m/way 
motorway - like highway or interstate
Wrong!!! at least the i/states and highways are usually free, I said USUALLY, of bloody cones and not only that they are not full of shredded rubber and other vehicle parts.
Our m/ways are pathetically maintained.
As an example it takes me over 90 minutes to drive 25 miles to visit my son because of roadworks which have been going on since Adam was a lad.
Another example, I drove from Chicago to Michigan and never saw a SINGLE cone or roadworks on the whole journey.
So there
I considered adding a bit about recognising motorways by the lines of traffic cones, but I didn’t think it was relevant, and anyway was probably covered by the “digging up the sodding m/way” comment earlier.
I thought Mehitabel just wanted to know what was meant by “m/way”, so I told her. I don’t think she was looking for a commentary on the relative quality of maintenence.
Had I said “beautifully maintained highway along which you can travel freely at 70mph without impediment” the six exclamation points might have been called for…
Where are these jackboots of which you speak? I must have them!
Ah, good old Bel Littlejohn…sister (?!) of Richard.
Spoiler coming…Bel Littlejohn is to the chattering classes of the UK as Ed Anger is to the conservative US: a fictional uber-partisan.
And no one called me on this…
Except for my friend in Inverness, who called me up to chew me out…before he found out it was a joke. 
BTW, what exactly DOES ‘bludy American’ mean, anyway??
This thread was a riot.
Reguards,
XT
Damn it, you mean those Brit sunza’bitches now have a foreign word for the all American freeway!!
I think they should call them interstates there same as here, and stop driving on the wrong side of the road. Furriners.
I see a “note” from DBC Pierre on there. I seem to recall his having written a novel making fun of Texans, a novel that is really popular in the UK. Some of the US-hatred really must be culturally popular in the UK for such a book to flourish.
Listen my Texan friend, it’s you guys that drive on the wrong side of the road not us, and how can we call them interstates when we aint got any bloody states.
S’pose we could call 'em intercounties but thassa bit of a gobfull innit?
Damn Yanks.
Oh and check out this letter, an excerpt from the link above. Sounds like SDMB poster Diogynes as a youth…oil conspiracy, America “killing” its own poor, America responsible for MidEast poverty, blah, blah…
When did “making fun of Texans” equate to “US-hatred”? I haven’t read it - it looks a little over-hyped - but it’s supposed to be a decent book.
In all honesty I am not much surprised to have seen The Guardian assemble a largely anti-American march of letters. The European press is far more forthright about their biases than is the American press (which still claims to present nonbiased news, whether or not it tries - NY Times - or doesn’t - Fox News), and The Guardian is on the howling liberal end of the political spectrum. I spent last year at Oxford and used to pick up one of three newspapers every day as a means of keeping an eye on world events:
The Daily Telegraph: If you want a conservative opinion.
The Independent: Hurrah for moderates!
The Guardian: Liberals ahoy!
From the way these three covered the Iraqi conflict, you’d have thought there were three different wars going on. The Telegraph was the one running the pictures of jubilant Iraqis toppling statues and the stories linking Andy Galloway (a virulently anti-war MP) to the Hussein regime, and the Guardian chose to focus almost exclusively on the hardships experienced by the Iraqi people during the war. Neither was precisely wrong, but neither, most unfortunately, was capable of presenting news without an agenda.
Kind of sad.
All too true… Texas-bashing is commonly practiced in all 49 states, as evidenced by this bit of doggerel often found scrawled in toilet stalls:
Here I sit,
bowels flexin’
giving birth
to another Texan.
Madox, if you read the letters, you’ll see that they’re not all “anti-American”.
[sub]and its George Galloway[/sub].
And I call bullshit on Mickey’s letter being written by a twelve-year old. While it has all the subtlety and nuance of a letter written by a twelve-year old (“You are the reason for the poverty in the Middle East” :rolleyes: ) , something just doesn’t ring true about it.
spoilers removed because this isn’t, well, a spoiler.
You mean Ed Asner?
And even the Independant would not have been without bias. Its not gonna happen. Even doing something “without bias” actually introduces another form of bias. As long as they’re making it obvious what their bias is…
Although, recently, the Guardian had some articles that didn’t seem to be screamingly lib. Maybe the world is ending.
Mojo, yes, I’d read the letters, and you’re quite right. Hence the largely prefix - the British press is not all or even mostly anti-American, but The Guardian was not, from the looks of it last year, going to be joining Robert Murdoch’s media empire anytime soon. My apologies about the Galloway mix-up.
George Galloway was actually the subject of one of my favorite parliamentary heckles. A question from one of the MP’s concerned a legitimate end to the war as no one in his right mind from the Hussein administration was going to step up to capitulate, and someone shouted that Galloway could perhaps do it for them.
And regardless of whether or not Mickey’s letter was indeed written by a twelve-year old, I am still surprised that any major publication would have deigned to give such a piece valuable space.
Bandit, Ed Anger is the Weekly World News’s resident Right-Wing Caricature. Ed Asner was CBS’s Left-Wing Caricature.