KEY POINTS:
Frederic Saldmann believes the French tendency to bottle it up in the name of decorum is harmful to their health. Evoking the spirit of the May 1968 student uprisings which shook French society to the core, the good doctor is calling on this most fastidious of nations to let rip to reduce the prevalence of various gastric disorders.
Having spent a couple of years in France, I can vouch for the fact that they're discreet to the point of denial when it comes to the noisier bodily functions. There's no French equivalent of "better out than in".
Whereas the English-speaking world has a rich comic tradition built around what dictionaries misleadingly used to define as "a small explosion between the legs", in France farting is no laughing matter.
Dr Saldmann also wants the French to belch at will, particularly after meals. The irony here is that the developed world has long looked down on cultures in which the post-prandial burp is the accepted way of conveying one's compliments to the chef. Now it emerges that these supposedly backward cultures have been adhering to sound health practice all along, while the Western obsession with social etiquette has given generations of diners a pain in the gut.
Mindful of the theory that animal flatulence contributes to global warming, I wondered what would be the ecological consequences if 60 million Frenchies simultaneously decided to cast aside all restraint. Could that be the tipping point, the straw that broke the camel's back?
I soon discovered that the world-wide web, so often a useful tool, is of little help when it comes to global warming. Truth was the first casualty of the propaganda war raging in cyberspace and the researcher is caught in the blogging crossfire between the doomsters and the head-in-the-sand brigade.
As an example, I came across a US congressman who claims that previous climate change was caused by dinosaur flatulence. (Perhaps they farted themselves into extinction, literally blew themselves away). It appears, though, that only one in three human farts contains methane, the worrying component in animal flatulence, so no great harm will come of it should the French adopt Dr Saldmann's manifesto.
Decline of the radicals The photograph of the three protesters who damaged the domes at the Waihopai spy base was a freeze-frame capturing the decline of the radical left.
To put it bluntly, the trio look like escapers from a home for the chronically bewildered. It's a far cry from the days when every second student slum/flat had a poster of Che Guevara, the epitome of revolutionary cool, and the protest movement's recruiting sergeants were charismatic young men like Tom Hayden who went on to marry Jane Fonda.
It's interesting how protesters who make anti-military gestures are invariably described as peace activists. Whatever its causes, the conflict in Iraq is now a civil/sectarian war so it's hard to fathom why puncturing a satellite dome on the other side of the world amounts to a blow for peace.
The appropriation of the word "peace" to mis-label what is actually pacifism or anti-Americanism or even appeasement is not new. A notable example was the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp set up in 1981 outside an air force base in Berkshire used by the US Strategic Air Command.
Peace is the absence of war and it's arguable that it was only the very high level of military preparedness on both sides and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the peace between the US and the USSR, two antagonistic imperial powers with competing ideologies, for 50 years.
Girls on pedestal Yet another fuss over "revealing" photos of a teenage girl. It reminds me of the West Coast Times review of my first novel which rapped me over the knuckles for having a teenage girl say the f-word to herself as she watches a businessman throttle a puppy for digging up a bed of delphiniums.
"I have no objection to course [sic] language per se but Old School Tie rather overdoes it, especially when Thomas has the 17-year-old female babysitter using 'gutter language' during a casual observation. It was unnecessary and added nothing to the credibility of the book."
Unnecessary, maybe, but so are most of the innumerable swear words uttered every day by both genders and all walks of life. If people want to idealise teenage girls, that's their affair, but they shouldn't expect those of us in the real world to go along with their rather creepy delusion.
