Vorsprung durch Schadenfreude

If a language runs out of the words to describe things properly, it is not uncommon to borrow expressions from abroad.

This way the French have given us Menage A Trois, the Italian can claim Al Fresco dining to be theirs and Germany has thrown Schadenfreude into the mix.

Ergo, one would wonder whether there is a pattern.

Then again, European countries have been at war with each other with horrible regularity over thousands of years and have invaded their neighbours and were invaded back by their neighbours since the old Roman days, a fact that contributes its fair share to the mixing of languages.

It is remarkable however, how influences seem to be particularly prominent in certain aspects of life.

Clearly anything medical is firmly in the hands of Latin but since this is a language that is dead beyond any medication, it shall therefore hardly be counted. (I don't even mention my profound Latin knowledge in my CV any more - what an irony.)

The legendary obsession of the French with matters of love have therefore brought us rendez-vous and the above-mentioned menage a trois, but also surprisingly many militaristic contributions such as sabotage and Agent Provocateur. And since apres-ski is pretty much non-existent in the French speaking part of Switzerland, it has to origin in France as well.

A few culinary add-ons such as hors d'oeuvre and amuse bouche can't be left out although the Italians with their pasta, pizza and al fresco dining certainly compete for the top spot.

But since our friends from Italy have given the world amore, they actually don't have to compete with anyone.

Which, in terms of major languages leaves us to contemplate the German influence. Schadenfreude, ie finding pleasure in somebody else's misfortune, clearly says a lot about how Germans are perceived (and we don't mean perceived as in wearing Lederhosen and eating Bratwurst and Sauerkraut). They have also given England the Blitz, which is a dubious claim to fame if there ever was one, and on a only slighter note Poltergeist, Doppelganger but finally Kindergarten.

But maybe to strike a balance with a fair few negative connotations, teutonic benevolance is heard whenever some replaces "Bless you" with "Gesundheit".

So maybe not all is kaputt yet, and it's not all about enjoying other people's misery which should provide some piece of mind next time you leap of a rather tall building in a charity "Abseiling".

Fortunately, the German word for fast, schnell, is, while occasionally used, not common enough to really have rightfully gained its place. Otherwise, our beloved Wikipedia - derived from the Hawaiian word for quick wiki, could have turned out to be Schnell-pedia.

And somehow I doubt it would have been the Uber-website it is nowadays.

The "Watching-Olympics-In-The-Office"-Olympics

The ancient Greeks and Romans had it right. There is nothing like a good, big sporting event to entertain the masses and create a community feeling.

Nowadays, there is no need to feed Christians to the lions to get a trading floor entertained.

The Olympics will do.

With the recent Euro 2008 slightly underwhelming in terms of public interest due to the absence of the England team, the next sporting event has just come upon us.

And this time, England is in. Not in the Olympic football tournament for reasons too difficult to explain (but having to do with long-standing animosities between the home nations), but in loads of other appealing disciplines.

Since the markets are currently not quite dead, but definitely on extended leave, the trading floors across the City are watching whatever sporting event is put in front of them.

This can be reasonably entertaining once getting used to the fact that every time you look up to the screen a different sport is on. One minute it's Badminton, then Archery, wild-water Kanoeing, synchronised swimming etc. You name it, it will be broadcast at some stage.

But of course some events are more entertaining then others, so from the last few days of becoming an avid trading floor athlete - these are the main findings.

• If there is UK participation, the noise level will rise. Suddenly Badminton players are being cheered on and we are rooting for show jumpers. It doesn't matter that we don't care about them for the next 4 years.
• Firm favourite in terms of hilarity value: Women's weightlifting. It caused major discussions since many of the women did not look like they were female. Do they test the gender when they do doping tests?
• Whatever it is, it has to come in snippets - an entire basketball match seems too long to handle since in that time, you could watch multiple heats of swimming as well as more Archery than was featured in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves".
• Team sports are particularly good when teams fail, such as the UK synchronised divers, because then you can watch them on live TV blaming each other for not having performed better. Single sports are a bit dull since there is nobody else to blame.
  
• When Andy Murray crashed out in the singles in the first round, he was a Scot. When he won his doubles match with his brother, they were British.
• Always know where your country ranks in the Medals Tables, and always rub it in. For instance, Germany leapfrogged Great Britain on Tuesday by getting four gold medals and that is worth mentioning. All the time.

Come the weekend, things might become a little bit more mainstream with the Track & Field events which traditionally have a bigger mass appeal.

But there will always be Women's Shot Put to keep us on the edge.

Bored of the Internet

After years of surfing the web, sending e-mails, sharing pictures, social and professional networking and watching "original content" movies, it has finally happened: I am bored of the internet. How did it come to this, and is there anything that can be done to rekindle the old spark?

On a recent night of being confined to my home shouldering the arduous task of looking after a 3-month old baby, I found myself (after the cause of my home confinement was put to sleep) surfing the internet and suddenly realised that I was bored of it.

The Facebook status was updated, I had read and answered all e-mails and I had watched movie trailers for more movies than I will realistically be able to see over the course of multiple years.

The usual news pages had nothing spectacular to offer (which could be seen as a good thing) and I was running out of things to do.

To give some background, I have been using the web since its very early days, which is about 15 years ago. With what can from today's point of view only be described as very rudimentary tools, there was a limited amount of content but it seemed like a great tool to communicate through "electronic mail" or even put pictures up on a website during a year abroad to keep the folks at home up-to-date.

These early days were of course followed by boom, bust and the another boom over the course of a decade.

Thinking about it, I could attribute my lack of enthusiasm to one reason, namely the internet having turned into a tool, something utilitarian, not unlike phones, cars, television, radio etc.

Nobody would imagine staying home a night to "spend an exciting evening on the phone", so why would I imagine to be thrilled by the thought of doing exactly that on the web.

Internet is so omni-present nowadays that it has become a means to do everything from acquire information, order pizzas, send picture postcards, invite to parties and so on, that it does not seem to be a technology that wows in its own right.

This does not have to be bad thing but is rather a sign about its wide-spread acceptance and about how people have become accustomed to it.

You would imagine that the first telephone users made calls simply because they could and to use this ground-breaking technology. If you call somebody today to let him know that you are excited to be able to make phone calls, you might figure what kind of response you get.

Then again, cars have been built as a means to enable us to get from A to B. But still, you would not need to have an Aston Martin to achieve this goal but could still do this with a Ford Model T.

So there is hope that the pleasure will find its way back to what is a mere tool currently. And I don't mean pleasure in the way Avenue Q thinks the Internet should be used.

The Frappuccino Brainwash

It's not just about waking up.
It's about making a lifestyle statement.
Cheers.

There is a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which a Virtual Reality game is being used to make the crew members of the Enterprise instantly addicted and which is later used by evil alien forces to brainwash the crew into giving up the starship.

Passing Starbucks on the way to work I felt very much reminded of this when one of the Baristas - dressed in the obligatory green apron - was handing out small cups of Frappuccino to the City professionals rushing by. It made me wonder when the adult population of the UK decided that life is not worth living unless one has at least consumed one ridiculously overpriced coffee-resembling product in the morning? Or whether it is potentially all part of a bigger scheme of the Baristas (which could -- for all I know -- be the name of an alien species) taking over the world and brainwashing us into succumbing to their Frothiness?

Looking at it differently, there are quite a few things around that a lot of people would argue they can't do without nowadays whereas 10 years ago nodody would have had them on the list of bare necessities. IPods, Wi-Fi, Facebook, Vitamin Water etc etc.

The key, and this is where the magic called marketing comes in, is making people believe that they genuinely cannot do without. Making it part of a lifestyle that people want to adopt, part of a culture that everybody wants to be part of.

It doesn't require a genius to sell water in the Sahara, but making people want to spend £4 for an iced coffee beverage takes a bigger effort.

It seems to have worked quite well for a while.

As long as a lot of people were making money like the girl in the Starbucks logo is catching gold coins, the strategy seemed to have paid off nicely. Looking at Starbucks closing down stores, h0wever, makes you wonder whether the Venti Caramel Frappucino is now moving from the "must-have" to the "could-do without" list, in particular when the cost of regular visits add up to the order of magnitude of a monthly travelcard.

Of course, everybody has to decide for themselves what they are cutting out of their daily routine when it seems that expenses are getting a bit out of hand. Whether it's the cab ride home, the Frappuccino, the lunchtime sushi rather than the M&S takeaway etc.

Always assuming that there is no evil head Barista in the mothership flipping a switch so that we find ourselves walking brainlessly to their next outlet mumbling:

Must - Drink - Frappuccino.

Air Travel gets mobile...

... with the introduction of mobile boarding passes. Currently, it seems to be Air Canada, Continental Airlines and Lufthansa with the latter only for flights within Germany.

Maybe, it's coming to an airport near us shortly as well, and fingers crossed, it's not arriving at Terminal 5.

The concept is quite remarkably simple: You check in online, the airline texts you a "Mobile Boarding Pass" which consists of a barcode and a confirmation and the barcode can be scanned at the gate to allow you to board.

For details about how it works with Lufthansa, a lenghty description can be found here. And even though a boarding pass printed less here and there will most certainly not help save huge areas of woodland, it is just one less piece of documentation that can be lost, misplaced or forgotten.

Apparently, British Airways is looking into it although the timeframe mentioned is the year 2010. Maybe they do need to sort out 15,000 pieces of lost luggage at T5 first.

Status Update Anxiety

Fancy having one sentence and one sentence only to convince everyone you have ever met, your former classmates, your colleagues as well as all your wife's friends that you are not only well-connected but also enormously witty? The Facebook Status Update is your stage.

There are numerous things about Facebook which - for the innocent by-stander - seem hard to understand, and the fact that the founder allegedly turned down a 1bn+ offer to sell it is only one of them.

For those not in the know, apart from being able to upload pictures, poke friends (or people you simply fancy) and give away virtual gifts (in exchange of real pay of course), you also have the chance, or as it turns out almost a moral obligation, to let everybody know what you are up to.

In the early days (which aren't that long ago), this usually amounted to statements like

• [R] is at home,
  
• [Y] is at work.
• [T] has a cold.

But now, since anyone who is anything has friends at least in triple digits, you don't want to read that 50 of your friends at at work and another 30 are at the pub. Hence there is a demand for quirkier, punchier and wittier status update.

We have the right to know what our friends are doing, and we have the right to be entertained. In the best possible case, both at once.

Apart from the fact of being disposable, short and usually instantly forgotten, some of the funnier ones have stuck to my mind. For instance a friend in Richmond on a weekend of District Line work stating that

[G] is stuck in Richmond for the weekend without Tube or train. It's like the beginning of a posh slasher movie.

or another friend who with the innocuous looking update

[A] begs Mistadobalina, Mista Bob-dobalina won't you stop.

did put the almost-forgotten "Del The Funky Homosapien" track straight back into my head where it stayed for way too long after reading his line.

Of course, there are more existential ones as

[J] is therefore he thinks.

or the rather self-aware

[K] is updating his status.

It has become a standard to announce the birth of babies by saying

[A] is Geronimo's proud daddy. 6:10am, 6lbs, 12oz.

and during the recent Euro Championship, I was easily able to deduce all results by just looking at what Spanish, Italian, German and French friends had put down.

Then recently, amongst a list of sometimes amusing, sometimes only accessible to insiders and sometimes though not boring but rather informative updates, I found a friend whose father had passed away days earlier stating

[X] misses her daddy.

and this one stuck more than all the others.