Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Are you going for the sexy undies again or are you going to buy your girl some chocolate this time?

The downside of the undies is that men tend to buy something sexy whilst women are looking for something comfortable. The two rarely meet in the middle. Sexy stuff is generally tight and made of thin material but women are looking for comfy and this time of year thin material generally doesn’t cut it.

But why do they like chocolate so much anyway? These days a lot of it is to do with the marketing by the chocolate companies, hence the mass of those little heart shaped chocolates that you see around Valentine’s Day.

However, there are also chemical reasons behind the attraction of chocolate. It’s a sweet and we are all attracted to sugary things for a start. However, it also contains triggers for your endorphins (the “feel good” chemicals) which other sweets don’t. Finally, specifically for the women it contains phenylethylamine which is related to chemicals peaking during orgasm.

It’s been over six months since I last heard from my previous employer (who I’m still notionally working for) so I was a bit taken aback to get a phone call telling me of two potential jobs.

Even more oddly, both seem quite reasonable jobs too and not wildly out of line with my previous experience either which is itself quite unusual.

The first one seems like a normal systems analyst job for the most part. I’m a bit wary of it though as some parts of the job description seem to indicate that it’s aimed at an insider so I don’t really rate my chances with it.

Slightly oddly given my own situation the second one is a secondment which I’m sure will complicate life a bit and also has the problem that there’s an end date for it with no obvious route “back”. That said, it’s an almost perfect fit for me or seems to me to be anyway. Whether it’ll seem so to them is, of course, a different matter.

Whatever the result, if nothing else it shows that they’ve not completely forgotten about me.

That used to be the standard question when international phone calls first became commonplace several decades ago.

Frankly, with so little contact, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about. Just as well really with the costs of international phone calls being at totally crazy prices back then.

It’s different now of course with international calls frequently being cheaper than even local rate calls. No, really: check the tariffs from your phone company and compare against some of the cheap calling services. Right now our normal local rate is around 7p a minute but it only costs us 2p a minute to call Australia!

However, despite the increased number of calls, the “what time is it” question still gets asked a lot in our household. You’d think we’d have gotten the hang of time differences by now, wouldn’t you?

We were all revved up for a decisive meeting with the solicitor this morning, nicely spruced up look, early departure to be sure to be there on time and all that. In fact we were so early that there was time for a really nice cooked breakfast which turned out to be surprisingly cheap.

Anyway, the appointed time arrived and a signature was collected. Well, these things always need a signature at some point, don’t they? Not too long after that we were called in and figured we were all set to go.

Well, it turns out that the other party couldn’t be contacted by their representative despite a number of attempts so the whole thing is adjourned until next week to give them a final opportunity. At the moment though it looks like the whole thing could fall through which is good for us though ’tis rather annoying to have had to collect everything together and for naught.

Which left us at a loose end quite early in the morning. All worked up to go for it and nothing to go for.

Oh well. At least it gave us a chance to have a relaxed morning for a change.

Christian beliefs and the law came into conflict back in 2008 when an openly gay couple turned up to stay at a B&B in Cornwall and were turned away because they were gay and the owners did not believe in unmarried couples sharing a bed. To complicate it a little more the couple were in a registered partnership which, supposedly, is equivalent to marriage however that aside the beliefs of the owners wouldn’t have counted that as a marriage anyway.

They lost their case today but have leave to appeal essentially because there’s quite a conflict between the gay couple’s right to stay and the owners right to their religious beliefs. This is merely the first round. In one corner we have the Equality Commission and in the other, the Christian movement around the world.

The problem in this case is that both the couple and the owners are “right”.

The couple are right legally in that it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and morally right as it seems wrong and intrusive to be enquiring about one’s sexual orientation. Do they ask the marital status of everyone checking in? After all, many heterosexual couples who’ve been living together for a long time would come across as being married so it wouldn’t be as simple as picking out a gay couple as opposed to two male friends who were travelling around together.

The owners are right both legally and morally too though. After all, article 9 of the human rights convention is very clear about one’s right of freedom of thought, conscience and religion:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Morally they seem to be right too in that clearly a gay couple in a bed was a major conflict with their own beliefs.

Given that they’re both right it would have obviously been better if the conflict between them hadn’t arisen. There are a great number of gay friendly establishments for the couple to have stayed with and likewise there are a large number of married couples to have stayed at the B&B. What needed to be cleared was that the establishment was a Christian owned one (there’s nothing on their website to indicate that) although I suspect that they could do little more than that: a “no unmarried couples” policy would probably be illegal.

This is one case that we’ll likely hear a lot more of in the years to come as it trundles along to the highest courts.