The Wiki Man

I recently saw a photograph of a street vendor’s stall in Argentina. The menu reads simply Orange Juice $5. Jugo de Naranja $4. Here unsuspecting Anglophones are paying a premium of 25 per cent for not knowing Spanish. It’s a practice known to economists as price discrimination — in other words setting a price in proportion to a customer’s propensity (or indeed ability) to pay. There’s a lot of it about — and in the internet age we can expect to see it more and more. How low a price will a website quote you for your new Mini Cooper if it knows you already own a Jaguar? It’s reminiscent of the famous comedy scene where Bill Cosby’s attempts to bargain down the price of a car are ruined when a passing friend greets him as Dr Cosby.

A friend of mine, a professor at an Ivy League university, specialises in research into transgenic mice, learning how DNA modifications affect intelligence and memory. A few years ago, after some genetic tinkering, he created a batch of mice of quite spectacular dimwittedness. They were useless in the maze, ditzily wandering about with no sense of spatial awareness and incapable of finding the cheese after repeated attempts. This wasn’t the only interesting thing about these mice. Every one of them had a most unusual pigmentation, at least for mice: they were blond. This was huge. ‘You’ve found the blond gene — phone the Sun!’ ‘Um, I was thinking more in terms of Nature or Scientific American,’ he said.

Toby Young in last week’s Spectator remarked on the peculiar malice, as he saw it, of the online comments posted in response to his articles. He has a point. The people who post comments are not the same reverential folk who form a paper’s traditional print readership. On the other hand, at a time when the Telegraph and the Guardian attract more than 18 million online readers each month, your online readership is no longer a small niche you can safely ignore. Why then do they seem so nasty? Most people who comment on writings on- line aren’t nasty at all. Responses to blog posts are often complimentary and constructive.

I am still waiting for an enterprising research company to publish honest readership figures for British news-papers. Not the boring stuff about what we read at the breakfast table or flourish at our desks, a decision driven by badge value. No, what I want to know is which papers people reach for in private when they find themselves on the loo with a full selection of news media to hand. You see I’m happy to bet that, in such circumstances, even Paul Johnson or A.S. Byatt reaches for the Sun or the News of the World first, and the Pope keeps a sneaky copy of Bild tucked behind the cistern. So I’m sure a few Spectator readers have by now furtively watched the Max Mosley film online.

Alongside the vast fuel tank which powers the Space Shuttle into orbit are two spindly tubes known as Solid Rocket Boosters (or SRBs). Their shape is not ideal: their manufacturer, a firm called Thiokol, had intended them to be fatter, but was constrained by the width of a horse’s rear end. It appears that Roman chariots arrived at a standard axle width of 4’ 81/2” for the simple reason that this width could accommodate two horses’ bums between the shafts. Standardisation of axle length was vital, as on muddy roads your wheels formed ruts that set solid in dry weather. A vehicle with a non-standard axle can become fatally cross-rutted, a danger for off-road drivers even today. So the 4’ 81/2” standard became literally entrenched.

Once again it’s the time of year when Spectator readers start loading up their cars with Andrex, Gentleman’s Relish and Marmite in anticipation of the annual drive to France. Do I have any advice to give? Unsurprisingly I do. For the first hour across the Channel, I quite like to listen to Nostalgie FM. This is a French Oldies station unintentionally rendered hilarious by some French law (probably by J. Toubon) which requires a proportion of songs on French radio to be sung in French.

‘Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.’ This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. It’s from a parody of the typical reader’s review in The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether some restaurant or other is any good. These reviews were usually written by the kind of people who preferred to purchase from an emporium than to buy from a shop. The word ‘peruse’ was always a clue. ‘Reluctant to entrust navigation to my lady wife, I chose to peruse the atlas myself, necessitating the removal of my driving gloves.

Those of you who saw his article a few weeks back will be pleased to hear Kelvin MacKenzie took a remarkable second place in his local council elections. Already the climbdown over parking charges has begun: the cost of a day’s parking at Weybridge Station is suddenly not £5 but £4. It’s the same story in my birthplace of Usk, where rebellious townsfolk recently rejected the idea of paying for parking at all — with the result that the car park is invariably full and hence totally useless. One thing the denizens of Usk and Weybridge clearly share is an unfamiliarity with the work of UCLA Professor Donald Shoup and his masterwork The High Cost of Free Parking.

If the climate-change debate has accomplished anything, it has proved people never say sorry. When I was about 12 the families of the people who now wince at every gramme of carbon we burn carried on their cars a yellow sticker reading ‘Nuclear Power — No Thanks’ (on 2CVs the sticker was rumoured to be factory-fitted). More linguistically gifted environmentalists preferred the German version ‘Atomkraft? Nein danke’, hinting at sexy Baader-Meinhof connections, or in my part of the world ‘Ynni Niwclear? Dim diolch’ (Back in the 1970s, I am fairly sure it read ‘Pwr Niwclear’, but modern versions all seem to prefer ‘Ynni’ to ‘Pwr’.

My article last week (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers. What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few million quid providing WiFi to the passengers, allowing them to make better use of their time on the train. I was told that this was typical of the ‘businessman’s arrogant assumption that only business passengers mattered’ — and what about people who wanted to go to Paris for leisure?

Last summer we picked up a hire car at Inverness. As I was dumping the rental paperwork inside the glove compartment I unearthed a forgotten pair of sunglasses so hideous in design it suggested that the previous renter had been either a porn star or a German, perhaps even both. That he was at least German became clear when I turned the ignition key, and the on-board computer began to display words like ‘Wankschaft’, ‘Bumreisen’ and ‘Fahrtzwiegel’. Worse was to come — the Hun had fiendishly retuned the radio and changed all the distance and speed settings to metric.

As you probably know (to your cost), Amazon purchases above a certain value incur no delivery charge. This offer works because so many people buy extra books to lift their order above the free-postage threshold. Predictably, in every country in which the retailer has launched the scheme, there has been an immediate and sustained uplift in sales. Except France. There the introduction of the offer had almost no effect. Yet this isn’t another case of l’exception française: in France, it emerged, the scheme was minutely different. Rather than offering free postage, as elsewhere, the company charged a trivial amount (around 10p). This seemingly irrelevant detail was the problem: once amazon.

There was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent... a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, ‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.’ It’s said that the internet promises to usher in a new age of altruism and selflessness but let’s not forget there’s a good side to it as well. Free porn, video piracy, and above all the chance to insult new people. Like the riverboats of Dr Johnson’s London, the online world provides the two things essential to irreverent abuse — anonymity and safety from physical retaliation.

Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as 'the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister'. The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers to leave. Articles along the lines of Why I’m Buying a Big House in France with the Money I Earn Writing this Rubbish appear alongside news of desperate couples driven away by ‘rush-hour chaos’, ‘crumbling infrastructure’ or ‘soaring crime’.

Following last week’s article, someone wrote asking me to dissuade them from buying the new ultra-thin Apple Air laptop, to which they had become curiously attracted. Delighted to help. In fact anything I can do to deprogramme you from the Apple cult will be time well spent. With luck you may end up devoting yourself to something more purposeful and constructive, such as Scientology. It’s not that I don’t like Macs. My problem is with what we marketing chaps call user-imagery. Your typical Mac-owner belongs to that class of people which believe the greatest pleasure to be derived from life is to spend it feeling quietly superior to everyone else.