Palfrey's life

Yay! Did my first social thing in two weeks, went to AEGEE thing last night. Appears that some people have actually noticed that I wasn't there which is comforting. They're planning to go to Belgium on the 6th/7th March, for a beer festival, partying, and general tourist look around of Gent and Antwerp, so I'm glad I turned up, 'cause I'm definately going on that one. On the topic of Belgium, spent about half an hour there talking to someone new, a belgian girl called Valentine, who can do some very odd things with her tongue (imagine rolling your tongue, and then pulling in the front bit to make a sort of cross-shape. No, I don't quite know how we got onto that topic). For those of you already planning smut-laden, gossip-mongering comments to that, there's nothing more to tell there, and neither is there likely to be, partly because my attention has been grabbed by another new face whom I really should have gone up to and spoken to. I'd give a description, but half of you can probably guess most of her description based on the fact that she had my interest from about the first moment I saw her.

Bike is buggered *again* (am plotting it's immiment melting down into pet food cans as we speak. Or just the replacing of the rear inner tube), and as a result I was walking to the AEGEE thing, and something happened that made me feel I'd finally really arrived in the Netherlands - someone tried to sell me a bike. Would have been tempted to buy it if it wasn't for the fact it was almost certainly stolen. Oh well.

(Disclaimer: some of this may well be inaccurate, I'm not in the US, I don't get the standard news media blasted at me. From what I hear, this might be a good thing. Feel free to correct.)


Let's get back to Biblical standards of marriage. How much for your daughter?
Yup, it's the gay marriage crap. Anywhere other than the US this would be some minor lunatic from a fringe group calling for the banning of something that's doesn't harm anyone, because they don't like it. But in the US, the lunatics are calling the shots.... things like this really make me worry

(from here) "It should be an inalienable right, guaranteed by our Constitution, to live in a marriage-based society," said Robert Knight, director of the Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute. "When you create counterfeit marriages and put them into the law, you're undermining society's most important safeguard against tyranny."

What is this muppet on? Sadly, this doesn't appear to just be a random fringe, but a majority of the loud-speaking people. The US social mix being how it is (with a goodly quota of rednecks from the *very* shallow end of the gene pool), coming out in heavy support of gay marriage right now is basically political suicide. So of the people that actually have a hope in hell of getting to become either senators or president in america, we've got the right (read: far-right by most standards) baying "ban this before they devalue our marriages", and anyone political that might actually want to oppose this can't do anything major without getting accused of being gay (political death above a certain level in america). *Hopefully* this will all blow over in a while, and the proposed consitutional amendment won't get the 2/3 votes it needs to get through. *sigh*. Fuckwits.

As someone I knew once said, "That the US elected [sic] Bush doesn't worry me. Anyone can make a mistake. What worries me is they might *re-elect* him.". If he keeps the levels of fear, terror, and outright xenophobia up, this might just happen.