not only the c...

My Australian background is linked to a pair of bridges. One, of course, is the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The other is the double-decker road/r...

At high school, our dear old ruffled chemistry teacher Gerald Spring liked to tell his favorite joke about a French barber. Holding up a mi...