mercredi 30 avril 2003

Night flights Today was tough in the office, dear. There's the oil hostage crisis in Nigeria, the presidential handover in Burundi which just might gradually help that poor country's people out of deep shit, and more out of Africa than I can even remember tonight... (I'm linking to AFP on Yahoo now we're there too, curious about how long these stories get archived for). Karin, bless her, seems to have improved the state of my insides with Poly-Karaya, which tastes absolutely foul. It may be on a hitlist of probably inefficacious drugs for the Sécu, but my favourite chemist also said it's good stuff. zzz And yeah, those elections! Union ones. A royal mess at AFP, now that the polling was supposed to be over agency-wide and the ballots counted by "category", until it was found that for the first time, the number of votes cast in the "collège journalistes was a few dozen short of a quorum. All hope of getting a consensus among the unions over what to do next were rapidly dashed, which meant going to Madame l'Inspecteur du Travail, lawyers and all that. DS will explain the next steps at his growing batch of special pages accessible via ASAP, just as soon as the situation is clear: that's all I can say here tonight to help keep people in far-flung bureaux informed.) zzz So tomorrow it's May Day, street marches for all those divided unions, but otherwise dead city time, one of the very few in the year when absolutely everything but essential services (and news agencies) close down. Untold millions of bunches of lily of the valley get bought and given. Underground it's not dead at all, since May 1 is the annual field day for the ticket inspectors in the Métro, who turn out in hordes to slap fines on everybody they can catch without a valid one. We'll see about the accordion players. In the past couple of years, the rise in immigration from eastern Europe has brought dozens of them to Paris; this morning, when I got on the train at Plaisance, there were five of them on the platform and at Invalides I recently counted 11! Fortunately, none of them boarded the train because I think that the next time I hear 'Those were the days, my friend', which they all play, I shall probably scream or simply kill... On a different note, for the bandit in my heart, those transport demons remind me to remind you about 'Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable' by Romain Gary, the feller who won the Prix Goncourt twice, under different names in one of the finest stunts ever pulled on the community of critics. I began at the end, with 'Les Cerfs-volants', the first novel in French I really enjoyed, even if in those days it was with the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other. Oh, and there was never anything wrong with that ticket of yours... Spin a coin on a dead loss and it becomes an open door. Sometimes you just have to go underground to come out in the right place. Orpheus looked back. Silly man. 11:58:08 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 29 avril 2003

Lowdown on the music store (for some) So it's out, and Steve's announcement on Apple's online music service was pretty much what the rumour sites anticipated. With it comes iTunes 4: "...new in iTunes 4 is support for burning data CDs or DVDs. It's not entirely clear how a data CD differs from an MP3 CD, but iTunes 4 now offers both options in the Burning pane in its Preferences dialog. This capability is particularly useful for people who have Macs with SuperDrives, since they can easily burn backup DVDs of their entire music collection. Not surprisingly, given the file format used for the iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4 can now import music from your CDs in AAC format along with MP3, AIFF, and WAV. To import music using AAC, you must have QuickTime 6.2, which is available as a manual download from Apple's QuickTime Web page; it isn't yet available in Software Update." (This and plenty more from TidBITS.) At MacMinute, they explain how it's all supposed to work. The Register details the "new, slimmer" 30 GB iPod. I've seen more and more iPods around in the Métro, but 30 gigabytes? Chuck Toporek at O'Reilly took a few notes during the announcement. And that's one of the places where some of the less than awed have begun to post their comments. The technology has been unleashed. Now what about the choice and the quality? Oh, and as Petra points out at TechSurvivors, what about people outside the US? That little hole in the "service" is right at the bottom of Apple announcement page. Update: Reax to all this hoo-hah are pouring in. At Blogcritics, Eric Olsen warns: "Diabetics beware: Devin Leonard's feature (at Fortune) on the new Apple iTunes Music Store is so larded with sugar and honey it might induce seizures..." while adding elsewhere on the same site: "let us not forget a service that people actually seem to use and like: EMusic, whose only problem seems to be that its catalogue is largely confined to the indie label world". On that downloads outside the US business, the Guardian Online doesn't reckon Brits, for instance, "shouldn't hold (their) breath ... it appears possible that Windows users in the US will get the iTunes store before Mac users in the rest of the world, which would hold a certain irony." Me, I'll be sticking to CDs for a good while yet, though I found Apple's note on mp3 vs AAC codecs interesting (never having heard of the latter till this morning...). 11:20:24 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 28 avril 2003

Beating a bad bout of the blues When I was a kid, I found this famous picture by Edvard Munch immensely disturbing. Nobody could satisfactorily tell me what it was "about" and World War II was sufficiently close a memory in the minds of adults I knew for some to equate it with the Holocaust almost in the same breath, when they talked about that at all. For Susanne Meyer, a Hamburg-born student of art and natural philosophy who runs her own website, "no other picture (...) has such an authentic way of expressing so directly the phenomenon of FEAR as an existential human condition" (Cyberinstitut.de). At mystudios.com, "dedicated to the advancement of arts on the web," they reckon it "perfectly sums up all the horrors that mankind has visited upon himself all throughout our checkered history" (review). The Norwegian National Gallery notes that the "work has gained enormously in popularity, especially since World War II. Perhaps the existential fear here rendered by the artist has become more widespread in recent decades?" They, like Meyer, quote Munch's diary entry for January 22, 1982: "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy - Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired - looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and town. My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear. And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature." (Article at a site by Museumnet Norway.) One of the bravest people I've read wrote in the early '90s -- I shall introduce her later -- that "Munch, hospitalised on several occasions for his psychiatric illness, remarked: 'A German once said to me: "But you could rid yourself of many of your troubles." To which I replied: "They are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings".' This is a common concern." A common concern, indeed. And one which -- fortunately to a far lesser degree -- I long shared, at times destructively. Until one of the wiser mind-doctors I've consulted on occasion, told me that I was unlucky, or lucky, enough to be "cyclothymic". I had almost no idea what cyclothymia was. For me, there simply was a jumble of "things that needed sorting out": the "highs" and the "lows"; a quite unreasonable sensitivity to the weather and even phases of the moon and the tides; periods of great creativity and others where even on the most glorious of days, I felt shrouded in my own dark night of the soul, a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald said "it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day" (thanks to the Sprezzatura weblog for reminding where that one came from.) These were among "symptoms", I swiftly learned, of cyclothymia, which gets a more clinical definition at Mental-Health-Matters. At an interesting 'Depression and Bipolar Web' created by a writer and journalist named John McManamy, who has battled "bipolar disorder" himself, others have stepped forward to contribute their own experiences (scroll down for the comments). Somebody else to address the disease is Dr Robert Hsiung, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Chicago, who maintains 'Psycho-Babble' (and calls himself Dr. Bob). Times were that I was as confused as "andrewb", who once left queries there about mood stabilisers and got a host of responses. For me, no treatment could really begin until I gave up the booze, which I did six years ago (with more help from my employer than ever I'd have imagined). Then came the psychiatric sessions and the drugs, in doses which have come down quite considerably since, coupled with a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder and starting to tackle that too! Well, I still have my bad days, like everybody else, though they're not the horror they used to be. One of my first girlfriends used to spend hers in bed, simple as that, and re-emerge when the black bout was over. I still know enough people who do something similar to be writing this post partly for them. As for the "nature or nurture debate" currently being revisited (that recent article by geneticist Dr Kevin Davies comes from NOVA Online), when I think I've got problems, I wish there was more I could do for a close relative whose "uppers" and "downers" come in four-monthly cycles which have proved singularly hard to deal with. Yesterday was a bad day, triggered by a range of things from a minor tummy bug I'd been nursing for a week to an overdose of fatigue and a sudden weather shift to bleak and grey. The day itself was a "write-off", left me uncommunicative, lethargic, depressed and unable to raise much interest in anything apart from a half-hearted bid to learn a bit more about HTML. But it passed. It's gone. And most important, I knew life was going to brighten up. For one of the most debilitating features of "manic depression" and even the milder variants of such disorders is the fear when you're down that you are going to stay down, the loss of self-confidence and sense of powerless, the feeling that it's never going to end. And when it does finally finish, the affective changes -- or mood swing -- can be so intense that in the elation of being "up", you forget what it was to be "down", as if it had been part of somebody else's life. Far worse is a reluctance to talk about it and an inability to seek help, which can easily be disastrously misunderstood by the people closest to you. I've seen too many instances of this among families and in friendships to feel that it matters to write about it here. Looking back on my years polarised in an uneasy mental "marriage of heaven and hell", I remember at least two things that long prevented me from doing anything about it. One was the fear of being considered an "invalid" or "nutcase" by workmates and by friends, written off as weak or "sick in the head". In fact, it wasn't like that at all. Once I faced up to my condition, one side-effect was pretty soon finding out who my friends really were. The other was the fear that tackling cyclothymia, even once I knew it for what it was, would cost me the creativity along with the "highs". For more than two years, it did. I managed at work okay, but otherwise lost both the desire and ability to write, didn't even want to listen to music or read poetry. I felt dulled, the loser in a "conflict between reason and the imagination" (here admirably dealt with in a study of William Blake and Carl Jung). Of all the people who pulled me through, top of the list is that courageous woman: somebody I've never met. Her name is Kay Redfield Jamison, the American clinical psychiatrist who has won a "genius award" for some pioneering work on mood disorders and helping people with them. Kay Jamison knows a great deal about Blake, Byron and any number of artists who have been 'Touched With Fire'. This book on 'Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament' is a masterpiece, not only recognised as such by her peers, but immensely readable. It's one of the only books I can say changed my life; chancing on it was like having an intimate conversation with somebody who really understood where I was at. Afterwards, I read Jamison's memoir, 'An Unquiet Mind', an equally astonishing achievement in which she recounts her own personal experience of manic depression. It's a very moving tale of the many battles she fought to save herself and take the treatment she feared, while bringing a new understanding of mental illness to her own profession. Both books are tremendously helpful for anybody facing any form of bipolar disorder, whether they're living with it or know people who do. This entry began with Munch and ends back in Norway. I've stumbled across a site strangely known as the Windsor Castle Online Archives. Where on earth Windsor Castle comes into it, I have yet to discern. And in this surprising repository of "wisdom, wit and humour," I might have a hard time finding out. There are more than 680 pages of it! 11:53:41 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 26 avril 2003

Polished 'freeware gems' for OS X Nice idea in a Giles Turnbull article at the MacDevCenter: "Owning a computer isn't cheap. There's so much to pay for, on top of the box that does all the work: printer consumables, connectivity, hardware upgrades, maintenance. "Oh, and software. (...) It occurred to us that it would be nice to tell you about some of the lesser-known freeware gems available for Mac OS X. We're talking about neat little apps that you might not have heard of, but that can do the job of something much better-known (and much more expensive) without you having to pay a penny for them." And so they do, right here. I'd only heard of three of them and use only one, but that mi text editor, for instance, looks very interesting... 6:36:52 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 25 avril 2003

Garlic and cod liver oil Yup, cod liver oil and garlic, in capsules. My mother thought it the weirdest Christmas present, but kindly obliged and sent me three of these. Boots wouldn't deliver to France, where such things can cost three times as much! (Subsequently, I've found other places where you can order similar products.) Last summer, I was given good advice and found that this blend works wonders for RSI: repetitive strain (or stress) injury. I don't know why the mixture helps, but this post is partly for N., a journalist who's got RSI so badly she says she'll "try anything!" In the early '90s, many people at AFP brushed off a growing number of RSI cases in the English-language services as the "English disease", just wingeing by a bunch of malcontents. Many British employers also dismissed it, partly because of a notorious court ruling, long since overturned, that it didn't exist outside the complainer's head. The French social security system also takes RSI seriously; when I finally went down with it myself and had to take weeks off work, they put me through some tests, one of which painfully involved sending electric currents up the arms to check out my nervous system's responses. And they concluded by declaring me "four percent handicapped for life". Somebody highly placed in the Sécu leaked me an internal document disclosing that RSI was the number one cause of industrial injury in the greater Paris region ... a paper which I ensured got published and reported in the appropriate journals. It was in the Sécu's own interest: treating RSI, if it gets to the stage of carpal tunnel syndrome, is quite a drain on state resources and they wanted employers to take on their share of the responsibility. When I developed bad RSI for a second time, the Sécu and AFP accepted medical counsel and allowed me to do an odd thing: go on a professional typing course, with the blessing of the state. This corrected some of my worst keyboard habits. I've been getting many RSI-related queries of late, from people with the kinds of symptoms noted on this list. There's no real cure as such and treatments vary, but resting up is essential. One very good site to start looking if you've got "the twinges" is the Typing Injury FAQ page. 11:17:10 PM  link   your views? [] More on Apple's latest 'open secret' "Steve Jobs, chairman and chief executive of Apple Computer Inc. (...), declined to comment on its forthcoming online music service and its reported talks to buy Vivendi's Universal Music label... "'There have been a lot of rumors in the last few weeks,' Jobs said in response to a shareholder question. 'Many of them are not true and some of them are true.'" Yahoo ran a Reuters story. That was after a denial of a Universal buyout a week back. But then, who needs a buyout? Speculation is reaching its peak at MacRumors and MacSlash, with plenty of comment. Answers on a postcard before April 28. 11:23:16 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 24 avril 2003

Stray reflections on Parisian cats In the jungle of the internet, there are some extraordinarily intimate weblogs, places one stumbles across with fascination -- or not! -- via acquaintances who frequent places like that Live Journal community I touched on a couple of weeks back. Places where one wonders where people draw their own boundaries between "reality", fiction and fantasy... What a week it has been: truly Paris in the spring time, some days as bleak and miserable as the leaden grey skies of an adolescence so many of us seem never entirely to escape, others riding the wings of a storm, catching the changes in the wind and maybe, even, learning a few more lessons of the heart... Marianne, being a "normal adolescent" herself, tends to weather adventures with greater aplomb than most of her elders, but when her time comes -- and the past week and more in her company have furnished ample proof that such a time is far, far closer than many parents care to imagine of their offspring -- I shall only hope that she might have managed the well-nigh impossible and learned something from the experience of others; or, at least, remember to come "home" for help when it's needed! But she, too, is bound to feel the heartache waiting on the phone that doesn't ring -- even if nowadays it's a mobile -- and the surge of joy when the feet heard on the stairs are at last the ones you've been longing to hear. Indeed, it has already begun. Now there's nothing like a visitor or two to rouse the mind anew to some of the wonders of the place you live in and take for granted. This is especially true when that place is Paris in April: a favoured month, like high summer when the traffic can mercifully thin for a few weeks almost to nothing. Some find August stifling, but I'm not among them. My legs still ached tonight; they lie to me that they've trekked every "village" between Montparnasse and Montmartre several times, but that's one of the things Paris is for.. Along with decades of warnings from women, including the one I've heard echoed by many an undone friend in one shape or another: "I'm dangerous - don't get involved!" These are usually ignored. That's also one of things Paris is for... When I was young(er) and already fascinated by wolves, one of the sillier things I did was to buy an air ticket for London which I really couldn't afford, in the hope that I'd catch up with her plane in time to persuade her that flying on to California -- in pursuit of somebody else -- was not a wise thing to do. Oh, I caught her all right; and I even proved to be right in the end about the decision she made. But that doesn't stop a friend, then doing duty as a tour guide, preferring to remind me how he of all people came upon me prowling around Heathrow airport until I was almost too drunk to stand up, much to the astonishment of the Japanese tourists he was accompanying. And the following day saw me on the night train straight back to hell. Very much later, I learned that hell, like heaven, is in the heart. And rather than fares I still really don't regret for an instant, too much of today's spare cash goes on the software I'll snatch up, rather like some people might buy superb clothes or first-edition books. Myself, I'll settle for the pair of pyjamas Marianne gave me, as one of the few items where I don't mind the designer label showing! I love the message... For all that I know of kinship with wolves, I'm very fond of cats, the more independent-minded the better. Unless, of course, they're my pet Jaguar. But Paris as "hell"? I didn't feel it that way for long. Not with marvels like the Place des Vosges at its heart. Now there's a place for the heart, as frequented by lovers in spring as the bridges spanning the Seine. It's a place where so many decisions must have been made, for worse or for better, which is scarcely surprising since you can walk right out of one world there into another. A place that Parisians simply haven't allowed to change, not for centuries, though it must and it will, like everything else. I've known three Parisian cats, recently renewed friendship with a fourth, and even gave a home to two of them, though Tom and Cherry have both passed on. Marianne's Kytie, who stays here sometimes, went "home" a couple of days ago, but my body remained trapped in the reflex tonight, carefully opening the door just in case she was in one of those moods to want to be chased halfway down the stairs. Not that it really matters: she's quick enough to come back. Good company when you're learning to play properly. Play is what it comes down to in the end, which is one reason why even for somebody passionate about things African -- the cultures, musics and some of the lifestyles and people -- the 'Book of Changes' would still have to be my desert island read. If I had to choose between the five copies I've got of this particular masterpiece, then Richard Wilhelm's complete version would be it, in a French translation that's the best I've found when it comes to sheer poetry. It just feels right. Ah, decisions, decisions... There are easier places to start, though, for cats who want an introduction in English. So here are a few I like: one account of basics; a thought or two on medicine; an encyclopaedic resource page; and a digression into Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching... Why, even the Franco-Chinese family doctor I'm lucky enough to have is named Yang. And if that isn't serendipity for you, I don't know what is. There's plenty more on synchronicity and one of Wilhelm's friends beginning at the C.G. Jung page. I really miss the cat already. But you can't have everything... 1:23:06 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 21 avril 2003

Cigars with Kofi? Humbug! After Nigeria's parliamentary election on March 12, a "seasoned" British diplomat in the country rated the poll on a scale for a friend in Lagos. He said that if 10 was perfectly transparent and fair and 1 was chaos, he'd give the voting 6/10 across much of the nation, but just 2/10 in the tormented southeastern oil states. Since I'm not back in 'the factory' quite yet, I've not heard any such "verdict" on Saturday's presidential election. One can simply hope that this isn't the beginning of more trouble in a country where democracy remains a very big experiment. I wonder what that diplomat would make of developments in Baghdad, where for 'Today' on the BBC, James Naughtie an hour or two ago interviewed Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial, returned exile groomed by the hawks in Washington. How assidiously Chalabi denied having any political ambitions at all! The man has several times said he wants to see US troops stay on for a couple of years, though he changed his tune in an interview last week for Time. In blatant disagreement with many others in and outside the country, he foresaw only a very minimal role for the United Nations, which has "no credibility in Iraq". This he justified with an attack on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, claiming that: "he smoked a cigar with Saddam Hussein -- he smoked six cigars with Saddam Hussein..." Apart from the colourful cultural imagery of a phrase to be assimilated with the much-televised habit of hitting things with shoes, the alleged puffing that has earned Annan the "derision" of the Iraqis, according to Chalabi, further divested the smooth-talking, would-be Iraqi leader of any credibility of his own. At 'The American Prospect', Robert Dreyfuss -- with whom I'd beg to differ about T.E. Lawrence, to the extent that the latter was outmanoeuvred by politicians and was scarcely a 'British imperial spy" -- has an interesting angle on "Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad". The Beeb has another profile, while at National Review, Max Singer last week thought poor Dr Chalabi is much slandered. Take your pick. I have, but will the Iraqis get a chance? This morning's fuss, as Jay Garner arrived in Iraq -- in another apparent Rumsfeld victory over Colin Powell and with a whole website devoted to "stopping" the general -- has put me in mind less of "British imperialism" than, once again, the good old-fashioned Roman way of running growing empires. With a difference: "...it will take someone with serious business know-how to 'introduce a capitalist system where there's been central-control socialism since the 1960s,' says Ariel Cohen, a foreign-policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Garner has that too," reckons Fortune magazine, rubbing revoltingly grubby paws with glee. zzz On the US home front, there's clamouring for ... democracy: "Bush wants all people to be liberated and live in freedom. I suppose that includes the US. So take him at his word and demand freedom now. Democratic and fair elections now!" proposes one entertaining entry at Heli's Heaven and Hell Radio blog. Thank heaven and Heli that it's not all devoted to Dubya. 11:31:10 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 20 avril 2003

A touch of passion In a less than golden youth as red-ribboned choirboy and dangerous church organist, I developed an unquenchable thirst for ... requiems and passions. My religious or spiritual -- whatever... -- outlook on life has since seen a radical overhaul, but I'll never forget the Easter that I discovered Bach's St Matthew Passion conducted by Otto Klemperer in a magnificently spacious 1962 recording by Walter Legge. I've heard many another performance, and I know a few of today's purists who've tried to sell me on Philippe Herreweghe's account. It's wonderful, but for me Klemperer's remains the most magistral of all recordings. Losing my simple Christian beliefs never stopped me buying such music, including far more recent brushes with the faith, such as Arvo Pärt's Passio and Gyorgy Ligeti's Requiem. Like many people, I discovered Ligeti via Kubrick's '2001'. That could well have been the spark that fired me up into several happy years as a reviewer of "contemporary" musics, among things I did for the Beeb. I also still have a very soft spot for David Fanshawe's 'African Sanctus'. The woman who played a decisive part in my coming to Paris at all introduced me to Rossini's 'Stabat Mater', where I'd be hard pressed to choose between Carlo Maria Giulini and Semyon Bychkov and the fabulous Cecilia Bartoli. Ghyslaine also forever opened my ears to Gustav Mahler as performed by Bruno Walter and some recordings of the late Beethoven quartets which were ... hmm, even more sublime than sex. A flurry of CD-buying this week has steered clear of that range, though, and included the soundtracks from two of my top 10 movies: Luc Besson's 'The Fifth Element', which merits a 'worship page' from one fellow fan and all kinds of "collectables" at SciFi Flicks; and 'The Barber of Siberia' by Nikita Mikhalkov, "clearly a composer's dream." But there had to be a touch of passion too: I was delighted to be re-united with Jethro Tull's 'A Passion Play', a find at Virgin on the Champs-Elysées (for once cheaper than it's selling at Amazon). Also snatched off the shelf was 'Ana José Nacho' by Mecano. At last! Marianne scarcely remembered that 'Hijo De La Luna' was one of her "cradle songs", but she did... 2:57:24 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 19 avril 2003

Behind enemy lines? This week, both 'Libération' and the 'Washington Post' published stories on how anti-French sentiment was beginning to bite (Post article requires free registration). Ah, how the world has moved on since Google ran such a celebration of France, liberté, fraternité and ... démocratie. Back in February, 'Le Nouvel Observateur' took a look at "these French people who've chosen America" (story in French). There weren't many of them, but 'Leur position, face à ceux qui disent: «Non à la guerre, malgré Saddam», peut se résumer ainsi: «Oui à la guerre, malgré Bush».' ("Their position, up against those who say: "No to war, despite Saddam, can be summed up like this: 'Yes to war, despite Bush'." ) 'Libé' tells us that last week, according to separate polls, 46 percent of Americans were ready to boycott French products, while 59% of the French were hostile to the US-British military intervention in Iraq. Now that American tourists have begun to arrive in larger numbers around this Easter weekend, sentiments are running high. The nearest McDonalds has shut down for renovation. It was among those stoned last month. They tried to keep it open with boards instead of windows for a week or two, but trade fell off. At the end of that demo, by the way, the riot police turned their water-cannons on the people in the cinema queues as well as the inevitable band of casseurs that trail along on such occasions, so a good time was had by all. Perhaps I prematurely wrote in a long piece on March 7 that the spat between peoples, as opposed to the politicians, were likely to remain little more than a "difference between friends". Derisory, uncivilised and always funny, 'L'Echo des Savanes' has in its May edition rounded up some of the best and the worst of 'How the Americans judge us today'. I've run into plenty of visiting Americans and Brits during the week's going about town, but observed no real hostility on the part of the French, apart from overhearing the occasional rude remark behind backs and a little more gruffness than usual from one or two shopkeepers and waiters. But I've also been wondering what Americans who live here, outside my usual circle of friends, have been saying about such behaviour. They have several sites of their own, and when 'Americans in France' last reported on "Anti-Americanism", they mentioned a poll saying that 70% of the French opposed the Iraq war. While this percentage has dropped since, you can now see graffiti and defaced advertisements around town where the "Fuck Bush!" message has metamorphosed into a "US Go Home!" one, and I don't think it's Paris they're talking about... One longtime US writer in Paris, Harriet Welty Rochefort, has with her webmaster husband Philippe set up a remarkable and most informative personal Franco-American Website. Their aim is to "help American visitors better understand France and the French and, hopefully, benefit from some tips on Life in France." But much of what they've written works the other way round too: a well-researched page on "Intercultural Differences !" also asks the question "what do Americans hate most in France?" As to the Brits, maybe I'll get to that another day. It is, after all, a long story. I don't altogether share the cheery outlook expressed by the Welty Rocheforts, since I suspect the fallout from the Iraq war is going to last even longer and run deeper than many of us feared, but theirs is a fine piece of "work in progress". At 'Merde in France', the first totally bilingual blog I've run across, a strikingly provocative author I have yet to identify describes just being here as "more than 20 years behind enemy lines"! 3:17:55 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 18 avril 2003

Another spin on the musical Apple Now 'Business Week' has taken up the "What's Steve got in store for music?" ongoing speculation: "Apple's Music Store is expected to have simpler rules. Each song will cost 99 cents -- no strings attached and no subscription required. What's more, people who have seen the service say it exudes Apple's trademark elegance and simplicity." (Tip-off from MacinTouch, which launched an RSS feed today.) 11:59:59 PM  link   your views? [] Esprit de 'Core' People have already written a lot about 'The Core' (QuickTime; Flash 6 -- and a-win-an-iPod pop-up!). It was released in the States before it came out here this week (called 'Fusion' at cinemas showing it in French). It's amusing to see the usual different views at the IMDb. "Everyone who was involved in this project should be banned out of Hollywood for the rest of his life. Director Jon Amiel should take a year off and begin to think about other career options,All the actors should dissapeare and never return to movies for at least five years.The people who wrote this film should replace their brains with those of cats. And finnaly,the people who are responsable for the awful,terrible and embrassing Sfx should go to Canada," thinks somebody in Israel, while in New York someone else shouts at us: "the acting was bearable, dialogue was campy and the movie's producers didn't hold back at all in making fun of themselves. they knew it was an absurd idea that armageddon come from the stalling of the earth's core, but they definitely researched this film to the hilt. there's actually a bit of character development in the movie too, something you don't see often in action/scifi movies. one thing i have to warn you about though....SEE THIS MOVIE IN THE MOVIE THEATERS ON THE HUGEST HUGEST HUGEST SCREEN YOU CAN FIND." Yes, well, we nearly always do that anyway, though in Paris the "hugest hugest" was unfortunately showing the dubbed version. The plot was wonderfully predictable, the acting was largely camp, though Tchéky Karyo as the French scientist stood out, while Marianne's favourite was DJ Qualls as 'Rat' the hacker. Hilary Swank in dress uniform cuts a fine salute and, if anybody ever films even part of that 'Night's Dawn' opus, Aaron Eckhart would probably have to get the part of Joshua 'Lagrange' Calvert, flying the 'Lady Macbeth'! Indeed, if Hamilton had written 'The Core', he might have given Eckhart and an over-earnest Swank a decent chance at free-fall sex, or something like it (many an SF writer's delight), once it seems they're decidedly doomed and have just 12 minutes left. Had I most improbably been in Eckhart's shoes, I'd have found that a far, far better thing to do than thinking patriotic and even spiritual thoughts... The special effects are almost all you could ask of a catastrophe cornucopia: a space shuttle crash-landing and the bird madness in Trafalgar Square worked rather better than a collapsing Coliseum and some of the oddities at the centre of the earth. I never quite understood why our bold crew had to avoid the "black bits" on their way to the middle with a payload of nukes... Alan Boyle took a look at the science of it all, as do Carolyn Giardina, and Jennifer Hillner at 'Wired'. It turns out we know precious little about the earth's core, but Discover finds "The Core a guilt-free pleasure? even for geophysicists and other science cognoscenti." Dash it all: I'll give a healthy 6.5/10 - that's minus half a point because our all-American heroes were silly enough to keep their suits on. ;-) (pix: Rob McEwan/Paramount) 1:18:04 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 17 avril 2003

Guns, wine and Rozes (TFM/Emilie de la Hosseraye) Two armed convicts make a break from a police van and find shelter with a family in a quiet, small and sunny French provincial town. They wind up staying for a 15th wedding anniversary dinner. During the evening, the Rozes turn out to be far more dangerous and inclined to unleash their fancies than the unexpected guests. 'Bienvenue chez les Rozes' is one of those delicious, unpretentious French black comedies panned by most highbrow critics but extremely popular with le grand public. It got an age-unrestricted rating. Marianne took me to see it, not the other way round, but while she laughed a lot, she finally enjoyed it less than I did. The murder and mayhem doesn't come quite where you expect it, there's blood all over the shop (no shock images, though, hence the rating); but Carole Bouquet as mum shows a great deal of leg and Clémence Poésy, the oh-so-sweet daughter, gets to display her own curves and a little mild perversion in a brief bedroom exhibition guaranteed to make a younger teenager squirm in her seat. Ah, and the uses given to one of those new iMacs and webcams liberally planted chez les Rozes by a decidedly delinquent son ... well, this is scarcely la petite bourgeoisie exposed by the likes of a Claude Chabrol, but there's plenty of fun. A host of nice little cameo roles (such as the one given Yoland Moreau, as the ill-fated cleaning lady pictured with Bouquet) add to the entertainment. 11:16:42 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 16 avril 2003

Safari season No plans to post much now and for a brief while. The weather's wonderful and tipped to stay so for at least another day. Time also to get my hand back in at TS, where it's getting hard to keep track of what remains, for now, the main Mac help, etc board and the big experiment in hand with new bulletin board software. And until next week, there are two very special ladies in town: only one of them being my daughter. The younger one has killed my plan to banish Microsoft completely from my Mac with the "official" arrival of tabbed browsing and further extras for Safari to join Camino. Internet Explorer is disappearing, but before I knew it, Miss Chat had installed MSN Messenger 3.5 for X. Can't live without it, she contends. After a couple of days with Safari v.73, I agree with Bill Palmer: if this is a beta, he's a giraffe. It'll certainly be my default with weblog-related reads and NetNewsWire. I spotted Bill's item at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter, which has finally slipped its way in as my home page on Safari and will join the links here. That list of "some places I go" gets longer whether or not I'm writing. For instance, they can't be to everyone's taste, but I find blogjam and scrappleface far too funny to keep out of an almost daily diet. As for really bad taste, Sony made a try in the games department. 3:08:54 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 15 avril 2003

SARS: the great - conspiracy - scam! "This article argues that this unprecedented viral attack is, alternatively, an ingenious social experiment featuring institutionalized bioterrorism for widespread psycho-social control." There are people who take Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H. author of 'SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome: A Great Global SCAM' and "thirteen books including the national bestseller, 'Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?'; and, 'Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare'" very seriously. "I'm building a bomb shelter and storing food staples," headlines one customer reviewer of 'Emerging Viruses' at Amazon. "Who better to link the Illuminati, the Rothchilds, the Royal Family, George Bush's grandfather, the Rockefellers, Adolf Hitler, Merck, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, I.G. Farben, the CIA, the NIH, vaccine related neurotoxicity, hypersensitivity, the devil doers of the Red Cross, 911 related events, a secret city under the Denver International Airport, and a Nazi artist who lives near him in Idaho." Quackerywatch brings a very different perspective on the messianic dentist. (Oh, and where did I get introduced to this apparently well-known feller? At Cruel Site of the Day. Some of them are!) 12:59:27 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 14 avril 2003

Tribute to a musical ambassador "Our friend, brother and spiritual leader left this plain for another, Sunday, April 6, 2003, 7:30 am, at the age of 75." Babatunde Olatunji first won world renown in 1959 with 'Drums of Passion'. He inspired and sometimes recorded with musicians ranging from John Coltrane to the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart. He taught in California, where 'Lark in the Morning' is among places offering an astonishing collection of musical instruments from all over the world (and I've meant to post this since first spotting the news at WorldBeatPlanet.) 1:22:42 PM  link   your views? [] Flash electric bodies 3D graphic artist, photographer and designer Christophe Luxereau (needs Flash plug-in), currently showing his 'Avatars' at the main Galeries Lafayette store in Paris (until May 31), gets a feature in this month's 'UniversMacworld'. His 'electrum corpus' is chic and provoc' (also Flash). Seeking more, I've lucked on an intriguing design portal at Le Wub (site in French, many linked galleries in English). 12:21:42 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 13 avril 2003

More X (10.2.5) and la Pomme's next step? Got to Mac OS 10.2.5, via the Software Update panel this morning. For now, after being stung by 10.2.4 (bad modem problems with cable), I'm being cautious again and have downloaded it to my desktop. Having perused the first reports at MacInTouch and MacFixit, it could be another risky one. For good measure, some are already recommending going for the 'combo' installer instead, reporting that it fixes some "issues" which may otherwise cause problems. This seems to be becoming a regular practice (and, ouch, 81.9 MB worth of it). At TechSurvivors, the bolder seem OK so far. But some of them have the luck of the very devil, n'est-ce pas, pendragon? zzz Apple's "interest" in Universal, also coveted by Microsoft, can only lend weight to some of the Panther rumours. "'While it can be argued that Apple could make some incremental revenue from the online sale of music, the company would not need to own a music company in order to do so,' Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Hillmeyer wrote in a note to clients (reported on MacCentral). 'In fact, there do not appear to be any synergies between a music company and a PC company, even one as innovative as Apple.'" Hmm... don't always believe what you read! "(Steve) Jobs already has secured deals with four of the world's five largest music corporations..." (Access to the LA Times story requires free registration.) 1:23:14 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 12 avril 2003

The media and the spoils of war Time for more questions, not exclusively for hacks. (At TS, I'd be roundly teased for a typical taliesineque thought-stream! I've not abandoned you people, but I do want to try my hand at a link-essay! If you're sitting comfortably...) Baghdad is in chaos and the story's all over the media. Some of it. There's no more striking series of reports than in The Independent today (pity I can't "borrow" the AFP photo on its front page). When I left for work this morning, the BBC was up in arms, rightly defending itself against Downing Street's blast against their man Andrew Gilligan for the way he saw the looting. Donald Rumsfeld has also attacked the media as Washington turns its sights on Syria. The same Rumsfeld whom I mentioned on March 31, for reportedly over-ruling his generals when they warned him ground forces would be overstretched. This was not merely a question of waging a war, it was also the little matter of planning for the aftermath. A perhaps overly cynical Senegalese newspaper (Le Matin' -- no website) editorialised today that chaos and looting may suit the US administration right now, the better to impose its own brand of "democracy" on Iraq later on. The same Rumsfeld in January gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos of ABC -- the transcript is on the US Defense Department site -- of which a sizeable chunk is worth recalling: "Stephanopoulos: Meanwhile, you have to prepare for war. I want to show up on the screen some guidelines you wrote for yourself that you think you have to think about before you commit forces to combat. They were printed in 'The New York Times.' It says: 'If there is a risk of casualties, that fact should be acknowledged at the outset, rather than allowing the public to believe an engagement can be executed antiseptically, on-the-cheap, with few casualties.' What should the public know right now about what a war with Iraq would look like and what the costs would be? Rumsfeld: Cost in dollars or cost in lives? Stephanopoulos: Dollars and human costs. Rumsfeld: Well, the lesser important is the cost in dollars. Human life is a treasure. The Office of Management and Budget estimated it would be something under 50 billion dollars. Stephanopoulos: Outside estimates say up to 300 billion. Rumsfeld: Baloney. How much of that would be paid by the United States, how much by other countries is an open question. But if you think about it, September 11th, besides the 3,000 lives, cost this country hundreds of billions of dollars. So, yes, measure the risk of acting, but also the risk of not acting. And if we suffered a biological September 11th, the cost would just be many, many, many multiples of any conflict. Stephanopoulos: But do you think the risk of an attack like that, another attack on the United States is increased by taking military action against Iraq? Rumsfeld: It is clearly decreased, because every day that Iraq continues with its chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, they get that much more mature and that much closer to -- in the case of nuclear -- to his having a nuclear weapon. Stephanopoulos: But might not an attack inspire other terrorists to try to attack the homeland? Rumsfeld: I don't think the other terrorists need inspiration to attack us. They already have. They're trying to do it now. We're frustrating it all across the globe by arresting people and putting pressure on them. In terms of human life, the other part of your question -- first of all, war is always unpredictable. It never plays out. We know he has chemical and biological weapons. Might he use them? Yes, he might. Stephanopoulos: And we're prepared for that? Rumsfeld: Our forces are prepared. Stephanopoulos: How -- he's also said (...) Saddam Hussein did, and in that speech he said, 'Baghdad, its people and leadership is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates.' I guess that means he's saying if you want to come here, you're going to have to fight in the streets of Baghdad. What kind of challenges does that pose to the military? Rumsfeld: Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. He's putting weapons systems right next to mosques, next to schools, next to hospitals, next to orphanages. He's talking about 'human shields.' He is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad. Now, it seems to me that almost every time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying 'here's a man who has lied all the time and consistently.'" On reading that last paragraph again, one may now legitimately ask, "How are we handling it, at AFP?" And many a journalist is doing so, now that the pressure has eased off a little. Do we always "preface" some of our stories as we should? How much editorial freedom are we allowed? Is the multinational make-up of the agency adequately reflected in our coverage, from the "embeds" to Baghdad and around the world? There can be no doubt from the daily "controls" measuring "performance" against Reuters and AP -- a standard, if often unreliable practice in all major media organisations -- and from the "pick-ups" in text, pictures and the broadcasters that the agency has so far done a remarkable job, with many journalists working in conditions I've not known myself for nigh on 20 years now. But are these stories sufficiently different from what the "competition" is saying in the ways that, according to many clients, distinguishes AFP from the others? The debate is at once internal, not a matter for this weblog, and external, like the Gilligan affair, since it's of prime concern to the readers, listeners and viewers for whom we work. And thus, I simply want to say here -- before a week's holiday takes my mind off these issues -- that the discussion is open and I'm among others in the agency who would welcome views from colleagues wherever they may be. zzz I was amused by J., who has mellowed since becoming a mum, for the crisp bluntness of views born of a particularly tough American city and of worst-of-Lebanon experience that always marks her style, though she never allows these opinions to slide into her work. I think many of us had seen enough of Rumsfeld repeating his lines the other day when she simply declared, with a shrug of the shoulders: "He's an asshole. They're all assholes." I have no idea who "all" was, nor whether this was J.'s considered verdict or a circumstantial outburst, but it surely eased much of the tension! And we had her to thank for getting first to a grand master of spin, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. (This site proved so popular that this morning there was simply a "place-holder", informing us that: "4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on its own server from the beginning." zzz The wholesale pillage in Baghdad we journalists are supposed not to dwell on led the Beeb this afternoon to post the sorry story of the Iraqi National Museum. I'd looked for more about this earlier and found mainly details that become ironic with hindsight. It's little consolation to read that by July 2002, much of the damage had reportedly been already done. One gateway to the lost and many other treasures was put on the Web in March. When and whether Britain, Washington, the European nations -- oh, and the Iraqi people -- will ever reconcile differences and form a government which genuinely suits everybody is anybody's guess, especially in the wake of Thursday's flag incident, which led Brian Flemming to consider 'The United States' Tragic Flaw' (via blogcritics) more comprehensively than I've ventured to do as a non-American, but so little has been learned from history. Nearly 83 years ago, in British colonial times, while the United States was only developing an interest in what was to become Iraq and its oil, a soldier-scholar wrote: "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster. (...) "We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?" If you haven't already guessed his name, it was Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence and this comes from a piece for The Sunday Times. By August 1920, a man who had no stomach at all for looters already knew that the vision he shared with the Arabs of their "nation" had been very largely sold out by his political "superiors". Women in Uganda are not dealing with looters the way Lawrence of Arabia might have done were he not perhaps rotating in his grave, but some of them are giving a whole new spin to the concept of 'make love, not war'. 10:01:57 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 11 avril 2003

'Reloaded' released What do they see? (Jadin Boland/Fox Studios Australia) Worth noting, for fellow fans, that not only has the Animatrix grown since last I looked, but today's a day to enter the M itself: the trailer for 'Reloaded' has been just released. Yeah!!! I've not watched it yet: certain pleasures just must be held off for as long as possible (oh, and the large version is a ... 59.6 MB download/QuickTime 6 required). The list of contributors to the philosophical part has lengthened too: 'Plato's Cave and The Matrix' even, along with the older pieces such as 'Wake Up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix' -- so the film just has to be up to expectations. Rumour has it there's a traitor this time round too. Some rumour even has it that it's one of the big three... zzz As for the pre-bedtime book, it's mostly outer rather than inner space again: I'm back with Hamilton before the trilogy fades in memory. When authors can't leave a theme like a dog a bone, the result isn't always successful, but thus far 'A Second Chance at Eden' is a cracking collection of yarns. 11:51:51 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 10 avril 2003

Fragmentation bummer "I had another disc explode a few years ago. However, I find it concerning. How, in the hell, is it possible that this happens to someone MORE THAN ONCE???" The illustrated woes of a man who spins his CDs to bits (via Cory at Boing Boing - in "places I go"). 11:28:38 AM  link   your views? [] Odds on Obasanjo The Nigerian giant faces a huge "test of democracy" this weekend, with legislative elections due to kick off a series of votes at all levels of government. In its "front page" intro to a story about what radical Afrobeat icon Femi Kuti, son of the late, fabulous Fela, thinks of it all, the Beeb says "Nigerian star urges young to vote in April's general elections". Sadly, when you read the story itself, this is not what the star of the Shrine is saying at all! It's more a case of "politics matters, but plus ça change..." At allAfrica, many stories pave the path to the polls: most of them for aficionados only, I reckon, but sound groundwork, much of it from a couple of the best of Nigeria's own papers. Olusegun Obasanjo is tipped to retain the presidency, despite many leaks in his party's umbrella, defeating his rival Muhammadu Buhari, but Nigerians know this ultimately comes down to a scrap between one former military dictator and another. For all the problems ahead of the vote, and heaven knows they've been numerous, our team at the scene reckon there's a good chance it'll be (relatively) all right on the day. I hope they're right. It's afterwards that the trouble could start (not without an echo or two of another big oil nation where some people still want to put a general in charge, at least for a while, and bugger the United Nations). Wole Soyinka richly deserved a Nobel Prize for some of the finest and at times funniest writing out of Nigeria. Among other famous men, Ben Okri is also a splendid, often magical read. 11:05:18 AM  link