Half the local Aussie population is leaving!

Sheridan Henty arrived in Pont-en-Royans in May 2003, having purchased a huge village house on the banks of the Bourne that was rebuilt in 1955 after the Nazi bombing of 21 July 1944. The original owner was a maquisard named Hugues Reynaud du Charmeil, killed in the bombardment.

When I first met up with Sheridan (an inevitable encounter in an environment where we were the only two Australians), I was amazed to learn that she was the sole descendant of the famous Henty brothers who left England on the barque Caroline and reached the Swan River, Western Australia, on 12 October 1829. [I remember that date because my brother Don was born on 12 October 1941, and our father died on 12 October 1978.] This tiny fuzzy drawing, executed by James Henty, shows the Caroline anchored off Rottnest Island:

Shortly after Sheridan's arrival, I learned by chance that my ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860] had reached Sydney on that same ship, working as a steward, on 6 August 1833. So, there we were in Pont-en-Royans, two shipwrecked Aussies whose ancestors had reached the New World on the same vessel.

Unfortunately, Sheridan has discovered that she cannot carry on living in Pont-en-Royans, so she has sold her house and will be moving back to Paris in the next few days. Yesterday, there was a delightful farewell luncheon for Sheridan in an excellent village restaurant.


Meanwhile, Sheridan Henty has given me officially the task of obtaining a valuation of her mysterious and magnificent ceramic plaque of a youthful Victoria. [Click here to visit my website.]

Back at school in South Grafton, we children learned that the Hentys couldn't stay for long in Western Australia because their English animals, brought out on the Caroline, ate poisonous weeds and died. So they left for what would later become the city of Melbourne, and they got involved in Tasmanian whaling. Here in the Royans, there are no poisonous weeds, but Sheridan is leaving us all the same. When a Henty moves, there might be great changes, as in the old radio saga of When a girl marries. In any case, whales in the Seine should be warned of impending danger.

Max gets mad about the Mayas

American sheilas should know that you don't fuck around with us Aussie blokes about ancient history, particularly when we've got Firm Convictions. And we all know that Mel Gibson has always had Firm Convictions, even about biblical stuff such as the treatment of Jesus. Mel knows what really happened. Don't ask me how or why. I have no answers. We must simply believe in Mel.

Last Thursday, Mel dropped in to a Californian university to talk about his recent film Apocalypto. Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American Studies, complained about the fact that Gibson's film presented the Mayas as savages. The academic passed the microphone to a Mayan representative, Felipe Perez, who made the mistake of speaking his native tongue, Spanish. This created a disturbance in the audience. There were boos and cries: "This is America. Speak English!" In spite of his having posed as a specialist on the Mayans, Mel Gibson revealed that he too was not a man of many tongues: "I can't understand what you're saying." In the confusion, microphones were turned off, and then turned back on again, enabling Mad Max to sum up the situation. Turning towards the eminent academic Alicia Estrada, Gibson blurted out: "I think you're a fucking troublemaker, so fuck off."

I'm not sure that many researchers would be prepared to adopt Gibson's blunt method of handling scholarly questions, which we can sum up in Mel's Mad Maxim: Fucking troublemakers should fuck off!

Reading

Over the last six months, my acquisition of English-language books has increased considerably because of the ease of getting them through the local branch of Amazon. Meanwhile, for old stuff of a historical or genealogical nature, the Gallica service of the BnF (bibliothèque nationale de France) has been useful at times, but not as much as I would have hoped. [Click here to see this service.]









A new system named Europeana has just gone into action. It is the French contribution to a future European digital library with an ugly but logical name: BnuE (bibliothèque numérique européenne). It goes without saying that this European initiative aims explicitly to counteract the dominance of Google Book Search in this domain. If you want to read, not only Racine and Hugo, but also Shakespeare, Dickens and Dante, then Europeana is the place to go. [Click here or on the banner to visit the website, whose interface is only in French for the moment.] For the moment, the catalog of Europeana is not very rich, compared with Google's present achievement of a million scanned books. [Click here to visit Google Book Search.]

If everything goes as planned, the great advantage of Europeana, compared with Google Books, will be the possibility of downloading fragments of a book in text format, so that they can be pasted into the user's work.

For me, the subject of books reveals that I remain a very old-fashioned fellow. While I love to see stuff flashing up onto the screen of my Macintosh, I must admit that there's nothing better, on cold evenings, than to sit in front of my open fireplace, with my bare feet up on the hearth, and a good book in my hands.

I remember our potter friend Maurice Crignon pointing out that the "three eights" system applies, not only to ordinary folk (roughly: work, personal affairs and sleep), but also to monks (even more roughly: their daily schedule of prayers, worldly activities and sleep). Well, I've created a personal three-part breakdown for my daily existence. It's not an earthshaking invention. The early moments of the morning are for thinking. The main part of the day is for writing or working on my computer. And evenings are for reading, or watching a little TV. I'm convinced that the human brain functions in a way that encourages this particular time-based division of operations.

Ordinary, all too ordinary

I've finally learned how to pronounce the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once you get into the habit of pronouncing the syllables smoothly and rapidly, they just roll off the tongue: mah-meud ah-mah dee-neuh jad. A couple of days ago, he was interviewed for the first time by French TV, and he came across (in an erratic context of language translation) as a very ordinary guy. Too ordinary, in fact, to be true. The French often apply a silly expression to individuals who talk as if they might be sneering slightly and trying to avoid an authentic contact. They say that he/she has a tête à claques (slappable face). Watching him trying to avoid the direct questions asked politely by the calm French journalists, I couldn't help feeling that it would be fun to slap Mahmoud's bearded face. But I realize that my reaction is a variant of an obsession whenever I see a guy sporting a beard like a banner, for alleged religious reasons. I feel like taking out a can of pink aerosol paint and giving his beard a few spurts, to make it stand out even more clearly. [For red and purple robed cardinals of Rome, I would use white paint, or maybe simply the traditional technique of cream tarts.]

We learn this morning that Ahmadinejad won't be visiting New York as planned to address the UN Security Council. He claims that his delegation couldn't get their US visas in time. If it's true that the US embassy in Switzerland was sluggish in supplying these documents, it's indeed a shocking predicament, like missing a train because the ticket seller had stepped outside for a smoke. Let's await explanations.

Howard speaks out on brutality

I don't usually see Australian PM John Howard as a positive leader on the world scene, but I must admit that I liked his rough style of talking about Zimbabwe and its president Robert Mugabe:

"Frankly, I've run out of patience. Most people have run out of patience about what's happening in Zimbabwe. We pussyfoot around far too much using diplomatic language. This man is a disaster. His country is just a total heap of misery."

Above all, we must applaud the courage and pragmatism of Australia's consul in Zimbabwe, Mark Lynch, who protected Sekai Holland—a female member of the MDC opposition party (Movement for Democratic Change) whose husband is Australian—by driving her to the airport and putting her on a plane to Johannesburg.

Howard described the context in which Holland had been bashed:

"The police are using brutal tactics. They're bashing up opposition politicians. They're fracturing skulls. They're behaving in a totally unacceptable fashion."

What a pity that Howard didn't use this kind of direct language in describing the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. [Click here for further photos.]

Second-hand creativity

I've often denounced a parasitic offshoot of creativity that takes an existing instance of genuine inspiration and reworks it insipidly to produce a pale copy. The example I've always used when whining is that of blue jeans. Once upon a time, the first adolescents who were so emotionally attached to their battered old pants that they refused to throw them away, even when they had holes at the level of the knees and buttocks, were authentic creators, who had invented a new sartorial concept: that of clothes with worn threads... not only at the seams. A variation on this theme was the case of kids whose jeans were a shade too long, so that they tended to put their heels on the cuffs of their pants, which would soon become threadbare and scruffy, often muddy. Another example of the bond between youngsters and their jeans was the idea of using a needle and thread to attach some kind of personal emblem to this mass-produced clothing whose aspect had become standardized. Some kids sewed on a cloth badge of one kind or another, but the most brilliant invention consisted of devoting time and effort to embroider a colorful message to observers, maybe admirers: the wearer's nickname, or the name of his /her idol or loved one. Imagination was in power, as Parisian adolescents wrote on the walls of the city in May 1968, and there were no limits to the ways in which young people might express spontaneously their attachment to this second skin: their jeans.

Then the marketing men and the industrial product designers stepped into the picture... and that's where the annoying phenomenon of second-hand creativity took over. They invented nasty techniques to mass-produce artificially "used" jeans, to make them look discolored and threadbare, to "personalize" them with badges and embroidery...

The notorious Hillary 1984 video (whose author has just been unmasked) provides us with a typical case of second-hand creativity. [Click here to see it on YouTube.] The primordial Macintosh ad, which ran on TV 23 years ago, was an extraordinary and daring work of creation. No such praise can be attributed to the messy mashup that has nevertheless just scored over two million hits on YouTube. This pale copy carries no clear message, but it manages to make Hillary Clinton look good in her Big Sister role. Meanwhile, the anonymous author was frankly dishonest when suggesting that the video might have been produced by Obama's team.

The concept of second-hand humor is similar to that of second-hand creativity. What I mean is that somebody invents a great joke, and then other dim-witted folk believe they can be funny by constructing insipid variants of the initial story. Some kind of general principle seems to be at play, meaning that second-hand things are inevitably dull. In the village, the witty innkeeper once invented a disdainful description for the endless series of new girlfriends, often mature ladies, whom his buddy used to bring along to the bar on the back of his motorcycle. The innkeeper referred to them by a French expression that can be translated as second-hand women.

Missing word

There's an ordinary French word that nobody, apparently, has ever bothered to translate into English: francophonie, meaning the existence of French, in many societies throughout the world, as an everyday operational language. Let me fill in this gap. Since the use of telephones is referred to, in English, as telephony, there's no reason why the use of French should not be called Francophony. Yesterday, March 20, was Francophony Day for 200 million French-speaking people throughout the world: a celebration organized by OIF [Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie]. Among other things, Francophony Day reminds us that the next Tour de France and Bastille Day are less than four months away.

Vernal equinox

My house at Gamone looks eastwards onto a vast half-circle of cliffs, which means that, throughout the year, I'm particularly conscious of the changing spot on the horizon where the morning sun first pokes its nose up above a cliff. Today is the vernal equinox: the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This morning, the sun appeared over the distant cliffs at the far end of the valley of the Bourne, directly in front of my house, and it had more than enough room to rise in the sky without hiding behind the Cournouze. The only problem is that the weather has remained so overcast today that I didn't see much of the sun at all.

Since settling down at Gamone, I've realized retrospectively that the evolving itineraries of the sun, and even the existence of the seasons, were aspects of the environment of which I was totally unconscious during my adolescence in Australia. I believe that my only vague awareness of the points of the compass was due to the fact that I grew up in a town named South Grafton, so I concluded that the place called Grafton no doubt lay to the north.

Unfortunately, in the pre-Alpine region of the Vercors, the night sky is invariably cloudy, which means that it's not an ideal place for star-gazing. I'm not at all sure that Galileo, if he had lived here at Gamone, would have got around to inventing the telescope. Worse than that, in view of the massive nature of the cliffs around the Circus of Choranche, it's not at all unlikely that Galileo would have carried on believing that these gigantic walls of stone remain stationery, and that the sun actually does the moving, gliding over the top cliffs. That's how it looks to me.

War effort

This famous photo shows Princess Elizabeth changing a lorry wheel during World War II. The 19-year-old heiress to the throne had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Services with the same rank as a second lieutenant. By the end of the conflict, she had become a Junior Commander capable of driving military vehicles. And today, it's quite possible that Prince Harry will soon be serving in Iraq.

In the Los Angeles Times, the Bush family biographer Kitty Kelley has just written a scathing article whose provocative title is indeed an excellent rhetorical question: Why aren't the Bush daughters in Iraq? [Click here to read the article.] In other words, why aren't they setting a moral example of patriotic service by playing some kind of meaningful role in the allegedly "noble" war being conducted by their father?

Discovery Channel

During the night, a centimeter-thick veil of snow covered everything at Gamone, from flowering shrubs through to my automobile. Apparently most of France has been hit by this cold spell.

Only two days ago, the television showed us Alberto Contador riding along magnificent sun-drenched mountain roads to his victory in the Paris-Nice race. It's amusing to recall that Contador's US employer, Discovery Channel, was in the limelight a few weeks ago because of a happening that had nothing to do with cycling. They're the people who aired the controversial documentary, produced by James Cameron and directed by Simcha Jacobovici, about a tomb near Jerusalem that contained bone boxes labeled Jesus, Mary, etc.

I don't know what the Spaniard Alberto Contador thinks about Discovery Channel's version of the Jesus story. Three years ago, he had a terrible fall in the Tour of the Asturias. With his jaws shattered, and suddenly racked by convulsions, 21-year-old Contador was taken to hospital in a critical state, and many observers, including fellow cyclists, feared that he might not survive. So, in Christian terms, Contador's brilliant performance in Paris-Nice on Sunday might be thought of as a miracle, a resurrection.

Not strawberry weather

Over the sunny weekend, I started digging up the earth for my strawberry patch. This morning, the plants were sitting on the floor of my living room, waiting to be taken out and placed in the earth. And then the sun disappeared behind low clouds, the sky turned gray, and fine hail started to fall. Ten minutes later, the hail had changed into rain and then snow. Not exactly the kind of weather for planting strawberries.

Opposite my house, on the other side of Gamone Creek, a dense wood on a steeply-sloped section of the hillside is a haven for roe deer. Over the last week or so, I've been enthralled by the non-stop symphony of bird calls emanating from the somber trees, which will be transformed into a mass of greenery in spring. In the precociously warm weather (according to the calendar, it's still winter), I had the impression that the birds were singing for joy. This afternoon, under the snow, they're still singing, but the tones are subdued and the melodies less strident, as if the singers were a little alarmed, or at least confused. Like us all.

Fourth anniversary

On Friday, the French PM Dominique de Villepin visited Harvard University, invited by the political science professor Stanley Hoffmann. Four years ago, that same Frenchman spoke to the United Nations in New York about the dangers of a US invasion of Iraq. A major American newspaper said that, over recent years, everything has changed except Bush's conviction that he can win the war in Iraq. Something else that has not changed during the last four years is France's conviction that this terrible and costly fiasco is not a war that can be won. By terrorists, maybe, but certainly not by Bush.

In the realms of international diplomacy, no politically-correct head of state or his ministers would ever refer to their foreign counterparts by means of derogatory personal remarks or judgments. The representatives of the Republic express themselves with a quality known in French as réserve. Besides, they avoid any remarks that might be interpreted as interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. For those reasons, it would be unthinkable for Jacques Chirac or Dominique de Villepin to react in the way as Australian PM John Howard when he recently blasted the US presidential candidate Barack Obama. But the fact that no French leaders refer to Bush explicitly as an idiot doesn't prevent onlookers from reading between the lines and guessing that this is what they think. One has the impression that nobody in France is keen to talk to Bush any more, or even talk about him. He seems to have become a kind of international nonentity, and people are simply waiting for him to go away, or be chased away.

Getting back to Dominique de Villepin, it's hard to guess what he's going to do with himself after the departure of Chirac in a month or so, because this man has never been an elected politician, and it would be funny seeing a former PM striving to pick up votes in a provincial electorate. During his American visit, somebody asked him whether he felt like becoming an expatriate... maybe in the USA. "No, " replied de Villepin curtly, "I'm too French."

Rugby victory for France

For many French TV viewers, yesterday was a busy day. First, at the start of the afternoon, there was the second-last stage of the Paris-Nice cycling race. Then there was a grueling series of three major rugby matches. Personally, I decided to turn the TV off and drive to St Marcellin to buy some plants: a flowering shrub and strawberries.

So, it wasn't until much later in the day that I learned that France had thrashed Scotland, and that England had failed to beat Wales. It's encouraging that France, as host nation of the forthcoming World Cup, has at least emerged victorious from the European six-nations tournament.

Cheese and wine portrait

Whenever Natacha finds me eating cheese and drinking wine, she has an urge to take a posed photo. Unusual behavior, no? The cheese and wine must send out photographic waves, or something like that.

Our dogs

These lovely peaceful photos of Sophia and Jojo on the kitchen floor were taken by Natacha on Sunday 11 March. It was clear to me, from the first moments I saw the dear old hairy dog, that he was in a poor physical state, although he didn't appear to be suffering, and was apparently perfectly alert. At one stage, while I was preparing a salad, Jojo even pointed his long snout up towards me, indicating that he would like a slice of tomato. That amused me: a dog who likes tomatoes. At one point, outside on the lawn, Sophia pranced around her friend, trying to coax Jojo into racing around with her. But Jojo's racing days were over.

On Sunday, though, I would not have imagined that, within three days, Jojo's life on Earth would be over.

Gifts from Provence

Whenever Natacha and Alain drive up here to Gamone to see me, they always bring along gifts. In an earlier post, I mentioned the sexy religious biscuits. They also supply me regularly with fine Marseilles olive-oil soap from the famous Le Sérail manufacturer founded in 1949.

On Sunday, they also brought me a lovely bonsai fig tree, grown by Natacha, which I've placed on the kitchen window sill between a pair of tiny jacaranda trees (also grown from seeds from Provence).

Like Christine and my daughter, Natacha knows exactly the kind of reading material that is sure to interest me. In other words, I'm fortunate in that these close friends from Marseilles take care of me.

Mediterranean Bondi

There's an article in the Australian press about a pair of promoters who would like to transform Bondi into a Riviera-style place like Nice or St Tropez. I'm reminded of a joke. An American tourist is admiring the green lawns of Oxford University. He asks a gardener: "What's the secret for having lawns like that?" The gardener replies that there's no great secret. "You simply water the grass regularly, then you mow it from time to time and you run over it with a roller. You simply keep on doing that for a few centuries."

Antique Nice was founded by the Greeks half a millennium before Jesus Christ, and developed by the Romans. Today, it has become the fifth largest city in France. It's crazy to imagine that a couple of hotel-owners could magically transform Bondi into an ersatz Nice. Paraphrasing the words about a drink that's supposed to imitate whisky, you might say: It looks nice, it tastes nice, but it just ain't Nice.

As for St Tropez, that's a different kettle of fish. It used to be a quaint fishing village until celebrities such as Picasso, Françoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot moved in there. Unfortunately, apart from the blue water, the physical setting of Bondi doesn't look anything like that of St Tropez. I really don't believe that people can suddenly decide to invest money with a view to making such-and-such a place look and feel like another famous place... unless, of course, we're talking of Disneyland creations. [On French TV, I recently saw a copy of an English village reconstructed in China, God only knows why.]

There's saying in French that probably exists too in English: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle." If Bondi could suddenly acquire a Mediterranean look, charm and sophistication, it would indeed be a Riviera resort.

Terrorist Willy Brigitte

The trial in Paris of the 38-year-old French terrorist Willy Brigitte and his condemnation to a nine-year prison sentence were not treated by French media as front-page news. I have the impression that the French authorities have been a little irritated all along by the notion that they were dealing with an affair that should have normally been handled back in Australia, where the alleged misdeeds took place. Besides, there appears to be little solid evidence proving that Brigitte was really planning to attack various sites in Australia: for example, the Lucas Heights reactor and the Pine Ridge installations. At the most, there were several suggestions that he intended to do so—otherwise he would not have been condemned here—but no firm proofs. It was good though, retrospectively, that the professionalism of alert French anti-terrorist investigators forced drowsy Australian authorities to wake up to the risk of local terrorism. When I was in Sydney last year, though, I was never aware of the presence of armed police at strategic sites such as the Harbor Bridge, the Opera House, train stations and Kingsford Smith airport. In talking of armed police, I don't mean plain-clothed cops with concealed revolvers, who would never trouble a determined terrorist. I mean groups of uniformed officers, wearing bulletproof vests, who are openly toting combat weapons.

Symbols

Although I've placed these two objects side by side, they have nothing whatsoever in common. The thing on the left is a stone statuette about a foot high, which my cousin brought back from an African medical stint. It represents a man seated on the ground with his legs folded up against his abdomen, and his hands held up against his face: maybe a position of prayer or meditation. The second object is in fact a sweet-smelling biscuit, about six inches from tip to tip, with religious connotations. Made in Marseilles, this traditional delicacy is meant to symbolize the legendary boat that brought four saintly women, including Mary of Magdala, from the Holy Land to the southern coast of France. Last Sunday, Natacha gave me a box of these biscuits.

Back in Paris, a rough girlfriend once saw the statuette and asked me what it was. I told her I thought it was some kind of African phallic symbol. I don't think my mate understood what I was talking about: "If you want my opinion," she replied, "it reminds me of a prick." The slit biscuit reminds me of something of the same kind. Don't you think the two objects look nice together?

In a field of olive trees

An old dog in a field of olive trees
walking away from his mistress Natacha,
seeking a wall to contemplate
in silence and solitude, like a monk.

Jojo has finally found his wall.

Juliette, gracious philosopher

In The English Patient, alongside Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche was simply sublime: the quintessence of joyous and profound femininity. The prestigious French weekly Télérama has just made Juliette their cover girl. The journalist asked Juliette what she thought retrospectively about playing the role of Mary of Magdala in the recent film of Abel Ferrara.

Inspired thoughts do me good. I'm thinking of Taoism, Suffism, poetry or Biblical texts. This calms an inner suffering. Without it, I would be suffocated. I don't believe in materialism. I don't believe that the body and spirit are separated. We are incarnate beings, but also possible beings, and this is proved by our dreams. When I played in Abel's film, it was important for me to say that Mary Magdalene had another role with Jesus than those prescribed by the Church. The fact that we've discovered, hidden under the sand, a gospel by Mary Magdalene is, for me, a total revolution. The vision of the teachings of Jesus through the eyes of a woman is fabulous... but nobody talks about it.

Yes, Saint Juliette, we should talk about such essential things.

Pirated software

Friends of mine are often intrigued (in an admiring sense, I think) by my fundamental opposition to pirated software, for profound political, moral and religious reasons. They know that Saint William—if I can be allowed to speak of myself in the third person—makes a point of paying for every bit he uses (that last phrase sounds better in French than in English) and will only stoop to using unauthorized software products if they happen to drop off the rear end of a truck winding its way up along the Gamone track. Which is perfectly legitimate. As the saying goes, we shouldn't look at gift horses in the mouth while trying to lead them to drink.

For years, I've advanced the theory that the greatest element of Bill Gates's business sense—which enabled him to become the richest man on the planet—was the fact that, in the beginning, hordes of i-peasants like me were frankly invited to rip off Microsoft products. I used Word and Excel for years, but I don't recollect having ever sent off a check to their manufacturer. For the time being, all this great stuff was free. We became addicted. And the name of our dealer was Microsoft.

Today, it's quaintly funny to hear the top Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes saying explicitly that, if people are going to pirate software, then it's best that they pirate Microsoft software. Personally, I would agree entirely if only there were any Microsoft software that's worth pirating. Today, on my Macintosh, I've got a copy of Word, to be used on the rare occasions that antipodean friends might send me stuff created with this ugly antiquated software gargantua. As for the rest, I sincerely admire Bill Gates for his great philanthropic initiatives, but I wish he'd stop thinking of himself as a computer guy. To my humble mind, today, Microsoft is definitively out, while Linux and the Macintosh are in.

Rambo caught with his pants down

I belong to a generation of Australians who've known for ages that our customs and police authorities are bloody good at dealing with pommie pervs, wog poofters, alien riffraff, etc, and the nasty stuff they might attempt to bring into our sunburnt country. I recall the case of my friend Geoff who returned home from France with a small bag of canned foie gras given to him as a departure gift from his friends in Paris. Fortunately, alert customs officers at Mascot intervened in the nick of time and confiscated all that dangerous stuff before it poisoned any innocent Aussies.

Eugene Goossens was a world-famous conductor in charge of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. In 1956, when Goossens was returning from a European tour, alert customs officers at Mascot found obnoxious pornographic material in the musician's luggage: photographs, prints, books, a spool of film, some rubber masks and sticks of incense. Nasty stuff! Just imagine the kind of places where a guy with a rubber mask could stick a stick of incense! Fortunately, the authorities collared this uncouth culprit before he could corrupt Australian youth.

Two years later, a diligent Sydney cop detected a wink in the eye of the celebrated pianist Claudio Arrau, pissing in a Hyde Park urinal. The musician was promptly arrested. Enlightened young Australians must find it hard to imagine that such a travesty of ordinary moral justice could have occurred, half a century ago, in the city that now sports the world-famous Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Today, the world learns that alert customs officers at Mascot have just caught Sylvester Stallone with his pants down. The facts are ugly. Aussie mothers and fathers are advised to make sure that their kids don't hear about this affair through the Internet. Rambo's luggage contained 48 vials of the human growth hormone product Jintropin, made by a Chinese pharmaceutical firm. Internet publicity informs us that this miraculous product enhances sexual performance, reduces body fat, increases energy, removes wrinkles, boosts muscle mass and "regenerates major organs that shrink with age". That last reference is surely an allusion to Stallone's nose, which got severely battered in countless Rocky films.

A distinguished Australian professor of linguistics commented [private communication] upon the Stallone affair:

It wasn't so much the confiscation as the way it was done that bothered me, particularly the body search plus the Warm Aussie Welcome:... "Woi doncha jus tell us where it is mate and save yourself a lotta trouble" snarled the Delightful Young Customs Officer who then proceeded to go through my address book looking for the "names of known supploiers".

Political beast

In French, the expression "political beast", applied to an individual with inborn talents for pursuing a political career, often in spite of huge obstacles, is not at all derogatory. On the contrary, it underlines the existence of rare skills, stubborn determination and natural gifts in the art of being a politician.

Ever since 1967, when Georges Pompidou invited 34-year-old Jacques Chirac—whom the prime minister nicknamed "my bulldozer"—to become a member of his government, this dynamic individual has been recognized by everybody, whether they like him or hate him, as a pure specimen of a political beast. Just as a dairy farmer can generally identify each of his cows, it has been said that, in his native Corrèze region, Chirac knew the names and backgrounds of countless rural folk. For example, if a farmer happened to tell Chirac that his aging mother was not in good form, then the next time they met up, maybe months later, Chirac would inquire: "Tell me, Gaston, how's your mother getting along these days?"

When my daughter was a little girl in Paris, she was offered a trivial but striking demonstration of Chirac's power of identifying people. Campaigning for the prestigious job of mayor of Paris, Chirac spent half-an-hour in the Rue Rambuteau, in the heart of Paris, which had been our home address since the end of the '60s. The candidate was shaking hands with every person he encountered, and nine-year-old Emmanuelle stepped into the line to await her turn. The giggling little girl was then proud to inform her schoolfriends in the street that she had just shaken hands with Chirac. A few minutes later, noticing that the candidate had crossed over onto the opposite side of the street, where his hand-shaking contacts concerned shopkeepers, Emmanuelle decided that it would be fun to see if she could succeed in obtaining a second hand-shake from Chirac. This time, to my daughter's amazement, Chirac made a smiling remark, proving that he had remembered her : "Ah, my little girl, I see you're a keen supporter!"

Last night, watching Jacques Chirac informing the nation on TV that he would not be running for a third presidential term, most viewers surely had the impression that they were witnessing a historic moment: the end of the reign of a prince of politics.

Older than America?

For isolated hillbillies such as Sophia and me, the daily arrival of the postwoman in her little yellow automobile is a major event. Often, she's the only human being I see during the entire day. The individuals who carry out this job in small townships such as Pont-en-Royans end up playing a vital role at the level of social cohesion, because they know everything that's happening in the community, and they concretize the bush telegraph system (referred to, in France, as the "Arab telegraph"). Many rural residents call upon the postperson to mail their letters and parcels, and they pay for the postage the following day.

A few years ago, I happened to say offhandedly to Martine—who's been our postwoman in Choranche for ages—that I was thinking of killing my old chooks [hens, for non-Australian readers], which had stopped laying eggs, but I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. Now, it so happens that Martine is a pure country girl from down in the south-west corner of France, and she can kill a chook just as easily as delivering a letter. After finishing her postal work, at midday, she came back up to Gamone and gave me a marvelous hands-on demonstration of slaughtering a chook, plucking it and preparing it for the oven.

Talking about our postal service, I've always been intrigued by a stone carving in the façade of their post office in the main street of Pont-en-Royans. 1490, that's a hell of a long time ago. Does this really mean that the two-story building that houses the post office of Pont-en-Royans was erected two years before Columbus discovered America? Probably yes, but we can't verify this hypothesis since the crazed revolutionaries of 1793 burned all the ancient archives of Pont-en-Royans.

All the archives? Well, not quite all the archives. Sitting here on my computer, there's a digitized ten-page parchment that describes in detail the medieval real estate of Pont-en-Royans. In this tiny fragment, you can clearly distinguish the word Pontis in the upper left-hand corner. Sure, it's not easy to plow through fuzzy medieval Latin. Personally, I have a lot of trouble in deciphering this stuff. As far as I know, no scholar has ever yet attempted to analyze and translate this parchment.

If ever I were to put together funds, find specialists and succeed in organizing a serious deciphering effort for these priceless Royans parchments [as I've been trying to do for the last two years], would they finally tell me whether the post office building was really two years older than the America of Columbus? No, not at all. The parchments were written around 1350. So, America and Martine's post office at Pont-en-Royans were still well over a century away in the future.

Daffodils

This morning, I admired the first Gamone daffodils. It's still winter. The flowers have jumped the starting blocks. Global warming? Maybe. In any case, my contemplation of the golden flowers plunged me into a region of timelessness.

Much has been said about the concept of celibacy (not mentioned in the Bible) within the priestly realms of the Church. Much has been said too about the monastic role of solitude and silence. Today, I'm convinced that these affairs should be reduced to the commonsense level of daffodils.

Let's be frank and honest. For a man who desires to come to grips with Creation, the presence of a wife and kids is a negative factor. You can't meditate about anything over breakfast! Now, don't get me wrong. I believe that family breakfasts are fine. But you can't contemplate the daffodils and converse with your children at the same time. I'm convinced that the great priestly principles of the Church have more to do with daffodils than dogma.

Genealogy and genes

The Internet has changed genealogical research in both good and bad ways. First, the bad news. For me, it's summed up in the names of two money-making outfits named Ancestry.com and Genes Reunited, which pester researchers constantly with publicity, trying to trap them into becoming paid-up members. These organizations lure newcomers into believing absurdly that family-history data will fall miraculously from the heavens, like rain, as soon as they join up.

On the positive side, I'm constantly thrilled by contacts from folk who've come upon one or other of my slowly-evolving websites concerning ancestors of my father and of my mother.

I'm eagerly awaiting delivery by Amazon of a new book: Stephen Oppenheimer, Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. According to a review that appeared a few days ago, this medical geneticist from the University of Oxford claims that most present-day English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh people are highly similar from a genetic viewpoint. This leads to the interesting conclusion that Britain and Ireland have probably been inhabited for thousands of years by the same genetic stock, which would have been only marginally diluted later on by the arrivals of invaders described in history books: Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans. For the time being, Oppenheimer's views remain hypothetical, and other specialists in the genetic approach to genealogy have reached different conclusions.

Meanwhile, as Wednesday's votes are being counted in Northern Ireland, and Gerry Adams is waiting for a gesture of friendly conciliation from Ian Paisley, Ulster's tiny mind will no doubt find it impossible to conceive of the shocking notion that Catholics and Protestants might both be similarly-constituted human beings with identical genetic roots. Last night, French TV showed a brainwashed Belfast kid who was aghast, lost for words, when the reporter asked him if he could have friends on the other side of the wall. [Literally, the city is studded with walls to separate the communities.] We shouldn't even say it's religion that separates these two camps. It's just plain garden-variety ignorance and stupidity... of the kind that "inspired" many of our Australian bushranger "heroes".

Goat stories

Gavroche is a male pygmy goat. Often, male goats are called bucks or billies, just as female goats are called does or nannies.

In my early days at Gamone, I had a pair of ordinary female goats, named Leah and Rachel. Their speciality was climbing onto the roof at the back of my house, and then scampering over the tiles to explore every corner of the roof. I couldn't keep them in a paddock with the sheep, because they'd learned how to jump fences. (Later, my sheep, too, acquired this art.)

I tied them to stakes, but this method came to a gruesome end when Rachel slipped on the sloping ground (all the ground at Gamone is sloping) and strangled herself. So, I gave Leah to a lady down in the valley who already had a billy goat. That was years ago. Since then, I've heard that Leah became the matriarch of an entire herd of goats.

The Hebrew Bible tells a weird story involving male goats. In Leviticus, Moses was informed by the Lord that the high priest Aaron must obtain two such animals, one of which will be for the Lord whereas the other will be "driven away into the wilderness of Azazel", who could well be some kind of a demon. The gist of this affair is that the second billy goat is supposed to transport all the sins of the Israelites into a remote region. A 16th-century English translator, working on the King James version of the Bible, misunderstood the name of the demon, and thought that "Azazel" was a Hebrew expression meaning "the goat that escapes". Consequently, the expiatory buck of Leviticus came to be known as a scapegoat.

The Bush administration has just sacrificed a worthy scapegoat (often known as a fall guy in modern slang) called Lewis "Scooter" Libby, whose former boss was a certain Dick Cheney. Nobody has ever suggested that Libby himself was responsible for leaking the CIA role of Valerie Plame, wife a State Department official who was saying things that Bush and Cheney didn't wish to hear. But it's Libby who'll be paying the price for this screwup.

The good thing about a scapegoat is that, once he has been packed off into oblivion, everybody back home can carry on living as if the sins transported by the buck never even existed. And nobody would ever dream of wandering out into the wilderness to retrieve the wretched animal from the clutches of the demon Azazel. In fact, if ever I were to get into any kind of really messy situation, I'm sure that certain people would suggest that I call upon the services of Gavroche. Being a midget, though, Gavroche could probably only expiate minor misdeeds. So, there wouldn't be any point in sacrificing my dear innocent friend for a big affair.

Epinal images

In my blog banner, the man and a woman walking on their hands symbolize, of course, the antipodean theme of an upside-down world. This engraving was created by a celebrated French printer named Jean Charles Pellerin [1756-1836] in the city of Epinal, in the Vosges mountains. Since then, brightly-colored drawings of this simple style are referred to as Epinal images. Besides, this expression is often used metaphorically to designate an over-simplified, almost childish, vision of a complex situation.

Why am I talking of Epinal and its simplistic but charming images? Well, a modern hospital in that city is equipped with radiation therapy equipment for treating cancer patients. And it has just been revealed that, in 2004 and 2005, two dozen patients received excessive doses of radiation. Four have died, and ten have grave sequels. The explanation for these catastrophic errors is almost unbelievable. The operator manual for the radiation equipment was written in English only, and the medical staff at Epinal were apparently unable to understand it correctly!

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In my blog banner, you don't need any words to understand that those antipodean people are walking with their legs in the air. What a pity that the operator manual for the radiation therapy equipment wasn't packed with easily-understandable Epinal images.

Quarry fears

In the valley below my property, alongside the road that runs down to the village of Pont-en-Royans, there's a small stone quarry that went into action in 1973. The extracted material, used mainly for roadside walls and parapets, is known locally as Gamone bluestone.

Two years ago, when their current permit ended, the owners indicated—with the help of a huge technical dossier—that they would like to double the size and output of the quarry, and the authorities launched a public inquiry. I played an active role—along with environmental associations, neighboring municipalities and fellow citizens—in pointing out the negative aspects of this project, which was finally knocked back by the authorities.

A few days ago, I learned that the owners are making a new attempt to obtain a permit to reopen their quarry, based upon lower production figures. For the moment, I don't know whether or not they're likely to succeed. To be perfectly truthful, the pursuit of quarrying operations would not trouble me personally, because the site is a fair distance from my house. On the other hand, the residents of Pont-en-Royans would suffer greatly from the surge of trucks moving through their already-congested main street. And this traffic could have a negative effect upon tourism.

This time however, since there is no public inquiry, we citizens shall not be able to protest. I'm not the only observer who fears that the reopening of the quarry could culminate in a pedestrian getting crushed by a lorry full of Gamone bluestone in the narrow main street of Pont-en-Royans, maybe at the dangerous intersection of the ancient Picard bridge. It's a highly plausible scenario. But powerful people make a lot of money by blowing up mountains and selling top-quality stone. No theoretical accident scenario, no matter how high its probability, is going to discourage them.

From South Grafton to France

For me, it's moving to observe the statuesque facial features and intense melancholy regard of this young man with an unusual Old World name, to know that he grew up in South Grafton at the same time as my grandparents, and to read today a letter about his experiences in France, sent to his parents in 1918. Unlike so many other Great War "Diggers", Verdi Schwinghammer managed to return home, almost intact. Another website has a touching description penned by a descendant:
He was a man who lived alone but was never truly alone. Living frugally and simply, Verdi’s life encompassed friendships with bishops and other churchmen, writers, actors, singers, musicians and returned servicemen and their families from both wars. He seems to have successfully reconciled the life of an impecunious bohemian bachelor with a deep spiritual commitment to his fellow men.

The Internet is a fabulous tool for picking up these small, almost private but precious fragments of our past.

Imitation

When my Swedish cineast friend Eric M Nilsson visited me in December 2006, he shot a few images of me talking about Gamone, first in English, then in French. Click here to watch this video sequence. For me, it's amusing to see and hear myself speaking French. I'm not surprised that people notice instantly that I speak with an accent. The only individuals who never considered that I spoke French with an accent were my children, when they were kids. Apparently they would disagree with schoolmates who dared to suggest that I had an accent. For my children, their father spoke "normally".

At home, Christine and I always spoke French together, and with the children. So, they did not really grow up in a bilingual environment. But the intonations of my voice apparently rubbed off onto François, who became proficient at garbling in a way that sounded as if he might be speaking English. Meanwhile, he started studying English at school. One day, his teacher asked my wife: "Please explain something that has been puzzling me for ages. I often hear your son François speaking something that sounds like good English. Then, a moment later, I have the opposite impression, namely, that he doesn't understand English at all. Please tell me: Does François really speak English?" I love that story, because I knew my son well enough to appreciate exactly what was troubling his teacher. He has always been an instinctive actor, particularly apt at playing the roles of people he observed: in other words, a talented imitator. So, it was perfectly normal that he should start out by imitating the voice and accent of his father.

I've just finished reading a great book about imitation: The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. The term 'meme' (rhymes with 'cream') was invented in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. It designates cultural entities that humans acquire by simply imitating other individuals who have already acquired such entities. For example, the art of using a mobile phone can be thought of as one of the countless memes in modern society. It so happens that I've never got around to acquiring that meme... mainly because nobody ever dials my mobile phone number, and I've not been sufficiently motivated to learn how to use this communications device... which I don't particularly like, preferring e-mail. When I ask my daughter to tell me the best way of learning how to use a mobile phone, she always explains that urban adolescents have seen how to use these gadgets simply by imitating the behavior of experienced friends who already knew how to use them. So, the art of using a mobile phone can indeed be thought of as a pure meme. And this meme has spread throughout society like an epidemic, through imitation.

Susan Blackmore is a fine writer, whose eclectic interests range from the psychology of consciousness through to meditation, paranormal phenomena and near-death experiences. The subject of her book, referred to as memetics, is a new discipline whose scope is awesome: the acquisition of all human behaviors and skills, from language through to the greatest achievements of the intellect. Since opening Blackmore's book a few days ago, I've had the constant impression that this is surely one of the most important books I've ever encountered, because it deals with every imaginable aspect of the whole human being. As I said, the underlying theme of memetics is that we've acquired everything that makes us human, all too human, simply by imitating others. (The general concept of imitation includes, of course, the possibility of reading books on a subject, and asking questions.) This ingenious explanation sounds almost too simple to be true.

Thomas time

The engraving known as The Holy Face was produced in 1649 by Claude Mellan [1598-1688]. This masterpiece is composed of a single spiraling line of varying thickness and density. In other words, if the line were to be transformed magically into a long roughly-spun woolen thread, you could pick up the end of the strand at the tip of Jesus's nose and unravel him. After that, if you felt like it, you could wrap him into a ball or even tie knots in him.

Something like that might be about to happen in Christendom.

For the moment, I'm surprised by the mediocre intellectual quality of most reactions to the forthcoming film announced a few days ago by its Israeli-born director, Simcha Jacobovici, seen here in a Discovery Channel presentation:

Any honest appraisal of the subject should at least mention the fact (maybe unknown to illiterate Christians) that the traditional burial site of Jesus inside the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem has been seriously contested for ages. You only have to set foot there (as I myself have, dozens of times) to realize that there's surely something basically wrong with this indoor kitsch setting, which simply doesn't look like the sort of place in which the alleged Son of God might have been laid in a tomb. The 4th-century emperor Constantine dismantled a pagan temple here, in the heart of Jerusalem (an unlikely location for an execution and a burial), before announcing, for no known reasons, that it was the place where Jesus had been crucified. Pilgrims who imagine that Jesus was put to death on a stark skull-shaped tumulus called Golgotha can make neither head nor tail of this official but uninspiring gaudy Greek site.

Now that the work of Simcha Jacobovici has made it known to the world at large that there's a good chance that the bones of Jesus were stored in a limestone box in Talpiot, it will be difficult to ignore this possibility... whose veracity would, of course, shatter the foundations of Christianity. If one doubts the bodily resurrection of Jesus, one has to doubt everything. We are probably entering an epoch of eternal doubt: Thomas time.

Glamour and fresh water

The Swedish group H&M has called upon Kylie Minogue to launch a new collection, and 10% of profits will go to a charitable British organization named WaterAid that aims to supply water and hygiene to the planet's needy.

Stylist Margareta van den Bosch says: "When we think of glamour and Australia, we think of Kylie!"

Let's toast those encouraging words and plans with a glass of fresh water!

Blog post # 100 — Aussie political cartoonist

I hesitated a little about an appropriate theme for the hundredth post of my Antipodes blog, but I finally decided to dedicate it to a brilliant compatriot named Peter Nicholson. For ages, I've been a fan of his work. I've always felt—rightly or wrongly, since I don't know him personally—that I'm on the same wavelength as Peter, and that the only thing that separates us is his immense talent (which I envy greatly) as a graphic artist and political commentator. Peter Nicholson has authorized me to include the following image in my blog:

Click on the image to visit Peter Nicholson's website at

http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/

Isn't that a fabulous encounter between Bush and Howard? The only thing that troubles me is that Nicholson's depiction of John Howard is such a nice little garden gnome that I almost feel like picking him up and cuddling him. Or maybe hitting his helmeted head with a brick...

Seriously, there are talented cartoonists, like Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, whose static work is poorly transformed into animation. In the case of Peter Nichsolson, his wavery lines translate marvelously into the brilliant animations of the Rubbery team. Each sequence is a nicely-designed little story, and the voices of Howard and Bush are fantastic. This is truly international-class animation.

In any case, Peter, if ever you happened to get into a fight, count upon me to stand alongside you, Mate. The only thing that frustrates me is that you don't evolve your perspective to the world at large, which would enable you to be celebrated as a planetary cartoonist.

The hosed hoser

It's likely that the title of this post doesn't ring a bell with anybody. In its original French, L'arroseur arrosé is the title of the world's first movie, less than a minute long, created by Louis Lumière in 1895. My mentor Pierre Schaeffer used to refer to it frequently. A gardener is using a bulky hose to water his plants. A prankster creeps up behind the gardener and clamps his foot on the hose, causing the water jet to dribble and halt. The gardener, wondering what has happened, peers down into the hose nozzle. The prankster takes his foot off the hose, whereupon the gardener receives the full force of the jet in his face...

More than a simple cinematographic reference, Lumière's hosed hoser sequence has become a social metaphor in France for things that backfire. For me, personally, I often take pleasure in using the hosed hoser concept as a principle of action... or rather reaction.

For example, a young woman phoned me half an hour ago with the intention of signing me up for some kind of a satellite TV deal. Speaking in naive terms (with the help of my accent), I had no trouble in steering gently the phone conversation around to the level of the important role of TV in rural communities. (I wasn't giving her any private data, of course, because she already had my phone number and address from the directory.) Rapidly, I told the anonymous lady—still in a naive tone of voice—that I was constantly alarmed by the idea of robbers, and that my house was henceforth a terrifying arsenal of mysterious weapons, linked to multimedia satellites and communications devices, designed to explode during the night if ever the presence of an intruder were detected. Exploiting my most seductive tone of an Anglo-Saxon charmer, I asked the lady to give me her name and her age [which the silly girl did: Amélie, 29], and told her that I would be delighted to invite her along to my place to learn all about my system. I added that I also sold insurance policies. The young lady bid me farewell in a friendly fashion that was both rapid and definitive. I had the impression that I had hosed her. What a nice naughty notion!

Sad affair

The Bush administration has just filed terrorism charges against David Hicks, who has already been detained without trial for more than five years in the notorious detention center of Guantanamo Bay. What a disgusting anticlimax to a mediocre affair. As an Australian, I'm ashamed of the way in which groveling Howard has allowed Bush to lead us up the the garden path concerning the treatment of this pathetic fellow who would have no doubt done better to stick to kangaroo skinning instead of signing up (so we're told) as an illuminated mercenary. Be that as it may, David Hicks holds an Australian passport. So, one might ask: What does it mean today, if anything, to be Australian? This affair is not only disgusting; it's frightening.

Google News

I'm becoming so enthusiastic about Google services and offers that, sooner or later, people are likely to accuse me of being either a fool or a financially-interested admirer, or maybe both. I think I'm neither, and I'm prepared to climb up onto the rooftop and scream if ever I were to discover that Google is less than what I thought it to be.

If you've been hiding in the jungle for the last few years, and you don't already know Google News, click this image to see what it's all about:

To be perfectly honest, I myself only emerged from the jungle quite recently, because I used to be tuned in regularly to CNN International before discovering Google News, and I was continually blowing out my bodily safety valves whenever I felt offended by CNN reporting: that's to say, at least once a day.

What I like first and foremost about Google News is their delightfully ingenuous warning at the bottom of their main page:

The selection and placement of stories on this page
were determined automatically by a computer program.

This seems to say: "If you don't like what you see, please don't blame us. It's the computer's fault."

In fact, I like what I see, because Google News enables us to see almost everything, from excellent professional journalism down to the worst shitty comments from narrow-minded scribblers.

I really don't know if the Google approach to real-time universal news is ethically perfect, because I ignore the legal environment in which they succeed in borrowing stuff—as it were—from all the media organizations of the planet. I can imagine that such-and-such a scruffy news-sheet from a remote village in the media backwoods would be thrilled to find its stuff announced on Google News. But I don't know whether the big newsgroups react similarly. Maybe, one of these news, Google will let us know what's happening at that level. The news, the whole news, and nothing but the news.

The art and the manner

In French, people who know how to handle personal events in an elegant fashion are said to have l'art et la manière. In other words, not only have they acquired the art of doing things correctly, but they also have a manner of adding a flourish of style. Good examples: the way in which cousins of my children have informed me of January 2007 births in the family:

When the art and the manner are accompanied by a tiny but supreme detail, this is often referred to in French as "the cherry on the cake". In the case of the pink envelope, it's the postage stamp, which I've enlarged so that you can see the details:

The text at the bottom says: It's a girl. And the image shows a plump pink baby girl emerging from a rose.