In these times of the global village and commodity travel for all, it really is important to decide on an internationally acceptable name for your child, as proven by the parents of the chairman of the Dutch Socialist Party.
I wonder how this guy copes when he travels to the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, etc.
Barbara Walters, a talk show host in the US, recently commented on-air that she had recently had the misfortune of sitting next to a woman on a plane who was breastfeeding her baby.
“It made me very nervous,” Walters said on the May 17 show. “She didn’t cover the baby with a blanket. It made us uncomfortable.”
This disgraceful comment resulted in lactating mothers in multiple cities organising a synchronised feed.
Another sterling example of how repressed some people here are, when someone can say that another woman breastfeeding makes her “nervous”.
My new green card (a.k.a. permanent residence card a.k.a. alien registration card a.k.a. I-551) arrived today. The conditional status has been removed and I am now a fully fledged permanent resident of the US, with all of the viral tax obligations this privilege carries.
For example, if I return to The Netherlands and do not surrender this card, I am still bound by US law to file tax returns and, if my earnings overseas are high enough, pay tax to the Internal Revenue Service, even though I would no longer be living in the US. In fact, if I keep my green card too long (8 years out of the last 15), even surrendering the thing ceases to be an option for the purposes of avoiding the tax obligation.
Anyway, since I’ve only held a green card for some two years now, I needn’t worry about this particular problem. With the arrival of this new, unconditional card, that’s me finished with American immigration bureaucracy for the time being. This card doesn’t need to be renewed until 2015, by which time we’ll be long gone and living in another country.
Suicide Bomber Barbie is the conduit through which one artist expresses his feelings.
“By his appropriation of a consumerist icon, the artist creates an emphatic subversion of this process, the artist seeking to help create the conditions of political change.”
Or something.
