I cycle quite a lot in the beautiful French countryside, in Auvergne. It’s a very nice region, and I love it.
The only inconvenience, apart from a few nasty hills, are farm dogs. Those little guys are not always attached on a leash or kept in a close perimeter, and you often run into one that is running around freely.
If they’re small dogs, it’s usually okay, you can stay on the saddle and go past. You just have to be careful that it doesn’t jump into the spokes of the wheels.
But with larger dogs, I get rather intimidated. One technique consists in climbing down from the bike, walking slowly past the big fella maintaining the bike between him and you.
I thought it was bad enough to have to deal with stray dogs in the French countryside, but I was reading a post on a bicycle forum about cycling in Turkey and nasty encounters with Kangal dogs.
This is sort of the “official” Turkish breed, and they’re used by Turkish shepherds as guardian dogs for sheeps.
A typical Kangal dog, complete with spiked collar.
So apparently this is very frequent to run into these when cycling in Turkey. I’ve read that when they are well-bred, they develop a strong instinct of protection for their flock, and they go as far as chasing wolves that attack sheeps (hence the spiked collar which protect them from wolf bites at the neck).
Problem is cyclists are also considered intruders, and those dogs are extra large and fit. I really like their appearance, but man I would feel very uncomfortable having to deal with them, look at the size of this dog:
I’m not sure I feel like going cycling in Turkey…
In case you missed it, nine countries have joined the Schengen area today: our three Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia and Malta.
For European citizens, we can travel through all those countries with just a simple national ID. This is even better for non-EU citizens who can now travel to these countries with a common Schengen Visa.
Goody goody!
An article on the BBC website.
A succession of weird assassinations: Andrei Kozlov (young vice-president of the Central Bank), Anna Politkovskaia, Alexandre Litvinenko (in the UK this time, this is quite something). Recently, Kasparov has been sent to jail for a few days for no obvious reason. All opposition seems to be systematically repressed.
But the fact is none of this is necessary, Putin has got a strong regime with a really strong following and would have won the elections anyway. So I have a question: what’s the point?
The answer probably lies in a deeper analysis of the Russian political sociology. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about that.
EDIT 04/12/07:Sarkozy has “heartily congratulated” President Putin on his party’s win. Talk about sucking up…On the other side of the border, in Germany, the government has said of the same Russian elections that they were not fair nor democratic.
Unser Täglich Brot is a documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter about food production.
It has no interviews, no comments, no music, and yet it’s absolutely brilliant!
In cinemas in the UK on the 25/01/08.
Continue reading ‘Unser Täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread)’
There’s a very, very interesting article on Le Monde Diplomatique about Max Havelaar and the development of fair trade.
It’s called “Max Havelaar ou les ambiguïtés du commerce équitable”. Unfortunately it’s only available in French, if I’ve got time I’ll translate bits of it into English.
Have you ever noticed that now a majority of coffee and tea you find at your supermarket are labeled “Fair Trade” and have the Max Havelaar logo on it? It’s literally exploded during the last five years.
Have you ever wondered why, with so many fair trade products now being sold, the situation of poor peasants in developing countries hasn’t improved significantly?
What do you think of McDonald’s or Starbucks, two companies that have dubious social practices, selling fair trade coffee?
If you’ve asked yourselves these questions, then this article is for you.
The article is quoting the CEO of Leclerc, one of the biggest supermarket chains in France:
Fair trade is just an emerging market segment. With bigger volumes, producers will be able to squeeze their production costs, thus allowing us to increase our margins.
This is surprisingly eloquent, especially coming from this CEO and that sort of confirms the feeling I’ve got when I’m in the coffee/tea alley at the supermarket: spurred by “charity coffee” businessmen, fair trade has quickly become the trade of fair…
I don’t want this blog to become just a repository for links to articles written by other people. But when I hardly have the motivation to write something of my own (this something wouldn’t be clever anyway), and when someone else comes up with a gem, I have to give you the link.
Influential Mac developer and astute businessman Wil Shipley is expressing his views about Apple, the iPod, the iPhone and iTunes. His thoughts are very sharp and I couldn’t agree more.
Continue reading ‘Apple, the iPod, iPhone and iTunes: comments by Wil Shipley’
