montyfood

I can't help thinking this is a good example of why Sony is losing audio player marketshare to people like Apple, putting good r&d money into a product like this. I know this will probably do well in Japan, but I don't think that's enough to rescue it from the undeniable pointlessness of the overall concept.

Plus I have a few questions: I assume those are speaker cones under the flaps at each end. If so, doesn't the maniac flapping of the thing work like a jazz trumpeter taking a solo using a mute (think wah-wah effect)? And similarly, how good can it be to listen to a sound source that is moving all across your kitchen table (think doepler effect)?

And be sure to check out the official ad for the Rolly which seems to be going for a kerr-azy euro vibe but comes over like a poor Michel Gondry impersonation. But of course to Japanese eyes that'll only make it cooler.

[Via Kilian-Nakamura, who gave the internet the insanely great Tokyo Wave Pool video.]

Yes, thank you - I did have a summer vacation. And like all good middle-class middle-Englanders I spent my holiday in France. Of course, not all bourgeois Brits are francophiles - I wouldn't even call myself a francophile, but I do like the place. And the people. And the way of life. What's not to like?

If you're reading this and you hold perhaps a unfavourable opinion of France, well, maybe you're just a bigoted ignorant American eating freedom fries, misled into thinking that France's opinion of the USA is one of mutual animosity. Maybe you're an English farmer aggrieved at France's general attitude to our agricultural industry. Or maybe you haven't really spent any decent time in this vast and diverse country. Because France, of course, like other large-enough countries whose modern borders encapsulate many older independent regions and "tribal" groups, is a diverse place. Her republic is a remarkable mix of cultural roots: Gallic Bretons in the north-west; Flemish and Saxon tribes in her modern borders with Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany; Romance Provençals in the south-east; Catalan and Basque influence in the south-west and Pyrenees; not to mention a gamut of cultures and communities in her rural heartlands where the verdant temperate undulating landscape gives way to the drier mediterranean brush as you journey from north to south, as most British holiday-makers do, driving towards the mediterranean climes.

It feels like another lifetime ago but I remember my first French lesson at school aged 11. Up to that point the only foreign country that really registered on my radar was the USA, due mostly to watching too much Bionic Man and Evel Knievel as a kid. But I can still recall the mix of incredulity and fascination as our teachers expected us to learn to count to ten in this alien language. Yet as the months and years passed, I learned of a country so very close to mine where the way of life was so very different and, to me at least, so beguiling.

And now nearly a quarter of a century later I have found myself many times in that land both as a tourist and a cultural apprentice in the truest sense of the word, wanting to learn how these people live their lives. And each time I go there I learn something new and fascinating about the place and its people.

So in my little carnet on holiday I made a plan to blog about the following things I learned about France this year. But just so this doesn't become one gargantuan post I will split it into several chunks over the coming days.

1. The land of gourmet food succumbs to political correctness

This one made me sit up. Last summer during our sojourn as we watched French TV of an evening, Mrs Montyfood and I remarked how many adverts there were for cheese. No great surprise I guess, but coming from a country where an advert for cheese would be probably something for kids (I'm thinking Dairylea or Cheesestrings - is that actually cheese?) watching a raft of ads for all manner of fromages late at night during serious adult programmes gets your attention.

Well, this year I noted the ads are still there but they all carry a health advisory note not unlike a packet of cigarettes would here. There is a website to accompany this campaign which is always referenced. Ads themselves carry messages such as "avoid snacking between meals" and "avoid foods that are too fatty, too sugary and too salty", scrolling like a news ticker on TV, or in that breathless accelerated style used for smallprint on radio ads, and seemed to feature on anything food-related, whether French staples or foreign fast food like burgers. It's all slightly disconcerting. As a Brit, I'm used to ads by McDonalds' and the like carrying chirpy Super-Size-Me-conscious messages about exercising and such, but cheese? In the land of cheese?! It makes you think: is nothing sacré?

But the facts reveal something about France both wonderful and staggering: the campaign is the result of a federal law. Just as advertisers of junk food here in the UK are under fire, so since February 2007, French adverts for such fayre must carry these warnings in an attempt to avert increasing levels of obesity. What does this reveal about France? That it is willing to pass laws that embody its social(ist) values. Only the year before I observed that government legislation had been passed to outlaw plastic supermarket carrier bags in favour of reusabe alternatives. In this country, the major supermarkerts vie with each other to be seen as the greenest on this front, yet still none of them have the couilles of the French to go all out and only have bags for sale. (Not unless you count the relative recent-comers to the market from Germany like Lidl and Aldi.)

There's something disarming about France warning its people about the health risks of one of its traditional foodstuffs. And yet, as we prevaricate about welcoming such measures, against a backdrop of Middle England's cries of "the nanny state", there's something refreshing about a culture apparently at ease with itself that it takes on board such realities while scoffing away daily on large amounts of dairy produce. Bon appetit!