Absurd beeping out or blanking out of “bad” words on TV.
I know it’s pushing the envelope but I wish my local PBS station had the courage to broadcast the British comedy, “Only Fools and Horses” without blanking out the second syllable of the word “tightass”. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. I thought my TV had an audio problem.
This might be a myth, but is it true that when the BBC version of the Antiques Roadshow is shown on US TV, they pixelate the “naughty bits” on nude paintings?
Oh HELL yes! I’ve been here seven months or so, and I still forget that I can’t stroll up to Asda on a Sunday night and pick myself up a frozen pizza. I like the fact that if I’m working a Sunday I get eight hours pay for six hours work, but oh man, the not-quite 24hrs thing completely stumped me when I moved over.
Be thankful that you didn’t come to Britain before 1994, when most shops didn’t open at all on Sundays apart from small corner shops, petrol stations and garden centres. The fact that you can now go shopping on Sunday stills feels a bit novel to me.
Likewise for 24-hour opening. I can’t exactly remember when it became widespread, but it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe ten years? So Tesco putting up a 24-hour sign is understood to mean “Get This! Most Days We Don’t Close At All!”, rather than “We’re Literally Always Open”.
Um, I should say England & Wales, not Britain. As I have been reminded before, Scotland has more liberal rules about opening hours, and I believe that it is legal for shops to be open 24/7 there.
Sunday trading is more liberal in most parts of Scotland, but even then the big “24-hour” supermarkets tend to shut at midnight Saturday and only open 9am - 6 pm on Sunday (there or thereabouts, no doubt there are exceptions).
Heh, this is totally correct. The locals understand that “Open 24-hours!” has a caveat attached.
Caveat emptor, you might say.
Ah yes, television. Thai TV is so bad I rarely watch it, but they’re crazy about pixellating out stuff. Cigarettes get pixellated. Alcoholic beverages get pixellated. Guns get pixellated. Even in an anti-smoking commercial like that one that plays Cat Stevens’ “Cats in the Cradle” while the kid who lost his father to smoking is poignantly rewatching home movies of Dad, who is smoking in each frame of them. The cigarette is pixellated out. What’s the point of THAT?
Bleeping out bad words. Heh. “Fuck” was a popular word to throw out in Thai soap operas for quite a while. They suddenly kept saying in English: Fuck you!" Must have had no idea what it meant, just thought it was something like “drop dead.” I think someone finally clued them in on what it meant, because it seems to have stopped, although I don’t watch that often. This is not something that drives me crazy, though, this inclusion of “fuck”; just highly amusing.
Der Spiegel once did a feature on the world’s cities, pretty much saying how terrible life was in pretty much all non-European cities except a few like New York and San Francisco. The section on Los Angeles started with an inner city kindergartener volunteering that she knew what brains looked like, because, as it turned out, she had seen people shot in the head. The section title, translated, was “A Pistol In Your Stocking”. Next it moved on to our choking, poisonous air, which was illustrated by a man walking out of a house with a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. On closer inspection, the man was obviously a construction worker who’d been working at some dust-producing task inside the house, but that wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the section. Nor was any damn positive aspect of life here at all. I think the photographer must honestly have believed that we all have to go around with masks on our faces.
I didn’t experience what DMark did, at least not to the same extent, but that was long before the recent wars.
Of course I don’t. It just seems that I was bombarded with it when I moved here. We lived in a rural town near to where the Grand Dragon of the KKK lived, and it seemed that nobody gave a rat’s patoot about anyone else’s feelings. The job I had was in a poorer area of town, and people would talk to me as though I was ‘one of them’: telling me how all the blacks are lazy and how they (the speaker) wouldn’t have had any problem getting food stamps if they were black, that sort of thing. One of my kid’s friends has a father who uses the n-word casually - or at least did until I told him I didn’t want to hear that word in my house or around my kids.
It is considerably better where we live now.
Most Bulgarians probably aren’t parochial morons either, but you’d never know that from reading your posts. The fact is that we can report on our experiences without implying that those experiences are universal, or that they are representative of anything except the people we come into contact with.
As Ginger says, most Americans are not raised that way, but this doesn’t make it any more pleasant for a foreigner who does encounter racist attitudes when moving to America. The OP asked about the experiences of ex-pats, so it makes sense that she would talk about her experiences.
Heh, that remind me of a CNN article a little while back. The article was some generic business story about trade with Asia and economic outlooks, but the photo had been taken during some kind of holiday (probably New Year’s) ceremony being held at the stock exchange: several women in formal kimonos and white geisha make-up, and a number of men in traditional period costumes. The caption: “traders on the floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.” :smack:
Anyway, I think what drives me nuts most about Japan is (a) the way the government bends over backwards to appease the ultra-nationalists, all the way down to the police very pointedly ignoring noise pollution and nuisance statutes when these yakuza-backed wannabes drive around with 1000-watt speakers blaring propaganda.
And (b), the way the press bends over backwards to appease the government. Media outlets have all become so dependent on having official press releases spoon-fed to them that they no longer do any investigative reporting of government officials for fear of losing their press passes. This may sound conspiracy-theory-level paranoid, but it seems that whenever some parliamentarian does get hit by the press, it’s inevitably someone who has recently fallen from favor with the LDP bigwigs, who apparently inform the media that the new scapegoat is fair game.
There have been many stories about Thailand in the international press that were completely divorced from reality, be it about sex, drugs, traditions, you name it.