A J&B ad campaign showed up in France a few years ago, and I again saw one of the ads today. The whisky ad features two tag lines. The first, “So British!”, is also how the local press likes to describe Kate Middleton. The second tag line translates to “Born in London, distilled in Scotland.” [...]
My concern trollish ways got the better of me. In my previous post, on Mélenchon as a pedagogue, I expressed worry that he was serving to bring workers over from the Front national to the Front de gauche only to later have troops available to follow Mélenchon into pushing for a Hollande victory over Sarkozy [...]
I already tackled Megan (now) Draper’s (winning) French-Canadianness when she sang “Il était un petit navire” to the Draperinos back at the end of season 4 of Mad Men. Further, the internet already melted down over the subsequent French song Jessica Paré chose to sing for the show, so I don’t need to touch on [...]
I was in New York this weekend, and I decided to spend part of Friday afternoon at Zuccotti Park. I had been told that there was nothing going on there, so I expected to see ruins of a political movement in tatters, the kind of romantic fantasy of an unexperienced nostalgia that has yielded us, [...]
A day or two ago, a short typed up note appeared in the elevator ин my building. Usually, if someone has something to sell (like a chair), they will use the bulletin boards on the ground floor. Inside the elevator, the space is more regulated. But this man was persistent: Cherche jeune demoiselle douce et [...]
A journalist friend once said that he’d never write a certain airline’s name “airBaltic,” because he refused to do their brand management for them. I can’t remember if he chose to call them “Airbaltic,” “AirBaltic,” or “Air Baltic” instead, but the lowercase initial was beyond the pale. In English, of course, proper names are always [...]
Continue reading about Free advertising and trademarked names
As far as I can tell, there are three men named Corentin (it’s a Breton name) who are memorialized in some way in (slightly greater) Paris: Corentin Cariou, Corentin Celton, and Corentin Cloarec. Cariou has a métro station and street named after him. Celton, a métro station and hospital. And Cloarec, a street. Corentin Cariou [...]
I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is [...]
Continue reading about Erich Auerbach on scholarship in the post-Library.nu era
Great news: Vélib’, the Parisian bicycle-sharing system I have previously described in detail and mapped, had a huge revamp of its website last spring. This coincided with a handful of new features that are of crucial importance to (especially) Anglopone/American tourists. First, the new website is entirely available in English. The old version seemed to [...]
After my maps of public transportation distribution in Chicago and Paris got a bit of publicity, people started asking for more. Here, I try to consider issues of population density as well as the role of buses.
Continue reading about On comparing Paris and Chicago public transit