The American President came off the fence yesterday by saying that he backed same sex marriage. For the leader of one of the most Christian countries in the world this is a major breakthrough.
The arguments for not allowing same sex marriage hold strongly in those regions in America where the church holds the biggest sway. And in most cases it is the deeply religious that seem to have an issue with same sex marriage.
But marriage has many guises and what may be considered abhorrent to some, may be perfectly normal for others. Take arranged marriages as an example, in India and some of the Arab countries, arranged marriages are normal and no one would bat an eyelid, even though to me I would find the idea of my parents choosing my life partner for me ludicrous.
Most Spaniards will tell you that bull fighting is part of their heritage, as is the lesser known darting of bulls, throwing goats off church towers and the leaving of horses and donkeys tethered to the ground with no food or shade.
Some of the Spanish zoos I have visited have also left me thinking, why the hell did I go there, with poorly managed grounds and enclosures that are an affront to the animals basic needs.
This issue does not stop at the Spaniards though; the world is full of countries that have dubious animal husbandry records. Its all got to do with the amount of value we place on a creature. An African would kill an animal with no qualms whatsoever, because his family require protein to survive. Some Chinese and some of the other Asians will breed dogs just as a food item. (Europeans will kill an elephant for sport; just ask the king of Spain if he thought it was a good idea.)
For all our technological advances we are still very flawed, being human will inevitably lead us to some very strange behaviors and things that our bodies do without our control.
Take the humble booger, it offers no calorific value, yet there are some who walk amongst us that will pick their nose, observe the takings sat on the tip of their index finger, have a quick look around to see who is watching and wolf it down. I saw this yesterday in the parking lot at a well-known, extremely expensive, local supermarket.
Farting, can be the funniest thing in the world, but not if it is you who is the fartee. The build up of gases can cause extreme pain and no end of clenching your butt cheeks together will save you from taming a pant ripper, especially when you are with someone else or in a packed lift. Even if you happen to subdue the brown growler, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will not smell like a dead dog on the Malaga road…In August. But if alone or in the company of someone you trust, a well-timed fart can produce no end of giggles. For some of us it is the best game in the world.
I saw my first real computer at age 25, by age 26 they had me working on it. Hailed as the future, I resisted, as I do most things technological. After transferring all my charges records onto a floppy disk and then some, I realized, hang on, I no longer need to hump a box of files all over the world, I just need to take this disk and a laptop.
Not your ultra slim laptop you see today, like supermodels, silky smooth, light and the batteries go for hours. No, the first laptop I was given weighed in at two kilos without the battery and looked more like Susan Boyle than Rosie Huntington-Whitely.
It was not to be though. You see the technology was just not reliable enough, Windows BC would crash on a regular basis, so we would often end up travelling with a ton of files so we could manually input training results, with the laptop ending up sat forlornly in a corner trying to reboot.
After the grace period given by the Gibraltar Government in regards to the helmet laws, it still appears that there are quite a few of our neighbours riding around town sans the proper helmet with impunity.
The helmet law was brought in exclusively to counter the rise in head injuries in motorcycle related accidents. But do helmets really save lives? A modern motorcycle helmet would be made out of a composite glass fiber, plastic and or carbon fiber; extremely strong and lightweight maxing out at a couple of kilos.
You will find that wearing something that strong will save your head, but will break your neck. An object will fail under impact at its weakest point, in this case, the neck.
