Recent Blog Posts
-
When Call-Center Scripts Go Bad
May 25 20128:38 am EDT -
Zynga on the Defense
May 24 20123:02 pm EDT -
Facebook Fallout Includes PR Fail
May 24 20129:25 am EDT -
Space Drama to Be Continued
May 21 20129:42 am EDT -
What Made Groupon Go Pop?
May 18 20129:34 am EDT -
Study Finds Millennials are Underbanked
May 17 201212:35 pm EDT -
Mad Men Not Impressed With Facebook IPO
May 17 201210:13 am EDT -
Pricing Experiment in Progress
May 16 201211:02 am EDT -
Did I Tweet That Out Loud?
May 15 20129:44 am EDT -
Revenge of the Liberal Arts Major
May 14 20122:58 pm EDT
Ich Bin Ein Tannenbaum
On what used to be called the "death strip" in East Berlin, a market for Christmas trees has bloomed.
Bloomberg News reports that the city of Berlin needs to thin out the thousands of pine trees that have grown in the desolate zone before the Berlin Wall where those trying to flee the Stalinist hell of East Germany could be shot on sight. (More than 200 people were killed trying to escape over the wall, which went up in 1961.)
Germans who want to buy and chop down their own tree can do starting this weekend. A nearly 7-foot tree costs 10 euros, or about $14, Bloomberg says.
Christmas and the Cold War are strangely connected. The Berlin Wall started to come down in November 1989, and a celebration of its fall was marked on Christmas 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the city. And of course Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Christmas 1991 as the Soviet Union fell apart.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
