I.O.U.S.A.

We can now hear the rumble of the financial tsunami that is about to hit us, and that movie's timing is perfect. Too bad it's only playing in "10 US Major Cities".

Can't wait to see it in Montreal, if it opens here someday. Gee, it's funny how people love bad news when they are not for them and try to hide from them when they touch their lives.





Official Movie Site

Sleeping in My Car

I love to drive and so far, I've embarked on a fair number of road trips. I drove to 3 of the 4 corners of North America (I have yet to see the North end of the road, but we'll fix that very soon.)

I once drove 11,000 km (6,875 miles) with my father, from Montreal to California and back in 11 days.

But my craziest roadtrip was with my buddy Sylvain, when we drove 5,500 km (3,450 miles) from Montreal to New Orleans and back in a 4 day week end. We drove 27 hours straight to get there and another 26 to get back in time to be at the office on Tuesday morning. (And we partied 2 days on Bourbon Street.)

I often had to sleep in my car. It's not that comfortable, but you get used to it and can endure for a few days.

I couldn't imagine it was a way of life for some people. I was very surprised to learn that some people who lost their jobs are living in their cars across the US. A growing number of cities even have designated parkings where they can park and sleep.

One of them is Barbara Harvey, a 57 year old mom from Santa Barbara who sleeps in her Honda CRV with her 2 golden retreivers.

We're not talking about gipsies in some remote corner of the Balkans or the Third World, it is hapening right now in California, the richest state of the richest country in the World.

The Greatest Adventurer Alive

French adventurer Patrice Franceschi is almost unknow in the English speaking world - mostly, I suspect, due to a language barrier. In fact, as far as I know, none of his numerous books and movies are available in English. And yet, he probably is the greatest adventurer alive.

Unlike media magnets like Richard Branson, Steve Fossett and Mike Horn, to name just a few, Franceschi's exploits are less athletic feats and closer to the old spirit of adventure where exploration, discoveries, the quest for knowledge and sometimes a desire to change the World were the prime motivators for risking your life. The hardships where an unwanted necessity.

Today, we have a new breed of action heroes looking to push their limits and establish World records on ego inflated quests. The essential part, involving exploration and making the World a better place have somehow been lost in the process.

Franceschi's interrest lies more on that old fashioned side and less on the superlative record breaking artificial side required by sponsors and media; and that may also explain why he his not as widely known as I think he should be, considering his accomplishments.

After all, he mounted his first expedition shortly after his 20th birthday and set to explore a grey spot on the map of Congo. When his Pygmy guides turned back, he pushed farther down in the dark forest under 240 feet tall trees where he almost died from starvation in the floods caused by the rainy season.

In the early '80s, he fought in Afghanistan alongside the rebels and against the Soviet invaders.

He was first to circumnavigate the globe on a tiny ultralight plane. It took him 2 1/2 years.

In the late '90s, he discovered a lost tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Risking his life, he sneaked into Nagaland (east India) to film a documentary on the Naga headhunters.

Fond of exploration, Patrice Franceschi worked on humanitarian projects (Somalia, Vietnam, Romania) and became a writer and a film director. He is also President of the “Société des Explorateurs Français” and Member of the “Société de Géographie”.

He succeeded in the latest sailing expedition of his ship " La Boudeuse " between 1999 and 2001 in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago.

More recently, after the wreck of his first ship, he mounted a new expedition around the World with his second ship La Boudeuse, taking along adventurers and scientists.

Who knows where he'll end next. One thing's for sure, he will pursue his quest to bring back the spirit of adventure into this overly bored World. It sounds better in french: "Transformer le quotidien en romanesque."



More info

La Boudeuse's Website

Short bio (French only)

Screaming heads

Thanks to Facebook's magic and to my cousin Dick Deschênes motorcycle wandering, I learned about a strange place in the middle of nowhere land.

Screaming Heads is a surprising mix between Easter Island and Scary Movie. It is located in a field in Burks Fall, Ontario, not far from North Bay and roughly 3 hours north of Toronto.

Peter Camani, the artist behind this surrealistic scenery is an art teacher. An eclectic by nature, his interests have included marathon running, martial arts, farming and aviculture in addition to painting and sculpture.

For more info, visit The artist's Website

All pictures courtesy of Dick Deschênes

Is a chicken just a chicken?

Something funny happened to me this morning as I was preparing breakfast. I cracked an egg with 2 yolks. Hmm... How come?

I went online to check but the egg was perfectly edible. Turns out you have one chance in 100 to get such a double yolked egg. They are generally produced by younger hens. It is supposed to mean luck. Great then!


Being curious, I got diverted and accidentally learned that there are hundreds of chicken species. Hundreds!

For me, a chicken what just that: a chicken. White and feathery, with a little red crest. That's it. White meat and eggs. Well, just in France, they have close to 50 chicken species.

The same applies to beef, pork and lamb.

And they all taste differently.

Funny that most people have no idea of all this. They buy their eggs and their steaks and that's it.

My guess is that our profit hungry economy as spawned huge mega farms where only the fastest growing (and thus more profitable animals) are raised.

Some people are actually working hard to save some of these species from extinction, like Pierre Oteiza who is raising black Basque hogs in France's Pyrénées Mountains.

Maybe we should ask ourselves: Is a chicken really just a chicken? Have some people deliberately narrowed my choices in the meat department? What's the overall impact of reduced biodiversity on the Planet? Aren't we losing something really interresting here?

Chicken Species: http://www.avianweb.com/chickenspecies.html

The Night of the Gun

The Night of the Gun, by David Carr is yet another junkie memoir in the likes of Jimm Carroll's The Basketball Diaries (Great movie with Leonardo Di Caprio) and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.

What's interresting is that it was written by a NY Times Colunist. The story is worth telling and the writing is great. That's all I needed to put it on my reading list.

Also, I must admit that the author's words grabbed me:

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much. But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason than I was there.

The book's Website is great: www.nightofthegun.com

A review, by the author.

The Genius of R. Buckminster Fuller

Thanks to my good friend Jean Lanoix, I just finished reading GRUNCH of Giants by the late R. Buckminster Fuller, a mind so brilliant that reading his book made my head spin.

Although Fuller is best known as the inventor of Geodesic Domes, he accomplished much more. I personnaly regard him as one of the great geniuses of the 20th Century.

Let me share with you an excerpt of the book where Fuller's accomplishments are listed. It is quite staggering.

[Excerpt]

There exists a realizable,evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet.The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big businessfrom its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology,with the vastly larger,far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely newWorld Livingry Service Industry.

It is statistically evidentthat the more advancedt he living standard,the lower the birth rate.It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. Nineteen twenty seven was the year when a human first flew alone across an ocean in one day.(In 1944, the DC-4 started flying secret war-ferryings across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1961, jet airliners put the ocean passenger ships out of business. In 1981, the world-around airlines flew over a billion and a half scheduled passenger miles and carried hundreds of millions of ton-miles of freight.)

This was the obvious beginning of the swift integration of all humanity, groups of whose members for all their previous millions of years on planet Earth had been so remotely deployed from one another that they existed as separate nations with ways of life approximately unknown to one another. It was obvious that the integration would require enormous amounts of energy. It was obvious that the fossil fuels were exhaustible. It was obvious that a minority of selfish humans would organize themselves to exploit the majority's transitional dilemmas.

I was convinced that within the twentieth century, all of humanity on our planet would enter a period of total crisis. I could see that there was an alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful, warring, and inherently vain attempts to solve one-sidedly all humanity's basic economic and social problems.

That alternative was through invention, development, and reduction to the physically working stages of massproduction prototypes of each member of a complete family of intercomplementary artifacts, structurally, mechanically, chemically, metallurgically, electromagnetically, and cybernetically designed to provide so much performance per each erg of energy, pound of material, and second of time invested as to make it eminently feasible and practicable to provide a sustainable standard of living for all humanity--more advanced, pleasing, and increasingly productive than any ever experienced or dreamed of by anyone in all history.

It was clear that this advanced level could be entirely sustained by the many derivatives of our daily income of Sun energy. It was clear that it could be attained and maintained by artifacts that would emancipate humans from piped, wired, and metered exploitation of the many by the few. This family of artifacts leading to such comprehensive human success I identified as livingry in contradistinction to politics' weaponry. I called it technologically reforming the environment instead of trying politically to reform the people. (I explain that concept in great detail in the latter part of this book. I also elucidated it in my book Critical Path, published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press.)

Equally important, I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity in realistically developing such an alternative program.

Being human, I made all the mistakes there were to be made, but I learned to learn by realistic recognition of the constituent facts of the mistake-making and attempted to understand what the uncovered truths were trying to teach me.

In my Philadelphia archives there are approximately forty thousand articles published during the last sixty years which successively document my progressive completions of the whole intercomplementary family of scheduled artifacts. These livingry items include the following:

Tensegrity: The continuous-tension/discontinuous-compression structuring principle of Universe (i.e., stars not touching planets, electrons not touching their atomic nuclei) introduced to planet Earth to replace the continuously compressioned, secondarily tensioned structuring in present world-around engineering theory. Designed, 1929; prototyped, 1929.

The Dymaxion House: The autonomous, mass-producible, air-deliverable dwelling machine weighing only 3 percent of its equivolumed and equipped, conventional counterpart, single-family dwelling. Designed, 1927; modeled, 1928; helicopter-delivered, 1954.

The one-piece, 250-pound bathroom: Designed, 1928; prototyped, 1936; mass-produced in polyester fiberglass in West Germany, 1970.

Synergetics: Exploration and publishing of the fourdimensional geometrical coordinate system employed by nature. (See Synergetics and Synergetics II [New York: Macmillan, 1975, 1979].) Discovered, 1927; published, 1944.

Dymaxion World Map: Discovery and development of a new cartographic projection system by which humanity can view the map of the whole planet Earth as oneworld island in one-world ocean, without any visible distortion in the relative size and shape of any of the land masses and without any breaks in the continental contours. This is the undistorted map for studying world problems and displaying in their true proportion resources and other data. Discovered, 1933; published, 1943.

World Game: A grand-strategy program developing the design science of solving all problems with artifacts, invented by self or others, which take advantage of all scientific and technological development through studies of their effects on the total world's social and economic affairs as ascertainable from the Dymaxion SkyOcean World Map. A means of assessing the feasibility of realizing various initiatives in solving world problems. Invented, 1927; applied, 1928.

Trends and Transformation Charts: These depict the total history of all the metallurgical, chemical, electromagnetic, structural, and mechanical trendings to greater performance per given amounts of given materials, time, and energy. A compendium of all the scenarios of science and technology's evoluting advances. Chronological chart of total history of scientific discoveries and technical inventions. Chronological chart of the mining of all metals and recirculation of the scrap of those metals. Chronological charts of all major industries' performances assessed in terms of per capita human use. These charts, begun in 1928; first published, 1937, at Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C.; published in Nine Chains to the Moon, 1938; published in Fortune magazine's tenth anniversary issue, 1940. This issue of Fortune went into three printings and took Fortune from red- to black-ink status. It changed U.S.A. and world economic health assessment from a tonnage criteria to one based on energy consumption.

The Dymaxion Omnitransport (for land, air, water-surface, and submarine travel): The first full-scale working prototype stage of which was the Dymaxion car, produced to test the crosswind ground-taxiing behaviors of an omni-streamlined, ultimately to be twin-orientablejet-stilts-flown, wingless flying device, which would take off and land like an eagle or duck, without any prepared landing fields (similar in principle to the forty-yearslater descent and takeoff, multijet system of the Apollo Moon Landing craft). Designed, 1927; prototyped, 1933.

Geodesic Domes: The unlimited-size, clear-span structures to accommodate both humanity's converging and deploying activities. Invented, 1938; prototyped, 1947. Since then, over 300,000 have been produced and installed around the world from northernmost Greenland to the exact South Pole; over 100,000 installed in children's playgrounds.

Octet Truss: The flooring or roofing structure for unlimited spanning. Designed, 1933; prototyped, 1949.

The Fog Gun: The pneumatic means of cleaning human body, dishes, clothing, etc., without plumbing's pipedin water supply. Designed, 1927; prototyped, 1949.

Compact, odorless toilet equipment: For conversion of human wastes into methane gas and fertilizer. Designed, 1928; proven in India; now being refined for production use.

Carbon blocks-inserted, copper disc-brakes: Invented and successfully demonstrated at Phelps Dodge, 1937.

Bunsen-burner-melted, water-cooled centrifuge: For processing low-grade tin ore. Invented and successfully demonstrated at Phelps Dodge, 1937.

Hanging bookshelves, and other furniture: Invented, 1928; prototyped, 1930.

Modeling of all geometric developments of energetic-synergetic geometry: Including tensegrity models of all geometrical structures and the hierarchy of primitive structural systems. The minimum, all-space-filling module. The foldable, seven unique great-circle models. The tetrahelixes. Discovered, 1927; demonstrated, 1936.

Twin-hull rowing and sailing devices: Invented, 1938; prototyped, 1954.

Triangular geodesic framing of ocean-sailing hulls: Invented, 1948; successfully demonstrated, I.O.R. racing sloop Imp, 1979.

Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as being "failures," because I did not get them into mass-production and "make money with them." Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics do not realize that money-making was never my goal.

I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive.

I saw that nature has various categories of unique gestation lags between conception of something and its birth. In humans, conception to birth is nine months. In electronics, it is two years between inventive conception and industrialized production. In aeronautics, it is five years between invention and operating use. In automobiles, it is ten years between conception and mass-production. In railroading, the gestation is fifteen years. In big-city skyscraper construction, the gestational lag is twenty-five years. For instance, it was twenty-five years between the accidental falling of a steel bar into fresh cement and the practical use of steel-reinforced concrete in major buildings. Dependent on the size and situation, the period of gestation in the single-family residences varies between fifty and seventy-five years.

Because of these lags, the earlier I could introduce the conception model, the earlier its birth could take place. I assumed that the birth into everyday life of the livingry artifacts whose working conceptual prototypes I was producing would be governed by those respective-category gestation lags. I assumed my livingry inventions' progressive adoptions by society would occur only in emergencies. I called this "emergence through emergency." For all of humanity to begin to break away from its conditioned reflexes regarding living facilities (home customs and styles), allowing them to be advantaged by my livingry artifacts, would take at minimum a half century to get underway. Since this was clearly a half-to-three-quartersof-a-century undertaking, I saw at the outset that I best not attempt it if I was not content to go along with nature's laws.