Strangely Perfect

French Resistance: de Gaulle in London. (This posting originally released on 16 Dec 2007.  Reposted and edited because of the subject’s death.) This is a BBC News article on the women of the French Resistance who worked with De Gaulle in London and then went to Paris with him for the Liberation. Claire is one [...]

Alan Johnson Sacks the Messenger This, of course, relates to the recent sackings and supportive resignations of Government Scientific Advisors (see More advisers may go in drugs row) . The home secretary faces the threat of more scientists resigning after sacking his chief drugs adviser Prof David Nutt for his comments about cannabis policy. Two [...]

Introduction I got a ping this morning from a website called cleanup-registry.net   It arrived because I’d been referenced as a website in the network setup using the plugin, “Related Websites” by the Blog Traffic Exchange (actually, it may be time to knock this experiment on the head as generally, the sites are only loosely related [...]

Introduction & History Recently, Microsoft has reworked it’s search engine (MSN Live Search) and renamed it Bing.  This was followed even more recently, with a joint venture between itself and former search king Yahoo! into a hazily explained search and advertising combination. Microsoft is well known for wheeling out the lawyers as backup to it’s [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

Atlantic Ocean Floor Profile Following the (as yet unresolved) crash of the Air France airbus on flight AF 447, much has been made about the ocean floor having huge cracks and being very uneven.  Most atlases, online and TV news reports say this and back the statement up with visual imagery of the bathymetry.  See [...]

A Week is a Long Time in.. Q.  In What? In prison – yes obviously In politics – yes In a relationship – well yes, especially the past week for me In Between News Items…. Yes! That’s the one! Last week it was announced to the world that 196 convicted French prisoners are going to [...]

What Brought Down the Air France Jet over the Atlantic? Just my tuppence worth.  The best current info on the subject is Wikipedia which has peer reviewed sifting and not a load of speculative ‘maybes’.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF_447 Also, check http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/ for good weather, navigation and aircraft info. Prescript Aside from a bomb, which has never [...]

One and a Half Days Left! You’ve one day left to get to Paris and see Jarvis Cocker jamming with the common people. It’s quite a good idea, actually; six days of 6+ hours sessions jamming in an art gallery as other people join in! Last day tomorrow. It’s at Galerie Chappe, 4, Rue Andre [...]

Not being a frequent foreign traveller, my recent stop in Eisenstadt, Austria, at a 5 star hotel open my eyes a bit.  A peculiar quirk, for me, was the toilet, with a shelf, in the room’s en-suite bathroom.  I’ve since found that it’s called a “shelf toilet”, a German invention to ease the inspection of [...]

The acknowledged founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, created the idea and much of the system that allows information to be shared, from the web page, by hyper-links, across the globe.  His was a basically altruistic idea. Brilliantly, it has brought disparate peoples together in hitherto unforeseen ways.  Anyone (like me), can [...]

A Case of One Man’s Cake is Another Man’s Poison I first read the short story, “The Bureau d’Exchange de Maux” by Lord Dunsany, in the late seventies in a compilation, probably a Panther Books one.  It’s staggering simplicity is matched by the masterful telling. View Larger Map Later, in (a sort of) homage, Crawling [...]

Paris Cycles Freely with Loaded Questions and Answers In Buddhism, there’s a concept called the forces of negativity which is inherent to the whole universe – but especially when applied to living sentient beings like ourselves. These negative forces are extremely apparent when the Velib Cycle Scheme in Paris is considered.  We have: The initial [...]

View Larger Map While walking George the dog today, I spotted an Egret in town! You can tell it’s an egret because nothing else is so brilliantly white. The seagulls and terns look dull in comparison! This really shows the pace of global warming in my short lifetime. When I first went to France in [...]