Munich, Moxy and Freem, Mohammad and Jack

A week of total web abstinence, seven days without even the thought of recourse to an internet café, is not without consequences. These can be quantified thus: 364 emails received, 12 worth opening! 106 in a private account I’ve maintained since back in last century; not one qualified to be opened. Gmail, since January my favourite, delivered 6 emails I was glad to read and identified 7 correctly as spam.

Oh yes, GoogleReader alerts me to well over 600 unread posts on the feeds I subscribe to!

I hate to think of what would await me if I had the temerity to disconnect from cyberspace for a whole month, a notion which occurred to me on the flight back to the Sandlands, Munich to Abu Dhabi with Etihad Airways.

It was the luxury of being in an Airbus which was almost empty which seduced me. I started thinking about how rarely I have travelled simply motivated by curiosity. We flew at 41,000 feet at almost 600 mph over Sofia, Bulgaria. Surely I must make an attempt one day to visit this part of what is now the expanded European Union?

From the window of seat 15K – the bulkhead row with generous legroom – I looked down as we passed over Anatolian beaches, popular with legions of holidaymakers but unknown to me. Would I enjoy a vacation there?

Etihad seems to prefer skirting Iraq with a flight path passing west and south rather than the familiar Emirates route to the north and east. The latter has its appeal, offering occasionally a majestic view of Mount Ararat. But looking down on Beirut from a height of over twelve kilometres, as I did on Friday afternoon, reminded me that I had only once visited that fascinating and problematic city. And that had been merely a business trip.

I should get out more!

The Munich week involved resolving a couple of outstanding family matters which, in all, took the best part of a single day. So I had time on my hands, to see old friends in the city which was my home in the eighties, to meet new people in the city, which hosted last week an important conference devoted to aspects of Television 2.0, and discuss with them some of the exciting prospects of media convergence.

The fact that Munich basked under a tourist-brochure-perfect blue-and-white Bavarian skyscape in perfect summer weather was a bonus. Endless walks, re-visiting parts of a city which is even more beautiful than I had recalled left me footsore but happy.

And I fell back into my old habit of watching breakfast television.

The logo unveiled with much fanfare by the organizers of the London Olympics was one of the stories covered on television. My initial reaction was a sigh of OMGWTF, particularly when I learned that the design had cost GBP 400,000. This reaction was followed by a prise of Schadenfreude when I read that the logo, when animated, engendered collateral damage of a neuro-physiological sort for beholders prone to epileptic fits!

Design guru Tyler Brulé is, coincidentally, a big fan of Munich which he rates alongside Barcelona and Vienna as emerging capitals of cool. His creative agency came up with the alternative logo shown on the left. It is, I suppose, too classical for the country languishing in the final throes of Tony Blair’s cool Britannia.

Blair was, of course, in Germany last week. His valedictory world tour intersected with the wanderings of George W., intent on spreading Moxy and Freem in his own inimitable way, at Heiligendamm. The German breakfast television spared no effort to bring blow-by-blow coverage, very professional and sometimes even poetically touching – the country road blocked by protesters, but all in innocent slumber in their colourful sleeping bags.

The summit cost millions to stage, inevitably, and concluded with the customary mixture of compromise, ambiguity, non-binding promises and almost blatant prevarication. In this context the video below is intriguing. It shows a world leader of the time visiting Berlin. Correction, that’s what it seems to show, for it is a reconstruction, a mere fiction; the great man never set foot in Germany but the message transported is clear and unambiguous. Could future G8 host nations learn from this example?

What else did I note during this web-free week?

That a cyclone had wreaked havoc across Muscat in Oman, with high winds even experienced in Dubai. MacDo submerged quite dramatically.

During the final part of the flight back to the Sandlands over the desert of Saudi Arabia I read in my newspaper that in Britain the most popular name for male babies last year was Jack, with about six thousand infants so christened. But the second most given name was Mohammad (in its various transliterations) and it is estimated that it will this year take over the top spot.

Food for thought, friends. Food for thought.