Yodeling is not a crime

At the crossroad of my interests, it crashes

I am a geek, a couch potatoe, a technology enthusiast, a gamer... and a mountain dweller. As a result, I could not let pass the opportunity to blog about this new game that will soon be available on the XBox:


I must say that I am not fully convinced by this game. Being a Guitar Hero, a Rockstar is somehow something valuable, but endorsing the traditional Lederhosen is slightly less appealing. And yet, why not. Some are doing their gym in front of their TV Set, some boxe, some ski... So let's open our mind, and close our hears.

To read further:

• Life is a game, a post on Assassin's Creed video game and its politically correct disclaimers

A breeze of fresh air

The best run ever

I will not crack a series of bad jokes on running to the loo, sliding marks, etc. No, I am not scatological enough to clutter this page with such vocabulary. However, I am from the French Alps, and I have also visited Japan recently, as a result, I could only be seduced by these Japanese toilets...
"Regular" Japanese bogs are already over-equipped with interesting features, including well-positioned water and air jets, heated seating, onboarded music to cover up your own soundtrack and preserve your integrity... So I was just wondering if this limited edition had a few more tricks in its bag. I don't know: evergreen scents, chilled breeze to give the feeling of speed, clapping and crowd roaring to encourage your skiing performance, etc.

In fact, I am not sure to let my brain wander any further, because I am certain that it will never even come close to the reality. Japanese toilets rules, that is all.


To read further:

• Toilet centric vocabulary, on shity days and toilets of all sorts.
• Love dispenser, an article on a weird dispenser found in the toilets of a major global media company.
• Japanese pictures, a slide show of my recent trip around the Japanese islands.

And the burger started to rule the world

Kingdom or neo-imperialism.

I have already mentioned several times the efforts led by creative agency Crispin, Porter+Bogusky to shift paradigms though clever usage of creativity. One of their customers is Burger King and in the US the fast food brand is facing the tough competition of archrival McDonald's but argue that their hero product, the Whopper, is simply the best burger to be sold on US soil. So how to substantiate such a claim?

When it comes to food and beverages, organoleptic tests have been used for ages. Would Mrs Smith prefer the coffee A versus coffee B? Mustard X versus Mustard Y? Coke or Pepsi? Now there is an obvious skew in the test results depending on your own history. If you have been bred on mother's apple marmalade, it is very unlikely that any other apple jam will ever compete. There are some elements engraved in our subconsciousness, be it individual or collective, that bias our perception of things. We tend to associate some emotional variables to what are sensations. I wrote an article a few months back on that topic when walking around the street of London and smelling the peculiar smell of evergreens...

That is the challenge that CP+B decided to address by setting a comparison test that would not be biased. They thus decided to move to remote places around the globe to meet people who had been lucky to escape the double-quarter-pounder-with-cheese tsunami. The principle is simple: if we present two unknown products to a consumer that has never been exposed to that category, then their ratings would really be valuable as totally objective.

Cultural checks... For your sanity.

When I looked at that video I have been torn between two feelings: on the one hand I was interested in this experiment from a ethnological standpoint, on the other hand I felt kind of upset about it. A few things bothered me.

First the way that these people are pictured, most of the time they are dressed up in their celebration outfits, just to over-stress the fact they were different people. That was a little bit too much for me. The other elements that bothered me was the necessity to go in such places and "corrupt" their perception by forcing them to evaluate the lowest quality of Western food. Would you like to participate in a test where you are asked to evaluate which goat turd tastes better because in some country it is considered a delicacy? I really like for that reason the very last sentence of the film: "seal meat taste better". After all, the US norm and especially Burgers are not, and should never be considered as a standard in terms of culinary excellence.

To read further:

• Londoniaz 1850, on how smells can bring you back in time.
• This is not a Method, an article on the Pepsi provocation in front of Coke UK Headquarters.
• Life without wall and cliches, an article on Crispin, Porter+ Bogusky campaign on PC and Apple
• Live to eat or eat to live, an article on British fast food habits