Clever Marketing or Chauvinistic Mayor

Gallus and Black Forest have a completely different meaning in Scotland when the words are strung together than when they refer to the Mayor of a German town.


However, in the real world, Triberg is a town in the Black Forest area of Germany and their Mayor is called Gallus Strobel. He is in the news cause he has set out separate parking areas for men and women.....

When you open a can of worms, you can't close the tin immediately, you have to let some wriggle away first.

His idea is wider parking spaces for women in areas that are better lit. Spaces for men are closer to concrete pillars and can only be reversed into. Now, depending on how this was marketed, this could be a great idea. However, he followed it up by saying that men were better at parking than women.

"In the new car park we found that two place were not rectangular, at an angle to the road and placed between walls and pillars; that makes parking difficult so we decided to allocate them to men," the 58 year-old mayor told Germany's Spiegel magazine.

Here's the bit where Mayor Strobel has tried to put the lid back on the worm can by adding, "there were great women drivers, and all women were welcome to try and park in the men-only spaces."


As a marketing ploy, this has worked brilliantly as now I know that Triberg is a town in the Black Forest and Gallus Strobel is the Mayor. I also know that being of the weaker sex, I can park my huge Audi A6 Quattro in a nice well lit area and not concern myself about my lack of driving skill.

What I will concern myself with though is that while nice Mayor Strobel has catered for women who lack driving skill he has completely ignored the requirements of the guys who can't even drive a hot nail into a snowball. But who am I to argue? If someone wants to give me a nice big parking spot while some dude wants to show off his hand/eye coordination in an area half the size, I'll happily watch the entertainment.

Oh well! You can't keep everyone happy I suppose.








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In Defence of the Motorist

I tried not to write about it, I tried not to laugh about it and I tried not to be upset about it, but I have so got to write about the huge crash involving a poor Toyota Prius and some fancy motors.

A 14 car smash is news however you look at it but the interesting cringe-worthy thing here is that the crash involved the super car wish list of the century including 8 Ferraris, 1 Lamborghini, 3 Mercedes and possibly a Nissan GTR (though some sources say it was a Toyota).

The convoy of cars were thought to be on their way to Hiroshima for a ‘gathering of super cars’ which could maybe mean it was a car show or meet of some description, but to be honest it doesn’t really matter does it?

The point I’m trying to make is that, yeah I did have a bit of a smirk, guffaw, giggle and even a chortle to myself but that was more like a nervous laugh. After all, if I had just totalled my Mk2 Scirocco Storm I would be near suicidal, never mind if it had been my McLaren F1.

The Guardian reported ‘The automobile enthusiasts, aged between 37 and 60, were condemned by Japanese police. "It was a gathering of narcissists," Mitsuyoshi Isejima of the Yamaguchi prefecture expressway traffic unit told Bloomberg.’

How very dare people have such powerful and expensive cars and possibly break the speed limit. How dare a self employed business man spend his cash on a car? I mean really!

Now to me that says it all, because someone likes cars and saves up to buy nice cars and enjoy them it doesn’t actually make them the devil or one of his associates. Though in the everyday world it appears that may well be the case.


Yes, the 60 year old Ferrari driver admitted he that he had been speeding and happened to have an error of judgement, but that can happen anywhere with any driver of any car. The car accident didn’t happen because these people had fast, powerful, expensive cars!