First of all, there’s another interview with me online. This time around, I was interviewed by Peter Joseph Lewis at Why Did You Write That? Come on over and check it out.
I also have a new post up over at Pegasus Pulp with a bunch of interesting indie publishing links.
Pop diva Whitney Houston has died aged only 48 and joins the league of pop and rock stars who self-destruct much too early. Now only Madonna and Prince are left of the great pop legends of the 1980s.
I came pretty close to seeing Whitney Houston perform at the Stoppelmarkt in Vechta in 1999. Two friend of mine wanted to go and asked me, if I wanted to come along. I didn’t go, because the tickets were too pricey for the poor student I was at the time. And besides, I wasn’t too fond of her latest songs, the quality wasn’t up to previous standards. Later it became apparent, that Whitney Houston had already started her descent into addiction by that time.
In other news, Stuhr, the suburb of Bremen where I live, elected a new mayor today. The results are here.
As you can see, it’s a pretty obvious homerun for one of the candidates, who won almost 80 percent of the vote. Not really surprising, since he was vice mayor to a very popular mayor* for the past few years, while his opponents are political newbies. Plus, one of them had a program that annoyed the hell out of me (and not just me, considering less than 15 percent of the electorate voted for the guy), because he focused solely on the parents of young children.
Another thing worth pointing out is that of the three candidates for mayor, only one is a member of a political party and that bloke is not the one who won. The other two are officially independent, though one is affiliated with the Pirate Party (a Pirate as a mayor would have been cool, but the guy is too inexperienced). But then party affiliation doesn’t mean much in local elections.
However, Stuhr wasn’t the only place to elect a new mayor today. The city of Duisburg in North Rhine Westfalia also had a mayoral election, albeit one to oust the current mayor Adolf Sauerland. Sauerland has been blamed for the deadly crush at the Love Parade techno music festival in 2010, which killed 21 people, and particularly for his absolute refusal to either accept responsibility or resign after the disaster. Now the people of Duisburg voted overwhelmingly to oust their mayor. Good riddance, too.
More good news: In the face of protests, the German government has postponed signing the problematic ACTA agreement (similar to the SOPA/PIPA bills in the US), as have the governments of Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. ACTA is not dead yet, but at least the protests have forced a rethink.
Finally, here is an article that came up when I searched Google News for an English language link about the Duisburg election. Modern Ghana reports about the Christian Wulff scandal, as seen from an African point of view. The headline says it all: “Politicians Are Everywhere The Same, From East To West!”
At the Book View Café, Sherwood Smith has a great post on unresolved sexual tension versus consumated sex scenes and which readers prefer. Plenty of good points in the comments as well.
*Our former mayor has been promoted to Landrat, i.e. head of the entire county.
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