Keys Corner

I don’t know if this is a general phenomenon at the moment, but I’ve noticed that garages locally charge the highest prices for petrol and diesel on Friday afternoon, and the lowest prices on Monday morning. The differential can be as much as 6-8 cents. The price then goes up later in the day on Monday. Prices during the week seem to be being adjusted up to twice a day, as prices often vary between the early morning, evening and the following morning – differences of 3-4 cents are common, with prices generally higher in the evening than in the morning.

I haven’t seen this reported in the press, but it seems to me that prices are being optimised to be highest when most people need to tank; before making trips at the weekend or when they have more time – on the way home from work, rather than on the way to work.

This year a new un-word has been doing the rounds in German Christmas advertising: X-mas.

Now, given that the Germans like polluting their language with all sorts of English words and phrases, many of which get used to mean something different to what an unsuspecting native English speaker would expect, I am actually surprised that Xmas hasn’t caught on more quickly. But it’s one thing to have semi-literate advertising copy writers mangle both English and German, it’s quite another when a normally literate editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung does it.

Liebe Süddeutsche Zeitung, X-mas ist ein Unwort. Es gibt es nicht. Wirklich.

The Independent reports that UK retailers expect to lose £9bn of business to internet retailers like Amazon and eBay this Christmas. That is over 37% of their pre-Christmas business.

We will be part of the same trend in Germany – we went out two weekends ago to try and get our Christmas shopping done before the advent rush and spent twenty minutes cruising the local shopping mall carpark looking for a space to park. Not one space was free and the car park was full of others also looking for free spaces. So we decided it would be more convenient to shop on the internet and came home. We haven’t bought a single present in a physical store this year.

It has been really lovely weather this week in Frankfurt, and I noticed that the Alte Oper (the old opera house) looks really good in the morning light, so this morning I took a camera. And after waiting for about 10 minutes for a group of Japanese tourists to finish taking pictures of each other, took this picture at about 08:45.

The New Scientist has published an article on e-money (subscription needed to read the full article) – using chip cards to make “micro-payments” to pay for tickets, meals and so on.

This isn’t the first English language article to report on e-money, but for some reason the authors have always managed to overlook Germany. New Scientist quotes the London Transport Oyster Card, with 3.2 million users as an example of a potentially successful implementation (there have been several failures to implement an e-money card in the UK), but in Germany there are 63 million Geldkarten issued and some 200 000 acceptance points which handled nearly 40 million payments in 2003, making it the world’s largest e-money system.

While not every Geldkarte is being actively used (they are issued by default on your ec-card by some banks) this is nonetheless a sizeable user-base and you can use them to pay for carpark tickets, tram and subway tickets, postage stamps and even Big Macs in over 400 German towns.

What does a chainsaw manufacturer do, to demonstrate the power of his product?

He builds a bike powered by 24 of them.

I found this a little late, but it makes an interesting read:

...It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer – a London Daily Express reporter on the scene – say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion…

You can read the whole article by clicking the link in the first line. Although this happened 72 years ago, it is strikingly similar to recent history, isn’t it? You can check the facts here.

Sometimes I despair of German polititians. Do you have to ask why Germany has the weakest economy in the EU, with more unemployed than at any time since the Weimar Republic in the 1930’s, when leading members of the government tell the public at large to boycott German companies?

I mentioned before that the local council is fighting graffiti by allowing artists to paint high quality “graffiti” in places which get vandalised. The previous example is still in good condition, but here is another example, also in Oberursel, on the road to Schmitten.

Only a few hundred metres from here, you can see what tends to happen otherwise:

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University warned today that British government estimates of 50 000 deaths from avian flu are based on enormously optimistic assumptions (that the death rate is no higher than for normal flu and that there is only one wave of flu) and that the government is making a mistake similar to the one made 10 years ago regarding BSE. He believes a more realistic figure is around 2 million deaths, many from pneumonia, for which there is still no effective treatment.

In the last week, 2 nurses in Vietnam have caught avian flu. Infection of health workers is a first indication, according to health experts, that the virus has become capable of jumping directly from one person to another.

The British government has ordered over 14 million doses of an anti-viral drug for delivery in two years time, which can be used to treat avian flu (at the moment there is no vaccine available, although tests are being made on experimental vaccines which are expected to offer some protection against the flu). A marginally better situation than in Germany, where risk of avian flu has been played down, with the government focussing more on the danger to German poultry, than on the risk to the human population. (I don’t recall seeing any reports in the German press about measures being taken to protect the local population against avian flu, despite the World Health Organisation’s latest warning that “The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic.”).

The current status of influenza infections in Europe is available here, by the way.

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