What’s that you ask? Well, that is one way how newspapers are sold in Austria on weekends. Pouches with newspapers are mounted at signposts, with an attached receptacle for money, and people who take a paper are expected to insert the appropriate number of coins. By and large this even seems to work.
I have seen some more mechanic solutions where you would not get the paper without inserting money, but those vending machines seem to not have survived the currency change that happened in 2002, when Austria gave up on its Schilling and embraced the Euro. In fact it was the same with most vending machines in low profit businesses. The cost of adapting the machines to accept the new coins was prohibitive and caused many goods to not be sold this way any more, or in the case of newspapers, it brought a revival of trust. What a nice effect 🙂
The title? Well, those two newspapers “Die Presse” and “Der Standard”, hanging there in concord, are two of the best newspapers in Austria, one strictly conservative, one liberal, and they both compete for the same small market of highly educated people who don’t submit to the yellow press. Of course they try to be different, just look at the colors of the money boxes 🙂
And there is more irony to it. The red sticker in between, reading “Krone Hit Radio”, advertises for a radio station owned by the biggest and one of the worst of Austria’s newspapers, “Kronen Zeitung”. What a rare display of unity.
Let me close with one more bicycle, one more Puch. Both of these images were shot with the Nikon 85/1.8, both wide open. When I left work yesterday (yes, it’s morning again) at 7pm, it was so dark that I decided to change from the slow 70-300 to something real fast, and I feel that the 85 is underused. I’ll be off for work in about an hour, and I’ll keep this lens mounted for now. Weather has not improved anyway.
Some time passes … nope, I will not. I just come from the bathroom, and while I was indulging extensively in the joys of hot water, weather has considerably improved. The sun is shining again, it’s got to be back to the 70-300 🙂
The Song of the Day is “Two Of A Kind” by Memphis Slim. I have it on disc 53 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, but if you look for something more … well … slim, I’d suggest the 1961 album “All Kinds of Blues”.