Eastside walk

Today I went on a tour of Amsterdam's eastern islands with a group of people. It was good, though a bit long. We were walking around for over 2 hours. I think we touched on just about every one of the main islands that are closest to the center. I've been on a tour before though, by boat, so I kind of knew some of the stuff the guides talked about.

As we walked down a particularly yuppie street (well, ok, most of every island is upscale and yuppie, but this seemed to be more so), I started paying attention to the names listed next to the doorbells. If there were two people listed, they never had the same last name. Assuming the two people are a couple and not just housemates, that is a lot of unmarried couples or married women keeping their last name. Not that I'm against it, the same applies to the nameplate O and I have, I was just surprised that I never saw even one where it was like "John and Judy Smith". The closest was one where the woman had a hypenated name. Quite signifying of how people tend not to marry here or women stick with their own name.

Other things of note: long ago I put a little logo in the sidebar that says ITMFA, which stands for "impeach the motherfucker already." It comes from Dan Savage, who has a well-known advice column and often uses the abbreviation DTMFA in his advice, which stands for "dump the motherfucker already." Someone then thought to change it to ITMFA and now there's a website and people making shirts and buttons to stand behind the cause of getting rid of Bush. So I thought I'd add the logo and you can click on it to get to the website.

Also, I am no longer reading the book The Plot Against America, even though I've not finished it, but not because I didn't like it. It's because O surprised me yesterday and gave me two books as a surprise and one was Brunelleschi's Dome, which is about the design and building of the dome of the Florence cathedral. I am reading it now since we'll be in Florence in just over 2 weeks, so when we climb the dome, I'll know all about its construction.