He is so French!

Social gathering.

The other week I introduced my son to colleagues during our Christmas lunch. He was not the only newborn in the room as our team seems to have undergone a baby boom lately, like most of the UK. There were three of them, plus a heavily pregnant colleague who could almost have delivered in front of our bemused eyes...


The debrief of that day was really insightful. Not only were my colleagues hypnotised by my son's charming smile, but they all reported an interesting fact: "he looks so French". That statement puzzled me. What does it mean? Obviously he has a French passport, two French parents, a lot of sex appeal, and he shrugs every now and then. But what would make him stand out as French from a crowd of three babies who, you would expect, looked like... well, babies?


Spot the difference.


I must admit that every now and then I play a similar game in public transportation. I spot an individual and try to identify its origin by the look, attitude, posture or body language. And I am pretty good at it. There are so many little hints here and there about where you are from. A little red mapple leaf flag sewed on your backpack, you are certainly Canadian. Waving hands, aren't you Italian? Too perfect a white smile and you are probably from the States, the West coast even. You wear flip-flops and a t-shirt whilst it is snowing outside, you are probably Australian, unless these are not flip-flops but sandals, then you may be from Newcastle.


My son does not walk around with a baguette under his arm yet. And his body language is pretty limited at his age, although he is very good with his hands which might make him a good footballer at some point. So it must be due to some of he dresses up. In France we have an idiom that says that the robe does not make the monk. But maybe the outfit makes the French...


We have indeed said a few times that our son wears "French baby clothes", as if that was a type of fashion. We struggled to get that point with my wife, until we looked at buying baby stuff in the UK. You must admit that the offering is quite limited once you have removed the cheezy, fluffy and over-functional clothes. For instance, I would probably not let my son wander around in a Manchester United red overall. If there is something I have learned it is that you must never compromise on style. So he will have to wear stuff I would be proud to wear myself. He is after all a little one, but a boy before all. So why put him through the pain of looking bad, when he could look good?


That might be the parents' attitude then that is at stake in the above-mentioned judgement. Maybe our son looks French, because we raise him as one despite our efforts to blend in. Arthur ought to be boy that values good-looking style, good food, good wine, good manners... And good company.


On that hereditary note, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and an Happy New Year. We are flying back to France to see if his cousins think that our son is "so British"!




To read further:

•  Victim of your origins, a self-explanatory title about the cliches associated to some nationalities
• The end of a myth, or how Brits, once European sexiest nation, has lost their appeal
• Subtle differences among English speaking nations, a click for a smile.

Quote of the day

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Rotten apple on page 3

There are a few companies out there that would like to give a bite to the Cuppertino-based consumer electronics giant... Microsoft, HP, and the list goes on and on. When I saw the following ad it made me smile. I liked the deprecative tone against Apple's too patronising (though not assumed) expression mode.  I liked the ad, though I am still not convinced about the product itself. Which is the opposite of what an Apple ad does to me... Interesting consumer behaviour!



To read further:

• Becoming an advertising reference, an article on how iconic brands become legends by being spoofed 
• 8 years later... A spoof of the Budweiser advertising campaign

Walk around the Loch, walk around the world

Loch me in the eye


Keen fan of Scotland whose surroundings amazed me when I toured it a few years back, I am always interested to see how the local breed promote their region and iconic products. To a certain extend, Whisky is the Scottish wine. You find the same kind of traditional, secretive techniques to ensure great, consistent quality of a product which is intrinsically subject to the unpredictable consequence of natural elements... It is also very easy to fall in the trap of the cliches: the bagpiper wearing a kilt with his face painted in blue... But it is also great to dig a little further in the ambitions of a nation that was too often discarded by the cousins of the South.


The following short film is a great story, told by a great actor. Robert Carlisle is not only a great stripper, he is also a good story-teller. So kudos to advertising agency BBH for the production of this one-take film depicting the story of Whisky brand Johnny Walker. The photography is great, the directing and acting too... But more importantly, the story line is insightful and great. Keep up the good work, and keep walking.

To read more:

• Love... Scotland: Scotland seen by Robbin Williams... Hilarious
• Ride on the edge of difference. A different way to ride the streets of Edinburg
• Highland, high time. A post on how to use masculine sex appeal to promote Scotish tourism and sports.

We Feel Fine... Thank you!

Turning the page


A while back, the news were all doom and gloom. The economical downturn was all over: in the press, on TV, on the top of the alibi lists used by large corporations to legitimise redundancy plans... Back then, I wrote a note about the positive attitude that one can adopt to face this challenging situation.


A few months later, I have encountered the embodiment of my earlier thoughts in the form of Christmas lightings. As we get closer to the holidays period, positivism seems to take over. I was hence happily surprised to walk up Carnaby Street and to discover this year's variation of their much anticipated Christmas decorations:

Peace. Love. Joy... All good intentions materialised in gigantic balloons covered in rainbow colours, shining stars and other feel-good graphic designs. They hang over the crowd like oversized cartoon bubbles, as if to visualise the intimate thoughts of passers-bys.


Picture that emotion.


As you may remember from a previous post, I am keeping a close eye on Bing, Microsoft new search experience which aims at offering consumers an alternative to Google's 10 boring blue links. Bing just got out of its beta phase in the UK, and the British experience now integrates a brand new way to search: visual search. Don't get me wrong, this is not a new way to search for images. No, this is a visual way to search. It provides users with thumbnails around a given topic, each picture representing an intent. In this example, the images represent travel destinations which can be filtered out using options on the left. You can thus decide that in June, in France, Lyon and the French Alps are one of the ideal travel destinations... Hurray!


Beyond the shameless promotion of my home region, why is that search marketing digression relevant to the current article? Visual search relies on a psychological fact: human beings process images 28% faster than text. This is probably why people like Jonathan Harris work tirelessly at visualising what cannot be materialised.


I refered to Harris' work a few times on this blog, because I just find it amazing. In 2005 for instance, Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris created the award-winning website wefeelfine.org, an exploration of human emotion that harvests human feelings from all over the internet. On that site, millions of bubbles are extracting from the blogosphere the words "I feel..." and then depending on the adjective that follows the verb the bubble gets coloured and clustered.

Log in to that site at any point of time and you get an instantaneous view of what people feel then. You can even filter out the results by gender, age groups, weather... Are men or women happier? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? Is beauty the bridge between happiness and negativity? How do our emotions change as we age? What causes depression? What's sexy? What's normal? What's human?

We feel fine finally provides a way to answer these questions that is both quantitative and anecdotal, putting individual stories into a larger context and showing the stories behind the statistics, or as the authors like to say, "bringing life to statistics and statistics to life."


If you want to learn more about this experiment on how to visualise feelings, the authors have published a book "We feel fine: an almanach of human emotion". Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is "a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion".

Now, that could be a great "Feel-Good Christmas Present", couldn't it?

To read further:

• Don't laugh for me Argentina, an article on what a real recession is
• Now this is a downturn, a note on what crazy people do to go downward 
• From scapegoat to superhero, or the real internet revolution.
• A colourful digital crystal ball, an article about the visual representation of your online presence

My name is not nobody

The name of the doubt.

As you may have read in September, I am for a couple months the lucky dad of a young little fellow called Arthur.

Finding the name of your heir is probably one of the most complex tasks in early parenthood. You cannot afford to be wrong... (Un)fortunately the pregnancy lasts for nine months, which means that you have three quarter of a calendar year to make up your mind. But also as much time to hesitate.

Dilemma after dilemma, books after books, long list after long list, arguments after agreements... It is a never ending story. Well so to speak, because ultimately, one day the little one is here and you have to call him by something. On that note, it was interesting to discover that in the UK, your baby can remain unnamed for a couple weeks, so you can buy yourself some time (I love this expression).

The naming brief.

As a couple of migrating French, we had some kind of a brief for our child's name. First it had to be a boy's name... Probably too lazy to cope with the burden of stabbing in the dark, we had asked for the sex of our child and reduced the task by 50%. But then we wanted: a French name that was also international; a name that would be pronounced roughly the same way in the main European languages; a name that would not carry any chav connotation (I am sorry to say that English names have a negative connotation in France, due to the success of 90210 and the tsunami of Brandons and Dylans that followed); a name which would not create puzzling initial... And certainly a proper name, not a word turned into a name.

In the end, we opted for Arthur, a name which ticked all the above-mentioned boxes on top of having seduced us both. Our son is named after King Arthur, this Briton who successfully fought the Saxons in the 6th century. Being a French King seems to be a key factor of success to achieve great things on this side of the Channel. Think about William the Conqueror or, closer to us, Eric Cantona. French emperors are to that extend less likely to succeed...

Around the clock.

We were convinced that we had thought of everything. Acronyms, permutations, abbreviations... In French, in English, in Italian and Spanish. No flaws could be found. And yet, one of the first things our parents said to us after "oh my God, he is so cute" was "we hope he won't be too often called Arthur!". This was said with a smile, as if there was an intelligent pun or a spoonerism in the sentence. But we were completely missing the trick(another proof of our lack of intelligence it seemed).

At some point, we had to ask. It is painful to be parents and yet to have to admit your ignorance and go back to your own parents just like you were five again. My mother explained me that there was an idiom when she was younger: "se faire appeler Arthur" ("to be called Arthur") meant then "to be told of". She could not recall the origin of this expression though.

After a little investigation to crack the riddle, we finally identified the potential origin of this idiom. And I could not refrain to share it on this blog, since it is tightly connected to cultural difference...
So flash back. We are in the early 40's in France. The German army is occupying most of the territory. To prevent both the sabotage work of the Resistance and the night bombing from the Allys, the Wehrmacht has instored a national curfew. After 8 o'clock, no more light. And German troops patrolled to enforce this policy.

On the one hand, the traditional German uprightness, on the other a world famous habit to "interpret" the laws. You can easily imagine the German soldiers banging at the door of a café, pointing at their watch to explain to the locals that they ought to finish their Pernod in the dark. They would probably add to the pantomime some basic German orders to make their orders crystal clear, something like "8 o'clock!"... Eight o'clock, Acht Uhr in Goethe's language.

For the non-German-speaking, and probably inebriated, fellows on the other side of the machine gun though, Acht Uhr actually sounded pretty much like Arthur. So being summoned "Acht Uhr" was like being told of by your teacher. "Hey Paul, they called you Acht Uhr/Arthur, so you'd better swallow that last glass and head home before it gets worse".

Since the expression have survived, at least amongst the baby-boomers who were "called arthur" by their parents every time they burnt a bra or sprayed slogans on the walls. As a representative of the Generation X, I had never heard of it. My son is not even two month old and he teaches me some cultural insights. That is promising, a bit like that gesture he gave me the other day. No doubt about it Arthur is French, and that he will be called Acht Uhr in the next few years.


To read further:

• Tattling ta-ta! an article on how the second world war influences the perception of our grand parents.
• Forbidding is forbidden, on these iconic slogans the French baby boomers came up with during the May 68 protests.
• Lost time is never found again, a post on how the concept of time differs from one nation to the other.
• Watch your moves or how movements and idioms can be differently interpreted by various nations.

Published. I am published.

A year ago (ok, a little bit more I must acknowledge) I added to my resolutions that I would write a novel... That might have been a bit ambitious from someone that comes from the same city as Stendhal, but I kind of made it. Kind of.

16 months later, "La Loi du Milieu" (The Law of the Underworld) has made its way from my head to the printer. So here is a self-promoting post to make the French-speaking readers of this blog aware that the bespoke short story is completed and is available for purchase on blurb.com. Sorry for the English speakers but you will be missing out until Steven Spielberg decides to adapt it to the Big Screen.

The pitch? Well, I have spend so much time on the introduction wording that there is no need to paraphrase. It is best for you to read it by yourself by clicking on the below-stated "Book Preview" link (note: the preview application is a bit heavy, so you will have to wait a bit, sorry). It will give you a idea of the content, style and photographic illustration to expect, and hopefully interest you enough to click further:

La loi du milieu. Une nouvelle de Cedric Chambaz Book Info

And because I am a model of generosity, I am happy to send a signed copy to the first person who drops me a line... Cheap incentive today, but hey, maybe one day this will worth millions, who knows:).

La loi du milieu.

Une nouvelle de Cedric Chambaz

Book Preview

Ménage à trois

Once upon a time.

French are said to have developed the concept of love affairs. Bill Maher highlights that as one our key trait in his excellent tirade about "being French". But what people may not necessarily be aware of is our fantastic story-telling capabilities. You really have to be good at it when living two parallel lives.

Here is an illustration from Canal+, the French TV channel which is also one of the main cinema producer around the globe. Canal+ is an iconic advertiser in France served by a great creative agency BETC Euro RSCG. They have come up over the last few years with some great advertisements including The March of the Emperor, Broke Back Mountain or Mafia. A saga that is creating much anticipation...

To read further:

• Parisian, head of crustaceans... another French advertising saga for Paris newspaper.
• 8 years later... the Budweiser iconic advert revisited
• How's your job? another great spoof of teh MasterCard saga... A bit horny.

French clichés... Frightening

Just came across this ad from Burger company Hardee's, and I must say that I really don't like. Too many clichés, not enough twists in it. And the product ultimately is nothing but a good representation of what French cuisine can and should be. Anyway they forgot the French beans, the French letters, the French windows, the French doctors... Merci quand même.

To read further:

• And the burger started to rule the world, an article on Burger King immersion in the world of Burger-agnostic civilisations.
• American dream... a short video on how journalist Bill Maher sees France. Hilarious.
• Cuisine like no other a real location about food.
• Computer Generated Tourism or how cartoon can make the most out of France.

Long live the King

A few months back, the Evening Standard published an feature what some people were referring to as a new Baby Boom in the UK. This time around, it was not platinum blond teenagers who were getting on the maternity row, it was rather the thirty-something year old middle class executives who were facing the economical downturn in their own way.

Redundancy plans, reduced bonuses... The middle class had to find something less expensive to entertain itself during last winter. And it seems that it got busy around Christmas.

A few months later, nine in fact, the aftermath of this cocooning plus cuddling phase definitely shows. Prams are now overcrowding the pavements of London, and bumps can be seen everywhere.

On our end, we jumped the gun: this morning my wife gave birth to our first baby, Arthur. Welcome my son.



To read further:

• Don't laugh for me Argentina. or how to put the current economical downturn in perspective
• Now this is a downturn. An article on people who are really going downwards.

Language on a life line

I have already refered a few times to this series of humorous points of view shared by English comedian and actor David Mitchell on all things contemporary. I could do noting but point to this one, which touches base on a topic close to my heart: languages. Some great thinking included in this sketch, including the conclusion: languages follow natural selection.



To read further:

• Victim of your origins, an article on the bias associated to cultural differences and Mitchell's point of view on generation clashes
• Be Welsh! Mitchell's view on Wales and its green pastures

The cost of loving

More of these pictures on my Flickr account

The right agenda

If you are a re regular reader of this blog, you may recall that my wife and I are expecting a newcomer in the coming days. This new addition leads me to think a bit more about cultural differences and oddities around families. So expect a few blog posts in this area in the next weeks... Yes, maybe I will find some time to write articles during some of these promised sleepless nights. Today, I wanted to draw your attention on how finance and tax influence private family lives.

There are indeed two key dates in the diaries of engaged couples: in France that is June 30th; in the UK, September 1st. Although love is a blinding exercise that drives you towards irrational acts, I have discovered that most of the above-mentioned couples are nevertheless very sensitive about their wallet, when they are about to tie the knot, or procreate.

Yes, I will... Save tax!

Let's take things in the "right" order. I will explain to the non-French readers why June is a key month for couples that are looking at getting married. But first I have to make a slight, though critical, digression on the French tax system. Unlike the UK where you are paying your income tax immediately, the French system waits for your fiscal year to end, consolidates all your incomes including wages, rents, share earnings, etc. and then apply a progressive taxation rates on the last 12 months. As a result the higher your total income, the higher the tax rate.

The second main difference is that the income is calculated by household, not by individual. Two singles leaving together are considered as two separate households with different sources of income, as they are not tied by an official, contractual binding. Marriage is the most common way to be seen, in light of the law, as a household. So from the day you say "yes" in front of the altar, the tax office starts looking at your two incomes as one, with its consecutive taxation rate implications.

If you followed me so far, keep the focus on, as this is the part that gets tricky (and you thought French were crooked).

When Mister A marries Miss B, Mister A as a standalone household stops existing. So is household B. And here comes household A+B. At the end of year, the tax office will look at all three households, and apply the appropriate yearly tax rate on each some income generated during the course of the fiscal year. Mister A's yearly revenue only totals up to 6 months of salary. So is Miss B's. And the couple will only pay taxes on six months of joint income.

This is a fantastic tax saver exercise, as you consequently "half" your income that year, and the tax that comes along. So let's be honest, couples are not getting married during the summer because they want a beautiful blue sky as the background of their wedding picture. They are simply trying to save on tax... probably to afford the expensive wedding anyway.

Give birth, save money.

The myth of the romantic French might have been damaged by the previous paragraph, but I am about to bring the Brits on par. We personally got married in October, because we had found the ideal location, and because we were paying our income tax in the UK anyway, so the above did not apply. During our preparation for the Big Day, we once met with a priest in London who reminded us, and the other couples in the room, that a child was an act of love, not a financial decision.

His sentence made me smile back then. As if everything in London was dictated by finance. As if I had to call an advisor in the City before getting romantic with my better half... Well, now that I have started piling up baby clothes, prams, toys, nappies for a couple months, it might well be the case.

I got struck by the fact that all the Brits around me where congratulating me for my "three-second contribution, life-long commitment", highlighting the fact that our child would be a September baby. At first I thought the entire nation was into astrology and that Virgo was the zodiacal sign to have... But no, their comments were triggered by another, more down-to-Earth consideration.

The British education system seems to have a few rules, including a strict definition of the child's age to enter the system. The child must be 5 during the school year which is September 1st to August 31st. This means that a child born in August will start school just after turning 4. On the other end a child born in September will start school a year later. And it seems that this rule has different impact on who you are talking to. The mother usually feels great about September children, because that mean they can keep them close to their heart for one more year (the child is also likely to be more mature when confronting the harsh life of maths and grammar). On the other hand, some people realise that this additional year may translate into incremental costs: one more year at the nursery...

I pretty sure that some people may make procreation plans like they would manage a business plan. The famous, "not tonight I have migraine" might well be replaced by "not this month, my bonus is jeopardized".

Anyway, that is me being sarcastic. Love is beautiful, and all proof of its celebration, be it a wedding, children or even a small bunch of flowers handed over a departing train... are outcasting all financial considerations. After all, as John Lennon and the Beatles once said "All you need is love".

To read further:

• The end of a myth, or how in 50 years the British sex appeal has plummeted
• Now this is a downturn. a funny twist on what was happening in the City not so long ago
• The bad education. an article on the subliminal messages disseminated in children TV programmes

A colourful digital crystal ball

Tell me your name...

I have recently stumbled upon Steve Clayton's blog and my attention got attracted by this little experiment from the MIT. Some students from this university have developed a piece of software that browse the internet after you entered a name. It then associates the contextual information surrounding your name into pre-defined categories that should ultimately compose your personality.

In the words of its genitor, Aaron Zinman, personas can be defined:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

I liked Zinman's approach, and accepted to test it against my own name, assuming that his alogorithm may find some qualifying stuff about me. And it did. This is who I am accordingly to Personas, pretty accurate I dare say:


To read further:

• From scapegoat to superhero, an article on how the web turned technology fans into contemporary heroes after years of bullying.

To Each Generation Its Own Branded Verbs

I wrote an article on another blog on how French and English differ in their language syntax, and how this can influence brand marketing. Here are the first few paragraphs:

As a non-native English speaker living in the UK, I am always amazed by how the locals manipulate Shakespeare's language. In spite of historical connections between French and English, inherited from years of reciprocal invasions, the two languages are significantly different in the way their syntax is constructed and evolves.

For instance, the French tend to turn everything into nouns. We don't "generalise", we make "generalisations". As a result, most additions to the French dictionary are nouns. In English, on the contrary, as soon as there is some level of interest in an action, people are likely to "verb" it.
And brands tend to trigger such interests.

It is therefore common to come across brand names in the English thesaurus. A British citizen is likely to say: "I'm going to hoover the carpets" because of the electrical appliance brand, Hoover, that has penetrated the collective unconsciousness after years of market domination.
Interesting enough, Hoover market share is now depleting in favour of Dyson, but the expression remains amongst older generations who had known its full glory. On the other hand, nowadays no teenagers would ever say "I will hoover my room" (assuming that a teenager knows what cleaning a room means). Note that they do not say that they will dyson either. They will come up with their own generational terminology once they will have figured out how dangerous for their health rotting pizzas can be.

(...)

To read the full article, simply click here.

No vacancy in the city

Languages and travel books

Some people pretend to master foreign languages because they can articulate two pseudo-sentences. Be careful if that is your case, as this can easily backfire. I have indeed come across this article from the BBC that describes the foolish adventures of a British tourist in Eastern France.

The first mistake might have been to visit the North-Eastern part of France... What was she doing there in the summer, seriously?

But the most hilarious part of the story lays in the fact that this modern Phileas Fogg was to learn that you should never extrapolate what's said on the tin. She indeed got locked in the Town Hall where she thought she could rent a room for the night.

This tourist should have known that in formal French a hotel refers to a large public or private house, the equivalent of a mansion if you want. When wandering in a city, you can thus come across "hotels particuliers" which are bourgeois private houses but also the "hotel des impots" (the tax office) or in our specific instance the "hotel de ville" (the city hall). Hotels -those were you can rent a room- are only called so by extension in reference to the fact that they are huge places owned by one landlord. They are certainly the most common hotels and refered as such by every living soul. Nonetheless you still ought to be careful when looking at a map, or you might have some unconfortable experiences...

To read further:

• Slick chop-stick-style. an article on the difficulties faced by Western tourists in Japan
• The Italian job, a classical on accents and misunderstandings
• Back in the office. another smart find from the BBC, when "out of office" change directions