house-arrest ou le château d’oléron

The settlement that has grown over the centuries around Le Château d’Oléron is arguably most famous as the place where Henry II held his troublesome but otherwise irreproachable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine captive for sixteen years for conniving to replace him as sovereign of England and outremar with their eldest son.  

Surely not the worst of places to wile away one’s sentence, but it turned out to be all the more endearing to us with the hindsight of nine hundred years that we’d visited this place (at least the Vauban fortifications and harbour) a mere five years hence and had forgotten about it—like the Wizard Gandalf said, “I have no memory of this place,” but being as function follows form for citadels, certain patterns start to emerge that tend to blur together.

Happily we had not remembered as we got to discover more, including the rows of former oyster-mongers bright water-colour shacks that had been conserved and converted to boutiques and studios—which reminded me of the laboratories and dwellings of the court alchemists of Prague whose workshops around the castle were resigned to a similar fate but didn't cost an extra entry fee to see—strongholds of Protestantism where the Huguenots had refuge given the island’s remote location, the Jesuit abbey converted into the Mairie, the city hall and chamber of commerce, and the historic square with a fountain that marked in neo-Renaissance style the inclusion of Île d’Orélon on the circuit of the Tour de France, acknowledged some ninety years after a jibe with competing publishers of a bicycle and a car magazines decided to put rubber to the road.  

Our bike trekking here, though no where near epic, took us through some really amazing landscapes of the island.

caveat lector

Though perhaps an object lesson in the reliability of the tabloid-press and this fast-food franchise does carry the daily issue of this particular publication in its restaurants for its diners’ reading pleasure, it seems very tragic that the German outlets would blindly carry this edition the following day after the murderous rampage in Munich, oblivious to the irony. In the main, German journalism is more reserved and sparing on speculation or salacious details (to protect the parties involved) and may never disclose names until one event is overcome by the next catastrophe. ISIS is the Cosplay Caliphate by its nature attracts losers and cowards to its sick and contorted cause, and operating under the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, gladly will accept someone settling personal scores under their ægis and allow the media to will connections that may or may not be there.

hühnergott

We discovered on the Atlantic stretch of beach leading to the lighthouse (Phare) of Chassiron on the northernmost tip of the Île d’Oléron thousands of stone piles (cáirn).  It was a really arresting and surprising composition, like a landscape from the imagination of Anton Gaudí.  The collected and arranged stones were obliviously bleached and hewn by the sea, pock-marked and made me think of the received folk-belief of the Hühnergotten (equivalent to the Celtic idea of the Adders’ Stone) that a rock with a naturally (or preternaturally) bored hole is a lucky charm—presumably because it can be strung through easily and worn as an amulet.  Not all of these stones could have been eroded by time and tide to specifications like this one I spied but left on the beach to achieve a perfect poultry-form (I realise that hühn has nothing to do with chicken but it is an association that gets reinforced like Sparkasse as Cheese Bank) as I think that would have been too magical.  I knew, however, that each stone was tending in that direction at least as we stacked and balanced ours along the beach as well before proceeding to the lighthouse and latter day ensemble at the promontory.

revenons à nos moutons

With it being Bastille Day, one could be forgiven for taking the title to be one of the rousing but lesser known verses from La Marseille, but it is actually a French idiom to the effect “but we digress,” which sometimes makes an appearance in English too as a turn of phrase.
From an anonymous medieval play called La Farce de Maître Pathelin, an anti-hero and petty thief tries to confuse a county magistrate trying him for sheep-wrangling but introducing details from a second crime—to which the judge cries “but let us return to our sheep at hand.”

campfire stories ou dame de la moselle

Our trip started with a bit of a fright and a mystery. Just back to the campsite just short of midnight after watching the football finale—and admittedly surprised and respectful that France, our and their host, had taken their defeat at the hands of Portugal with such model sportsmanship and rather than rioting, there were cheers and fireworks for the winners.

We were in Metz, not the game‘s venue in Paris but perhaps as we were more fearful of the former rather than anything else, this nightmare fuel did not really have the chance to settle in or register much further, and H, having arrived a moment before me, warmed me not to be scared of the ghostly apparition with her back to us in a white slip.  One never gets better than such grainy evidence.  Click to enlarge, if you dare.

Like something straight out of a horror movie, the figure was communing with something and oblivious to us. H clicked the door lock which reports a heavy clunk and flashes the parking lights. This only caused her to position herself behind the camper.

Now, with her out of sight, I was creeped out by the thought she might crawl under the bus to get me. The Lady in White however ambled on towards the shores of the Moselle where the campgrounds were more densely packed (we were in the last pitch) but strangely, no one was about to notice her.

I ventured that maybe it was her time to return beneath the waters. A few days later, it elicits a shudder. To dispel this visitation, please enjoy a few brighter impressions of Metz. Subsequent campsites were markedly less fraught with fright.

vacances

PfRC will be taking a much needed sabbatical for calmer shores. Stay tuned, same time, same station, for ongoing adventures. Thanks for visiting and adieux nos amis!

a brief history of injunctions

Though such examples of true and unabashed stalking are no laughing matter and to be alive at the same time as great thinkers is an enormous privilege, it did make me giggle to read Bob Canada’s sobering indictment and predictions of recidivism for the American woman resident in Norway recently sentenced and served a restraining order for her harassing but contradictory claims of being enamoured and concurrently wanting to kill Professor Stephen Hawking—plus her characterisation as the world’s laziest psychopath. Apprehended whilst shadowing the physicist during a conference in Tenerife, the woman alternately professed her love (perhaps a honey-trap) for Hawking and her grave displeasure with him for disproving God. Regarding the later, I can’t recall Hawking proving or even attempting to demonstrate that he was capable of such a thing.

electric mirages

The fatal accident involving a tractor-trailer and driverless carriage, the brilliant BLDGBlog reports, was certainly a tragedy, but also prizes out insights into the increasingly inscrutable realm of machine perception.
Just as the component influences of complex algorithms quickly grow beyond human comprehension and artificial intelligences behave in ways that their programmers could not predict, it’s rare that we bother trying to understand how a machine sees and judges accordingly. When things run like clockwork, I suppose we are not that considered about what’s under the hood and how it works. Diagnostics revealed that the robot car could not distinguish between the chassis of the truck and the sky, forwarding further thought on the design of infrastructure and of space in general (the home, highway, office and warehouse) to make it more (or less) machine-accessible. What do you think? Is real-estate to be landscaped for use by computers, much like most of the traffic of the internet, or are those unreasonable accommodations?