March 2008 Archives

Walking up to the Rivercenter just before 9.00 am on this cool grey San Antonio Saturday morning, I come across closed streets, a police cordon and a seemingly endless torrent of marchers in pink. Two pink ladies in Starbucks tell me it is the “Race for the Cure” breast cancer awareness march, and there are forty thousand of them on the streets this morning. Traffic is gridlocked for miles around, and on the through road between the Marriotts Rivercenter and Riverwalk, the two main NPRA conference hotels, drivers have turned off their car engines and are standing around complaining. The mood is getting ugly. One young lady accosts me to say she is abandoning her car and taking a cab. How’s that going to work? A big man shouts that the marchers are raising money for abortion.

Anyway, by the time I come out of the Rivercenter just after 10.00 am, the roads are clear and it is as if nothing has ever happened. The Blog posting which had been taking shape in my head (“San Antonio gridlock greets arriving delegates ... chaos envelopes conference city ...”) is cast on the scrapheap.

Meanwhile, up on the mezzanine floor of the Marriott Riverwalk, the hi-tech ICIS suite is taking shape. I take some “before” photos of the ICIS techie team setting up the equipment, and we chortle over last night’s photos at Pesca, Swig and Coyote Ugly.

NPRA banner on the Hilton Palacio del Rio

Race for the Cure through San Antonio

The ICIS suite before

An empty flight is a joy to mankind. The vacant seats and the lack of visible activity make the ten-hour flight from London to Houston, Texas an entirely stress-free experience. Best of all, we nip through the dreaded arrivals hall and immigration in a matter of minutes instead of the usual hour’s zigzag queuing. The only hiccup is when an immigration official takes it upon himself to deface Andy’s passport by putting the Houston entry stamp across two of the last free pages. We are all incensed.

I have not wasted the ten hours aboard and have broadened my mind by learning another two words of Chinese (very slow progress here), reading half the new Henning Mankell book and watching two rather feeble films: Lions for Lambs (hopelessly didactic, long political dialogue which doesn’t move the plot forward, and Robert Redford maybe should think again about his anti cosmetic surgery stance), and Michael Clayton (George Clooney brings about downfall of evil fertilizer company, but does anyone care?) Still, I learnt that Americans say “tourniquet” as if it rhymes with etiquette, which will come in handy one day, I’m sure.

Click here to read Joe’s NPRA conference opener, and here for my pre-conference interview with the president of NPRA. Or just wind back to www.icis.com for the full coverage.

It’s a crashing disappointment to find that most online restaurant reviews for San Antonio are from aggrieved diners who want only to share their revenge with the wider public. For chemicals folk heading down the I10 next week for the NPRA conference, here are some not-so-nasty reviews of places to dine and be seen around the Riverwalk.

Little Rhein Steak House

Luckily I’d booked way in advance because the small dining area was heaving with men in suits packed around solid oak tables and a queue had formed across the front of the low stone-built restaurant. The air was slightly steaming because it was raining outside, as so often during NPRA, but the service was swift and friendly, and the steaks are always perfection. The menu is very limited but this is a great business lunch place.

Pesca

The best place to be is at the bar watching the bar staff slashing grapefruits with hatchets to serve with the jumbo shrimp. Unlike most San Antonio shrimp, these actually have some flavour, and the bar staff claim to have won this year’s San Antonio “Best Margarita” competition – or was it last year’s? There’s a nice Med feeling to the place, with its light sea-blue décor, but the chairs are too low to get comfortable. The food is light and trendy, and the clientele is split between conference delegates and tourists.

Fig Tree

Nice terrace, but inside it’s like a girl’s bedroom, and way too romantic for a business meal. After a wince-making meal where one industry player poured out details of his divorce, the Blog won’t be going back there in a hurry.

La Mansion del Rio (Las Canarias)

Stylish, expensive, mostly couples. Small bar, but lacking in atmosphere. The terraced seating makes it easy to check out who’s dining with whom. Outside is pretty, but recent NPRAs have been too wet.

Market Street

Best Mexican food, street theatre and fun Tex Mex souvenirs. It’s a short drive there, but almost impossible to get a cab back to the conference hotels. The Atlas Maritime party on a balcony overlooking the street is hard to beat.

Lucy Craymer has come across a new and unexplored end-use for baseoils...

When baseoil producers start to feel the pinch of the economic slowdown (she writes), they could change strategic direction and start selling their product for use in the old nip and tuck.

They wouldn’t be the first. It’s been reported that an Argentinian conman Dr Daniel Serrano has been persuading youth-obsessed celebs to have low grade silicone similar to car lubricant injected into their faces.

Not only was it not the superior form of Botox he claimed it to be, but alleged victims such as Priscilla Presley are now having to get the damage rectified.

Serrano was convicted of drug smuggling and the conspiracy and use of unapproved drugs.

(Thanks to www.techfreep.com for the photo.)

Are you setting off to NPRA with yours clipped to your ear, slung on your hip or tucked away in your jack sack? Do you take part in the synchronised switching on of cell phones as soon as your plane has landed? Does your cell phone accompany you to the bathroom and bedroom, and vibrate comfortingly throughout every meeting?

Maybe it’s time to think twice about your constant companion, because new research shows that male heavy cell phone use is linked to significantly lower sperm counts. The study by the Cleveland Clinic, and published in “Fertility and Sterility” (another Elsevier publication), states that the more men used a cell phone, the lower their sperm count and quality was.

(photo from The Big Experiment)

The Blog's daughter was on TV on the Discovery Channel's "The Big Experiment" last night.

Episode 3 shows a bunch of disaffected kids being introduced to science experiments, and is being shown again on 22 and 23 March - but the website so far has video clips from just the first two episodes. I'll add the link to her episode once it's up on the web. She's the student helper in the black T-shirt sticking electrodes to the children's heads.

On the subject of daughters and chemical industry kids, click here for the Blog's previous piece on Chemicals II: The Next Generation.

It's a tenuous chemicals connection, but there are some great photos of the Museum of Art (MUMOK) in Vienna, designed by my namesakes Ortner&Ortner (two for the price of one) posted on Tuesday on my now favourite architecture blog, "A Daily Dose of Architecture".

Dramatic footage of a fire on Monday 17 March at INEOS in Dormagen, Germany as shown on Germany's Express TV, and captured here on YouTube. From all the shaky videos of fires and explosions on YouTube, it seems that anyone living near a chemical plant has a videocam permanently on standby to record the events for TV and posterity.

Click here for Nel Weddle's original article on the fire and Linda Naylor's follow-up piece with a link to the video.

Curious news today from my colleague Adam Tinworth, head of blog development at ICIS's parent company RBI (Reed Business Information), who finds that one of our fellow bloggers in this very building has started up a blog on the sole subject of Reed Elsevier's proposed divestment of RBI: the aptly named "Divestment Watch".

Hot news from our fellow RBI bloggers here at Airline Business today. A possible tie up between Continental, every Houston chemical player's favourite airline, and United Airlines, is probably not going to happen.

"The apparent collapse of a proposed Delta/Northwest airline merger is likely to leave other possible combinations on the drawing table for some time. A possible Continental tie up with United, conceived as a response or domino reaction, is probably not going to happen."

The chemicals market was on hold for two hours on Monday afternoon as frontline ICIS reporters turned their minds to building constructions from elastic bands, tubes and sticks in the pursuit of grouping and bonding.

Screens were dimmed and phones stood silent in the hi-tech ICIS London office, as the editorial team turned themselves into their three new groups, based in a very loose fashion around crude oil, olefins and aromatics.

In the purest traditions of corporate team-building, compromising photos and even videos were taken, clothing left in disarray, firm friendships made and broken, and strong enmities established between the groups.

Later, as wine flowed and retro Italian food was consumed, wild tales were told. Steve and Mike told the story of how Richard Gere had allegedly shaved a gerbil and inserted it into himself, after which someone told the tale of how a local Sutton restaurant had been closed down by health inspectors after two different types of human emissions had been found in the curry.

Later still, the team creapt back into RBI's Quadrant House under cover of darkness to perform puzzling but revealing skits, much to the bemusement of the night security staff.

Photos by PG and video by Lucy to follow.

Are you booking your hire car for the long drive from Houston to San Antonio, Texas for the NPRA chemicals conference at the end of March? Be sure to request this added security feature, the "Trunk Monkey", as recommended today by the Made by Monkeys blog.

Our fellow blogger Karen writes: “Forget drive-by-wire braking systems or hybrid engines, the trunk monkey is hands down the best automotive technology I’ve ever seen. I hope this feature is an option on my next car.”

(Disclaimer: The Blog in no way endorses violent conflict resolution.)

See the Trunk Monkey in action.

Moscow tops the world's capitals in terms of hotel room rates, according to our fellow RBI bloggers at Travolution. Here is the top ten from a survey out today by Hotels.com of the average price per night and increase/decrease from 2006 to 2007. The Blog isn't so sure about what you'll get for your money in London at £115.

Moscow - £194 - up 22%
New York - £143 - up 5%
Dubai - £125 - up 4%
Venice - £125 - up 12%
London - £115 - up 15%
Geneva - £109 - up 9%
Cancun - £104 - down 8%
Rome - £104 - up 3%
Edinburgh - £103 - up 6%
Oslo - £100 - up 18%

Global trading of chemicals would grind to a halt without Yahoo Messenger. But how secret are our business and personal communications on messenger platforms? It's enough to bring every trader and market reporter out in a cold sweat to read on the New Scientist blog that

"If you used the instant-messaging system MSN messenger in June 2006, all your chats were being collected and being passed (anonymised, of course) to researchers at Microsoft Research, a paper in the physics pre-print server arXiv reveals."

Their results show that people are more likely to chat with others in the same geographical location, age group and of the same sex. Each account had on average 50 buddies and, in the IM world, people are separated by “7 degrees of separation”. People also chat more often and for longer with members of the opposite sex. Well, well, well ...

With less than three weeks to go until the petrochemical hordes board their flights for the golf and pre-conference conferences of NPRA, the ICIS fashion editor predicts another strong showing from the “manbag” and “murse”, perennial favourites on the chemical conference circuit.

Industry devotees will be now be eyeing up the new “Bob Bag” as featured in the London Sunday Times this weekend. In his “Locker Room” column, Tom Stubbs writes:

“Bob Geldof has always loved a bit of Mulberry. Now, the pair have created the ultimate man bag. The Bob Bag has lots of compartments for all the junk you would usually stuff in your pockets. (Price on request)”

(Actually, I see on men.style.com that the price is $1,900.)

(Thanks to Daily Mail for photo.)

As sure as night follows day, last week’s outpouring of anti plastic bag sentiment had to be followed this week by a total rebuttal by the world’s scientists and science journalists.

Scientists are now queuing up to rubbish the campaign, in articles such as:
‘Sexed-up’ numbers should not always be accepted as science, and
Q&A: trying to get a handle on the truth, and
Plastic bag eco fears are based on science blunder.

Apparently, the original research showed that fishing tackle posed a danger to sealife.

I was surprised to get an email from London’s Royal Opera House warning me that the performance of Salome which I was due to see on Saturday was full of “nudity and violence”.

After that there were reviews in the papers with added gory photos for those who were a bit hazy as to what nudity and violence actually looked like. By the time we came to the dance of the seven veils and the head-chopping finale, the suspense had been building for weeks.

It’s a bit like that with the long-awaited news as to who will be the buyer of BASF’s styrenics operations. There was a hint at EPL last week that the announcement was imminent and that a top styrenics manager would not be making the move to the new owner.

And on Friday came an insider tip that a major announcement would be made by INEOS in the next few days.

The Blog is breathless with the suspense….

Look at the fashion page of the FT for tortuous connections between pictures of gorgeous girls and economic trends. The FT's demographic can't switch off from business even while reading about designer fashion, so against shots of catwalk models you can read about hemlines being linked to the health of markets. One designer's fondness for separates and jumpsuits indicated a desire to "buckle up, batten down and hibernate for the duration (of a recession)". Elsewhere, "as the Dow Jones industrial average dropped ... Chanel's skirt lengths dropped - all the way to the ankles."

Cute piece in the FT yesterday about how a plastic toy manufacturer has relocated his production from China to the UK: "Value strategy is no puzzle for toymaker". Although the costs were three times less in China, the advantages of logistics and image outweighed this.

(Thanks to funonthenet.in for the photo.)

On the perimeter road of Heathrow there is a stretch where you look straight into the lights of six approaching aircraft coming in to land. In the dawn sky, the hovering white lights look like alien craft amassing for attack. This week I have three 5.00 am starts, and this is the second. Is this what beauty queens mean when they say they want to travel and be happy?

The key to a good business day trip is to travel light. Take one Blackberry, one memory stick, one lipstick, and ditch the rest. The man in the grey suit climbing the steps to the aircraft next to me is carrying just a newspaper. How cool is that?

On early morning flights, every seat is taken. I skim the free FT for news of oil, chemicals or any update on the sell-off of my own company, Reed Business Information (RBI). But really I am looking for the Lucy Kellaway column which is the best thing about an early morning Monday flight. In one small piece she manages to wrap up the very topical issues that we have been talking about in the workplace - the fact that companies are intruding into our private lives and that by working on 29 February we have given one day of our labour for free.

In oil-metropolis Houston, our Americas managing editor, Stephen Burns is all set for Tuesday’s primary …

Still digesting the advent of $100/bbl oil (he writes), the US Gulf chemical industry is about to be hit with another first – a primary election in Texas on 4 March that will actually matter in terms of deciding the candidates in the November 2008 presidential election.

In more typical election years, the Republicans and Democrats usually have decided on their candidates before it is the turn of Texans to vote.

But 2008 is a one-of-a-kind, with the Republican front-runner John McCain still dogged by a conservative opponent who won't quit and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton locked in a titanic struggle for the Democratic nomination.

Texas is shaping up as a make-or-break state for Clinton, while a loss for Obama could be the start of the kind of comeback for Hillary that her husband Bill Clinton made famous in the 1992 primary season.

Turnout in the Texas primary is expected to smash all records. Early voting already set staggering marks, with Houston's Harris County showing early voting by Democrats up 550% over 2004.

Clinton has tended to fare best among unionised and Hispanic voter sub-sets, both of which are well represented in the chemical industry.

But Obama has done well in urban areas in general and hence will benefit more from the relative over-representation of those voters under complex party rules. Obama is also expected to continue to erode Clinton's once-presumed support among African-American voters, who make up a significant part of the voters in Houston's chemical-intensive neighbours Beaumont and Port Arthur.