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...