Ahh, that’s a very different thing. And not the meaning I’d taken. Not that I’m @dtilque, but you fooled me too.
If you lived in/near Miami as I do, you’d understand that a dozen ever-higher highrises are under construction at any time and a new tallest seems to come about every few months.
Collapses are, thankfully, a bit more rare.
It might be noted that in USglish, “pancake” is also used as a verb, as in “When the Flat-Earth rocket guy’s parachute failed, he pancaked in the desert”. In this case, the flatness pertains to the relative aspect ratio of the result as compared to what it was before – absolute thinness when pancaking is not as important as the flatness of at least one surface which did not have that particular aspect of flatness before it pancaked.
The true battle will be between the Slice and the Tavern Cut.
Ah. I see you’re a fan of Special Ops.
No I didn’t understand that humor. Still don’t. What recent events do you mean?
I’m guessing the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in suburban Miami, last year.
Ah, I’d forgotten about that. Not quite recent enough for my aging memory.
When I see “flat as a pancake”, it makes me think of the Bugs Bunny cartoon with Christopher Columbus. You can see King Ferdinand waving around the pancake at the beginning of this clip:
As someone who has cycled the length and breadth of Kansas I can confirm that some of the bubbles in the batter are quite steep.
To get back to the breakfast table, restaurant pancakes in the U.S. in my experience are typically fairly thin, up to several mm thick unless they contain something like fruit. In any case “flat as a pancake” just refers to flatness and not thinness. There are temporary hillocks if you overdo pats of butter.
The first place I think of with respect to “flat as a pancake” is Kansas, but there are locations that rival or exceed it. To name another, there’s coastal Texas.
This is exactly what I was going to post!
Hey, there’s the grain elevator in that clip.
Growing up in Wisconsin, we had several nicknames for people from Illinois: the least derogatory was “Flatlanders,” due to the perceived flatness of Illinois, compared to Wisconsin. (Though, I have no doubt that Kansas makes Illinois look like Colorado, by comparison.)
That is particularly absurd. I have seen far more topography in Kansas than I have in Illinois. Moreover, if you head east out of Denver, it will take you at least an hour to get to the Kansas border, and the only way to tell you are actually in Kansas is the welcome sign. About 40% of Colorado looks exactly like Kansas except for the signs.
I have driven through Kansas a couple times, and flown over it innumerable times. I’ve done the same over west Texas.
There is no comparison. West Texas is flat like a billiard table. Kansas is flat like a lake on a windy day. One gently undulates a bit; the other is FLAT!!!11!1!!!1! to the limit of your ability to perceive.
Having grown up at the beach in So Cal, I’ve seen very bumpy mountains and I’ve seen very flat oceans just by turning around while standing in place.
West Texas is disorientingly, disturbingly, scarily flat. it makes calm oceans look hilly. Kansas is not like that. Quite.
I think we can safely say the reason the north winds are so cold in West Texas is that there is nothing between Lubbock and the North Pole but a couple of barb wire fences.
You can see my office in this picture.
@Northern_Piper just above … That’s one hell of a view you have from up there in the corner office.
That is true if you are north of Sweetwater. However, if you take I-10 west, you get into some rather non-flat terrain not too far out of San Antonio. At least, along where the freeway goes. If you really want to see suffocatingly flat, drive from Grand Forks ND to Rugby.