The Good Side of Brittany

Emily thought my last post was quite hard on Brittany. I have little sympathy for the place - Brittany was quite hard on us, and I do not intend to sugarcoat my reflections on the difficulty of our lives there. But it wasn't all a horror, and I thought I'd put together another post to share the lighter side of seven years of hell...

(Click for larger versions)

Dolmens and Wine

While I don't have anything particularly interesting to write today, I do have a few nice pics to post. Shown here is the Dolmen of Kerbourg, one of the best-preserved and most interesting dolmen sites on the Guérande peninsula. We didn't even know it existed until we happened over it in a guidebook, and found it was only five minutes' drive from here. Unlike the bigger, more commercialized sites, this is just standing freely out in a field, and one can crawl all over it, touch it, and go inside of it if one doesn't mind a bit of crawling.





Emily wanders around in the large end cave of the interior, probably trodding all over the six thousand year old remains of some ancient Asterix.

The only other bit of news today is the repeat of the shocking international wine debacle of 1976. I suppose I should probably stay out of the wine shop for a few days lest an irate French wine seller start screeching at me about the subject. It could be worse - Imagine the horror if they'd been beaten by some of the emerging new North Carolina wines!

Rock Carving in Hyperspace

"We're just recycled history machines,
cavemen in faded blue jeans.", Jimmy Buffet

Continuing with the pics from Carnac, today's photo is a stone of particular interest because it has markings. Now, this is nowhere near as cool as the stone drawings we found inside the Dolmens of Mane-Kerioned - a total surprise to see, because one is in pitch darkness and only the light from the entry is visible, and then one lights a match or clicks a flash and suddenly you realize you are surrounded by elaborate wall drawings. Of course, there's no telling who made the marks on this stone at Carnac - they could well have been made by a bored farmer or even his plough! While the alignments are a great mystery, one part of the puzzle that often gets left out of the various, "Star Charts to Ancient UFO's?"-type arguments is that no one really knows how these things were originally laid out. For the past four thousand years, local farmers have been moving the stones out of their fields and farmlands. They have been shifted, slid, piled, and re-arranged to the point that it's really difficult to guess just what positions they were in to start with, and it wasn't until the 20th century that anyone really began to pay any attention to them and think that perhaps they were more than plough-breaking annoyances. While the majority of them are probably still in their original positions, one should bring a large grain of salt to any arguments that depend on a precise and exacting diagram of the locations of the stones today.

Speaking of contacting aliens, there is a fantastic bit of news published now about the possibility of real-life hyperdrive. We live in a very science-fiction world these days!

No One Knows Who They Were, or WHAT They were doing...

And if that title doesn't get Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" stuck in your head, you probably don't know where the expression, "It goes to eleven" came from either...! (The Spinal Tap parody documentary was admittedly a hit-or-miss film, but for anyone who had seen too many "serious" attempts at rock music documentaries on early MTV, it was a god-send, and Spinal Tap-isms seem to have seeped into the vocabulary of everyone in their thirties-forties today just as badly as Python-isms)

If you peer closely at today's pic, you can see Emily in her tan giant coat and me in the dark green, standing and looking at the stones of Carnac. My father shot this pic, as well as the excellent pic I posted the other day. It was a perfect day for photographing the stones, with just enough fog to give everything in the distance a properly misty, surreal feeling. I'll bet the stones would look great in snow, if we ever actually had snow here. I've read up on the stones a bit, and was glad for the opportunity to walk among them. In the summers the stones are closed off by gates, to hold back the erosion caused by thousands of tourists, but off-season the gates are open in some of the fields, and we had a great walk through the stones at Menec and especially Kerlescan, where the big stuff is. We also hiked into the woods to see the Giant of Manio and the Quadrilateral - both excellent sites, and free to wander around in and touch. It really is extraordinarily electric to lay hands on a giant stone set up by our wild ancestors 5,000 years ago. One can only wonder what they'd have thought of us there photographing their work with a digital video camera.

Speaking of which, I did assemble a short video of our trip to Carnac. It is split between the first portion, which shows the trip there and the small village of Carnac itself, and the latter portion which has a lot of us walking around among the stones, climbing the stone windmill, and playing at the Giant of Manio. I am seeding it via BitTorrent now - anyone interested in downloading can right-click HERE and choose "Save Link as", then open the torrent file in their BitTorrent client of choice for download. I'll seed it for a few days just in case anyone is interested. Just be warned that, while the standing stones are a marvelous sight, the video itself is typical homemade family video quality, so don't expect a pro documentary! Total size is around 260 meg and the file is in MPEG2 format.

If Only it had a Godzilla Toy

Today's pic is again from Carnac. In the museum there, they have a large scale model of the alignments of Menec and Kermario, more-or-less accurately rendered down to the tree (Though inexplicably missing a ruined house). The museum seems to have totally relocated since we first visited it in 2002, when it was found nestled behind the Kermario alignment within easy walking distance of the Kermario créperie. That site has apparently closed down, and the parking area is roped off - The entire museum is now located in a new spot on the main road down near the end of the Menec alignments. It's a bit bigger than the old one (which was mainly a glorified gift shop). This one is a very, very nice glorified gift shop with some video rooms and model rooms thrown in. Lest one think they've gone all intellectual, however, be assured that you can still buy all the Breton stickers, flags, and "Mysteries of Ancient Brittany" picture books that you'll ever need!

Sadly, the model is protected by a glass case (A good thing, because I'm sure it would have been stripped to the bare tabletop by locust-like tourists by now if it wasn't covered). This is sad because what the model really needs is for someone to, in passing, quietly insert a Godzilla toy onto the board somewhere. Just looking at the meticulous construction brings back all those childhood memories of wanting a toy monster to lay waste to the landscape.

Carnac, and the Adventure of the Camera-Eating Toilet

The subconscious is a powerful thing. I've been working on assembling the video clips from our Christmas vacation with my parents, and this involves all sorts of image manipulation, title creation, etc. The image here is a photo taken at Carnac, the oldest site of standing stones in the world (predating the Egyptian pyramids, in fact). I created this as the intro-title for the video segment on Carnac, and only afterward did I glance at it sideways and think, "Ye gods, I've created a 70's progressive rock album cover!" As a friend said, I expect to open it up and find a bunch of black and white photos of sulky-looking twenty-somethings in spandex outfits and long hair. It is, I must say, a terrific photo though - I don't know if I'm being unabashedly bragging or not, as I have no clue who took this (Either my father, Emily, or myself). We kept passing the digital camera around all day, which led to Holiday Incident #2 (#1 was the spectacular disintegration of our TGV train en route) - The Camera-Eating Toilet.

I must digress - Public toilets in France are, to an American's expectations, anything from terrifying medieval pits to fascinatingly arcane exercises in exotic plumbing. The former can still be found scattered through any number of villages, and are best described as sheds erected to hold in the smell of a round hole dug in the bare earth, or chipped through bare rock. You squat, do your business, and flee before anything you've disturbed in the dark pit comes up to investigate why the sun was blotted out. Other designs are positively 23rd century, like the mirror-walled pay toilets in some big cities. At Carnac, the public toilet resembles what we think of as a shower - A sort of tiled-bottomed recess with foot pedals that one steps into and (apparently from the look of the place) fires wildly.

My father is a long-time plumbing and heating man, and was understandably fascinated by this exotic arrangement - more fascinated, in fact, than his jacket pockets were up to, and the next thing we knew, he appeared outside holding a dripping and very dead digital camera and one last battery (The case had popped open on impact with the tile and the other three Ni-Mh rechargables had all vanished into the maw of the basin). We held a brief ceremony for the death of our faithful camera, which was a bit of a stupidly sentimental favorite since we started the pipe business with it, and it was one of our few belongings to survive the original move to Brittany - and then got on with business, ordering a new one from FNAC which arrived nearly before I'd gotten up from the computer chair. Kudos to FNAC for excellent service in the busiest of seasons! And now we have a new digital camera, an Olympus FE-120 - Less than half the cost of our old one new, with three times the megapixel count and resolutions, easier use, and a sharper macro mode. Blog visitors may have to get accustomed to new pictures opening HUGE now, as the camera defaults to something insane like 2600x1600 res.

Now that I've typed all of that, I'll have to leave the actual description of Carnac itself for tomorrow...