A Twinkie is a mass-produced junk-food snack. It consists of a tube of yellow cake filled with white frosting and preservatives. I think Twinkies were the first junk food, and there was a famous murder case where the defense argued that the murder’s mental capabilities were impared by his consumption of junk food; this was nicknamed “the Twinkie defense” and was (and is) the subject of much mockery. Recently, twinkie has also become slang for a young, slender, effeminate gay man. I’ve seen it used mostly by gay men in their 30s or 40s who are pursuing said twinkies.
Other ceremonies and special occasions:
- Sweet 16: 16th birthday, mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class white girls.
- Quincenaria: 15th birthday, Mexican-American girls. It’s HUGE in Southwestern states; poor Mexican-American families will plan for years and practically bankrupt themselves for Quincenaria parties.
- Bar and Bat Mitzvah: Jewish boys and girls, usually 12-14 years old. Parents often spend tens of thousands of dollars on Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties. (The US has a very large Jewish community compared to other developed English-speaking countries.)
- Confirmation: Catholic boys and girls, usually 11-13 years old. Big parties are much more prevalent in Rust Belt areas with a large Catholic population, especially for Italian-American families.
- Bachelor party: men about to marry.
- Wedding anniversary: usually the 25th and 50th anniversary.
Having painted with tyhis stuff a LOT, I’m pretty sure that it does contain latex. Every time I used it, I felt as if I was seakling the room in rubber. Maybe yours is different.
And there’s no way an American paint would be called “Emulsion” paint. It almost sounds disgusting.
Like “Emulsion Paint”, “Decorating Filler” is way too much a mouthful for the American market. “Spackle” sounds fun and inviting. (Dave Barry sais that he used tons of this in doing his home repairs, and imagined that somebody might take one of his old houses and turn it into a tourist attration: “Spackle Kingdom, Five Miles Ahead”)
I like “cladding” (which is what we call the outer layer on a fiberoptic cable, aside from the protective covering), but it sounds too genteel.
Sometime used here, but nobody would use “tiles” to refer to something not made of ceramic or linoleum.
Definitely used here as an alternate term.
By the way, as William Poundstone points out in his book Big Secrets, although Twinkies are thought to have the “shelf life of gravel”, they actually have a relatively short shelf life, and are quickly discarded if they don’t sell. But usually the amount ordered matches the demand pretty closely. According to him, Twinkies were started when the creator saw that shortbread sold well in the fruit season, and not well outsode of it. His idea was to incorporate something like tthe whipped cream used on shortbread to make it more attractive. The “creme” used ain’t “cream”, but fulfills the function. They alsop sweetened and softened the basic shortbread. I’ve eaten twinkies, and they’re OK, but it’s been many months since I last had one.
American sports teams are, unfortunately, privately owned. The only exception I know of is the Green Bay Packers football team, which is owned by the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin and can’t be moved. Other teams can be moved wherever the owner decides to take them, although it’s rare to move a team. When I lived in Baltimore, there was still a lot of bad feelings over the moving of the Baltimore Colts football team to Indianapolis; they had literally snuck out at midnight under cover of darkness, some ten years earlier. Also, when the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, Bud Selig, wanted to build a new, larger stadium for his underperforming, poorly selling team, he blackmailed the city of Milwaukee into paying for it by threatening to move the team. That’s just one reason why Selig is an asshat.
It sure does seem that when you see a news item about some wacky crime, juvenile delinquency, attempted legislation, etc., chances are good it comes from FLA - with an especially high incidence in Pinellas County (Tampa-ish).
I’m not exactly sure why, but my WAG would offer their pretty poor public school system, and the observation that the climate is as attractive to uneducated poor people as it is to retirees. Toss in a ton of immigrants who find cheap employment in agriculture and tourism, stir with a couple of natural disasters every couple of years, and season with a fragile eco-system and insufficient fresh water, and you have a recipe guaranteed to produce more than its fair share of kooks.
Actually, I think roof shingles are very rare to absent here; ceramic tiles, slate or artificial slate are the most common coverings for pent roofs.
I lived there for a few years, and I can safely say … well, kind of.
Florida is where rednecks of the deep South collide with street-smart transplants from the urban Northeast. There’s also a strong Latin influence, thanks to an influx of Cuban refugees, Puerto Ricans and immigrants from Caribbean countries and South America. Add retirees who permanently relocated from their home states, snowbirds from the Great Lakes region and Canada, millions of tourists, and a seedy element that is attracted by the perceived glamor of the state and the opportunity it presents. That seedy element, along with some Caribbean-style dysfunctionality, give Florida its reputation.
Really? That surprises me. The yellow color of school buses is a safety feature–school buses carry children, who aren’t always careful in traffic, so there are traffic laws sayinig that you have to stop, in either direction, when a school bus stops. The yellow color helps you recognize that it’s a school bus so that you know to do that.
Usually, a paid bus driver. You need some kind of a special license to drive a bus, so it’s not as if you can round up a parent on the spur of the moment.
We’re getting better about this, but we still elect way more people than we should. I’ve never actually voted for a dog catcher, that’s the canonical “silly elected office”, but it’s quite rare. But I’ve voted for coroner, auditor, clerk, sheriff, school superintendent–and yes, these people campaign. Usually the campaigning takes the form of, “My opponent is corrupt”.
MOD: please feel free to merge this into the previous post.
Also, when you ask some Floridians why their state seems so … well, Farkworthy, a standard response is “shit flows downhill.” It’s much the same reason why there are far more runaway teenagers in Western cities than on the East Coast; it’s the end of the line for oddballs and the less scrupulous.
I’m quite glad that some of the people answering these questions are qualifying them with regional, socio-economic, and ethnic factors. America is such a vast country that, despite increasing homogeniety in brands, chain stores, etc., things are different depending on where you are. For example, right where I grew up, we had very strict gun laws, no death penalty, no football or cheerleaders (no fields or grass either!), no malls, and almost none of my friends owned a car (no point to it, because where we hung out downtown, who could afford to park?)
However, about ten miles away from me in Westchester, NJ, or Lawn Guyland, there were kids living the full suburban lifestyle with many of those things, although the full Texas-style football lifestyle was almost unheard of (very academically-oriented around here).
And the sports-teams-moving has been a constant, too–they also changed names a lot in the early days (Yankees started out as the Highlanders). If you want to hear some inventive cursing in Brooklyn, invoke the name of Walter O’Malley to people of a certain age. However, city governments often get involved in luring or trying to keep a sports franchise with tax breaks and/or brand-new stadiums, which always irks a substantial base of taxpayers while exciting others. In fact, I’ll be taking the elevated train later and be able to look right down at the foundations being dug for the brand-new Yankee Stadium, right next to the existing one in which both my grandfathers watched the Babe play.
It seems odd because, frankly, it IS odd. Owners pick up and move (mostly in football) because of one thing and one thing only: money. I don’t know how it is there, but over here, for a while, there was a popular municipal feeling that having an NFL team would be a great economic boon. To entice a team to move to an area, the area would have bills and laws and such passed that essentially paid for the arena with public funds (and not the owner’s funds). An owner would then take that offer and go back to the city he currently resides in and tell them that if they don’t get a big, fancy, new stadium with extra luxury boxes (and more money for the owners), they’d bolt and take the other offer. If you’re feeling frisky, look at the Cleveland Browns picking up in the middle of the night and moving to Baltimore and becoming the Ravens. That’s STILL a bitter pill.
A way to stop this is to make public funds unusable for stadium building. If you want a new stadium, build it your own damned self, Mr./Mrs. Owner. That won’t happen, though.
Well it doesn’t happen over here at all jeez can you imagine the fury of fans if their football team was uprooted from Manchester and shifted over 200 miles away to London. There’d be riots I assure you.
So when an American team is re-located surely the owner cannot insist that the players also move, that to me would be ridiculous
Add to the above: it doesn’t matter if your team is in the top flight or in Division 2, they are the team you support, just them, no others
There is MUCH furor, although we wouldn’t get to riots. We save our riots for worthwhile causes, like upsets in college basketball.
Players get paid enough so when the team moves, the players most likely move as well. Either they do that or maintain at least two residences.
I think the former fans of this club would disagree with you. It was a one-off, though.
In the case of United they’d be closer to their fans, at least.
Of course the players move when the team is moved. They also move if they’re traded from one team to another. Don’t players sometimes switch teams over there?
I think it’s a holdover from the 2000 presidential election, what with hanging chads and recounts and whathaveyou. I’ve lived here most of my life and I like it fine. No state income tax, I can wear shorts in November, and you’re never more than an hour’s drive from the beach.
Yes players are sold when the transfer window opens.
My point was the moving of a whole bunch of players from one location to another.
Usram As a Man City fan I totally agree 
Most baseball players keep their primary residence in Florida or Texas, where there’s no income tax (they’re paying enough taxes as it is, since they pay income tax in every state they play in) and it’s warm enough to work out during the winter. Some live in Arizona, where there is income tax but it’s still warm enough to work out as well.
Players do typically keep apartments in their home city for homestands, but they generally don’t live in the area year-round.
Teams moving has been more common in football and basketball than in baseball. The Montreal Expos were the first team in almost a quarter-century to move when they headed to Washington to become the Nationals, and that move was because no one in Montreal payed any attention to the Expos.