Traveling around the galaxy in Star Wars, and Star Trek, and most other Sci-Fi stories for that matter, is a lot like driving a car in Switzerland: No matter where you go, it never really takes longer than a few hours.

Most flags are terribly boring to look at. Take a rectangular shape, divide it into three identically sized bars either vertically or horizontally, take two or three different colors, finito. They're almost as boring to look at as a bar code, and all the fancy historical and often pseudo-historical and more often pseudo-metaphorical explanations of what the colors represent are a ton of crap: Because either you wouldn't get that by yourself, or they're just plain irrelevant and interchangeable connotations like "blue symbolizes water", "red symbolizes blood or fire", "green symbolizes Islam", "yellow symbolizes the sun". The problem is: Most places have water, almost every place's history has something to do with some blood or fire, any Islamic country is... well, an Islamic country, and most places do see some sun once in a while.

Very few distinctive flags out there. Too few.

I'd love to extent the subject of country branding to the flags. After all, they're the most obvious visual mark or icon to choose in order to represent a country. And believe it or not, there is an advantage in having a distinctive flag. It's not the only item that helps branding a country, of course: Size and political relevance will play a role, the identity management itself, historic facts and myths do, current politics do, location does, and so on. But it is one factor, and not one to be treated lightly. Because people are ultimately visual beings, and anchoring any brand (or country) in someone's mind, adding some values and emotions to the brand (or country) will be a lot easier if you have a distinctive visual emblem. And not just a colored bar code.

Particularly small countries that don't have huge budgets and possibilities to anchor their identity and message in a worldwide audience's mind because they're usually ignored anyway should be aware that a concise and well-built brand is important. And that the cheapest visual item you possess and the one you can always bring up and display anywhere, to huge audiences, for free, be it in school books or sports events, happens to be your flag.

And if you're about to scream "Blasphemy! How could one ever change my country's flag, only in order for it to be a stronger brand! There's history in this flag, and meaning!", then yes, I'm aware of the political difficulties involved, but:
a) look into the history of current flags, most of which aren't actually that old, and many of which aren't older than my grand-grandma
b) Habits and principles are usually a poor guide into the future
c) No "country" is forever, none has ever been
d) Not even the definition of what a "country" is is forever - quite far from it in fact
e) Politics is always a convincing job anyway; and much of it is about establishing new habits and beliefs

I'm down to 16 unread (resp. read but unanswered) e-mails in my central inbox; that equals about 70% of the height of my screen.

And as we all know, the measure for a mailbox' state of fullness is "do all mails fit on screen" or "do they go beyond the screen".

Thanks, Christmas.

This magic "Konjunkturpaket" has been on the top of Spiegel Online's headlines for many weeks now, again and again, in different contexts, with different amounts, and different people saying something about it.

I guess it is, in fact, a "Konjunktivpaket".

For the first time in my life I'm in Tashkent, and I don't feel like going out every evening. I was at VM Bar last night, though. But for today, I envision a small get-together with some friends, then some work in my hotel room, and an early breakfast full of energy on Sunday morning.

Dreaming of an early breakfast on Sunday morning! I can't remember any dream like that since I was 8 years old and they had these cool cartoons on TV every Sunday at 7:00.

Every city of sufficient size has a dark side that one can see. Every city of insufficient size has a dark side, too, but it might just be located outside the public space. The dark side is something that is usually not shown to foreigners, guests, whom we all want to show the bright side, the beautiful side. As for myself, I'm far more interested in the dark side of places I visit. Because this dark side usually has a local touch. Despite of all the worldwide similarity of despair and problems and alcoholism and drugs and sometimes violence, the dark side is commonly the place where you meet genuine people whose stories are disturbing, touching, and often important. In this way, these dark sides are a genuinely local place. In my personal opinion more local than the sushi bar in the old town, the advertising people's favorite creative club, the Irish pub at the corner, and often even more local than the "genuinely local restaurant" in the tourism district.

I'm not spending all my time in such places. Seriously: I couldn't. It takes a certain amount of energy and curiosity, and of readiness to dive into a different world that is usually not really pleasant. Sometimes it's necessary to take some time to refuel the curiosity batteries, be it by spending a Saturday evening at home, or by going to the downtown sushi bar, the advertiser's favorite creative club, and watch a game at the Irish pub: By going to places that are as predictable as the result of a mathematical formula, where the guests are equally predictable, and you always know what kind of people you'll meet in what place (even though you can occasionally still be surprised about how they act once they're really drunk). In these predictable places, the people you meet are indeed people "like you and me". In the meaning of exactly that: Like YOU (yes, that's you) and me (that's me, right).

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So you thought after the dot-com bubble that the IT folks were weird, right? You've always sort of known that they're weird. And it's not only because they eat cold pizza at 3am while trying to iron out some bug in the syntax, and because they know more about Science Fiction than about how to keep an apartment clean, or to cook. You probably also thought that they're weird, or at least suspicious, because they did all these things you can't understand. They program stuff, which essentially means: They create things you can't touch using only incomprehensible combinations of letters and numbers and other characters, some of which you've never seen before, and many of which you wouldn't find in any good old Shakespeare play. As opposed to a person who takes a piece of wood and crafts it into a table, or a person who takes metal and shapes it into a sword, the good new IT guys just don't seem to be doing ANYTHING of real value. And back then, in the years 2000 and 2001 or even before, this was even more likely to be your (at least subconscious) perception than it is nowadays. It just wasn't yet the age in which it was a perfectly common thing to sit with your Macbook in a cafe for half the day, surf the web and work on some "projects", while drinking Latte (and it has a trace of irony that you're not even considered weird doing that, probably because these "projects" are at least comprehensible and you can imagine that something tangible comes out of at least some of them).

So a bunch of weird (read: part incomprehensible, part mystyfied, part "not creating anything tangible") IT folks did lots of stuff nobody understood, and a majority of us (read: non-IT-guys) were ready to bet money on the hope that some of the stuff these IT folks did, and that we did not understand, would sooner or later turn into fortunes. Never forgetting that some of it indeed DID, most of it did not.

Now we witness banks crashing, and it's quite the same story to a simple mind like me:

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The Dow Jones is falling, markets are collapsing, banks go bankrupt, and me? I have spent too much money on clubbing this weekend.

Maybe the government would give me, say, 100 Euros to stabilize my balance sheet?

Is capitalism actually for free?
That'd be rather ironic, wouldn't it.

By the way, we discovered yesterday evening that we are living in a free country. Now we are waiting for the impact this will have on the average amount of money we waste on different things (beer, drinks, and alcohol) during the month.

In a rather amusing discussion just now, we figured out that the potentially most successful breed of human beings (in terms of economic development) would be a crossbred Russian-Swiss hybrid, combining the positive elements and characteristics of both cultures.

However, half a minute later in the same discussion, when going through the characteristics of this hybrid, we discovered that if you cross a Swiss with a Russian, what you get is essentially an American who can't speak English.