Saturday, May 31, 2025

Francis Poineau

Francis Poineau is a shepherd and cheesemaker from Larrau, Basque Country, FranceHe owns a herd of manex red-head sheep and produces Ossau-Iraty cheese and Basque yogurts. 

In 1983, he learned to make cheese during a training course in Oloron Sainte Marie and decided to process the milk instead of selling it to the Chaumes dairy. In 1986, he acquired a share of a cayolar in Ardakotxea in Larrau, where he remained a shepherd until his retirement in 2022. 

In 1990, he joined forces with a farmer from Moncayolle to reduce their respective workloads. At the same time, he became involved in the AOC Ossau-Iraty and the Confédération Paysanne, of which he was the national secretary from 1997 to 2002.


Having started his career with 120 sheep, he retired with a flock of 140 animals.
His succession is now ensured by another landless shepherd like him.

Poineau is also the Co-President of the Alternative Chamber of Agriculture EHLG (Euskal Herriko Laborantza Ganbara).

 


Friday, May 30, 2025

Denis Gheerardyn

Former civil servant turned organic market gardener Denis Gheerardyn, works 10 hecatares across the plains of Offekerque, in the north of France.

Aside from a greenhouse that still produces beautiful lettuce in the depths of winter, the bare land is covered with straw and silently preparing for the first spring sowing.

While farmer's organizations and government promotes ever more expansion, Denis says "...that is not serious. There are many small farms going along peacefully without continuous modernizing". 

When in his 50s, denis left everything he knew and became a farmer, now achieves a 40.000euro turnover and is a leader in the organic field in the Calais region.

"On a personal level", he says, "it's a great satisfaction to live in nature every day, to sow and harvest beautiful vegetables. To be independent, to have freedom of choice and action". 

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Célestin Coyos

COYOS Célestin was born in Chéraute (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) in 1908.

He ordained a priest in 1933 and left Seoul (Korea) the next year.
He studied Korean in An-song but, suffering from tuberculosis, he had to return to France for treatment. He was then a professor in Mauléon (1941-1945) then in Ménil-Flin (1945-1948).
Returning to Korea in 1949, he was sent to the major seminary in Seoul.
In 1950, he was taken, with other missionaries, to North Korea. He was the only survivor of the "death march".
In 1955, he returned to Korea, where he was appointed parish priest of Cho-nan and Andong (1962). He then became a chaplain to nuns (1976-1991), then retired to Suwon.
He died on March 3, 1993. He is buried in Andong.

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Tobacco Growers of the Semois

A beautiful video from a time long past: tobacco growers of the Semois region in Bohan (Belgium).
These passionate artisans discuss the various aspects of their trade, from harvesting to diseases that attack tobacco plants and the selling price of pipe tobacco.

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Antonio di Benedetto

Antonio di Benedetto (1922 –1986) was an Argentine novelist, short story writer and journalist.

Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his adolescence, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1953, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor.

Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels. Zama (1956) is considered by critics to be his magnum opus. El silenciero (1964, The Silentiary) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise, and was followed by Las suicidas (1969, The Suicides). These three novels have come to be known as the "Trilogy of Expectation".

In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards but never acquired a level of worldwide fame comparable to other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages.

Monday, May 26, 2025

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin “died in 2006 a disappointed man,” said Janet Biehl, the author of Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin. At the time of his death, his dream of social revolution had failed to materialize.

Born in New York City in 1921 to Russian-Jewish parents, Bookchin was raised as a revolutionary. His identity is described as being “socialist first, Russian second, Jewish third.” He immersed himself in the growing revolutionary spirit left in the wake of the Depression decade of the 1930s, building skills as an orator and a writer.

As time went on, Bookchin broke with the Marxist left, and began to gravitate towards environmentalism in the late 1950s—mostly due to concerns over pesticides being used on food.

He saw this as happening because of how large-scale and centralized farming had become, and then he started formulating the same critique of cities and political units. Decentralization of power became his new project, and with that he began to gravitate towards anarchism. By the end of the 1950s, Bookchin was looking to realize structures that could carry out this decentralization.

He was inspired by ancient Greece’s face-to-face democracy, despite the fact that it was an “incomplete” democracy, largely due to the marginalization of anyone who wasn’t a male with property.

He wanted to find a way to implement [assembly democracy] universally. Bookchin imagined that if everyone at the local level had to debate and vote on whether or not to scrap their own environment, it would never happen. He began to organize people towards this idea, which he termed libertarian municipalism.

As the first Earth Day came around in 1970, people began to embrace his ideas. The movement for direct democracy saw gains in cities such as Burlington, Vermont—where Bookchin lived at the time—and Montreal.



Sunday, May 25, 2025

Strip Tease Game

Strip tease card game - Theatre suit – Producer (1930s).

A game which features characters involved in performing (and subsequently prosecuting and defending) a striptease. The complex rules allow for two variants of the game, providing for prosecution of the person (or theatre) presenting the striptease.

Saturday, May 24, 2025

The Bystander

The Bystander was a British weekly tabloid magazine including reviews, topical drawings, cartoons and short stories. It started in 1903 and its first editor, William Comyns Beaumont, later edited the magazine again from 1928 to 1932.

 It was popular during World War I for its publication of the "Old Bill" cartoons by Bruce Bairnsfather.

It published some of the earliest stories of Daphne du Maurier (Beaumont's niece), as well as short stories by Saki, including "Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped". The magazine ran until 1940.


Friday, May 23, 2025

Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes

Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes (The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes) is a 1982 French comedy film starring Louis de Funès, Michel Galabru and Claude Gensac. It is the sixth and final installment of the Gendarme series, as well as the last film de Funès appeared in before his death.

Four young and beautiful female gendarmerie officers come to learn from the old gendarmes but it turns out they are coping much better with problems than their teachers. Things get hotted up when the "gendarmettes" are kidnapped one by one.


Thursday, May 22, 2025

Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (The Troops of St. Tropez)

Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (The Troops of St. Tropez) is a 1964 French comedy film set in Saint-Tropez, a fashionable resort on the French Riviera.

Starring Louis de Funès as Ludovic Cruchot of the gendarmerie, the film is the first in the Gendarme series, and spawned five sequels.

Ludovic Cruchot, a highly uptight gendarme in a small French village, has been reassigned to the seaside commune of Saint-Tropez under the orders of Command Sergeant Major Gerber who takes no lip from his outspoken new subordinate. His daughter Nicole quickly adapts to the life in the city and, much to Cruchot's traditional-minded chagrin, begins to mix with the local carefree youths who often blatantly defy her father's official authority. However, they ridicule her at first, so she states her father is a rich American named Ferguson who has arrived at the port with his yacht and owns a red Mustang.

Soon, the gendarmes find themselves confronted with a major problem: a group of persistent nudists. Any attempts to arrest them in flagrante delicto are foiled by a lookout; but after several failures, Cruchot manages to hatch a master plan and succeeds in getting all the nude swimmers arrested.

Later, Cruchot discovers that his daughter and her new boyfriend have stolen and crashed Ferguson's Mustang into a ditch, puncturing a tyre in the process. Unbeknownst to any of them, Ferguson and his teammates are a gang of robbers who have stolen a Rembrandt painting, which is still in the trunk. Cruchot manages to get the car out but realizes that the objects he threw out of the car to fix a puncture, including the painting, are valuable items.

The man who pretends to own the painting then kidnaps Cruchot, but Nicole and her friends knock out the group that kidnapped her father, and the painting is returned to its rightful owner.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

The Beret Spy is Back

The latest harvest from Emile, the Beret Spy. 

Spy-work from the Netherlands and Washington DC. 









Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Monday, May 19, 2025

Mosa Anderson

Mosa Anderson was associated with the Save the Children Fund for many years, serving as a member of its Council 1933-1967. In 1916, on her return from Paris where as an accomplished linguist she had been studying Russian, she was asked by Dorothy Buxton to assist in the production of the 'Cambridge Magazine' which ran articles translated from foreign newspapers. In this capacity she acted as a Russian language translator. After the foundation of the Save the Children Fund in 1919 she moved to Manchester to continue with 'Notes from the Foreign Press' which had been taken over by the 'Manchester Guardian', and continued presiding over the editorial work until the end of 1921. Mosa Anderson attended a SCF Summer School and an Esperanto Conference in Geneva in the 1920s. In 1923, then in London, she became secretary to Charles Roden Buxton, MP, husband of Dorothy Buxton, Eglantyne Jebb's sister, joining him in investigating the situation of German refugees in France in the 1930s.

During World War II she worked on the establishment of residential nurseries in Britain and later, in April 1946, she went to Poland to organise post-war relief work, spending some 11 months there. She later worked in Germany. 

Mosa Anderson was also a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and was the author of several books including 'German and Europe's Future (National Peace Council, 1946), 'Noel Buxton: A Life' in 1952 (Noel Buxton was Dorothy Buxton's brother in law), and 'Henry Joseph Wilson: Fighter for Freedom' in 1953.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Louise Carson

Born in Montreal and raised in Hudson, Quebec,Louise Carson studied music in Montreal and Toronto, played jazz piano and sang in the chorus of the Canadian Opera Company. She has published seventeen books: three collections of poetry.

She's been shortlisted in FreeFall magazine's annual contest three times and won a Manitoba Magazine Award. She has presented her work in many public forums in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatoon, Kingston and New York City. Carson lives with two cats in St-Lazare, Quebec, where she writes and either shovels snow or gardens, depending on the season.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Bridget's Beret

Bridget's Beret is a 2010 children's book by Tom Lichtenheld

Bridget loves to draw, and she likes to wear a beret for inspiration. So when her beloved hat blows away, Bridget searches for it high and low. She files a Missing Beret Report. She even considers other hats, but none of them feel quite right. It's no use; without her beret, Bridget can't seem to draw. How will she overcome her artist's block?



Friday, May 16, 2025

Me and the Colonel

Me and the Colonel is a 1958 American comedy film based on the play Jacobowsky und der Oberst by Franz Werfel. It was directed by Peter Glenville and stars Danny Kaye, Curd Jürgens, and Nicole Maurey.

Danny Kaye speaking to a man in a beret - scene from "Me and the Colonel

In Paris during the WW II invasion of France, Jewish refugee S. L. Jacobowsky seeks to leave the country before it falls. Meanwhile, Polish diplomat Dr. Szicki gives the antisemitic and autocratic Polish Colonel Prokoszny secret information that must be delivered to London by a certain date. The resourceful Jacobowsky, who has had to flee from the Nazis several times previously, manages to "buy" an automobile from the absent Baron Rothschild's chauffeur. Prokoszny peremptorily requisitions the car, but finds he must accept an unwelcome passenger when he discovers that Jacobowsky has had the foresight to secure gasoline. The ill-matched pair (coincidentally from the same village in Poland) and the colonel's orderly, Szabuniewicz, drive away.

Thursday, May 15, 2025

José Mujica - RIP

Uruguay’s former president José Mujica, once a Marxist guerrilla, flower farmer and boinero-extraordinaire, whose radical brand of democracy, plain-spoken philosophy and simple lifestyle fascinated people around the world, has died yesterday, 14 May 2025. He was 89.

Mujica, widely known as “Pepe”, spent all of Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship in prison, where he was tortured and spent years in solitary confinement.

During his 2010-2015 presidency, Mujica oversaw the transformation of his small South American nation into one of the world’s most socially liberal democracies. He earned admiration at home and cult status abroad for legalizing marijuana and same-sex marriage, enacting the region’s first sweeping abortion rights law and establishing Uruguay as a leader in alternative energy.

He sparked global fascination by shunning the presidential palace to live in a tiny farmhouse and donating most of his salary to charity.

In his final interview, Mujica repeatedly answered interview questions with philosophical aphorisms.

“Life is a beautiful adventure and a miracle,” he said. “We are too focused on wealth and not on happiness. We are focused only on doing things and – before you know it – life has passed you by.”

Mujica had no children and is survived by his wife, Lucía Topolansky, another former militant.