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 [...]
This early February speech, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for the Front de gauche, a left-wing coalition in France, has been helpfully subtitled in English: Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend [...]
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 [...]
— Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel Escúchela, la ciudad respirando In honor of an article I had run in The Classical, “Paris is Earning,” I watched Paris brûle-t-il ? earlier this week. The 1966 movie, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola [...]
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
When I made my Paris Métro map, the joke was that the next step would be the leap in order of magnitude between subway stations and Vélib’ stations. For those who don’t know what Vélib’ is, it’s the Parisian bike-sharing system that I’ve already described in great detail. But I knew there was no way [...]
Anecdotally, I have felt since moving to Paris that one is never, ever too far from a Métro station. This is in contrast with Chicago, where one can be literally over a mile from an El stop. But I had not, until now, measured it out. Similarly, last year, a friend, who was living in [...]