Finally...

Yay! Sense!

Well, sense in installments.

Seems as though our dearest Länder have finally been able to agree on most (!) parts of a country-wide smoking ban in public places such as bars, discos, schools, kindergartens (?! WTF? That was ALLOWED??), etc. No word on universities, though. TYPICAL! I am about just to hang up No Smoking signs surreptitiously and then see what happens.
However, smokers will still be allowed to smoke in designated smoking rooms. And those bars not able to provide their guests with a smoking room will be allow smoking in their bars, but there will be a sign with a large "R" on those.

The idiocy... What on earth is so difficult about understanding that if something is dangerous for the person addicted AND others it should not be done in the presence of those it can be harmful for as well? The whole debate is absolutely ridiculous, and there are absolutely no pro-arguments whatsoever on the pro-smoking side.
Most people engaging in the debates did not manage to support their points, and how would they, because there ARE no arguments for it. There are smoking bans in other countries and those are working fine, WHY does it have to be Germany, as always, in which there is a huge, long, wordy debate about everything, in which the most brain dead things are being said in support of a insupportable argument?

It was sooo aggravating to be forced to see so clearly that some of the people in charge of my country have so little in their heads. I cringed at some of those arguments, seriously. They all boiled down to, "Well, it has always been done this way, there is no reason to change it", or to "Well, it is part of a good culture to smoke while drinking wine, it would do damage to our culture if we banned smoking in restaurants", or to "It is a discrimination of addicted people if we exclude them from society!", or even to: "Well, seems as though one of our most reliable institutes had shown us significant evidence supporting the theory that passive smoking indeed does lead to lung cancer, but it could STILL be wrong!"

... but those are MY LUNGS! Ahem. It really started hurting after a while.

Surveys

( Surveys... )

Tokio Hotel and the perils of growing up online.

I am not sure whether to laugh or cry. I have to admit that I never quite got the hysteria about the German band Tokio Hotel, but then, I have always been too old for that kind of fannish band support.
My friends might have cried bitter tears in earlier years when BSB had a fight, or TT split, but somehow, music was never important enough for me to care that much. Sad teenage life, no? Well. It did save me some tears, and, when  I look at the kids I'm teaching today, some embarrassment, too. I am so glad that we did not grow up on the internet, seriously. jaywalker23  showed me one more reason to be glad.

A while back, a girl uploaded the following video in which she told off all the Tokio Hotel haters for dissing her favourite band. They were all jealous anyway, she said. They had no business dissing her band, she said. They should stop trying to diss them or they'd diss them back, she said.
 

( Video of the proud Tokio Hotel fan No. 1 )

Of course, being as hilarious as it is, it received very nasty reactions. People dressed up and imitated her. People laughed about her. People got her video on the gossipy music news on telly and laughed about her. And now, there is this video here:

( Video of the no longer proud ex-Tokio Hotel Fan )

... in which she says that she's grateful for all the people who'd given her a piece of their mind and who'd told her off for being a Tokio Hotel fan, that she'd realised now that it was indeed very silly to be a fan of that band and that she'd now seen the error of her ways and was thankful for that.

Isn't it ... scary?

Internet fame is scary. Thanks to YouTube, loads of people now know what this girl looks like, and everybody who finds out her user name can just go and tell her off or imitate her and insult her and tell her off and laugh about her
Of course it also serves her right for uploading such stuff, but it's got to be dangerous to her mental health to be laughed at by that many people.