Hulluja nuo ihmiset!

[yakalskovich]

Or: "These humans are crazy!"; or: "Die spinnen, die Menschen!" or: "Il's sont fous, les hommes!" (meaning humans, not men in particular; that is another story).

A blog is originally a web-log, which means that I a) log my RL life on the web or b) log where I have been on the web; this is the latter sort of entry.

While the fax spooled slowly into the spooler (and I am so not doing anything taxing in the meanwhile as not to disturb the software), I was surprised by the following articles:

US occupation forces Iraqi farmers to buy expensive patented seed from US companies! (in English)

Provider demands their customers to pay for being wiretapped (in German)

Americans worried about planned wind power generators off the New England coast (in German?) What is their problem? What "aesthetic desaster"? I love wind power generators; for me, they're part of the coastal landscape. How can anybody think old windmills cozy and nostalgic, but hate wind power generators?

Because of The Shrub, US Americans are actually emigrating to Canada - and not only ever saying they would! (in English)

And now something positive at the end: the unobtrusive civil servant who is going to kick Microsoft off all computers in Munich's public administration (in German)

Comments

[wiebke.livejournal.com]

Vermont is pushing for wind power generators b/c they want to make themselves independent of outside power sources (such as power plants in Canada, from which they import energy). Vermont is in New England but not a coastal state, so they are looking to put the wind things on their mountains -- which is controversial because the mountains are very beautiful (very similar to the Eifel or the Sauerland, small and green) and these things would poke up and look funny. They are also worried about the impact on birds. However, I think it will probably happen because Vermont is extremely progressive in terms of environmental policy (and social policy of course -- they have gay civil unions).

[yakalskovich]

I'm all in favour of the wind power generator - they are not only environmentally progressive, they are also entertaining. Those that we have in the coastal regions of the North and Baltic Seas have always proved so amusing to count and not and talk about while on vacation in the summer with the Little Lady, killing the boredom of many a boring drive. "Look, the first Windrad!" (while we are driving north) or "Look, there's the red-striped one already, we're almost home!" (at the holiday apartment we rent every year) - those observations are fixed features every summer.

And no, I'm not being facetious, I mean to prove that people accept them once they're there, like church spires and windmills. You can tell any Vermonters you might encounter that they can calm down.

However, when I tried to buy a postcard with wind power generators for woelfle last summer, there weren't any, as if the resorts were ashamed of them - how silly!

Oh yes, I was going to ask you about gay civil unions, too...

[wiebke.livejournal.com]

Speaking of things people "get used to," recent polls in Vermont (taken at the time of The Election) show that something like 70% of Vermont residents support either gay civil unions or marriage. Basically, after 3-4 years, there has been no disaster, so they don't care.

A funny story related to this... My friend Stefan comes from the Netherlands. He is as gay as they come, but he says he did not know about the gay marriage/union law that passed until it happened. He said there was no big controversy at all -- certainly unlike here! In Georgia they just passed an amendment to the state Constitution that says "marriage = man + woman" -- really disheartening. Ugh.... Of course in my home state they have had same-sex marriage for a year now I think!?

[yakalskovich]

Well, it would be so rude to pronoune them un-married again after they had been married, wouldn't it? So people get used to it. To gay marriage as well as to wind power generators.

I wonder how the Het-Only States are going to handle those things after ther fact. Imagine a gay married couple moved from Boston to Atlanta for job reasons - what are they then? No longer married? And what do the courts or hospitals say about the speical rights of spouses? It makes your mind boggle. Their status of being married or not flickers from state to state?

So, for fic-writing reasons, I need to know about gay civil unions and gay marrigage in Masachusetts, especially Boston. What rights does it give them etc. Is there anything a gay married couple is not entitled to, as compared to a het one (the way they can't adopt children here in Germany)? Are there different stages of officially being recognised as a couple? I know that all that originally began in the US when certain local administrations started extending benefits to non-married partners of their employees, and that in turn began including gay partners. There had to be some sort of official act to state they are, and it all rolled off from that point, if I remember correctly. Can you point me to some web site where I can find out about all that? I was going to mail you about that, but now we're talking anyway, I can ask here as well. The prospective recipient of said fic knows I'm researching this, even, so there needn't be that much secrecy.