Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a non-same-sex marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by those who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

On my shopping list for this week:

- rainwater barrel, 500 l.
- olive oil, 1 l.
- plain black swimming shorts
- white cloth, ~6 m.
- gold ribbon or cord, 2 m.

Finally, I'm getting baptised.

This looked like a fun exercise, but as usual my main motivation is chest-beating vis-a-vis nhw. I've been generous with my definition of "live" and counted all the places I stayed at least a month; thus we have Lauda, Selcuk, Kanavu, Patras and Freiburg, but not Agion Oros Athos or Varanasi, tempting as it was to include them (and thus many, many ( Read more... )

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I went for a run this morning, over mounds of spoil from the canal, along the railway tracks, past stagnant ponds, following the line of pylons. Here and there were a straggle of barbed wire, an abandoned car, a run-down shack perhaps inhabited by someone deeply evil. It could have been the beginning of a suburban horror movie, or a public-funded ( Read more... )

I met M in Varanasi in 2000. Now he's going for the first time to Pakistan and, gulp, Afghanistan, with a couple of nice Muslim friends he met in India ( Read more... )

Latest from the European Citizens' Initiative: a Very Cool Leading German Marketing Agency Which Shall Remain Nameless At This Point offered to do our marketing for free. That news made my week... as did the ECI conference in the Parliament, which was interesting in the parts where nobody was trying to argue that Direct Democracy is The Answer, and ( Read more... )

Today's kisses: one Spanish Conservative MEP, 50s, male.
Today's aborted dates: one Irish journalist, 20s, female.
Definitely time to drown my sorrows in the internet ocean... At least it's all very international, but balance isn't the only thing about gender that one has to get right.