Sometimes I think that the human psyche can’t get any weirder. Then I read this. Oh well, at least he’s won some sort of Darwin award and taken himself out of the gene pool…

 

(hat tip to Kameron at Brutal Women)

As I get older I find myself reading obituaries more and more. Marking one’s time on the tree of life by seeing who’s fallen off the neighbouring branch, I suppose. Two obituaries in The Guardian today caught my eye.

 

The first is for Gladys Tantaquidgeon (what a glorious name!) – a matriarch of the Mohegan tribe – who has died aged 106. Gladys obviously was able to cling to the branch for longer than most of us will ever be able to do. She sounds to have been quite a character.

 

The second is for Eva Svankmajerova, wife of the filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, and an accomplished artist in her own right. She has died at 65 (only nine years older than me; damn, that branch is close!). I see that she was responsible in part for the animation and puppetry of Little Otik, a creepy little jewel of a film.

The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics reports today on the state of queer couples in The Netherlands. It states that, in The Netherlands, there are almost 53,000 couples of the same sex living together: 29,000 gay male couples and 24,000 lesbian couples. 

 

That 53,000, by the way, represents more than 1% of all couples living together in The Netherlands. Most of the couples simply live together (perhaps with some form of legal agreement, the research doesn’t make it clear). Just over 5,000 couples have a "registered partnership", while about 6,000 have a full civil marriage. Thus, taken together, the percentage that have entered into a partnership bound by civil law is almost a quarter.

 

About 9 percent of gay couples have one or more children – often from a previous relationship. Just one percent of the gay male couples have children; 18 percent of the lesbian couples have children.

 

About a quarter of the gay couples live in one of the four largest cities in The Netherlands (Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht). That still leaves 75% who live outside of these cities. We’ll be one of those, and even more so when we go to live in the middle of nowhere in Gelderland next April. 

There’s an interesting series of programmes (Dubai Dreams) on the BBC at the moment that centre around the building boom currently underway in Dubai. Today’s entry on BLDGBLOG is a pair of "before and after" photos that really bring home the scale of the building boom. There’s also a pointer to the Pruned blog, where the "is it all going to end in tears" question is raised. In some ways, Dubai is only Shanghai, but with the volume control turned up even higher. But I can’t help feeling that the whole edifice is constructed on the notion of cheap oil. I see no evidence that the skyscrapers and other buildings are being constructed to be energy efficient. What are the air-conditioning bills like now, and what happens when the cost of energy rises as it inevitably must?

I see that the Vatican is about to release its document that will explicitly bar gay men (women obviously can’t apply anyway) from entering the priesthood. Apparently it will also bar those who "support ‘the so-called gay culture’" as well. Um, what is this ‘gay culture’ of which they speak? It seems to me that it is one of those silly phrases that apparently has meaning, but which, when examined closely, disappears up its own rhetoric. It’s like that other fabulous beast: the ‘gay community’. Both phrases conjure up an image of a monolithic club to which all gay people are automatically members. Message to the Vatican: gay people come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of beliefs and behaviours. In short, we are indistinguishable from the rest of humanity because, shock, horror, we are humans too.

 

No-one in their right minds talks about "the left-handed culture" or the "redhead community" as though the group of people that are left-handed or the group of people that are redheads share anything other than the attribute that defines their group. A group is not the same as a community or a culture – but this is clearly a concept that has escaped the authors of the Vatican’s document.