Antipodes

The nasty stuff called global warming doesn't seem to have hit Gamone yet. This was the view, at midday, from in front of my log fire. S...

The ongoing conflict is Gaza is weird in many ways. First, there's the obvious question of why the Hamas suddenly decided, on December 1...

In one of my favorite newspapers, The New York Times , an article by Frank Rich entitled A President Forgotten but Not Gone [ display ] s...

The excellent French weekly L'Express has assembled a list of the best French quotes of 2008 [ display ] . Not all of them can be trans...

The silly verb " to party ", popular in The Sydney Morning Herald , might have been invented for Paris Hilton . Partying seems to ...

My 93-year-old uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker —a former dairy farmer from my birthplace at Waterview, near Grafton—has been living for the last ...

One of the most amusing, if not fulfilling, jobs I can imagine would be speechwriter for the pope. Let me explain. No matter what a run-of-t...

The first joke is factual. It concerns a delightful adolescent habit in the USA that consists of wearing a so-called purity ring and making...

It's absurd to apply the expression "Holy Land" to the tiny segment of hell on Earth named Gaza , where dozens have been dyin...

Whenever Emmanuelle drops down to Gamone for a few days, as is often the case, she looks after, not only her father (who takes pleasure in ...

This charming photo (copyright Sipa ) accompanies an article in the website of the Nouvel Observateur weekly [ display ] revealing that sa...

As far as I know, oysters were not a biblical foodstuff. As members of the shellfish category, oysters are not, of course, kosher. But I don...

I recall a Dilbert story in which the pointy-haired boss got caught in heavy rain in the parking lot and turned up soaked at the office. Di...

This evening on French TV, along with countless other followers of the Vendée Globe around-the-world yacht race, I was overjoyed to see an A...

For the last twenty-four hours, the international computer world has been thrown into a feverish state of agitation following a couple of ne...

In the region where I live, one of the most interesting places is the charming medieval village of Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye . In the Middl...

Certain individuals leave the scene rapidly, at the speed of gravity. Others take their time, leaving wearily in dribs and drabs, with their...

Here at Gamone, I'm accustomed to the usual presence of a few rodents of a rural kind, which I hardly ever see. They've never distur...

Corina sent me a link to this delightful video: Besides the fine footwork, sense of rhythm and choreography, I love the dog's enrapture...

My aunt Nancy Smith in Sydney reads this blog, and she's a keen golfer, like her husband Peter . (The adjective "keen" is a p...