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Ray Bradbury on an encounter that changed his life

art, history, language & literature / /

From Sam Weller’s interview of Ray Bradbury in “The Art of Fiction No. 203” (The Paris Review: Spring 2010, No. 192):

Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end.

The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn’t know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks—a little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear—and I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language! He took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.

Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.

Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.

When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.

Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.

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A summary of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society

business, education, history, law, politics, science, technology / /

From a summary of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (Abridge Me: 1 June 2010):

The Concept of the Conventional Wisdom

The paradigms on which society’s perception of reality are based are highly conservative. People invest heavily in these ideas, and so are heavily resistant to changing them. They are only finally overturned by new ideas when new events occur which make the conventional wisdom appear so absurd as to be impalpable. Then the conventional wisdom quietly dies with its most staunch proponents, to be replaced with a new conventional wisdom. …

Economic Security

… Economics professors argue that the threat of unemployment is necessary to maintain incentives to high productivity, and simultaneously that established professors require life tenure in order to do their best work. …

The Paramount Position of Production

… Another irrationality persists (more in America than elsewhere?): the prestigious usefulness of private-sector output, compared to the burdensome annoyance of public expenditure. Somehow public expenditure can never quite be viewed as a productive and enriching element of national output; it is forever something to be avoided, at best a necessary encumbrance. Cars are important, roads are not. An expansion in telephone services improves the general well-being, cuts in postal services are a necessary economy. Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses boast our standard of living, street cleaners are an unfortunate expense. Thus we end up with clean houses and filthy streets. …

[W]e have wants at the margin only so far as they are synthesised. We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce. …

The Dependence Effect

… Modern consumer demand, at the margin, does not originate from within the individual, but is a consequence of production. It has two origins:

  1. Emulation: the desire to keep abreast of, or ahead of one’s peer group — demand originating from this motivation is created indirectly by production. Every effort to increase production to satiate want brings with it a general raising of the level of consumption, which itself increases want.
  2. Advertising: the direct influence of advertising and salesmanship create new wants which the consumer did not previously possess. Any student of business has by now come to view marketing as fundamental a business activity as production. Any want that can be significantly moulded by advertising cannot possibly have been strongly felt in the absence of that advertising — advertising is powerless to persuade a man that he is or is not hungry.

Inflation

… In 1942 a grateful and very anxious citizenry rewarded its soldiers, sailors, and airmen with a substantial increase in pay. In the teeming city of Honolulu, in prompt response to this advance in wage income, the prostitutes raised the prices of their services. This was at a time when, if anything, increased volume was causing a reduction in their average unit costs. However, in this instance the high military authorities, deeply angered by what they deemed improper, immoral, and indecent profiteering, ordered a return to the previous scale. …

The Theory of Social Balance

The final problem of the affluent society is the balance of goods it produces. Private goods: TVs, cars, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol are overproduced; public goods: education, healthcare, police services, park provision, mass transport and refuse disposal are underproduced. The consequences are extremely severe for the wellbeing of society. The balance between private and public consumption will be referred to as ‘the social balance’. The main reason for this imbalance is relatively straightforward. The forces we have identified which increase consumer demand as production rises (advertising and emulation) act almost entirely on the private sector. …

It is arguable that emulation acts on public services to an extent: a new school in one district may encourage neighbouring districts to ‘keep up’, but the effect is relatively miniscule.

Thus, private demand is artificially inflated and public demand is not, and the voter-consumer decides how to split his income between the two at the ballot box: inevitably public expenditure is grossly underrepresented. …

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You need to know if your product is a luxury or a premium

business, language & literature / /

From Seth Godin’s “Luxury vs. premium” (Seth Godin’s Blog: 17 May 2009):

Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. …

That doesn’t mean they are senseless expenditures. Sending a signal is valuable if that signal is important to you.

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more. … They’re happy to pay more because they believe they get more.

…

Plenty of brands are in trouble right now because they’re not sure which one they represent.

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A better alternative to text CAPTCHAs

business, science, security, technology / /

From Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, & Shumeet Baluja’s “What’s Up CAPTCHA?: A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation” (Google: 20-24 April 2009):

There are several classes of images which can be successfully oriented by computers. Some objects, such as faces, cars, pedestrians, sky, grass etc.

…

Many images, however, are difficult for computers to orient. For example, indoor scenes have variations in lighting sources, and abstract and close-up images provide the greatest challenge to both computers and people, often because no clear anchor points or lighting sources exist.

…

The average performance on outdoor photographs, architecture photographs and typical tourist type photographs was significantly higher than the performance on abstract photographs, close-ups and backgrounds. When an analysis of the features used to make the discriminations was done, it was found that the edge features play a significant role.

…

It is important not to simply select random images for this task. There are many cues which can quickly reveal the upright orientation of an image to automated systems; these images must be filtered out. For example, if typical vacation or snapshot photos are used, automated rotation accuracies can be in the 90% range. The existence of any of the cues in the presented images will severely limit the effectiveness of the approach. Three common cues are listed below:

1. Text: Usually the predominant orientation of text in an image reveals the upright orientation of an image.

2. Faces and People: Most photographs are taken with the face(s) / people upright in the image.

3. Blue skies, green grass, and beige sand: These are all revealing clues, and are present in many travel/tourist photographs found on the web. Extending this beyond color, in general, the sky often has few texture/edges in comparison to the ground. Additional cues found important in human tests include "grass", "trees", "cars", "water" and "clouds".

…

Second, due to sometimes warped objects, lack of shading and lighting cues, and often unrealistic colors, cartoons also make ideal candidates. … Finally, although we did not alter the content of the image, it may be possible to simply alter the color- mapping, overall lighting curves, and hue/saturation levels to reveal images that appear unnatural but remain recognizable to people.

…

To normalize the shape and size of the images, we scaled each image to a 180×180 pixel square and we then applied a circular mask to remove the image corners.

…

We have created a system that has sufficiently high human- success rates and sufficiently low computer-success rates. When using three images, the rotational CAPTCHA system results in an 84% human success metric, and a .009% bot-success metric (assuming random guessing). These metrics are based on two variables: the number of images we require a user to rotate and the size of the acceptable error window (the degrees from upright which we still consider to be upright). Predictably, as the number of images shown becomes greater, the probability of correctly solving them decreases. However, as the error window increases, the probability of correctly solving them increases. The system which results in an 84% human success rate and .009% bot success rate asks the user to rotate three images, each within 16° of upright (8-degrees on either side of upright).

…

A CAPTCHA system which displayed ≥ 3 images with a ≤ 16-degree error window would achieve a guess success rate of less than 1 in 10,000, a standard acceptable computer success rates for CAPTCHAs.

…

In our experiments, users moved a slider to rotate the image to its upright position. On small display devices such as a mobile phone, they could directly manipulate the image using a touch screen, as seen in Figure 12, or can rotate it via button presses.

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A story of failed biometrics at a gym

business, security, tech in changing society / /

Fingerprints
Creative Commons License photo credit: kevindooley

From Jake Vinson’s “Cracking your Fingers” (The Daily WTF: 28 April 2009):

A few days later, Ross stood proudly in the reception area, hands on his hips. A high-tech fingerprint scanner sat at the reception area near the turnstile and register, as the same scanner would be used for each, though the register system wasn’t quite ready for rollout yet. Another scanner sat on the opposite side of the turnstile, for gym members to sign out. … The receptionist looked almost as pleased as Ross that morning as well, excited that this meant they were working toward a system that necessitated less manual member ID lookups.

…

After signing a few people up, the new system was going swimmingly. Some users declined to use the new system, instead walking to the far side of the counter to use the old touchscreen system. Then Johnny tried to leave after his workout.

… He scanned his finger on his way out, but the turnstile wouldn’t budge.

“Uh, just a second,” the receptionist furiously typed and clicked, while Johnny removed one of his earbuds out and stared. “I’ll just have to manually override it…” but it was useless. There was no manual override option. Somehow, it was never considered that the scanner would malfunction. After several seconds of searching and having Johnny try to scan his finger again, the receptionist instructed him just to jump over the turnstile.

It was later discovered that the system required a “sign in” and a “sign out,” and if a member was recognized as someone else when attempting to sign out, the system rejected the input, and the turnstile remained locked in position. This was not good.

The scene repeated itself several times that day. Worse, the fingerprint scanner at the exit was getting kind of disgusting. Dozens of sweaty fingerprints required the scanner to be cleaned hourly, and even after it was freshly cleaned, it sometimes still couldn’t read fingerprints right. The latticed patterns on the barbell grips would leave indented patterns temporarily on the members’ fingers, there could be small cuts or folds on fingertips just from carrying weights or scrapes on the concrete coming out of the pool, fingers were wrinkly after a long swim, or sometimes the system just misidentified the person for no apparent reason.

Fingerprint Scanning

In much the same way that it’s not a good idea to store passwords in plaintext, it’s not a good idea to store raw fingerprint data. Instead, it should be hashed, so that the same input will consistently give the same output, but said output can’t be used to determine what the input was. In biometry, there are many complex algorithms that can analyze a fingerprint via several points on the finger. This system was set up to record seven points.

After a few hours of rollout, though, it became clear that the real world doesn’t conform to how it should’ve worked in theory. There were simply too many variables, too many activities in the gym that could cause fingerprints to become altered. As such, the installers did what they thought was the reasonable thing to do – reduce the precision from seven points down to something substantially lower.

The updated system was in place for a few days, and it seemed to be working better; no more people being held up trying to leave.

Discovery

… [The monitor] showed Ray as coming in several times that week, often twice on the same day, just hours apart. For each day listed, Ray had only come the later of the two times.

Reducing the precision of the fingerprint scanning resulted in the system identifying two people as one person. Reviewing the log, they saw that some regulars weren’t showing up in the system, and many members had two or three people being identified by the scanner as them.

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David Foster Wallace on leadership

history, language & literature, politics / /

From David Foster Wallace’s “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” (Rolling Stone: 13 April 2000):

The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché or boring at all; in fact he’s sort of the opposite of cliché and boring.

Obviously, a real leader isn’t just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to think is a good guy. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with “inspire” being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. It’s a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you “looked up to” (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a Scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend’s parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are “authority figures,” but it’s a special kind of authority. If you’ve ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren’t, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.

Lincoln was, by all available evidence, a real leader, and Churchill, and Gandhi, and King. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, and certainly Marshall and maybe Eisenhower. (Of course Hitler was a real leader too, a very powerful one, so you have to watch out; all it is is a weird kind of power.)

…

Now you have to pay close attention to something that’s going to seem real obvious. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. Because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is his own self-interest. If you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying really is in your interest (and it really might be) — still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman’s ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful … although admittedly it’s a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.

…

Yes, this is simplistic. All politicians sell, always have. FDR and JFK and MLK and Gandhi were great salesmen. But that’s not all they were. People could smell it. That weird little extra something. It had to do with “character” (which, yes, is also a cliché — suck it up).

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Gottman on relationships

science / /

From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):

So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things”.

…

Another puzzle I’m working on is just what happens when a baby enters a relationship. Our study shows that the majority (67%) of couples have a precipitous drop in relationship happiness in the first 3 years of their first baby’s life. That’s tragic in terms of the climate of inter-parental hostility and depression that the baby grows up in. That affective climate between parents is the real cradle that holds the baby. And for the majority of families that cradle is unsafe for babies.

…

So far I believe we’re going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things.

…

Bob Levenson and I were very surprised when, in 1983, we found that we could actually predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period just by examining their physiology and behavior during a conflict discussion, and later just from an interview about how the couple viewed their past. 90% accuracy!

…

That was surprising to us. It seemed that people either started in a mean-spirited way, a critical way, started talking about a disagreement, started talking about a problem as just a symptom of their partner’s inadequate character, which made their partner defensive and escalated the conflict, and people started getting mean and insulting to one another. That predicted the relationship was going to fall apart. 96% of the time the way the conflict discussion started in the first 3 minutes determined how it would go for the rest of the discussion. And four years later it was like no time had passed, their interaction style was almost identical. Also 69% of the time they were talking about the same issues, which we realized then were “perpetual issues” that they would never solve. These were basic personality differences that never went away. She was more extroverted or she was more of an explorer or he was more punctual or frugal.

Some couples were caught by the web of these perpetual issues and made each other miserable, they were “grid locked” like bumper-to-bumper traffic with these issues, while other couples had similar issues but coped with them and had a “dialogue” that even contained laughter and affection. It seemed that relationships last to the extent that you select someone whose annoying personality traits don’t send you into emotional orbit. Once again conventional wisdom was wrong. The big issue wasn’t helping couples resolve their conflicts, but moving them from gridlock to dialogue. And the secret of how to do that turned out to be having each person talk about their dream within the conflict and bringing Viktor Frankl’s existential logotherapy into the marital boxing ring. Once people talked about what they wished for and hoped for in this gridlock conflict and the narrative of why this was so important to them, in 86% of the cases they would move from gridlock to dialogue. Again a new door opened. Not all marital conflicts are the same. You can’t teach people a set of skills and just apply them to every issue. Some issues are deeper, they have more meaning. And then it turned out that the very issues that cause the most pain and alienation can also be the greatest sources of intimacy and connection.

Another surprise: we followed couples for as long as 20 years, and we found that there was another kind of couple that didn’t really show up on the radar; they looked fine, they weren’t mean, they didn’t escalate the conflict — but about 16 to 22 years after the wedding they started divorcing. They were often the pillars of their community. They seemed very calm and in control of their lives, and then suddenly they break up. Everyone is shocked and horrified. But we could look back at our early tapes and see the warning signs we had never seen before. Those people were people who just didn’t have very much positive connection. There wasn’t very much affection — and also especially humor — between them.

…These sorts of emotionally disconnected relationships were another important dimension of failed relationships. We learned through them that the quality of the friendship and intimacy affects the nature of conflict in a very big way.

…

One of the major things we found is that honoring your partner’s dreams is absolutely critical. A lot of times people have incompatible dreams — or they don’t want to honor their partner’s dreams, or they don’t want to yield power, they don’t want to share power. So that explains a lot of times why they don’t really belong together.

Psycho-physiology is an important part of this research. It’s something that Bob Levenson brought to the search initially, and then I got trained in psycho-physiology as well. And the reason we’re interested in what was happening in the body is that there’s an intimate connection between what’s happening to the autonomic nervous system and what happening in the brain, and how well people can take in information — how well they can just process information — for example, just being able to listen to your partner — that is much harder when your heart rate is above the intrinsic rate of the heart, which is around a hundred to a hundred and five beats a minute for most people with a healthy heart.

At that point we know, from Loren Rowling’s work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA) , so their heart is beating faster, it’s contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening — people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation.

…

Because men are different. Men have a lot of trouble when they reach a state of vigilance, when they think there’s real danger, they have a lot of trouble calming down. and there’s probably an evolutionary history to that. Because it functioned very well for our hominid ancestors, anthropologists think, for men to stay physiologically aroused and vigilant, in cooperative hunting and protecting the tribe, which was a role that males had very early in our evolutionary history. Whereas women had the opposite sort of role, in terms of survival of the species, those women reproduced more effectively who had the milk-let-down reflex, which only happens when oxytocin is secreted in the brain, it only happens when women — as any woman knows who’s been breast-feeding, you have to be able to calm down and relax. But oxytocin is also the hormone of affiliation. So women have developed this sort of social order, caring for one another, helping one another, and affiliating, that also allows them to really calm down and have the milk let-down reflex. And so — it’s one of nature’s jokes. Women can calm down, men can’t; they stay aroused and vigilant.

…

Physiology becomes really critical in this whole thing. A provocative finding from Alyson Shapiro’s recent dissertation is that if we take a look at how a couple argues when the woman is in the sixth month of pregnancy, we can predict over half the variation in the baby, the three-month-old baby’s vagal tone, which is the ability of the vagus nerve, the major nerve of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for establishing calm and focusing attention. That vagus nerve in the baby is eventually going to be working well if the parents, during pregnancy, are fighting with each other constructively. That takes us into fetal development, a whole new realm of inquiry.

…

You have to study gay and Lesbian couples who are committed to each other as well as heterosexual couples who are committed to each other, and try and match things as much as you can, like how long they’ve been together, and the quality of their relationship. And we’ve done that, and we find that there are two gender differences that really hold up.

One is that if a man presents an issue, to either a man he’s in love with or a woman he’s in love with, the man is angrier presenting the issue. And we find that when a woman receives an issue, either from a woman she loves or a man she loves, she is much more sad than a man would be receiving that same issue. It’s about anger and sadness. Why? Remember, Bowlby taught us that attachment and loss and grief are part of the same system. So women are finely tuned to attaching and connecting and to sadness and loss and grief, while men are attuned to defend, stay vigilant, attack, to anger. My friend Levenson did an acoustic startle study (that’s where you shoot of a blank pistol behind someone’s head when they least expect it). Men had a bigger heart rate reactivity and took longer to recover, which we would expect, but what even more interesting is that when you asked people what they were feeling, women were scared and men were angry.

So that’s probably why those two differences have held up. Physiologically people find over and over again in heterosexual relationships — and this hasn’t been studied yet in gay and Lesbian relationships — that men have a lower flash point for increasing heart-rate arousal, and it takes them longer to recover. And not only that, but when men are trying to recover, and calm down, they can’t do it very well because they keep naturally rehearsing thoughts of righteous indignation and feeling like an innocent victim. They maintain their own vigilance and arousal with these thoughts, mostly of getting even, whereas women really can distract themselves and calm down physiologically from being angered or being upset about something. If women could affiliate and secrete oxytocin when they felt afraid, they’s even calm down faster, probably.

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I did not tow your car

commonplace book / /

From Scott Rosenberg’s "Web 2.0 jottings":

AOL’s Jonathan Miller … told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: "The person here did not tow your car. They are here to help you get your car back. If you cooperate, you will get your car back faster."

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Secret movies in the Paris underground

art, cool stuff, weird / /

From Jon Henley’s “In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema” (The Guardian: 8 September 2004):

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said. …

Members of the force’s sports squad, responsible – among other tasks – for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us." …

There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.

… the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work.

Film noir in the Parisian catacombs. Secret bars and telephones. Scuttling down drains for secret assignations. "Do not try to find us." I’m swooning just thinking about it!

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