Well, on the train from New York to Princeton Junction I got to witness just such an event. A girl sitting opposite me stopped a chap who was passing through; it became clear that they had been in the same fairly close-knit social group in New Jersey at some point (probably when they were at school) but had since fallen out of touch. As it happened, both were now working in Manhattan: she as a personal assistant for some public-relations dragon, he spending eight days a week living it large in investment banking. It sounded to me like two stereotypical ‘young-adult jobs’ from a movie (cf. The Pursuit of Happyness, The Devil Wears Prada). Because of his lengthy working hours, he is living in New York in an apartment he shares with some mutual acquaintances, but she evidently still lives with or near her parents somewhere in northern New Jersey.

After a while, the well of ‘Did you hear about so-and-so?… No, she chucked him…’ conversation ran dry and so our friends turned to personal anecdotes to keep things going. I’m afraid I wasn’t in a position to take notes (it would have been too obvious, as we were facing each other), so can’t give direct quotations. However, the young lady told a story the gist of which was as follows:

She had been at a party and had somehow become quite inebriated. She then got into her car to drive back to her father‘s house (at this point, a collective sharp intake of breath from those of us in earshot and listening in on this not-at-all-muffled conversation: we could guess what was coming). Quite close to home she drove off the road into some sort of electrical substation, thus cutting off the power to the whole neighbourhood. Somehow, in spite of some fairly extensive injuries, she was able to drive away, and so went home.

About ten minutes later there came a ring at the doorbell, and she opened the door to two policemen. They had been sent to investigate the damage to the substation, and had seen her car in a sub-par state in the driveway. They asked her straight off whether she had driven in to the substation, and she replied that she had. However, she reserved her right to avoid self-incrimination as clarified by the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and refused to answer any more questions. Her father hadn’t realized that she had come home, but attracted by the sound of the doorbell he came to find his daughter in conference with the long arm of the law just as the said long arm was trying to drag her down to its local lair, but he persuaded the knackers that it was more appropriate that she should be taken to the hospital for attention to her injuries.

The trial is pending. The defendant has already admitted that she drove into the substation, and so presumably will face a conviction for dangerous driving. But the more serious charge would be that she was Driving Under the Influence of alcohol (or Driving While Intoxicated: the crime is given one of the two names in the various states¹) when the accident occurred. This would certainly have a penalty on her licence, and possibly also come with time in gaol to match. However, apparently her solicitor has advised her that the police cannot prove that she was drunk when she had her accident; instead, it is supposedly a realistic proposition that she was so traumatized by the crash that she got home and immediately put away half a bottle of Bourbon, thus explaining her condition when the police showed up at the door. Even the defendant herself thought that this was a hilarious proposition, and those of us seated around who were purposefully not listening in exchanged amused glances. Anyway, good luck to her and her lawyer; I hope the jury appreciates her appeal to basic evidentiary logic. Evidently the lawyer comes from the O.J. Simpson school of defence (‘if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’).

Still, at least the crash happened in densely-populated New Jersey, and not as she was trying desperately to drive across the desert in the middle of the night.

Notes

1. In Austin, at the beginning of this trip, I was surprised and disturbed to find a fleet of taxis which bore the name ‘DWI Guy’ on the side. I wondered why any taxi driver would advertise the fact that he had been even accused, let alone convicted, of driving drunk, or indeed why any potential passenger would get in such a taxi. It was only as I was leaving that I realized that they were in fact advertisements for a local criminal defendant who specialized in drunk-driving charges. ↩

[I]n the same way that race is at the core of what it means to be American and at the core of an American experience and class is at the core of British experience, I think that language is at the core of Canadian experience.

—Official Languages Commissioner, Graham Fraser, quoted in the Hill Times, 31st August 2009

Can we really define these three countries that simply? This troubles me. I know that class-consciousness is far more acutely tuned in the UK than in other places, and my present travels through the southern United States—and elsewhere in the country—have shown that racial considerations are still a daily concern. In fact I can only disagree outright with the suggestion that ‘language is at the core of Canadian experience’: it is really a question of where you live, since, for example, residents of British Columbia can rely on English as a true lingua franca, whereas in some of the eastern provinces (primarily, of course, Quebec) the conflicting relationship between French and English is more of a concern.

What then, Mr Fraser, is at the core of the ‘Australian experience’? Apologizing for things you had nothing to do with? (Zing.)

Notes

1. Yes, that’s right: I just coined a bastard compound. Deal with it. Or would you rather I’d written ‘glottaphiles’? ↩

This photo is a stitch of ten separate frames; you’ll note that I didn’t photograph the floor or the ceiling, which is why they are just black holes in the panorama. You need QuickTime in order to be able to view it, I’m afraid, and it probably won’t work in Internet Explorer.¹ I will be publishing lots of photos from the Met and the Cloisters tomorrow or the next day, I hope; consider this a foretaste of things to come.

(It might take a while for the full image to load, because it’s quite big. Hint: hold down the shift key on your keyboard to zoom in, and hold down ctrl/control to zoom out.)

The gallery notes for this painting:

The picture covering the wall of this room is a rare survivor of a form of public art and entertainment that flourished in the nineteenth century. Invented in Great Britain in the 1780s, panoramas (Greek for “all-sight”) were displayed within the darkened interior of a cylindrical building. Illuminated by concealed skylights, these circular paintings offered the illusion of an actual landscape surrounding the viewer. Like Vanderlyn’s Versailles, panorama subjects were usually foreign landmarks. Visitors paid a small admission fee and were rewarded with vicarious travel to different parts of the world. During the Industrial Revolution, when urban populations expanded, global exploration blossomed, and tourism surged, the public crowded to panoramas as they do to movies today.

A native of Kingston, New York, Vanderlyn studied historical painting in Paris during the Napoleonic era and conceived his panorama project after seeing the American artist and inventor Robert Fulton establish a panorama theater on the Boulevard Montmartre. Vanderlyn made his preparatory studies at Versailles in 1814 and 1815 and executed the huge painting (circumference 166 feet) in a barn in Kingston three years later. He also raised money to construct, behind City Hall in New York, a handsome Palladian building called the Rotunda, in which he exhibited his panorama and historical paintings. The Rotunda was, in effect, New York’s first art museum.

In Vanderlyn’s panorama, the spectator stands at the head of the grand staircase on the parterre d’eau, or water park, with a view to the east of the massive western façade of the palace and to the west of the vast gardens, great avenue, and grand canal. Vanderlyn cast the scene in the warm sunshine of a late summer afternoon (according to the panorama program, between four and five P.M., in September 1814) and animated it with fashionably dressed visitors. In the center balcony of the palace stands King Louis XVIII, the restored Bourbon monarch, saluting a small crowd on the parterre below. On the right side of the view of the gardens is a circle of figures that includes Czar Alexander I of Russia (raising a monocle to his eye) and King Frederick William II of Prussia, who helped defeat Napoleon and restore the monarchy. (The location of these figures is indicated on the original diagram key to the panorama reproduced on the kiosk in this gallery.) The artist portrayed himself near the czar and the king, pointing out the sovereigns to an unidentified companion.

Notes

1. You should be using a modern browser, anyway. ↩

Funny Words and Sounds

• Antigodish, NS
• Barrie, ON
• Bartibog, NB
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cranberry Portage, MB
• Flin Flon, MB
• Forget, QC (presumably really pronounced ‘forjé’)
• Hope, BC
• Knob Lake, NL
• L’Épiphanie, QC
• Medicine Hat, AB
• Moose Jaw, SK
• Nipissing, ON
• Sexsmith, BC

Reminiscent placenames

• Aberdeen, SK
• Aylesbury, SK
• Bangor, SK
• Bridgewater, NS
• Chatham, NB
• Chatham, ON
• Chester, NS
• Dartmouth, NS
• Gloucester Junction, NB
• Halifax, NS
• Kensington, PE
• Lancaster, QC
• Liverpool, NS
• London, ON
• Maidstone, SK
• New Carlisle, QC
• New Glasgow, NS
• Newcastle, NB
• Norwich, ON
• Oxford, NS
• Paris, ON
• Scarboro, Pickering, Whitby, Oshaw … Brighton; ON (adjacent along the railway line east of Toronto)
• Windsor, NS
• Windsor, ON
• Woking, BC
• Woodstock, NB
• Woodstock, ON
• Yarmouth, NS

First, that hilarious pronunciation, of which the French make so much fun. At Mass on Sunday the girl singing the Gloria managed to make the word gloire rhyme with père.¹ In fact many speakers’ vowels have been shifted so far from the pronunciation in the Hexagon that I really have to stop and listen hard in order to be able to understand what they are saying.

There is also a tendency to hyper-nasalize French nasal vowels, which also shifts the individual vowels’ position. For example, the word pain (bread) is hyper-nasalized to be pronounced more like [paeeeng].² Similarly, as I write this on the train from Quebec to Montreal, the woman behind me is on her mobile phone making arrangements for a taxi to meet the train, which she pronounces [traeeeng]. These vowels are often nasalized to such an extent that that final [g] becomes really audible.

However, not everyone I’ve met speaks with such a strong Canadian accent, in the same way that not everyone in the U.S. speaks with a southern twang or a New Jersey whine.³ (Or, indeed, that not everyone in Australia speaks with a rough-as-guts fair-dinkum accént.) I have come across several people who have evidently been brought up speaking in the French-French fashion. Those are the ones, of course, whom I have the least difficulty understanding.

I’ve also been struck by the way people use the various phrases of greeting. I think that in fact there is a general confusion about the correct formula to use at a given moment, or at least a far greater elasticity of what is permitted/expected. On my first evening I went to a very pleasant Breton restaurant: I arrived and the waitress (in traditional clothing, including the funky lace bonnet) called to me across the restaurant, ‘Bonjour!’ I checked outside, it was still dark; I responded (out of habit), ‘Bon soir!’ When she came over to my table with the menu, again she said, ‘Bonjour.’ Weird. Meanwhile, in Geneva I got particularly accustomed to the departure-formula, ‘Bonne journée’ or ‘Bonne soirée’.⁴ In Switzerland the use of the departure-formula became so ingrained in me that when I returned to English-speaking lands I really had to fight the urge to say ‘Have a nice day’ when taking my leave. Here, however, it seems to be far less commonly used, and when it is used at all it is not so rigorous. I have said ‘bonne journée’ to people and have just had ‘Merci’ in response, or, even worse, silence. Meanwhile, I have also heard lots of people just using the greeting-formula at the moment of departure, hence one waiter saying ‘bon soir’ to me as I left the restaurant.

One other point of confusion was the meaning of the word déjeuner. You learn in about lesson two, of course, that déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Quebec they use it to mean ‘breakfast’. Déjeuner is of course a literal translation of breakfast (and/or vice-versa)—jeûner is ‘to fast’. Indeed, the introduction to the Wikipédia article on the subject suggests that déjeuner meaning breakfast was universal until the nineteenth century, at which point petit-déjeuner began to gain currency, ‘spécialement en France’.

I always learned that the response to ‘Merci’ is ‘Je vous en prie’, or, less formally, ‘De rien’. What I have occasionally heard here, though, is ‘Bienvenue’. Evidently this is a direct translation of the English ‘[you’re] welcome’. Thinking about it, the English phrase makes relatively little sense (there is an argument for saying that it’s an abbreviation of something along the lines of ‘you’re welcome to the act of kindness which I have just performed for you.’), but in French, to my ear, ‘Bienvenue’ is even more nonsensical. And thus hilarious.

Nowhere have I seen the standard word boisson. In its stead the universal word is breuvage, which I suspect is used since it sounds like the English ‘beverage’. I obviously haven’t got access to my massed ranks of dictionaries here, but when I looked up breuvage on wordreference.com it was suggested that the word is only ‘littéraire, humoristique’. As you might expect, a list of words with peculiar Quebecker usage is available—where else?—on Wikipédia.

However, there are some things which you might expect to change, but which have been kept very much in the French fashion. Compound numerals are used as in France, so seventy is soixante-dix, and ninety is quatre-vingt-dix. In Geneva—as, I believe, in Belgium—you hear septante (with the [p] pronounced) and nonante, and further east in Romandy (certainly by the time you reach Lausanne) people say huitante for eighty. When I was in Saint-Boniface, a French-speaking place which used to be a separate city but is now incorporated into the city of Winnipeg,⁵, I asked the girl at the museum about the non-compound numbers: on her face she portrayed a mixed look of confusion (having never heard of septante or nonante) and disgust (because, she seemed to reason, that is a ridiculous way to count or to speak). Another Francism which is maintained is the orthographic convention of writing the unit of currency after the price: so, for example, not ‘$4.40’, but ‘4,40 $’.

Notes

1. Also at Mass, the greeting at the sign of peace which I heard being used was ‘Paix du Seigneur’, and not ‘Paix de Christ’, which I know from France and Romandy. But of course, that’s not so much a linguistic difference as one of the liturgical practice of the locale: ‘…according to local custom’, and all that. ↩
2. I’m afraid I have neither the time nor energy to write proper IPA here. ↩
3. I was quite excited in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax to overhear my first Brooklyn accent of the trip: a mother, trying to take a photo of her children, saying ’Yeh took so lawwng that it [sc. the camera] tunned awwf…’ ↩
4. Indeed, in Geneva especially, there is a third departure-formula, ‘Bon dimanche’, whose use is generally prescribed for during the day on Saturday and in the morning and early afternoon of Sunday. People don’t seem to mind, however, if you forget and use the more generic journée/soirée, options. ↩
5. Saint-Boniface and Winnipeg are each the seat of its own diocese, though, the former covering the south-east portion of Manitoba, the latter stretching to the border with Saskatchewan to the west and quite far north. ↩

1. When looking at a photo, click on it. The photo will then open as big as your screen will allow. Squint no longer. Or squint less, at least. If you click on the enlarged photo again, it will disappear and leave you back where you started.
2. When you’ve blown up a photo like this you can then select alternative sizes from the list along the top: the biggest size available is called X3 (as in ‘XXXL’). If you choose that, you will be able to use the horizontal and vertical scrollbars in your browser to pan around the image.
3. You can also use the left and right arrows on your keyboard to navigate between photos within an album. This even works when you’ve enlarged a photo as described above: if you press the right arrow on your keyboard, it will open the next photo in the sequence already enlarged.
4. When looking at the ordinary view (without an enlarged photo in the way) you can click on the button labelled ‘Map this’. A new window/tab will then open with a map from Google Maps showing where each photo was taken. Cool, huh? You can drag the map around with your mouse, change from the default ‘Satellite’ view to ‘Map’, and zoom in and out using the control at the top-left of the map panel (but you can’t use your mouse scroll-wheel to zoom as you can on Google Maps’ own site). Some disclaimers: sometimes it just doesn’t work, even though it should—for example, at the moment the Texas and Arizona gallery isn’t showing geodata. Also, some photos won’t appear on the map, because there is no geodata for them: this is often the case for photos taken indoors, where my GPS tracker can’t get a fix on the positioning satellites, or for those photos where (for whatever rare reason) I didn’t in fact have the tracker with me and turned on.
5. There is another button next to ‘Map this’, called ‘Style’. Clicking on that brings up a menu from which you can choose different ways of viewing the gallery. The ‘Journal’ option is, in my opinion, an excellent way of browsing my photos. Try it out—make your browser window as big as possible for the best effect. I have vacillated about making it the default option, but it has some downsides, including the fact that you can’t make the photos any bigger than just fitting into your browser window (unlike the way I described above). You can easily change back to the default view-style, which is ‘SmugMug’. Your browser will remember which view-style you were last on the next time you come to look at my photos.

The event which really made me consider this situation was when I was dining in Fairbanks in an upstairs restaurant. A fellow diner across the room sat there, nonchalantly chewing the cud with his cap wedged on his head. I suppose you think that I shouldn’t have let it bothered me, but it did. I’m sorry to say, I judged that man. And he didn’t come out well.

Sadly (or not) I haven’t got the self-confidence, poise, or menace of Tony Soprano in these matters:

YouTube - Sopranos - Power of suggestion [From S01E09, ‘Boca’. It should be noted that Tony Soprano goes on to send the couple a bottle of Montepulciano.]

Meanwhile, further indication of the significant mental deficiency of the baseball-cap-wearing masses:

People have been saying that every man has a desire to re-introduce the Fedora, but apparently America hasn’t heard. Fortunately, someone has the right idea when it comes to these things. I hope someone out there is listening.

No, I’m on my way to L.A. I’ll be back in Santa Cruz on Monday: I have to go back to work. Well, I’m going to be picked up by Jenna, Jonno, and Kelsey. We’re going to meet up with Jasmine in L.A. then we’re going to drive to New Mexico tonight. Well, I guess Jenna’s car doesn’t have air-conditioning, ¹ and we don’t want to drive across the desert during the day without air conditioning. Well, y’know, we have to cross Arizona. The journey will be about twelve hours, and we’re leaving at 11, maybe 12, so we’re going to have to travel during some daylight. Shut uuuup! It’s going to be soooo miserable… I agreed to do it, then Jenna just dropped this bomb on me. [Later] It’s gonna be fine. I just have to keep telling myself that. [And so on, for about ten minutes, with frequent repetition of the ‘It’s gonna be fine’ riff.]

It sounded to me like a recipe for disaster. I myself was exhausted on the train, and couldn’t possibly contemplate getting to L.A. and starting a nice, safe drive to New Mexico that night. When I arrived in Tucson last week at 10.30 p.m., it was still 90ºF. Central Arizona—including Phoenix—is even hotter. I hope Jenna, Jonno, Kelsey, and un-named train girl arrived safe and sound, and that they are still talking to one another.

Notes

1. This is a really confusing usage which both fascinates and frustrates me. I can’t work out if it’s specifically Californian (or even specifically valley-girl slang), or else in widespread usage across the U.S.A. In this context, ‘I guess’ doesn’t mean ‘I guess that’ or ‘I suppose that’, but rather it means ‘I know that’, or more specifically, ‘I have recently learnt that it is definitely the case that…’. ↩

When I got to Tucson by train from San Antonio—after nineteen hours on the train—it was 10 at night, but the temperature was still a remarkable 90ºF. I got across the road from the station to my rather idiosyncratic hotel, where I was told that there was no air-conditioning. Glug. But, I was told, there was an evaporative cooling system (which is affectionately known here as ‘swamp cooling’) which works with the assistance of a ceiling fan and the window being open about a foot. This did seem to work rather well but because the window had to be open my room was filled with the noise of the busy street below. Fortunately I was so exhausted from the journey that I quickly fell to sleep and woke the following morning. On my way to Tucson airport for the journey to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon via Phoenix, the taxi driver told me that that night had been the first for weeks when evaporative cooling was effective. Previously the conditions had been too humid for the evaporative cooling to work. Phew.

At the Grand Canyon, the temperature was considerably lower: about 76º–80ºF. This is a result of the altitude of the canyon rim: about 9000 feet. This high altitude presents its own problems for the unwary traveller because of the thinner air. I certainly found that the relatively easy walk along the rim required more energy than I expected, and that I had to go more slowly as a result.

Arriving in Los Angeles from the Grand Canyon, it felt extremely humid indeed. Fortunately I was able quickly to re-adjust to being at sea-level after the altitude at the canyon, and I soon came to realize that it wasn’t as humid as all that. In fact my time in L.A. was remarkably comfortable: it was sunny, with an air temperature of about 80ºF. This was aided by regular gusts of breeze coming in off the great Pacific. As a result, my experience of L.A. wasn’t of the sticky city covered by smog and cloud which I’d been told to expect: instead I saw a bright and breezy city with plenty of wide spaces and shady places. What a surprise!

WARNING: this building contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Well, that’s certainly one idea of a friendly welcome. Apparently, in fact, this is a sign which is used so often throughout the state that it has lost all meaning. But still, I hurried down that flight of stairs quicker than I might otherwise have done.

Having been regaled with stories of queues at LAX immigration stretching for hundreds of yards, I expected the arrivals process to take hours. In fact when I did get down the stairs from the cancer-ridden doorway I found a long hall with hundreds of staff members encouraging the newly-arrived passengers to go down as far as possible since, as far as I could see, all the immigration desks were then manned. There were ‘welcome’ announcements specifically for my flight from Sydney, and I went straight to the desk where I was directed. Understandably enough I was interrogated fairly closely about what I was doing, but everything was civil and only lasted for a maximum of five minutes. The most boring part was queuing to take my bags through customs/quarantine, but even that didn’t take long.

Talk about efficient. Heathrow could stand to learn a thing or two about my experience. Perhaps I just got lucky?

Still, it’s a fun game and no one has claimed that it’s realistic. My high score so far is 48. At that point the massive four-engine jets are coming in so thick and fast that I tend to ignore one side of the screen, with tragic consequences.

Paper:

Romance Philology

Due:

12 March 2009 Complete!

]]> 2009-03-09T12:58:39+00:00 Richard Flynn http://richardflynn.net/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Notebook&seed=%7Bhomepage%7Dnotebook%2Fessays%2F%23essay-125&seed_title=Essay%3A+Classical+Tragedy+Comparisons http://richardflynn.net/notebook/essays/#essay-125#When:12:05:02Z “Compare the stagecraft of Racine and Euripides.”
You should examine in detail Racine’s Andromaque and Iphigénie and Euripides’ Andromache and Iphigenia at Aulis, looking out particularly for their use of scenery, exits and entrances, costume, properties, movement and gesture.

Paper:

Ancient & French Classical Tragedy

Due:

10 March 2009 Complete!

]]> 2009-03-02T12:05:02+00:00 Richard Flynn http://richardflynn.net/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Notebook&seed=%7Bhomepage%7Dnotebook%2Fessays%2F%23essay-124&seed_title=Essay%3A+Late+Latin+Glossaries http://richardflynn.net/notebook/essays/#essay-124#When:14:34:17Z “Commenting briefly on their linguistic context, and focusing on phonology and morphology, discuss the systematic differences between the alternative forms presented in Rohlfs’ texts 7 [extracts from the Appendix Probi] and 34 [extracts from the Reichenau Glossary, the Hermeneumata Montepessulana, the Hermeneumata Monacensia, the Glossae Vaticanae, the Glossarium Amplonianum, and the Monte Cassino Glossary]. Why were there these differences and what do they tell us?”

Paper:

Romance Philology

Due:

26 February 2009 Complete!

]]> 2009-02-25T14:34:17+00:00 Richard Flynn http://richardflynn.net/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Notebook&seed=http%3A%2F%2Frichardflynn.net%2Fnotebook%2Fentry%2Fwere-you-ready%2F&seed_title=Were+you+ready%3F http://richardflynn.net/articles/view/were-you-ready/#When:21:15:00Z

YouTube - Cisco Systems - Are You Ready?

Cisco ran a series of these advertisements during the years 1998–2000:¹ they all ended with the phrase ‘Are you ready?’ repeated over and over. As far as I am aware, they were never broadcast on terrestrial TV in the UK: the only time I ever saw them was on Qantas in-flight entertainment. Evidently they had such an effect on me that whenever I hear someone say ‘Are you ready?’—even now—I think of Cisco. I searched the other day and found this video, and one other which was less evocative.

It’s interesting to compare the ‘facts’ as stated in the advertisement with the Internet and the Web as they exist today:

The Web has [sic] more users in its first five years | than telephone did in the first thirty.

Well, this ad was made more than five years after the Web was invented: depending on who you ask, we can put that event in 1990 or 1992. It could be that the child actor (who sounds like she’s speaking a southern-England variety of English) mispronounced the –d as –s, but perhaps from Cisco’s point of view the advertisement was made within the first five years of the Web: it was certainly made less than five years after the Web became commercially attractive.²

A population | the size of the United Kingdom | joins the Internet every six months.

It has been estimated that in 2007 the United Kingdom had a population of nearly 61 million. One source suggests that at the end of 2008 there were 1,574,313,184 users on the Internet from all over the world (1,574 million), whereas there had been 360,985,492 at the end of 2000. If we assume that growth has been consistent over those eight years (we can do nothing else), then there were 75,832,981 new users every six months over that eight-year period. So, the growth of the Internet hasn’t slowed since Cisco’s advertisement: if anything, the rate of growth has increased.

One day the Internet will make | long-distance calls | a thing of the past.

The phrase ‘long-distance calls’ here is shorthand for ‘paying higher rates to place calls outside my local area’, which is a particularly American phenomenon.³ Presumably they didn’t mean ‘going on the Internet will mean that you will no longer want to speak to people over a long distance because you’ll be so excited about what you can find on the Web and what you can accomplish using email.’ Well, it’s true: many people now make use of VoIP to place long-distance calls where they would previously have used the POTS. VoIP is hardly ubiquitous, though, especially in the consumer market, where it’s really only the affluent tech-savvy who are aware of, let alone use, services like Skype. I understand that many businesses and large enterprises are deploying VoIP systems now for their phone services; the biggest provider of enterprise VoIP hardware is Cisco. Hmm.

Something that always confused me about these ads is quite what it is that they’re advertising. The hardware implied in the voiceover at the end are high-end packet-routing switches, as used by Internet Service Providers. Did Cisco really expect executives ISPs and Internet Exchanges that weren’t already using Cisco hardware suddenly to purchase expensive new equipment on the strength of a slightly soppy ad campaign? I don’t believe it. Or were they trying to get their name more generally known? But to what end? Cisco still doesn’t market direct to consumers (their consumer brand of networking hardware is Linksys). Some might describe this as a prime example of corporate behaviour in the Web boom: all fur coat and no knickers, with no real purpose to the marketing.

I also have a strong suspicion that each of the child actors is a native English-speaker.

Notes

1. The ads were stopped at about the time of the great dot.com bust in 1999/2000. ↩
2. Amazon.com was a pioneer in Web commerce: they came online selling books in 1995. ↩
3. In the UK and Australia it is unusual to have different providers for local and long-distance calls. ↩

]]> 2009-02-16T21:15:00+00:00 Richard Flynn