Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis.

René Kleboth, Master of the Vautrait de Banassat, maintains the largest pack of foxhounds (over 400 hounds) in France at his kennels at Chirat-l’Eglise in Allier. But these Poitevin foxhounds hunt wild boar in the forest of Tronçais, not foxes.

Run, Sangliers, run!

Hat tip to Jesse Swan.

French photographer Eric Dubos recently went out with L’équipage Kermaingant et le Pays de Normandie* hunting in the Forêt d Ecouves and got some great pictures.

*French hunts are all called either “Rallyes” or “Équipages.” They wear more old-fashioned and elaborate uniforms than British or American hunts. Ladies sometimes wear tricorn hats, and may be seen flaunting dashing Inverness-style coats. In most cases, a lot of the hunters will carry and play round hunting horns. Where British and American hunts use only a very limited repertoire of horn calls and signals, each French hunt has its own elaborate polyphonic fanfare, and in addition to many complex musical tunes for all sorts of occasions, there are even entire masses composed for French hunting horn. French hunts, instead of the fox or the hare, often pursue much larger quarry, like the red deer (the European equivalent of our elk) or the wild boar.

All this certainly looks like great fun.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

A police helicopter flying over Glasgow, Scotland last Friday lost control and crashed into the roof of a crowded Irish pub, killing three on board and six customers. An additional 32 persons present in the bar were injured.

Apparently, free speech was also a casualty as Scottish newspapers subsequently reported that a teenage male was arrested on Sunday for posting “racist and sectarian comments” on an on-line social networking site.

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Meanwhile, French prosecutors announced today that preliminary charges of “public insult and inciting hate” were filed last month against Bob Dylan for comments made in the course of a Rolling Stone interview last year during which the singer-songwriter discussed race relations in America.

Curiously, the offended parties were the Croats. What Dylan said was:

If you got a slave master or [Klu Klux] Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

By a curious coincidence, the Republic of France was also awarding Dylan the Legion of Honor around roughly the same time that French prosecutors were indicting him for hate speech.

Theodore Dalrymple reflects, in Taki’s magazine, on the modern state’s law enforcement priorities and their deeper meaning.

A couple of American filmmakers came to Paris to interview me—it always surprises me that anybody would take so much trouble to interview anybody, let alone me—and decided that the little park opposite my flat, with a pretty little bandstand, would be a good place to do so. They set up the camera, but a few seconds later, before they could ask me a single question, a municipal policeman arrived. They were not allowed to film here without a permit from the mairie of the arrondissement, he said. I explained that these were Americans, come all the way from Texas expressly to interview me. He, a very pleasant and polite man of African origin, phoned his chief to see whether an exception could be made. As I suspected, it could not.

I told the film crew that we should make no fuss; the man was only doing his job, silly as that job might be. As it happens there were several drunks in another part of the park making aggressive-sounding noises and breaking bottles, but them he did not approach, perhaps wisely, as they were several and he was only one. He thought he would have more luck with someone wearing a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers as I was. We found a café willing to accommodate us.

The contrast between the authorities’ alacrity on one hand in preventing innocent filming for a matter of a few minutes (the policeman said authorization was necessary because it might cause a disturbance, and, being kind, I refrained from laughing), and on the other their slow response to a nasty incident that might have ended in murder, was emblematic of the modern state’s capacity to get everything exactly the wrong way around, to ascribe importance to trivia and to ignore the important. There are, of course, many more employment opportunities in trivia, since there is much more that is trivial in the world than is important.

France is not unique in this respect, or even the worst example I know. In London I once parked outside a hotel where I proposed to stay. Parking was forbidden outside, but I stopped only to take my baggage inside. I received a parking ticket within sixty seconds, a miracle of efficiency (I genuinely admired it in a way), though it was perfectly obvious from my car’s open doors that I did not propose to stay long and was only taking my luggage into the hotel. But on another occasion when my wife telephoned the police to inform them that youths were committing arson in our front garden before her very eyes, they had no time to attend to it. A more senior officer, however, did find the time a quarter of an hour later to complain to my wife that she had wasted police time by complaining in the first place.

It often seems, then, as if modern state authorities live in a looking-glass world: What normal people regard as important is for them of no importance, while what they regard as of supreme importance normal people regard as of no importance. For them the respectable are suspect and the suspect respectable. A tweed jacket is a sign of menace, while a broken bottle is a sign of harmless intent.

One must not exaggerate the degree to which official idiocy impinges on our lives. The exaggeration of misery is one of the royal roads to political disaster. Still, I have seen the future, and it is idiocy.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Charles Godefroy taking his Nieuport 11 “Bébé” through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on August 7th, 1919.

Wikipedia:

For the occasion of the victory parade on the Champs Élysées on 14 July 1919, marking the end of hostilities in World War I, the military command ordered the airmen to participate “on foot” – like the infantry. This was a provocation to the pilots, who regarded themselves as “heroes of the air”. At a meeting in the “Fouquet” bar located on the Champs Élysées, a group of aviators decided to address this affront by selecting one of them to fly through the Arc de Triomphe during the parade. The choice fell on Jean Navarre, who had twelve air victories and was considered to be an ace among the fighter pilots. However, Navarre was killed in a practice flight on 10 July. With 500 flying hours, Charles Godefroy considered himself experienced enough to take over the task, which excited the young aviator. With his close companion, the journalist Jacques Mortane, he inspected the Arc de Triomphe several times to examine the air route and the air currents; then he began to practice at the bridge over the Small Rhône at Miramas.

On 7 August 1919, three weeks after the victory parade, under cover of secrecy and dressed in his warrant officer uniform, Charles Godefroy took off at 7.20 a.m. from the airfield of Villacoublay in a biplane “Nieuport 11 Bébé” (Bébé = baby – because of its low wing span of 24.67 ft / 24’8’’ or 7.52 m). He reached the Porte Maillot shortly thereafter. Coming from the west, he circled the Arc de Triomphe twice and began the approach along the Avenue de la Grande-Armée. He gathered speed and forced the plane down and through the Arc. He did not have much clearance – the width of the Arc is 47.57 ft / 47’6’’ (14.50 m). He passed at a low level over a tram in which passengers threw themselves to the ground, and many passers-by ran away frightened. Godefroy flew over the Place de la Concorde before returning to the airfield, where his mechanic checked over the engine. No one at the airfield had taken any notice of the flight, which had lasted half an hour.

The journalist Jacques Mortane had the whole event filmed and photographed. Articles have been published in many newspapers. The film screening was banned by the Commissioner of Police. Godefroy stayed officially in the background, but his name could not be kept secret for long. The authorities disapproved of the event and were afraid of it being imitated, but Godefroy escaped with only a warning.

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

CP Entertainment:

A researcher from Paul Sabatier University, Julien Cucherousset, heard from local fisherman that in River Tarn of Southwestern France catfish hunt pigeons in addition to other prey. He and his team set up cameras to capture the amazing predator in action.

A group of catfish in River Tarn are seen swimming close to a flock of pigeons on land. When a catfish gets close enough, it lunges forward to grab the bird’s neck and drag it back to the water to swallow its meal.

“These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey,” the researchers wrote in their study. “In the process, they temporarily strand themselves on land for a few seconds.”

The hunting footage is so fierce that the researcher dubbed the carnivorous catfish as “freshwater killer whales,” after killer whales in Argentina that swim close to shore and snatch sea lions on the beach.

The predatory fish in question are Wels catfish (Silurus galanis). They can grow up to 2.49 m (8 ft 2 in) long and can weigh up to 89 kg (200 lb), so they could potentially go after even larger prey than pigeons.

The hunt is the Vautrait Piqu’Avant Bretagne, founded 2009, which hunts the wild boar in the forests of Brittany with a pack comprised of 35 couple of Anglo-French tricolor and black-and-tan foxhounds. The Hubert Mass and hounds blessing was conducted at the 13th century Gothic Basilica of Notre-Dame de La Guerche-de-Bretagne.

The French wear considerably more elaborate hunt uniforms than we do, and they accompany their hunting activities with the most splendid horn fanfares.

The ceremonies recorded in the videos took place November 10. St. Hubert‘s feast day is November 3rd. The ceremonies were probably the preliminaries to the hunt’s formal opening meet.

Saint Hubert du Vautrait Piqu' Avant Bretagne 10… by dm_50a761ee26328

bénédiction de la meute au rendez vous – La… by dm_50a761ee26328

Saint Hubert du Vautrait Piqu' Avant Bretagne en… by dm_50a761ee26328