Talking to a young guy at Heathrow he was alarmed that I lived in New York (he didn’t realize I didn’t live in the city). He said he could never go there because it was too dangerous with all the people being shot on the street.
News to me.
I’ll tell you what the problem with going to metric is (actually, there’s more than one, but I’m mentioning that most readily comes to mind for me): nobody over here knows WTF the units mean. Sure, it’s convenient to talk about grams and kilograms and meters and centimeters but if I were talking on the phone to somebody that I didn’t know from another country and asked them how much they weighed and how tall they were and they came back with: “120 kilos and 1.76 meters” I’d have to get my calculator out to give me an idea of how those translate into lbs. and feet (and inches). It’s mostly a matter of convenience and familiarity (and, my understanding is, cost. I remember in the mid-'70s there was all this talk about how the U.S. was going to “make the change to metric!” then it all just fizzled out mostly, I think, because this country ended up not wanting to spend the $$$ it would take to change all the signs, and whatnot, to reflect metric system information).
Beaver pelts, of course.
Last time I was in Calgary, the girls on stage would strategically place a loonie on a particular spot on their genitalia, and then encourage patrons to toss loonies at them to knock that particular loonie off. That was about 5 years ago. This was explained to me as the general practice in CAD strip clubs. Now that’s my only experience north of the border.
Yeah, now THIS is a thing I find weird about “Merkan” culture and I’ve lived in the U.S. almost my entire life! My (adoptive) father is originally from Chile and he used to tell me all the time how weird he thought it was that in this country ALL sporting events, from the least consequential high school game to the Super Bowl, have the national anthem played before them (S.I. did an article about just that [“Oh Say Should We Sing?”] several years ago - I think after an N.B.A. player turned his back to the flag during the playing of the national anthem before a game he was going to be involved in). He told me that in Chile national anthems are played only before games involving teams from different countries (such as with international soccer). Personally, I think it’s a waste of time. The more you do that sort of thing the less people tend to pay any real attention to it.
Everywhere except uniforms of professional sports teams, that is.
Traditionally, we tuck the bills into the waistband of their g-string…
Yes. But people with any sense of objectivity can admit when someone else’s way of doing something is better than theirs (I’ve got one: I read a while back that in Finland or Iceland police have access to people’s salaries so that when a person gets caught, say, speeding, the CEO making 500000€ a year will get dinged MUCH more [in a raw numbers sense] than the poor sap who’s making 30000€ a year will. I LIKE that system!!).
We hosted a couple of Asian students (one from Thailand, one from Japan) a few years ago and they seemed to have this same attitude. It almost seemed that they thought it unnatural for men and women to want to be together any time before the age of - oh, I dunno - 25. Based on how many Asians there are in the world I never would’ve guessed they’d have an attitude like that.
You say that… wait 'til you wake up bleary-eyed in the morning and head over to your coffee maker (which you use, of course, in the spirit of embracing a truly American morning experience) and the carafe has markings on it representing “cups”. You are informed that you should put 1/4 cup of ground coffee in the basket up top for each 2 “cups” of water. But these cups are not cups. They’re coffee cups. If your carafe doesn’t easily fit under the water faucet it may occur to you to use the measuring cup, the glass beaker that you’d use when following a recipe. But those cups are cups. The cups on the coffee carafe aren’t the same kinds of cups at all. There are cups and then there are cups and not all cups are one cup, even when their capacity is described and delineated in cups.
Of course, even if we did use the generic term, we would say “acetaminophen” rather than paracetamol.
I don’t think this is a common perception. The more common dividing line is 18 or high school. It’s weird to be dating someone who is still in high school.
Yeah, that’s the worst idea ever.
Having been to England, France, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, and India, I don’t have the perception that they have fewer advertisements.
Yeah, “Merkans” seem to think there’s something “sacred” about professional sports uniforms that they are horrified at the idea of of plastering them with ads (that may be changing, however. WNBA and MLS teams wear advertisements on their uniforms and nowadays the stadiums generally are named after some corporation. Or they at least have some corporate name in there, somewhere: “Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium” comes to mind).
Isn’t the automotive industry already using metric?
I just checked, and yes it is.
Nascar drivers are amateurs?
No you don’t. You pull on the tassels until their silicone weights shift their center of gravity and they topple over.
They’re professional, but it’s not a sport!
This is basically a function of our almost complete lack of mass transit (outside a few cities.) For example, I live in Orlando, which has a metropolitan population (roughly equivalent to a “built up area” in the UK) of well over 2 million. That’s the same size as Birmingham and its environs. However, Birmingham has an extensive urban and suburban bus and rail system, while we have… about 30 bus routes that run on the hour more or less during daylight hours. We also just (as in last year) got our first passenger train service, which has one route.
Yes, we have already established that I won an argument with my Father in law after the died. But thanks for fighting ignorance.
I thought about doing so but I didn’t mention them because A) I’m not into auto racing, and B) I thought it was pretty much common knowledge - even amongst non-racing fans such as myself - that auto racers’ suits and cars are absolutely PLASTERED with advertisements.