Category: No Politics Friday

In about one month I will be taking my first real trip to a foreign country. I've been to the basic Comfort Zone countries that Americans can visit without experiencing any severe culture shock – Canada, UK, etc. – but in late May I'm going to Brazil for a week.

Don't worry, I'm not actually doing anything fun like going to Rio to party my ass off. My itinerary would make your grandmother jealous; let's just say that a lot of modern architecture will be toured and photographed.

One obvious rule when traveling is to avoid anything with "American" in its name unless you happen to be morbidly curious about just how ridiculous an image of Americans is held by people in other countries. Not that we do not give the rest of the world ample reason to think we are ridiculous, and not that Americans don't hold ridiculous misconceptions about foreigners who travel here (Japanese people all know karate! Everyone who speaks Spanish is from Mexico! Italians must eat pasta for every meal!) Rather than take offense, I enjoy learning about what people who have never been to the U.S. and may not know many Americans think of us. It's…revealing.

This is a list on Thought Catalog of 43 anecdotes relating to Americans traveling abroad and discovering what other people think of "American" food. It is fantastic. Add your own tales in the comments here if you want. Some of these I knew (The Japanese put corn in things to make them "American") or assumed (People around the world think Americans put ketchup on everything). Other things here were new to me.

In Brazil, for example, "American" food items are drenched in mayonnaise. I never considered mayo a particularly "American" food – seems French, if anything – yet it makes sense that movies, TV, and advertising always show big jars of it in American kitchens and fridges. Finding mayo absolutely disgusting is all the motivation I need to make sure that I resist the urge to order American-style anything.

Of course stereotypes are full of holes and exceptions, but the one that comes closest to being valid is the foreign assumption that Americans put cheese on everything. We don't all do it, and we don't all put it on everything, but…let's face it, folks. We put a lot of cheese on things.
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Here in the Midwest it is difficult to find items on restaurant menus that are not covered in cheese (often of the liquid "nacho" variety). Oh, and ranch dressing. The entry that describes how in Finland, "American Sauce" is creamy ranch dressing is a bit too on the nose. A friend once worked in a popular chain restaurant – not the fast food variety – where 55 gallon Rubbermaid garbage cans were used to mix ranch dressing, such was the demand for the stuff on a daily basis. I have heard similar tales from restaurant staff coast to coast. While it is true that I live squarely in the heart of cheese-and-ranch country, I'm confident that these are traits found in all regions of the country to some degree.

Perhaps I'm the only one who sees great humor in this, but something about ordering a Tex-Mex platter in Germany and receiving Tortilla chips, mozzarella sticks, chicken nuggets, hot wings, hash browns, and potato wedges is priceless. Is it any more ridiculous than ordering "German food" in the U.S. and getting bratwurst and soft pretzels? I mean, most reasonably educated and self-aware Americans understand that our ethnic foods have been Americanized. Chinese takeout bears little resemblance to food served in China and Taco Bell is to Mexican Food what Disney World is to Detroit. While I will be visiting a large city with a lot of international visitors (Brasilia) and a major tourist destination (Iguazu) I hope I can enlighten at least one Brazilian or fellow tourist to the effect that, no, Americans do not all carry guns and eat french fries with every meal and drink Coke for breakfast and put cheese on everything.

I might have a moral dilemma about the last point, though. If we're being honest here, we kinda do. If there's anything we can't cover in cheese, bacon, and ketchup, I don't know what it is.

Oh, and apropos of the tale about Koreans putting whole hot dogs on "American pizza", my one horror story from the UK was discovering that kebab mystery meat (what goes into Gyros, essentially) can be and is a pizza topping. Come on. We're not animals. Let's maintain a little dignity.

This news story in the Peoria Journal-Star is the most Peoria thing that ever Peoriaed. From now on when anybody asks me to describe this place I am just going to send them the link.

The police – acting on a search warrant signed by a judge whose qualifications to be on the bench are immediately suspect – raided the home of a young man who made a fake Twitter account for the Mayor of Peoria. Aside from that, well, not being illegal, the news story 1) begins by explaining what Twitter is, as the median age of a Journal-Star reader is approximately 93 and 2) goes on to note that the fake Twitter account had…wait for it…fifty followers. It turns out that making a parody Twitter account for a podunk elected official about whom zero fucks are given it is not the ticket to internet fame.

A few gems:

“They said they had a search warrant and took all the electronic devices that had Internet access,” Pratt said. “They said there had been an Internet crime that occurred at this residence.

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”

Peoria Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard said officers were investigating the creator of the Twitter account for false impersonation of a public official. The offense is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to ,500 and up to a year in jail.
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What exactly is an "internet crime"?

Do the dipshits that end up working for a city this pathetic understand that the crime of "impersonation of a public official" refers to, like, things other than setting up an obviously fake Twitter account?

By about March 10, the bio of the Twitter account was changed to indicate it was a parody account.
Settingsgaard, however, said the intent of the account was not clearly satirical.
“I don’t agree it was obvious, and in fact it appears that someone went to great lengths to make it appear it was actually from the mayor,” Settingsgaard said in an email response to questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's our Sheriff. I wonder which online degree mill he graduated from.

By late March, the @Peoriamayor account was suspended by Twitter. It had about 50 tweets and just as many followers.

Does something with 50 followers even register? Is that even a blip on the radar? Something that obscure would go completely unnoticed if not for the fact that the Mayor and police are calling attention to it in this manner.
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Basic Streisand Effect, people. Oh wait, nobody here has heard about that yet because it only happened ten years ago. The internet is still new to these people and they don't quite understand it yet.

Every time I hear a helicopter I get excited and think, maybe the Gin and Tacos readers have come to rescue me. Then I realize it's just another medevac flight to the regional burn center because a meth lab blows up in someone's face approximately every twelve hours here.

When I need to make a joke about white trash – and believe me, the last 12 years spent in Indiana, Georgia, and central Illinois have made this necessary on more than one occasion – my go-to cultural reference point is the Chevrolet El Camino. If I'm feeling punchy I can sub in the Ford equivalent (the Ranchero) or, to test the depth of automotive knowledge of the intended audience, the El Camino's identical clone the GMC Caballero. I'm sure these were fine vehicles in their day and in some parts of the world the "ute" body style is quite popular (I'm looking at you, Australia).

There is just something about the unholy wedding of a pointlessly large 1970s American sedan with the bed of a pickup truck, however, that screams "Both humans and animals have been conceived in the bed of this vehicle." If you see any of these vehicles on the road today, you can rest assured that the family of six shoehorned into its single bench seat is on the way to pick up some scratch-off tickets.

Is that mean? Yes. That is very mean. But for whatever reason, the Coupe Truck idea did not attract a very high class clientele in the American market.

Despite the jokes that they invite, there is something lovably silly about these vehicles. They look so ridiculous and mis-proportioned that it becomes endearing. Not so, however, with Japan's response to the late 70s/early 80s car-truck conglomeration craze: the Subaru BRAT. That's supposed to stand for "Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter", which lets you know right off the bat that nothing good is going to come of this. Basically Subaru designers hacksawed the rear end off a Leone sedan and made…this:

The best part, however, is that Subaru engineers and bean-counters collaborated to circumvent a 25% U.S. import tariff on trucks (the known in the auto industry as the "Chicken Tax"). They did this by classifying the BRAT as a passenger car, which they achieved by…bolting two seats into the exposed bed of the truck. Look at these and try to envision any scenario in which the "backseat" passengers would survive an accident.

Or normal driving over 30 miles per hour.

Note the plastic sled-type handles affixed to the seats. So your odds of remaining in the vehicle at speed were a function of grip strength.

Awesome.

Fortunately Subaru forewent plans to weld the seats to the bed in favor of bolting them in place, so with ordinary tools a buyer could (and almost all immediately did) remove the seats. But in promotional photos, Subaru was legally obligated to play along with the conceit that this was a four-passenger car; hilarity ensued.

Yeah, good luck with that guys.
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Like all horrible things from the 70s and 80s the BRAT is celebrated for its awkwardness by today's irony hungry hipsters. Jonny Lieberman at Motor Trend is polarizing – some people find his videos unwatchably annoying, while others appreciate his silly enthusiasm – but I would recommend giving his five-minute jaunt in the BRAT a viewing if you're bored. It's fun, it takes the car at face value, and if nothing else we learn that because the gearshift attaches to the transaxle through a crude hole cut directly into the floor of the cabin, illegal drugs can be slipped out of the vehicle during a traffic stop.

Subaru produced a more modern but equally ridiculous version called the Baja from 2002-2006 before finally admitting that the American market simply isn't, uh, ready for this type of car. However, given our fondness for all things retro it wouldn't be surprising to see some manufacturer resurrect this idea again in the future.
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Sometimes I start a post and fail to finish it before it ceases to be relevant, so it ends up in the trash. Other times I will write something and realize before completing it that it's not very good. And occasionally I look at an orphaned post fragment and feel fortunate that it was never completed, because everything about it that seemed intelligent at the time now seems quite foolish.

Last weekend I wrote half a post about the media coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, the main point being that what the media were attempting to sell as some great "mystery" was really just a mundane and predictable, if tragic, set of events. But after another week of following that story, I give up.
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I yield. This is ridiculous and fascinating. Each new detail that becomes public makes the story more bizarre instead of less.

If we can accept that a relatively new aircraft of a type with a nearly flawless safety record does not simply disintegrate in midair without provocation, then the range of plausible explanations is broad. Aside from the tantalizing details about stolen passports (which are as likely to be used for crimes like drug smuggling or illegal immigration as for terrorism) there is the revelation, apparently plausible, that pilots on this crew allowed passengers into the cockpit. Now there are claims that the plane flew for hours after communications were lost – I was under the impression that it was extremely difficult, although not impossible, for modern planes to have their transponders switched off and its means of external communication silenced.

Most baffling of all, though, is the idea that the plane could have flown around off-course for hours in radio silence without a single passenger using a mobile device to make a call, text, or post regarding the flights. In a much shorter amount of time, passengers on the 9/11 planes made dozens of attempted calls from the air. Even if we buy that the pilots somehow made the plane radio silent, how could the passengers be prevented from communicating?

Every time I think I have this one figured out the story gets more bizarre.

My latest guess is that one or both pilots concocted an excuse for the passengers, switched off the transponder, and flew around over the ocean until fuel was exhausted in some kind of laborious act of suicide. In a few hours something else will probably seem like a better explanation. Half-cocked theories welcome in the comments.

On Wednesday evening I had about 90 minutes of sleep. This is rare for me; while I was a terrible insomniac as a kid and teenager, in recent years I've slept like a normal person. One bad night never killed anyone, but suffice it to say that after three consecutive 75 minute lecture classes on Thursday I was…done. This is relevant as a preemptive apology for giving you the quarterly Link Salad post for NPF. Despite having collected a lot of neat things lately I lack the energy to write about any one of them in great detail. So please enjoy, and by all means don't spend Friday working.

1. It was only a matter of time until one of BuzzFeed's billions of pieces of link bait turned out to be interesting.
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And this little write up on "American Parties" in foreign countries did it for me. I find this concept fabulous; apparently the two mandatory features at an American Party are red plastic Solo Cups and…popcorn? Presumably, shitty American music is involved as well. We are rightfully wary of internet journalism about "trends" – what the average NPR correspondent calls a fad sweeping the nation is actually anecdotal evidence from one of their friends – so I'm curious whether this is really a thing, I want to believe it is. And of all the things I'd imagine people around the world would see as symbolic of Americans, red plastic Solo Cups ranked low on the list.

2. An interesting read (from the ancient past: 1994) about an eccentric rich guy who concocted a plan many years ago to replace taxes with thousand-year trusts. And the story ends with the Unitarian Universalists going to court to try to steal his fortune after he died. Typical.

3. Apparently the heir to the throne of the Ottoman Empire lives in New York and is essentially a regular guy. That's an unbeatable cocktail party story, though.

4. Boeing developed an Android phone for intelligence agencies that self-destructs (more accurately, it erases all of its own data) if the phone case is opened. That technology has obvious utility in the world of security clearances and Top Secret information – and I'm guessing it won't be five years before they're including this on every phone so service providers can hold your data hostage.

5. Here's a terrific collection of images of placeholder text that someone forgot to replace in either signage or newspapers / magazines / advertisements / etc. The headline "3 DECK HEADLINE PLEASE" is a little on the nose even for a British newspaper. This reminds me of those old galleries of BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) in public places. Those are a helpful reminder that as long as we build SkyNet with Windows XP humanity is guaranteed to survive.

And now…

You know I enjoy helping you do anything other than work on Friday afternoons. If you follow Gin and Tacos on Facebook you may recall that I used to post trivia questions regularly. However, now that I host a weekly trivia game in town I have to write about 20 questions per week and I don't have much left in reserve after that. But with all these damn questions (I think it's around 400 by now) it might be fun to share some of them here.
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Last Wednesday's game was apparently difficult – or perhaps the players were drunker than usual – so why not start there. Honestly the games I write are much less difficult than the ones I played in Georgia, and I always feel like I want to ask harder questions. It's supposed to be fun, though, so I let up around 6 or 7 on a scale of 1-10. Oh, and I guess we have to skip the music rounds because I don't have any idea how to embed songs without the artist and song title being immediately apparent.

Of course you can cheat your ass off with Google if you want, but what the hell would be the point of that. You lose the strategic aspect of the game (it's a point system / bid game) but have at the questions anyway. Answers in the comments sometime on Friday.
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1. Sports: Plus/- 18", what is Mike Powell's World Record in the long jump, held since '91?
2. Dr. Who: What does TARDIS stand for?
3. Anatomy: In what part of the body is the vitreous humor found?
4. Language: Which country has the largest number of official national languages?
5. Presidential Trivia: Only two men who have been president died before reaching 50. Name them.
6. Sports: What nation has won the most Winter Olympics medals all-time?
7. Name the Actor/ress: Hugo, Rules of Engagement, Schindler's List (Who appears in all three films)
8. Literature: Who is the primary antagonist in Treasure Island?
9. Geography: 40% of all Australians live in what two cities?
10. Food: According to UNICEF, rice, corn, and wheat are the three most consumed foods on Earth. What is fourth?
11. Sports: Three men have won the FIFA player of the year award / Ballon d'Or three times. Name two.
12. History: From what country did the United States purchase the Virgin Islands in 1917?
13. Science: After the chimpanzee, what animal is humans' closest living relative?
14. Acronyms: What does TIME (as in the magazine) stand for?
15. Cities: What is the northernmost city in the world with over 1 million inhabitants?
16. Sports: What two men first summitted Mount Everest?
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(No Mallory conspiracy theories please)
17. Language: In any order, what are the five least commonly used letters in the Oxford English Dictionary?
18. Units of Measure: Which is longer, a mile or a nautical mile?
19. TV: What was the name of the company George Jetson works for?
20: Final Trivia – Music: In 1996, Rolling Stone named this album the 3rd worst album of the year. Five years later in 2001, they named it the 16th greatest album of all time.
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What is it? (Hint: It was the band's 2nd album)

Have fun. Because I have fun coming up with these.

I have a thing for rodents. I've owned seven pet rats over the years (although none at the moment) and around 2010 I had the good fortune to discover a blogging capybara named Caplin Rous. Caplin's owners/pets, a couple named Melanie and Rick, live on what appears to be a farm outside of a place called Buda, TX with a wide variety of animals.

Exotic or rare pets are difficult to keep for a number of reasons, but their setup was perfect. They have the two things a capy needs – a pool and a lot of land – and the devotion to their animals to make sure that all of their needs are met. Unfortunately it turns out that some plants that are harmless to "normal" American animals are toxic to a South American native rodent and Caplin died too early. That's one of the downsides to exotic pets – many lessons have to be learned the hard way.

Melanie was heartbroken, as any pet owner understands, but shortly after Caplin's death she was contacted by an exotic animal breeder with some distressing news. A capy had been adopted by an owner who was neglecting him – would Melanie take him in?

And that's how Garibaldi (Gari) became her new pet. To make a long story short, I have a hard time communicating how much pleasure I've gotten since that moment from following Gari's antics on the blog. Melanie is a very funny writer, which just adds to the entertainment value of the hundreds of pictures, tales, and videos of Gari that I could rely on to cheer me up.

The problem was that in the first year of his life, Gari was mistreated. His first owner did not actively abuse him, but she was almost criminally ignorant of how to care for him. He was kept in a small apartment, rarely let outside, and fed dry dog food. Capys need a ton of sunlight and vegetable matter to remain healthy. The bottom line is that when Melanie met Gari, he had scurvy (with that nice vitamin C-free diet), vitamin D deficiency, and weak, brittle bones from lack of calcium. He was also extremely underweight. After a few months with his new family, though, he had been nursed back to health.

Well, he was nursed back to…as healthy as he could be. There's no way to "fix" brittle bones, and one by one Gari's teeth started rotting out of his mouth. The teeth weren't very strong, so they would slowly develop infections which spread down to his jaw. He was constantly back to the veterinary hospital to be put through oral surgery and rounds of antibiotics that can be fatal to rodents. After all that, he eventually succumbed to the inevitable and his infections spread to his kidneys, which failed.

Essentially this guy – who brought a lot of joy to a lot of people beyond his family – was killed by the ignorance of his first owner. And that's where I'm going with all of this.
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I can't stand seeing people adopt pets, particularly of the "exotic" variety, without having a clue how to care for them. They see something on Buzzfeed and decide they want a cat or dog or reticulated python or bobcat or capybara so they rush out and buy one. Then they have revelations like, "It turns out that pythons are 15 feet long as adults" or "Gee, this 150 pound rodent eats about $20 of food per day" and they end up releasing the animal or slowly killing it through negligence. It's sad and it's cruel.

Don't do that. An hour of internet research by someone who wanted a capybara could have added five years to his life, and he would have brought a lot of people (myself included) a lot of happiness over that time.
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OK, for obvious reasons I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey. I understand that it's horrible and that it is aimed at the lowest common denominator and that it is basically just bad internet slash-porn of the type and quality one would find on a BBS in the last 1990s.

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But seeing actual excerpts from the book, even in Can You Believe This Shit format, is a mind-blowing experience. Like, I knew it wasn't a good book but honestly it's hard to believe this is real.
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How many hours did the author spend combing thesauruses for synonyms for "said"? Just say "He said" like a normal person.

No one "muses."

How did people even masturbate to this?

Sometimes I withhold criticism from things that I know a lot of people enjoy because I get tired of hearing about what a mean old crank I am.

So it's very convenient for me when someone more well-know, in this case John Cole at Balloon Juice, takes care of the "Old man yelling at cloud" part for me. Here is John's take on cruises. As in cruise ships. And I must admit that I concur in full with his sentiments. I do not get it. I do not get it at all.

Obviously it's not fair to broad-brush cruise ships as pestilent shit-barges teeming with disease – while cruise ship outbreaks garner huge amounts of media attention, they represent only a small percentage of the hundreds (thousands?) of cruise ships floating around every day. That said, the specter of catching some heavyweight Lower GI bunker-buster is just one of the many unappealing aspects of getting on a cruise ship. As John says, you're essentially imprisoned on a boat and temporarily disgorged on various islands (usually impoverished communities) to be robbed both legally, by the various franchise retailers hawking jewelry and other "luxury" purchases, and extralegally by the locals whose desire to rob dipshit American tourists is, if not noble, certainly understandable.

The appeal of cruises appears to be, in my estimation as a non-cruiser, limited to two demographics. One is people with children who want to go on a vacation during which they can ignore their children but remain reasonably confident that they are being supervised and entertained with organized activities elsewhere in an enclosed space. Drop Billy off at the water slide or the bungee pit or the climbing wall or the medieval yarn-dyeing workshop and then head down to the lido deck for two or six daiquiris. The second demographic seems to be people who want to go on vacation but either don't know how or they will go to almost any length and expense to avoid having to make decisions for themselves.
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I know a lot of people who have gone on cruises – I'm a Midwesterner, for chrissakes – and from their reports I've gathered that the primary activities on a cruise ship are, in order: eating, getting shitfaced, eating, and eating more.
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I always ask the same question – is the food any good? I imagine that it's rather like a casino buffet, in that it is not particularly good but boy howdy there sure is a lot of it and it's always available. With few exceptions, this has been confirmed. The food is described as "decent" or "just OK" or "not bad" right before the individual explains how they gained 10 pounds in 5 days on the Carnival Lard Barge. That doesn't sound terribly appealing, especially given the price one pays to climb aboard.

To recap, we have a confined space full of the worst America has to offer (the elderly, screaming children, and Southern/Midwestern cow people), loads of mediocre buffet food, expensive alcohol (although some offer "all you can drink" kamikaze packages), and the guarantee that you will see nothing real about the countries and places you "visit." More power to you if this is the vacation you enjoy; to me it sounds, with remarkable precision, like my idea of hell. It's difficult to imagine the experience being improved now that cruises are rapidly becoming a late-career cashout for musicians and other entertainers on the downside of their career.

If anything can make the experience I've described here worse, it would be having to listen to 90 year-old Bob Dylan in international waters with no prospects for escape other than suicide.

(Fun Fact: the world's largest actual "floating prison" is anchored off Riker's Island in New York.)